Power law behavior
and world system evolution:
A millennial learning process
A millennial learning process
Tessaleno Devezas,
George Modelski
Is social change
on the scale of the human species a millennial learning process? The
authors answer in the affirmative, demonstrating that world system
evolution, viewed as a cascade of multilevel, nested, and
self-similar, Darwinian-like processes ranging in ''size''
from one to over 250 generations, exhibits power law behavior, which
is also known as self-organized criticality. World social
organization, poised as it is on the boundary between order and
chaos, is neither subcritical nor supercritical, and that allows for
flexibility, which is a necessary condition of evolution and
learning, and these in turn account for the major transitions marking
world history and serving as the general framework for long-range
forecasting. A literature review confirms the close affinity between
evolution and learning, mathematical analysis reveals the crucial
role of the learning rate as pacemaker of evolutionary change, and
empirical evidence supports the concept of a cascade of evolutionary
processes. The general equation describing world system emergence
shows it to be a project whose current period is now 80% complete,
suggesting that its major features might now be in place.
Technological
Forecasting & Social Change 70 (2003) 819-859
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Francis Heylighen
Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
Francis Heylighen
Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
