One person who is examining the discovery of recurring social pulses'on the basis of extensive data evidence, and covering a period of 200 years of human inventions, and innovations of a technological and non-technological kind, is the physicist Cesare Marchetti. Radical in his claims, he thinks he has traced the high level of self-organization in Western industrial societies in a quantifiable and hence verifiable form. The kind and number of examples he uses are impressive. It is a question of populations' of cars or computers, or of the substitution of each of the most important energy sources, from wood to fusion energy. But a population'can also be the series of the erection of Gothic cathedrals, the career of criminals, or lists of publications by scientists as well as catalogues of works by artists. The basic figure of Kondratiev's cycle appears everywhere, which models growth, maturity and decline in logistic curves. The ‘internal clock'of the activity of social innovation which Marchetti thinks he has found indicates, towards the end of a period of recession, at the rock bottom of the sine curve, at the same time the beginning of the next wave of innovation. With its rise, new markets open up for the products it will produce, and it leads to the creation of new jobs and investments. This ‘megabreathing’ of society can be explained - in so far as Marchetti enters into explanations – from the perspective of the theory of evolution: not just in the biological process of evolution, but also in the social one there are niches which are to be found at different levels of abstraction. Whether bacteria, cars or mega-technologies for the production of energy – the observed populations first grow into niches which they try to colonize'. In doing so, they are never completely alone – other rivals are either already in the niche or equally push their way in. A logistic equation, named after Lotka-Volterra, describes the relation between the size of the colonizing population and the speed of growth at which it approaches saturation point. It is essentially a question of processes of diffusion, since they are easier to measure and count than mutations (technological innovations) or selections (the testing of innovation). In case a niche is already full, the ensuing rival has good prospects of being able successfully to oust the less efficient population and ultimately to fill the niche.
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From the Future to the Extended Present