The regality is built up and maintained mostly through territorial wars at the borders. In terms of regality theory, an empire must be regal in order to stay together.
It requires a great deal of power and discipline to prevent internal conflicts and to keep such an empire together. Empires that are created in this way have an inhomogeneous population. The fall of empires: Contributions from historical dynamics theoryġ3Ethnic groups that are incorporated one by one into an empire as it grows often preserve some of their culture, ethnicity, religion, and language. For now, it is assumed that there is synergy between the two mechanisms, perhaps as the result of some kind of gene/culture coevolution 16 and we will use the terms regal and kungic, regardless of which of the two mechanisms is implied. It can be argued that psychological responses to intergroup conflict are likely to be much faster than cultural r/ k selection and therefore more effective, but the cultural r/ k mechanism probably has at least some effect as well. Interestingly, the predictions of this cultural r/ k theory are so similar to the predictions of the theory of a psychological desire for a strong leader in times of intergroup conflict that any of these two theories would provide a logical explanation for the same cultural effects. 15ġ2This theory predicts that the cultural r-strategy will be most efficient in times of intergroup conflict, while the cultural k-strategy will be most efficient where there is no culturally different neighbor group to compete with. This is typically seen in times of peace, when ideals of individual freedom become more popular than ideals of patriotism and unity. The opposite is a cultural k-strategy (written with a small k), which allocates few resources to winning new hosts and more resources to making its hosts satisfied so that they will not choose competing memes. This is seen, for example, where a warring group impose their culture on the people they conquer, and also where a religious sect spends a lot of resources on winning new converts or competing with other religious groups. A cultural r-strategy is a strategy where the meme complex makes its hosts spend a lot of resources on propagating their culture and beliefs to others.
A selfish meme-or rather a selfish complex of memes-can use different strategies for utilizing the resources of its hosts (that is, the persons holding the memes) to produce either a great quantity or a high quality of cultural offspring. This allowed populations to accept the very hierarchical political structure and tyrannical leaders of the historical empires.ġ1It has been proposed that the distinction between r-and K-strategies in biological evolution (see chapter 3.3) can be applied somewhat analogously to cultural selection, though the analogy is far from perfect. We can regard such a war as a supernormal stimulus leading to an extremely regal response. A large-scale war with firearms is probably much more deadly than anything our ancestors saw in the evolutionary prehistory that shaped the regal response pattern. 10ħAs the groups grow bigger and stronger, they also become more warlike in accordance with regality theory. DNA studies show that the most prolific male lineages originate from areas with agriculture or pastoralism and domesticated horses. 9 Efficient weapons technology and transport technology may have been spread by a similar mechanism: the groups with the strongest weapons and highest mobility have been likely to win wars over other groups with inferior weapons. There is plenty of evidence that the growth of large civilizations and empires through history has been connected with the spread of agriculture. This allows the population to grow still bigger and make still bigger armies, and so on. The new food production technology is now adopted by the newly assimilated population. A bigger population can make a bigger army, and this enables them to win wars and incorporate neighbor groups under their rule.
This allows them to feed more children and increase the population density.
If a group of people invents a more efficient method for food production-for example, a form of agriculture-then they can produce more food per unit area. 6Both versions of cultural selection theory can explain some important aspects of the growth of regal societies.
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