Leonid E. Grinin and Andrey V.
Korotayev
The present volume is the third issue of the Almanac series titled
‘Evolution’. The first volume came out with the sub-heading ‘Cosmic,
Biological, and Social’ (Grinin et al. 2011), the second was
entitled ‘Evolution: A Big History Perspective’ (Grinin, Korotayev, and
Rodrigue 2011).
When we started the publication of the Evolution Almanac, we
proceeded from the idea that we need epistemological key terms in order
to understand the changes occurring in nature and society in their
entirety and similarity of patterns and laws of development etc .
There are quite a few scientific notions that сan be employed as such
key terms. We think that evolution is one of them. In our
opinion, the concept of evolution remains important for the unification
of knowledge. At present we also need a higher level of co-operation
that could provide a large-scale analysis of the evolutionary processes
through interdisciplinary approaches. Our research in this direction as
well as our interaction with those who work in this field representing
various sciences and approaches (including the Big History one) have
convinced us that this idea is really fruitful. The application of the
evolutionary approach to the history of nature and society has remained
one of the most effective ways to conceptualize and integrate our
growing knowledge of the Universe, society and human thought. Moreover,
we believe that without using mega-paradigmatic, theoretical instruments
such as the evolutionary approach, the scientists working in different
fields may run the risk of losing sight of each other’s contributions
(Grinin, Korotayev, Carneiro, and Spier 2011: 7).
What is more, we have become convinced that the evolutionary
megaparadigm is not only capable of uniting representatives of different
branches of science; it is capable of finding such research directions
where representatives of different sciences can work together. The
present volume (subtitled Development within Big History,
Evolutionary and World-System Paradigms ) demonstrates this in a rather
convincing way. In addition to the straightforward evolutionary
approach, it also reflects such adjacent approaches as Big History,
the world-system analysis, as well as globalization paradigm and long
wave theory. The Big History issue was discussed in much detail in the
previous issue of the Almanac (Grinin, Korotayev, and Rodrigue 2011).
Big History or Universal evolutionism considers the process of
evolution as a continuous and integral process – from the Big Bang all
the way to the current state of human affairs and beyond. It implies
that cosmic, chemical, geological, biological, and social types of
macroevolution exhibit forms of structural continuity. The great
importance of this approach (that has both the widest possible scope and
a sound scientific basis) is evident. It strives to encompass within
a single theoretical framework all the major phases of the history of
the Universe, from the Big Bang to forecasts for the entire foreseeable
future, while showing that the present state of humankind is a result of
the self-organization of matter. However, the evolution field is much
wider than the single Big History’s line of changes (though it is very
important).
On the other hand, many readers of our Almanac may be less familiar with
the world-system approach. That is why further we will discuss it in
some detail. We also find it appropriate to say a few words about the
notions of ‘world-system’ and ‘the World System’.
The notion of ‘world-system’ (as it is used in the present Almanac) can
be defined as a maximum set of human societies that has systemic
characteristics, a maximum set of societies that are significantly
connected among themselves in direct and indirect ways. It is important
that there are no significant contacts and interactions beyond this set,
there are no significant contacts and interactions between societies
belonging to the given world-system and societies belonging to other
world-systems. If still there are some contacts beyond those borders,
then those contacts are insignificant, that is, even after a long period
of time they do not lead to any significant changes within the
world-system – for example, the Norse voyages to the New World and even
their settlement there did not result in any significant change either
in the New World, or in Europe (see, e.g. , Slezkin 1983: 16).
Within this framework, the ‘world-system’ can be characterized as a
supersystem that unites many systems of lower orders, such as states,
stateless societies, various social, spatial-cultural, and political
entities – civilizations, alliances, confederations, etc. Thus,
the evolutionary field with respect to a world-system has the maximum
wideness in comparison with other social systems. The very process of
social evolution is modified within a world-system, because contacts
become denser, whereas the role of macroevolution becomes more and more
salient. In a certain sense it appears even possible to say that
independent evolution of separate societies tends to cease, because the
evolution of particular societies becomes more and more influenced by
macroevolutionary aromorphoses that diffuse within the world-system
framework. That is why we observe different rates of development in
societies belonging to world-systems and isolates, in the main
(‘central’, Afroeuroasian) world-system
(= the World System) and peripheral (e.g. , American)
world-systems (prior to their incorporation into the World System). In
general, the larger the size and internal diversity of a social system,
the more internal links it has, the more complex those links are, and,
ceterum paribus, the higher is the rate of its development.
A formal criterion that allows us to regard (with Andre Gunder Frank)
the Afroeurasian world-system as the World System is the point that
during its entire history this world-system encompassed more territory
and population than any other contemporary world-system. What is more,
for the last few millennia it encompassed more than a half of the world
population and this appears to be a sufficient criterion permitting to
denote this world-system as the World System. Another point of no less
importance is that the modern World System that actually encompasses the
whole world was formed as a result of the expansion of that very system
which, after A. Gunder Frank (1990, 1993; Frank and Gills 1993), is
denoted in the present article as the World System (and which up to the
late 15th century was identical with the Afroeurasian
world-system).
The world-system approach originated in the late 1960s and 1970s due to
the works by Braudel, Frank, Wallerstein, Amin, and Arrighi, and was
substantially developed afterwards (see, e.g. , Braudel 1973;
Frank 1990; 1993; Frank and Gills 1993; Wallerstein 1974, 1987, 2004;
Chase-Dunn and Hall 1994, 1997; Arrighi and Silver 1999; Amin et
al. 2006; Grinin and Korotayev 2009). Its formation was connected up to
a considerable degree with the search for the actual socially evolving
units that are larger than particular societies, states, and even
civilizations, but which, on the other hand, have real system qualities.
The Almanac consists of four sections.
* * *
Section I. Globalization as an Evolutionary Process:
Yesterday and Today contains three articles demonstrating that
Evolutionistics11Evolutionistics is an interdisciplinary field
of research focusing on studying similarities and differences in
evolutionary laws, principles, patterns and mechanisms at all or some
levels and stages of evolution. Therefore, Evolutionistics is a common
field for carrying out special evolutionary research. is capable of
creating a common platform for the world-system approach, globalization
studies, and the economic long-wave theory. It is worth saying a few
words about this theory (see also Korotayev and Tsirel 2010; Grinin,
Devezas, and Korotayev 2012).
The Russian economist writing in the 1920s, Nikolai Kondratieff observed
that the historical record of some economic indicators then available to
him appeared to indicate a cyclic regularity of phases of gradual
increases in values of respective indicators followed by phases of
decline (Kondratieff 1922: ch. 5; 1925, 1926, 1935, 2002); the period of
these apparent oscillations seemed to him to be around 50 years. He
discovered this pattern with respect to such indicators as prices,
interest rates, foreign trade, coal and pig iron production (as well as
some other production indicators) for some major Western economies
(first of all England, France and the United States), whereas the long
waves in pig iron and coal production were claimed to be detected since
the 1870s for the world level as well (note that as regards the
production indices during decline/downswing phases we are dealing with
the slowdown of production growth rather than with actual production
declines that rarely last longer than one or two years, whereas during
the upswing phase we are dealing with a general acceleration of the
production growth rates in comparison with the preceding
downswing/slowdown period [see, e.g. , Modelski 2001, 2006 who
prefers quite logically to designate ‘decline/downswing’ phases as
‘phases of take-off’, whereas the upswing phases are denoted by him as
‘high growth phases’]). Many social scientists consider Kondratieff
waves as a very important component of the modern world-system dynamics.
As has been phrased by one of the most important K-wave students (who is
also among the contributors to this volume), ‘long waves of economic
growth possess a very strong claim to major significance in the social
processes of the world system… Long waves of technological
change, roughly 40–60 years in duration, help shape many important
processes… They have become increasingly influential over the
past thousand years. K-waves have become especially critical to an
understanding of economic growth, wars, and systemic leadership… But
they also appear to be important to other processes such as domestic
political change, culture, and generational change. This list may not
exhaust the significance of Kondratieff waves but it should help
establishing an argument for the importance of long waves to the world’s
set of social processes’ (Thompson 2007).
There are three articles in the section.
George Modelski (‘Kondratieff Waves, Evolution and
Globalization’) considers that contemporary Kondratieff wave (K-wave)
studies show two tendencies: first, a macroeconomic analysis that maps
long trends of prosperity and depression with GDP data, and second, a
sectoral approach that traces the influence of K-waves of basic
innovations, and the rise of a succession of leading industrial and/or
commercial sectors on the emergence of a global economy. They stand in a
close relationship with world politics, democratization, and
globalization. An evolutionary explanation of K-waves is one that gives
a reasoned account of the emergence of the modern global economy over
the past millennium, and one that may project equally far into the
future.
Leonid E. Grinin and Andrey V. Korotayev (‘Globalization and
the World System Evolution’) proceed from the point that the formation
of the Afroeurasian world-system was one of the crucial points of social
evolution after which the social evolution rate and effectiveness
increased dramatically. The authors analyze processes and scales of
global integration in historical perspective, starting with the Agrarian
Revolution. They connect the main phases of historical globalization
with the processes of development of the Afroeurasian world-system, in
which the integration began a few thousand years before the Common Era.
Grinin and Korotayev analyze some versions of periodization of history
of globalization and propose their own periodization of globalization
using as its basis the growing scale of intersocietal links as
an indicator of the level of globalization development.
Andrey V. Korotayev (‘Globalization and Mathematical Modeling
of Global Evolution’) points out that the variation in demographic,
economic and cultural macrodynamics of the world over the last ten
millennia can be accounted for in a very accurate way by very simple
mathematical models. It is shown that up to the 1970s the hyperbolic
growth of the world population was accompanied by the
quadratic-hyperbolic growth of the world GDP and these are very tightly
connected processes, actually two dimensions of one process propelled by
the nonlinear second order positive feedback loops between the
technological development and demographic growth. The suggested approach
throws a new light on our understanding of globalization processes. The
author discusses that the most of the world population got ‘globalized’
many millennia before ‘the century of globalization’, though the World
System had only encompassed the whole of the Earth landmass in
the 2nd millennium CE.
* * *
Section II. Society, Energy, and Future. The evolution
of human society (as well as the evolution of the Universe in general)
is connected rather tightly with the development of the capacity to
capture and transform energy. The future of humanity depends rather
heavily on the solving of energy problems. This direction of the
evolutionary studies is developed in all the three contributions to this
section that on the basis of Evolutionistics unite the long wave theory,
the Big History, and globalization studies. There are three articles in
the section.
William R. Thompson (‘Energy, Kondratieff Waves, Lead
Economies, and Their Evolutionary Implications’) affirms that one way to
look at the evolution of technological innovation is to develop ways to
convert various types of matter into successively greater amounts of
energy to fill sails, to spin cotton or to drive automobiles and air
conditioners. One approach to interpreting Kondratieff waves (K-waves),
associated with the leadership long cycle research program, emphasizes
the role of intermittent but clustered technological innovations
primarily pioneered by a lead economy, with various significant impacts
on world politics. This approach is further distinguished by asserting
that the K-wave pattern is discernible back to the tenth century and the
economic breakthrough of Sung Dynasty . While K-wave behavior has many
widespread manifestations, the question raised in this essay is whether
explanatory power is improved by giving a greater role to energy and
energy transitions in the K-wave process(es). Eight specific
implications are traced, ranging from the interaction of technological
innovations and energy to cosmological interpretations.
David LePoire (‘Potential Economic and Energy Indicators of
Inflection in Complexity’) proceeds from the idea that energy and
environmental factors have often driven transitions in natural evolution
and human history to more complex states which are far from equilibrium.
He points out that recent studies have indicated: 1) the importance of
energy along with labor and capital in determining economic
productivity; 2) the potential slow-down of growth in economies and
sciences; and 3) the relatively increased pace of global technology
diffusion compared with concentrated technology breakthroughs. His paper
identifies indicators in energy, economic growth, and global economic
disparities to connect historical trends with potential scenarios of the
transition to an expanded sustainable non-equilibrium society. By
transitioning back to a sustainable non-equilibrium pattern, the
required complexity changes may also slow down as suggested by
interpretations of Big History major events. Similar transitions have
been observed and modeled in natural dynamic ecological
systems.
Joseph Voros (‘Profiling ‘Threshold 9’: Using Big History as a
framework for Thinking about the Contours of the Coming Global Future’)
makes use of the ‘8-threshold’ formulation of Big History due to David
Christian. Voros examines some of the conceptual possibilities that
arise when one consciously and systematically takes a ‘Big History
perspective’ on the future of humanity at the global scale.
Specifically, he considers the question of what the next major threshold
in Big History – what he calls ‘Threshold – may look like in broad
outlines.
He finds that the most probable global future currently in prospect is
a slowly-unfolding collapse or ‘descent’ over a time-scale of
decades-to-centuries towards a human society characterized by
ever-declining access to sources of fossil-fuel-based energy. In his
opinion such a future trajectory clearly has major implications for the
level of human societal complexity possible. This suggests undertaking
an anticipatory program of continuing research and exploration into both
the underlying nature and the emergent characteristics of the coming
transition to ‘Threshold 9’.
* * *
Section III. Aspects of Social Development. The themes
of contributions to this Almanac cover all the areas of Evolutionary
studies; however, most articles deal with social evolution. This section
touches upon four aspects of social evolution – technological,
environmental, cultural, and political.
There are four articles in the section.
In their article ‘Macroеvolution of Technology’ Leonid E. Grinin
and Anton L. Grinin, basing their research on abundant data,
demonstrate that global technological transformations is one of the most
fundamental causes of human evolution. Among all the major technological
breakthroughs in history, they consider the most important the three
production revolutions: 1) the Agrarian Revolution; 2) the Industrial
Revolution; and 3) the Scientific-Information Revolution which will
transform into the Cybernetic one. In the article the authors introduce
their original Theory of Production Revolutions. This is a new
explanatory paradigm which is of value when analyzing causes and trends
of global shifts in historical process. The article describes the course
of technological transformations in history and demonstrates a possible
application of the theory to explain the present and forthcoming
technological changes. The authors argue that the third production
revolution that started in the 1950s and which they call the Cybernetic
one, in the coming decades, that is in the 2030s and 2040s, will get a
new impetus and enter its final stage – the epoch of (self)controllable
systems. They give certain forecasts concerning the development in such
spheres as medicine, biotechnologies and nanotechnologies in the coming
decades (the 2010s–2060s).
In his paper ‘Volcanism as It Impacts the Integrity of the World
System’, Tony Harper investigated a very interesting aspect of
interconnection between society and environment, notably the
relationship between the occurrence of global volcanic events (GVEs) and
the integrity of the world system. Tree-ring data recording GVEs is used
as a context for comparing the response of the world system through four
centuries after any given GVE. It is found that the GVEs have no
significant effect in the century after them, but two, three, and four
centuries afterwards. Besides, this effect is counterintuitive, as the
world system became more but not less urbanized. The rank
size-frequencies were analyzed for each data set to show that all
changes effectively fit a linear series characteristic of the systems
exhibiting self-organized criticality. Finally, it is shown that a
threshold effect with respect to the number of year equivalents of GVEs
exists; whereby the reduction in world system urbanization occurs in the
century right after such threshold events. These results are then put in
the context of both physically and endemically induced societal
collapses.
Within Big History framework, Christopher J. Corbally and
Margaret Boone Rappaport (‘Crossing the Latest Line: The Evolution of
Religious Thought as a Component of Human Sentience’) explore the
emergence of religious thought as a major foundation of sentience and
some aspects of the subject of Human Sentience in Big History
retrospective. They put following questions: Do religious and scientific
thought have common roots and ongoing connections? Is scientific
thinking enhanced by a capacity for religious and artistic thought? The
authors also explore religious thought as an evolutionary adaptation
with cognitive, emotional, and perceptual features that were acted upon
by natural selection.
Neil Robinson (“‘Natural” States and the Development of
Democracy’) points out that such scholars as Douglass C. North, John
Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast have developed a parsimonious
theory of the relationship between political order and economic
development. They argue that most states in human history have been
‘limited access orders’ (LAO) or ‘natural states’, rather than ‘open
access orders’ (OAO). They also state that this framework can be used to
analyze constraints on economic development and the development of
political order across recorded human history. The author considers how
cases from the former Soviet bloc can be integrated into their theory.
The paper reviews North et al. ’s ideas and maintains that the LAO
schema can be adapted to describe Soviet-type systems. It argues that
some of the variance between Soviet-type systems and their ability to
move from LAO to OAO can be accounted for by the way that the logic of
being a LAO led them to engage with the global economy.
* * *
Section IV. The Driving Forces and Patterns of
Evolution. This section deals with various phases of megaevolution.
There are the following articles.