Posts

Last May I was visiting family in New York when I got a call from the amazing and irreplaceable Natalia Reagan. She asked me if I was interested in being on “StarTalk All Stars” (a podcast that is part of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s network of science outreach). My first reaction was panic! It sounded very scary as I hate my voice and get very nervous at the thought of having to seem like I know what I’m talking about.

Rahul Oka, Agustin Fuentes, Susan Sheridan, Mark Golitko, Nam Kim, and I recently published a paper in PNAS looking at how demographics affects both the size of a war group and conflict causalities. Here is the gist: Many scholars have noted that in hunter-gather populations, the number of people involved in fighting can be as much as 40% of the population, but this percentage drops in big state-level societies.