Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Anthropology, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322;
Ecology Center, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Oct 2;115(40):9962-9967. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1802859115. Epub 2018 Sep 17.
We conduct a global comparison of the consumption of energy by human populations throughout the Holocene and statistically quantify coincident changes in the consumption of energy over space and time-an ecological phenomenon known as synchrony. When populations synchronize, adverse changes in ecosystems and social systems may cascade from society to society. Thus, to develop policies that favor the sustained use of resources, we must understand the processes that cause the synchrony of human populations. To date, it is not clear whether human societies display long-term synchrony or, if they do, the potential causes. Our analysis begins to fill this knowledge gap by quantifying the long-term synchrony of human societies, and we hypothesize that the synchrony of human populations results from () the creation of social ties that couple populations over smaller scales and () much larger scale, globally convergent trajectories of cultural evolution toward more energy-consuming political economies with higher carrying capacities. Our results suggest that the process of globalization is a natural consequence of evolutionary trajectories that increase the carrying capacities of human societies.
我们对整个全新世人类群体的能源消耗进行了全球比较，并从统计学上量化了能源消耗在空间和时间上的同时变化——这是一种被称为同步性的生态现象。当人口同步时，生态系统和社会系统的不利变化可能会在社会之间级联。因此，为了制定有利于资源可持续利用的政策，我们必须了解导致人口同步的过程。迄今为止，尚不清楚人类社会是否表现出长期同步性，如果是，其潜在原因是什么。我们的分析通过量化人类社会的长期同步性开始填补这一知识空白，我们假设人口同步是由于以下两个因素造成的：(1) 在较小的范围内建立社会联系，将人口联系在一起；(2) 在更大的范围内，文化进化朝着具有更高承载能力的更消耗能源的政治经济趋同。我们的研究结果表明，全球化进程是增加人类社会承载能力的进化轨迹的自然结果。
