Putting the model into the perspective of a ticking clock is an appropriate analogy because everything we are measuring: technology, economic eras, worldview and social structures are evolving through time. Patrick Nolan and Gerhard Lenski's macro sociology textbook Human Societies has now reached its 11th printing edition. Let's begin using their data for the agricultural era.
Patrick Nolan and Gerhard Lenski agricultural evolution model
Since Nolan and Lenki's book Human Societies does not explicitly layout the dates, I wrote professor Nolan and he sent me the dates. Since humans arrived in different geographic areas at different times, the clock for the agricultural era, did not run everywhere at identical time frames. There are some areas which have yet to enter the agricultural economy just as as there are others which have not yet breached the industrial economy. What is depicted are timelines for the leading edge agricultural era economies. In the following graph we will overlay the transition periods for our proposed model.
Overlaying Nolan/Lenski model with the proposed transition periods
In Nolan and Lenski's model they described the changes in the maturity of technology which drove the agricultural era. The simple horticultural period aligns to the inheritance period for our model identically. It does so because the technology is very rudimentary despite the fact that the technologies are brand new and will have enormous import for the remainder of the economic era. But because the enormity for the impact is not large yet the inheritance period for prior worldviews and social structures are yet relatively unchanged.
At the start of chapter 7 in Human Societies, archeologist V. Gordon Childe, one of the greats in the 20th century, was quoted in saying that the horticultural phase for the agricultural era featured more inventions than the remainder of the agricultural era. For an archeologist this would indeed appear to be true. When you find evidence for things like the wheel and the plow, that period will appear as if it featured more invention because when the archeologist finds more refined wheels and plows later in time, the technological innovation appears to be something less. However can we say that a refined wheel built for specific geographic conditions was less inventive or valuable than the first rudimentary wheel? It is the refinement in technologies which provides for the ongoing viability for an economic era. The process for technology refinement features much more complexity and requires just as much innovation to refine.
We saw this same dynamic for the industrial era. The early inventions in steam, electricity and other engineering feats were so large and very different from the agricultural era that people mistake our current period, the age of information, as something very different than what it really is the continuation of the industrial era. Today we have a new industry for computers and networks. But the increased economic values they bring are in the efficiency they bring to all of the existing smokestack industries as well as the new ones built out on top of the old ones. Can we say that electricity was a bigger innovation than the Internet? The complexity of the Internet is orders of magnitude more complex than the basic principles for harnessing power sources and transforming them into electricity.
Therefore the model is validated in a kind of manner by both what Nolan and Lenski say as well as Childe. Frankly this is where the technologist operating within industry, such as myself, has a very real advantage in perspective. The complexity in technology is something we understand on a visceral level because we work with refining technology all day - every day. I think the model is saying the same thing as the academic community has outlined. The difference being the perceptions relative to the complexities in technological maturation.
Basic evolutionary clock
The three economic eras on the clock with transition periods
The three economic eras are depicted on the upper right on the evolutionary clock. As we are about half way through the industrial era, only half of the era is shown. The hunter-gatherer era is depicted foreshortened as well as the archeological evidence only began to appear in the transmission and undercurrents transition periods. In the graphic on upper left, the transition periods are included as well. Only the agricultural era has its transition periods labeled in the graphic. In the following graphs we will compare transition periods in worldview with another economic era.
Worldview Inheritence Period
What demarcates the Inheritance Period is that a new economy has just been born. Therefore the impact on humanity is one of managing the changes which occur in society as a result of the new technologies in play. Greater population is now supportable and therefore the immediate strain is on how to manage growing societies. Governance is the issue for the inheritance transition period. Large increases in population have been documented in all three of the economic eras within their inheritance periods.
In the Inheritance Period for the agricultural economic era we see shamans getting political authority, growing into chiefdoms, villages, towns and cities. In the Industrial Era's Inheritance Period we again see creation of nations, new republics, socialism along with the birth of a new middle class. It might not appear we are speaking of worldview but these changes require new rules and structures for social interaction. The inherited worldview in the religious sense is simply running essentially unchanged within the new economy.
Worldview Impact Period
In the agricultural era the impact period was a time when the inherited worldview began to go shift. The gods were becoming increasingly human although at this time the gods themselves did not care about humans. Human's only interactions with the gods were to keep them happy. Humanities oldest poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, was written during the impact period and clearly the poem addressed humanities shift away from hunting and gathering to farming as the new economy. The poem is the oldest because writing was invented a few hundred years before the poem had been recorded.
In the industrial era, the impact period was entered only four decades ago. The inherited worldview began undergoing shifts in adding thinking and levels of personalization which never existed before. Most of the world was illiterate through the early establishment of the industrial era. Though it may simply be a coincidence, the enormous shift in communications as a result of the Internet, much like the first written languages, also came into existence in the impact period. The impact period features the faint beginnings for new thinking and not the actual update for worldview.
Worldview Transmission Period
The transmission period occurs after societies have reached an overall consensus from the update period as to what worldview is as a whole. Don't forget that worldview is the synchronization for the sum truths in knowledge at that point in time. In the hunter-gatherer era (44,000 to 18,000 years ago) it has been archeologically shown to have been an animistic world (see section 3 - the hunter-gather pages for more details). Cave paintings and carvings were dominated by lethal animals. During this time the only human figures that have been universally recovered were the pregnant women figurines called Venus Statues.
In the agricultural era (200BCE 1300CE) we saw Gods law fashioned into man's law along with the Golden Rule universally become the new standard for human worldview. As the model projects that the transmission period for the industrial era is still 200 years away there can yet be no comparisons.
An Example of an Evolutionary Clock*
The clock you see depicted above is not meant to be a comprehensive representation for the clock. Rather it illustrates the primary underlying principles for the model and is therefore provided as an aid to quickly grasp the model. The model proposes that history cycles within economic eras for the transition periods in everything from worldview to social organization and structures due to the identical driver in every era the development in human technologies.
The second major principal that the evolutionary clock highlights is the how many economic eras humanity has experienced. I have seen proposals for as many as five; however, this is a historical model and not one for philosophy or sociology. In trying to stand up a historical model we must use a construct which does not move to solve a subset before we have a functional framework in place for the superset.
The model recognizes three distinct economic eras by examining the output in how technology was developed, utilized, and most importantly as the measure in diffusion, its impact on society. Asking questions such as how was the technology powered? What was the impact on human communication as a visible byproduct in refining core technologies? What was the investment model utilized to fund the development of core technologies? The answers for these questions provide a substantive historical frame in what constitutes an economic era and what were periods and ages within an economic era.
Before we go deeper into the model let's walk through an applied example of how the model works. By using an example theory is set aside and we can watch technology shaping human culture.
