Agent-Based Evolving Societies - Advances in Social Simulation - page 290

demographic explosion. Similarly, the problem-solving organization is generally
overemphasized during its first steps due to extremely high demand and is then
reduced to a more reasonable size. Moreover, if the population is reduced, less
fights and more loyalty are observed. If an organization achieves its purpose in
spite of being empty R i = 0, then this organization is disbanded.
Skipping Stages? Another important property of the human societies de-
scribed in [2,3] is that even if life conditions are good enough, a stable state
cannot be built directly from a tribe, while skipping the chiefdom stage. The
chiefdom stage brings the necessary social control organization to prevent the
society to collapse. They use this type of examples to describe why societies
evolve through well-defined stages. We simulated this “what if” question with
our model with the following hypothesis: can a society in a wealthy environment
expand to the nation stage (build a CH organization) and remain sustainable
without reaching the chiefdom stage(build a police organization)? To this extent,
we run our model in setting harvest tech level to 300 (or any higher value) and
preventing the police organization to be created (agents never vote “yes” for a
leader in the village phase).
In these conditions, the society initially starts by growing, until reaching the
point where the loyalty to the village becomes low. Then, the CH organization
is created and the population keeps growing until the resource consumption
meets the available resources. Then, individuals start fighting. Since no police
exists to prevent combats, human agents fight until killing each other. Thus, the
society collapses until reaching approximately the size of a family and is then
limited at this point. This reduced size eventually triggers the removal of the
CH organization, since the tribal communication mechanism is sucient to keep
the loyalty towards the village high enough. Thus, the society has returned to
the tribal stage. Consequently, our model matches the predictions made by the
theories at the collective level: each societies have to evolve one stage after the
other and in the correct order in order to remain sustainable.
6 Conclusion and Future Work
In this paper, we presented a method to build societies capable of extend-
ing themselves with organizations solving collective issues. These organizations
emerge from bottom up, with a mechanism which is internal to the society and
based on the agent's local perceptions. Moreover, these extensions can be created,
strengthened and removed on the fly, making the society capable of adapting to
environmental and social changes. The method consists in merging the local ob-
servations of the issue amongst the society. This merging allows the society to
become aware of the situation and then to build the appropriate organization in
order to solve the issue.
We tested this method in modeling the first stages of human societies. These
stages are characterized by the occurrences of two organizations, the police and
the cultural harmonization(e.g. temples or schools)organizations,solving societal