Fractal Evolution of the World System

Discussion

Tessaleno C. Devezas:

"Devezas and Modelski (2003) have shown that world system evolution consists in a cascade of multilevel, nested, and self-similar (fractal), Darwinian-like processes ranging in time from one to 250 generations, exhibiting power law behavior, which is also known as self-organized criticality.

The conception is that of a cascade of differentiated non-linear processes transporting the world system through a series of transitions. An outline of this conception is presented in table 11.1 below. It includes both the fairly familiar, shorter-range ones, such as Kondratieff waves (K-waves) and long cycles of world leadership, and also the less familiar, longer range millennial sequences that, even while of millennial scope, steadily shape our social experience.

The modern world system is marked by the emergence of a global level of interactions —a level that might be best described as oceanic in character, and planetary in range, in distinction to the mostly regional scope of pre-modern systems (though we keep in mind, of course, the silk roads across Eurasia).

That global level of interactions—whose agent-based processes are accounted for in column 4 — is gradually devolving a set of institutions (e.g., free trade, international organizations, democratic movements, global media) whose evolution is recorded in processes named in column 5 (the basic distinction here is between four differentiated levels of organization: global, regional, national, and local). The world system processes of column 6 are, by contrast, species-wide, and in that manner, envelop, and summarize, the social evolution of the world population.

The first three columns of table 11.1 concern generations, and the process of generational turnover. Generational turnover may be measured by the time it takes for one generation to replace itself biologically. This generational process links biology with social evolution, and it is important too for sizing up the status of social evolutionary developments [see Modelski (1998) and Devezas and Corredine (2001)]. This basic pulse or beat of generations lies at the basis of the entire array of evolutionary processes shown in table 11.1.

Generations (g) are the basic metric of all evolutionary processes and that is why the period of these processes is reckoned (in column 1) in terms of generations.

Column 2 expresses the extension in years of the different processes considering a mean duration of 30 years for the generational turnover; these numbers for g ≥ 8 were rounded for the sake of simplicity.

The generational process therefore appears in column 3 as the carrier wave of the entire cascade. We know that it is in itself a basic learning process, and it carries the information for all the other evolutionary learning processes. We observe that the periods of all the other processes shown in that cascade are multiples of that unit of “generation.”

In column 4 of table 11.1 we encounter an array of four global agent-based evolutionary processes. These are the event-sequences that we find at the grassroots level of great social movements. We might call them the micro-processes of the world picture, the micro-foundations of macro-processes at the population level. They help us understand how seemingly abstract evolutionary developments actually happen."

(Colum 5. Global Institutional; Column 6. World species-wide)

(https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230618381_11)

Source

From the 2009 book edited by William R. Thompson.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Evolutionary Trajectory of the World System toward an Age of Transition. Tessaleno C. Devezas

Copied from the 2 available excerpted pages on the Springer link:

• The Devezas-Modelski’s Fractal Evolution of the World System, p. 223

• Table 11.1 Cascade of modern evolutionary processes, p. 224