Razib has 10 questions for Peter Turchin, quantitative ecologist turned cliodynamicist:
Your initial research program was in quantitative ecology. What prompted your switch into modeling historical dynamics?At some point I simply realized that most of the big questions in population dynamics were solved, or about to be solved. So I wrote my book on Complex Population Dynamics, where I synthesized what I thought these answers were, and started looking for some more challenging field. It turned out that the last scientific discipline that has not yet been mathematized was history. At first, I thought that I would simply write some mathematical models for historical dynamics, as a hobby. But once I did that, I wanted to see whether their predictions could be tested with data. To my great surprise, it turned out that there is a lot of quantitative data for historical processes, so testing models and theories is eminently possible. As a result, at this point my main thrust is empirical, rather than mathematical; or, more precisely, I am primarily interested in testing theories with data.
I’ve mentioned Turchin’s work on cliodynamics and the problems of growing élites before.