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9.1-http://mbscientific.org/wiki/Our_Social_Evolution- Introduction

9.2-http://mbscientific.org/wiki/Early_Migrations

9.3-http://mbscientific.org/wiki/Dawn_of_Civilization

9.4-http://mbscientific.org/wiki/Early_Empires

9.5-http://mbscientific.org/wiki/Religious_Empires 

9.6-http://mbscientific.org/wiki/Reshuffling_the_World_Order - 20th century and on

ch9- Creation of US - Co-Evolution of Governance, Religion, Science and Economics

1- Evolution of Religion and Governance
2- Evolution of Science
3- Evolution of Economics
4- Evolution of Non-Sectarian Governance- Modern Democracies
5- Evolution of Weapons - Military Evolution

In the last chapter we covered how knowledge evolves. We discovered that societal knowledge trees and cultures are one and the same thing. Here we'll cover how our social morphologies actually evolved over the past 10,000 years by looking at the historical record. We will look at how iconic societal knowledge trees of governance, religion, science and economics evolved together, creating our ever changing social morphologies along the way. 

1- Evolution of Governance and Religion

We are wired to make sense of our surroundings as a matter of survival. Ever since Homo-Habilis's days, and probably before, we were forced to compete with our fellow animals by figuring out the environment and making tools in order to cope. The act of trying to figure out the environment had two pivotal side effects in our evolution. The first was the development of symbolic thinking. We see evidence for that in rock drawings as early as the paleolithic age, some 40000 years ago (and probably before). Symbolic thinking creates abstract sets of related objects in our mental picture of our environment. For our paleolithic ancestors, that would have meant themselves, their friends and enemies, their animal and plant food sources, environmental landmarks, terrestrial and cosmic symbols, etc. One could argue that by then our ancestors must have developed a language to verbalize what they were drawing (they certainly had the vocalization capacity).

An interesting note about these rock drawings is that they were placed in very inaccessible caves, indicating that they were ritualistic practices, maybe the first inklings of shamanism. So one can imagine that these ritual acts were indeed acts of symbolic deification. Contrary to common portrayals, shamans were then (as are today) bearers of important practical knowledge, such as the knowledge of surroundings, animal behavior, edible plants, medicinal plants and inevitably psychedelic plants. This brings us to the second pivotal point in our evolution, that is the need to create mental closure. You see, once the mental picture of  the one's surroundings gets large enough then one can see the boundaries of the known and the unknown. By the paleolithic period the known set was all that was required for survival, the clan elders and shamans where the guardians of that knowledge, which must have made them very important in the clan social structure. But that process necessarily evokes the concept of the unknown. And that is more than just an abstraction, that is the domain of all the new stuff that could come in handy, and all of the bad stuff that could kill. By default, the clan elders and shamans must have been the guardians of that as well. In the process the shamans developed the first religions that tried to depict these concepts of existence, the known and the unknown. And perhaps that is what we see in the rock arts, the known: horses, oxen and hunters, and the unknown: the deified, God like creatures depicted in cosmic settings.

As groups became more successful and larger, social behavior gained increased significance. By the time agriculture got established in Mesopotamia some ten thousand years ago, the act of symbolic deification had come out of caves and was placed in the most prominent places. The first known altar, dedicated to the deity Inana (or Ishtar), was placed on a hilltop in the present-day southern Iraq, around which the first known city, Uruq, grew. So the first steps towards civilization were religious in nature and shamanism evolved to become the social glue that covered everything from hunting to herding to agriculture to social behavior (undoubtedly inducing acts of paying homage and material goods to the deities and the priestly casts that cared for them). At that point in time, the natural and the supernatural were an undistinguishable amalgam channeled by the priestly king cults. By 3500 BC clan elders and shamans had evolved to the priestly king cults that we see in Mesopotamia, then Egypt and later in India, Persia, Africa, what is now called the Americas, etc. Rulership, knowledge and deification had merged to become the central driving force in the perpetuation of those early societies. That pattern of tying in rulership, knowledge and deification continued right up to the modern days, though the forms of deities changed, depending what suited the culture most. Agricultural societies tended to favor female deities, herding cultures tended to favor male deities. There were forms of pantheism (seeing God in everything), polytheism (many Gods governing various aspects of perceived life) and monotheism (God of Abraham). Those religious themes exist to this day and the main task of religion, which is putting a symbolic face on the metaphysical and harvesting the knowledge of the day to construct social behavior, remains intact. Monotheism evolved into Judaism, Christianity and Islam in that successive order in Middle East. Polytheism evolved into Hinduism and the related religions of the Indian subcontinent. Pantheism evolved into Buddhism, Daoism and the related religions of  East Asia. And the Shamanic practices to this day remain among native groups in Americas, Australia as well as groups not touched by the larger social evolutionary forces that have by now swept the globe.
In short, religion appears to be a universal human trait that has evolved over time, has shaped the governance of societies and the societies themselves, over time emerging as socio-political morphologies that we see today [sorry Christians, but that applies to Christianity as well. Yes Christianity, who doesn't believe in evolution, actively shuns it, actually is a very good example of religious evolution, in the context of social evolution. PBS FRONTLINE has a very good documentary rendering the evolution of Christianity, in fact it is called "From Jesus To Christ"].

Ok, so we know from history that evolution of religion happens, in the context of social evolution, but why? Morphological Flows shed light on that. From a personal perspective, in light of the domains of internal attention (art of survival in the known domain) and external attention (art of growth into the unknown), all religions give psychological comfort and cohesion to the members of the order. They provide mental closure. The basic unwritten contract is that if you, the practitioner, follow the rules of the religion, then you will be given redemption in this life and salvation in the thereafter. Not only this is psychologically comforting to a person but it also offers the glue for social cohesion. It becomes a point of personal comfort in moments of distress, pain and death (there are no atheists in the foxhole!). It becomes the guide in social rituals of marriage and birth. In between birth and death, it governs the rules reaching manhood and womanhood, conduct and punishment, trade and war.
So, religion codifies behavior. Lets explore that further, especially in the context of the Middle Eastern religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam that have by now encompassed most of the globe. These religions provide the framework for morality and define immorality. That is the philosophy of good behavior vs bad behavior: kindness vs hatred, generosity vs greed, piety vs debauchery. Morality in turn frames ethical vs unethical behavior: do onto others as you wish others do to you vs do onto others what you can get away with. Or, be kind to your neighbor vs screw your neighbor before he screws you. Or, help those less fortunate, vs to hell with the poor go get yours! Ethics then get codified into law where behavior is governed and bad behavior is punished. One can broaden the scope and argue that the modalities of morality, ethics and law are social orders rendered in specific religious language, and as such any religion worth its salt employs those modalities as frameworks for social cohesion.
It is noteworthy that efforts to do away with religion, as in communism, dysfunctional humanism (where man replaces God, ala Nitsche) etc. have proven to be disastrous. Without the personal psychological comfort that governs birth, death and everything in between, the common man's mind is deprived of a road map. Without the moral and ethical compass and the social glue, society falls into arbitrary dictates and whims of whoever is in charge. And we have seen this in action, over and over. You see, one man rule, dictatorships, have a narrow time span. They are effective, only during the reign of the strongmen, or at best during the succession of rulers, the dynasty. Whereas religion, as a societal knowledge tree, is reinforced, evolves, generation after generation, thereby providing social/cultural stability to the group across generations. Where one man dictatorships are only stable during the strongman's reign, religions provide social stability over very long periods of time, much much longer than the lifetime of any ruler, or practitioner for that matter. That is why governance morphs, evolves, with religion, as an expression of natural selection of stable systems over unstable systems. Strongman rule is inherently unstable, the strongman eventually dies. Religion gives governance the stability over time that it by itself can't provide.
All of the previous arguments reside in the context of mono-religious, tribal type societies. What happens in the case of multi-religious, e.g. immigrant societies, where many religions have to coexist. One thing that can happen is that one religion becomes the dominant one, the state religion. In such cases, the amalgamation of religion and governance, remains intact. On the other hand, in the case of Functional Humanism, if we could call it that, governance has to somehow incorporate all of the contributing religions that give its social sub-sets moral/ethical/legal impetus. From an evolutionary perspective, functional humanism was forced upon societies with many religious orders, e.g. US, Canada, etc. Therefore the emerging governance of such societies, e.g. authors of the US constitution, had to devise a non-sectarian form of governance in order to allow each of these religious orders the freedom to exist without the threat of religious conflict. Were as dysfunctional humanism replaces God with man, functional humanism tends to leave the issue of religion alone altogether (with varying degrees of success, or failure, depending on how you look at it). What inevitably happens in these democratic forms of governance is that non-sectarian legal/constitutional framework becomes the framework of social order. In turn, that legal/constitutional framework serves as the social glue, augmenting the hitherto necessary religious framework that could permeate and evolve across generations. The constitutional framework doesn't replace the religious frameworks, they can happily coexist within their domains so long as they do not supersede it. Once that happens, the main functional role of religion in providing stability to governance over time is no longer needed, governance and religion can separate. Over time, the constitutional framework provides the needed social stability. In such a case, the people in that society are free to practice any one religion, amalgamate various religious beliefs and practices, or drop religion altogether. Even in these free societies religion retains its staying power. Religion still can and does provide social stability and order to the faithful, it still provides psychological comfort to the believers. It still provides needed mental closure where constitutional law, and science for that matter, can't.
Because of the multi-generational social stability effect, history shows that religion is necessary for the social/psychological evolution of the group in the long run. It is noteworthy that this applies to even truly grizzly religions. Native American religions such as the Maya, Aztec, Toltec, etc. regularly practiced human sacrifice and child sacrifice in particular, including their own children. Shamanic cultures in Papua New Guinea practiced cannibalism until recently. Even in those cases, it seems that having a religion was a necessity in developing a social/psychological framework, all be it a particularly nasty one.

Having said what is good, necessary, about religion, we must also note what religion is notoriously bad at. One is that any given religion is universal, it isn't, non of them are. Any religion applies only to the people of the group, the flock. The consequence of making that mistake is universally disastrous. Our history is full of religious wars that persist to this day. The anatomy of that rift is easy to see. The fire brands of one group say that my way is the word of God, another group's fire brands say no my way is the word of God, and the next thing you know they are at war. There is no better motivator for battle than fighting for God.
Another thing that religion is particularly bad at is rendering divinity, i.e. the works of God. If you want to see works of God in action, study physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, etc. You will not find any specifics on the actual mechanisms of creation in any religious text. It is worthy of analysis as to why that is. Again, religion is aimed at the flock, the common man, and it is aimed at behavior understandable to the common man. Moses didn't come down from the mountain with quantum mechanics, he came with the ten commandments. The point is that religion is created by the priestly class of the people, for the people, in the language that they understand. Religion is created in the image of their practitioners. That is why it is so group specific and effective as a social glue. It must speak to the least common denominator of understanding within the group otherwise it is ineffective.
Finally, another thing that religion is particularly notorious for is exceptional cruelty to anything threatening, especially to the members of the flock deemed heretics. To religions, almost universally, going against the word of God means expulsion, punishment, and even death. Disrupting religion, especially in primitive societies, meant disrupting the social order. That would have been intolerable to the governance of the social order, which religion happened to foster. 

2- Evolution of Science

Early science was produced by the priestly king cults as well. Astronomy, writing, mathematics, time keeping, etc. were already established in Mesopotamia some 6000 years ago. But increasingly the memetic flow of ideas spread out from the priestly casts and took on a life of its own among commoners. By the Age Of Access, about 500 BC, Confucius, Buddha, and Zoroaster where putting distinctly nonsectarian flavors on social behavior and in Greece scientific thinking had come to its own. For the first time we see the segregation of the natural and the supernatural and the beginnings of what would eventually become scientific thinking. Scientific thinking codifies abstraction. That is, you have an abstraction, you prove it or disprove it. If you prove it, corroborate it, it becomes a scientific fact; if you don't, then it is just a mental model. That is distinctly different from the preceding religious thinking, which relies on faith, not corroboration. In morphological flow terms, scientific thinking is the way we expand our domain of perception, where new facts get established. And that is done via the codifying aspect of scientific thinking, i.e. corroboration. If a principle gets corroborated and implemented, new tools and devices are built, then the result becomes imprinted on the senses as well, it becomes a new physical fact. Scientific thinking establishes that behavioral mode as a principle, whereas until then truths were often decreed or established by social/religious consensus, whether they were corroborated or not.

The Islamic Caliphates absorbed the Greek, Persian, Indian and Chinese bodies of knowledge and greatly expanded it. By 800 AD science had its own reign, separate from the mosque and supported by the priestly-king establishment. The first universities and hospitals were established. All of that got absorbed and gave rise to the renaissance period after the fall of the Islamic southern Spain.

Divorce of science and religion in the renaissance Europe (15, 16th century AD) was particularly nasty. It started in earnest when scientific thinking tried to wrestle the heavens from the dominion of the religious order. It was the word of God in bible that set earth as the center of the universe and gave man dominion over earth. Then came along the fellow called Copernicus, he said that earth and other planets revolved around the sun. That was heresy to the core, and back then heretics were put to death. In fact that happened to a fellow by the name of Father Giardino Bruno who figured the Copernicus fellow may have a point. So they tortured him, then spiked him at the stake and then they burned him alive. Shortly after that Galileo came along and he had a telescope. That gave him firm evidence. There where all these other planets, they revolved around the sun. They had moons that revolved around them. There was a solar system. And, man had dominion over non of that! Of course he didn't exactly say any of that, having heard of Bruno and all! But he did write a book about two friends having a conversation about the subject. For that they put him under house arrest for the rest of his life (the Pope was his life long buddy).
All of that was put to rest by Kepler (early 17th century). He actually codified planetary motion. It was corroborated, it was factual. And if that went against the word of God according to any religion, well too bad, fact is a fact. It is interesting that Christianity actually absorbed that. It adapted to a rather devastating body blow. By late 17, early 18th century Newton had a completely corroborated (all be it partial) model of the universe. But he himself saw God as the master planner. The response was rather brilliant, even if out of necessity. It went like this: if science goes against creation, and the evidence is corroborated, then we'll just absorb the science within the creation domain, and we'll call it creation science (sound familiar?!). Mind you, this is all an argument within Christianity, the rest of the world was doing just fine!
Then along came Darwin in the 19th century and took creation itself away from Christian theology. God didn't snap a finger and create Adam. God didn't create Eve from Adam's Rib. God didn't give man domain over earth or anything else for that matter. In fact all things evolve, man included. If that wasn't bad enough, man evolved from ape. Well, no God fearing Christian was going to take that! The entire religious order was up in arms. But they had a problem, there was evidence, scientific evidence backing evolution. There was ample comparative anatomy placing orders of species. There was ample geological evidence that placed evolution of species in a geological timeline. And oh God, the bible was dead wrong, earth wasn't 6000 years old, it was like millions, maybe billions of years old!?!
And then it got worst, a lot worst. In twentieth century, the genetic code was cracked. Now we knew, with scientific precision, the actual biochemical mechanisms of not only evolution, but life itself. Then came the curtain call for biblical creation. By the end of twentieth century entire genomes for species, including man's were mapped. Man and chimp were ~99% genetically alike. Man and banana were ~50% genetically alike. From the geological angle we have precision dating. We can place the tree of life in geological time spanning some 4 billion years on earth.
And there is more, a lot more. In twentieth century we found out that matter and energy could be exchanged, we built atomic bombs and nuclear reactors. We found out that time itself slowed as one approached the speed of light. We found out that there are billions of other galaxies, trillions of other solar systems. We now had quantum mechanics and everything digital. The very concept of time and space as we know it is the property of us?! How do you absorb a biblical God into that picture? Short answer: morphological flows.

Notice that within the discipline of morphological flows religious thinking and scientific thinking reconcile. They are two aspects of our morphological evolution. But outside of the discipline, religion and science do not reconcile, they clash. Specifically, science requires scientific thought as its foundation. You have an idea, then you prove it or disprove it and until proven its just that, an idea. Religious thinking goes by faith. Faith and scientific thought do not reconcile. But within the morphological flow discipline that makes perfect sense. Our brains are wired to create closure. We sense and need to be part of the big picture. So what science can't figure out is punted to the realm of religion. It can provide the psychological refuge that comforts and nurtures. Science is necessarily cold. Religion must be warm and comforting. That is unless you piss off the guardians of religion, in which case they excommunicate you, persecute you, punish you, kill you and then throw you in hell. 

All of that makes perfect sense within the discipline of morphological flows. It is perfectly ok to be anthropomorphic, to create God in your own image. After all you encompass all that you know; who else would you create your God in the image of? Of course we model the universe in terms that we understand. What else would we do, model it in terms we don't understand? We are linear creatures subjected to a narrow bandwidth of seeing space-time and we model our universe in that sense. It is dead wrong, but perfectly understandable. We don't expect anything differently.
But following the morphological flows through material morphogenesis, biological morphogenesis, and in us, social morphogenesis, in a continuum, a clear picture emerges. In that rendering, evolution is the mechanism of creation. Not just in biology but in everything. The main lesson is that everything is abstract. We see a small subset of it with our minds eye. Yet a smaller subset of that registers on our 5 senses. That is what we are stuck with. But even so, we can see that the movie of creation, in time lapse, is made up of chaotic dynamics. Energy coalesces to create shape in a continuum of hierarchical complexity. On each step of evolutionary creation a myriad of entities are created, each progressing on their own lifelines. The stable ones perpetuate and the unstable ones die off. That applies to material morphogenesis, biological morphogenesis, and as we are finding out here in detail, to our social morphogenesis.

3- Evolution of Economics

Similarly economics evolved over the past few thousand years as well. It is believed that domestication of animals such as cattle, along with the advent of agriculture gave rise to the first significant modes of trade some 10,000 years ago. The cattle and the crops in essence were measures of wealth, as they are today in many tribal cultures in Africa and Asia. We see evidence of the first form of banks, as repositories of wealth in terms of grain, animals and precious material such as gems and metals around 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. What made such repositories possible were governance, which imposed and enforced the rule of law, writing which provided mechanisms for the keeping of records of deposits and withdrawals, and science of agriculture, animal husbandry and tool making, etc. which made the goods available in the first place.

We see the first results of the merger of governance, religion, science and economics in the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt some 4500 years ago. This spectacular result was just the kind of thing that memetic evolution needed to firmly establish governance, religion, science and economics as the way to establish social cohesion.

We see the first signs of silver currency, in form of ingots in the Middle East by 2200 BC. We see the first evidence of coins by 650 BC in Asia Minor. The significance of these events is that it tightly binds government with trade. Prior to that any two parties could engage in an act of barter as a rule. But when legal tender was established the rules changed. Now the two trading parties needed a third party, the government, which created and guaranteed the value of the legal tender. So by 600 BC we see the personification of the third party in the form of the merchant banker in Asia Minor and soon after through out the Greek city-states. The banker is directly bound to the government because that is the source and the guarantor of the legal currency. The banker is also directly bound with the traders whomever they may be. Sprinkle these bankers all over the ancient world and you get a trading network that crosses national territories, resulting in the start of the international trade and a directly bound international community.

So from 500 BC on we have had a flow of trade throughout nations which were mortal enemies. It provided the binding glue for societies that would be in a normal state of conflict. It provided for the exchange of goods, ideas, technology, belief systems and all of the things that are needed to create a transnational community, even though most of the time they desperately sought to kill each other.

Another significant event in the evolution of economics where the introduction of stocks. It is not clear exactly when that took place, but it isn't hard to imagine early bankers pooling the resources of many clients into a large venture that they individually wouldn't be able to afford. That established the advent of big business. Prior to that only governments could afford big projects, but those were all intra-national, i.e. within their domains of influence. Stock offerings allowed businesses to be established internationally. That meant that investors that would normally be mortal enemies could forge tight bonds based on economic interests. This was and is to this day the key to forging a tightly bound international community out of what could otherwise be nations in conflict, with different backgrounds, languages, belief systems and otherwise little commonality at all.

About 950 AD paper money was first introduced in China and shortly thereafter gained ground to become the preferred tool of conducting financial transactions. Prior to that fortunes where tied in to physical objects such as gold, silver etc. So the amount of wealth was capped by the availability of those objects. So economics itself was capped by the availability of those objects. Paper money has a virtual aspect to it. Though the paper is physical, its worth is a virtual number printed on the paper. This single facet removes the artificial cap of availability of objects such as gold or silver.  Therefore, paper money, and monetary notes in general, freed up economic activities to fit the commerce at hand as opposed to fitting the gold or silver at hand. But that created another problem.

As the scale of trade increased unfamiliar situation pertaining to money exchange became problematic, these are concepts the we now understand as parts of macro-economics: inflation, price elasticity, supply and demand, capital formation, taxation capacity, valuation, money printing. These terms began to force a scientific approach to economic analysis after the renaissance period. By 17 and 18th centuries there were myriad of schools of economic thought. But perhaps the most significant implementation of them all, taking advantage of new political realities in the newly born United States, was Hamiltonian economics, dreamt up and implemented by Alexander Hamilton, among others, in the late 18th century. He in essence created the modern stock market. Where as before stocks were bought by a few wealthy merchants, in the new American political regime everyone could be a shareholder. That system, capitalism, by which we live today, allows for raising vast amounts of capital that even governments couldn't dream of. That allowed for the rapid implementation of industrial revolution and later military industrial complex and now knowledge revolution. This system allowed for unimaginable economic global expansion with all of the social implications that it encompassed. And it is the system within which the industrial world lives today. However, as successful as it has been, it has serious drawbacks among which is the creation of few super wealthy classes and  vast amounts of poor workers with no economic rights. 

The backlash to that system were socialist economic philosophies and more significantly the communist economic philosophies of Marx and Engels (19th century). The outcome of that was the violent overthrow of the super rich classes and the government regimes that went along with them. The communist block of nations was born.
From an economic perspective (along with everything else as it turned out) communism was a disaster from the get go. Capital pools shrank, poverty exploded, and what on paper was to engender universal equality became the rule of the mob personified in a dictator. Having rooted out religion and therefore without any moral compass, every single communist country became the domain of one strong man or another that ruled by fear. And as we know, by the end of 20th century every single communist country had practically crumbled and communism as a global economic movement was finished.

However socialism in many cases merged with capitalism creating various forms of social capitalism almost everywhere. In some countries, Scandinavia for example, the economic system is in fact social capitalism. The rest of Europe and Canada also practices forms of social capitalism. United States has stayed faithful to its purely capitalistic roots, although even here social entitlement programs are heavily funded.

By late 20th century a new form of economy emerged, the knowledge worker economy. It was significantly different from anything that appeared before it. Traditionally, trade involved the exchange of money with goods, physical goods. These goods included food stuff, tools and objects, objects of necessity or desire, otherwise they were material in substance. The knowledge economy puts that notion on its head. Here, knowledge itself is the stuff of currency. The goods are now abstract in nature. Software, movies, recorded music, "how-to" books, etc., we all buy this stuff and what is takes to make them is knowledge. But it hardly stops there, consider the impact of the knowledge of engineering, economics, politics, medicine, mathematics, and the list goes on and on. Knowledge economy even permeates traditional economies by rapidly increasing productivity in a variety of traditional sectors. There are entire university systems dedicated to creating and training these knowledge workers for the endless parade of jobs that are in demand. And the investment banking sector is betting billions, trillions of dollars over time, to develop and gain ownership of knowledge that is yet to be established, giving (hopefully!) rise to the goods and services of the future. 
To fully understand the scope of the knowledge worker economy it is important to understand the credit based economy. Credit, as in various forms of borrowing, has existed basically ever since trade started. But, in the case of the knowledge worker economy it becomes the financial foundation as well the fuel. To (over) simplify the picture, the manufacturer of knowledge goods, as well as its buyers, borrow from the banks which borrows from the government, which prints and regulates monetary notes. As the size of the economy grows (more knowledge goods are produced and sold), the government simply increases the supply of monetary notes to support the growing economy. Say in the case of purely knowledge based products, software, games, books, movies, music, expert services, etc. there is nothing physical in that monetary flow to hinder or cap the flow. The size of the economy can expand unrestricted by material availability. In applied sectors of the knowledge economy, permeating established genres of engineering, medicine, agriculture, architecture, etc. knowledge products and expert services can proliferate without being capped by material restrictions as well, by enlarge. Compare that with say material based industries such as oil, or wood or steel; they are capped by the availability of the materials in question. Moreover, knowledge products are generally produced with a relatively small energy overhead required to make them, compared to material based industries. Finally, the knowledge worker economy is inherently global.

Knowledge economies have two morphological markers:

1- A System and a Culture of learning- The System of learning consists of primary, secondary, trade, university, and post graduate educational institutions. The Culture of learning instills the fact that learning is a constant in the knowledge economy. In fact the real learning begins after graduation from the System and entering the workforce. It is on the job that real learning and the application of knowledge in building and selling of knowledge products come to bare fruit. The System is the foundation of the knowledge economy, the Culture is its engine.

2- Economic Freedom expressed in free trade networks, specifically the Internet- Economic Freedom lets knowledge products proliferate without bounds. The economic transactions are by enlarge carried out electronically, these days primarily on the Internet.

As we will see later on, the impact of this evolutionary morphology is huge. The knowledge worker economy has already created immense amounts of goods, services and wealth. The hot markets of present and future are in essence driven by the knowledge worker economy. We will cover this topic in much more detail in the second part of this exercise.

4- Evolution of Non-Sectarian Governance - Modern Democracies

Throughout history governance and religion went hand in hand. In many cases the religious and governing classes were one and the same. There have been previous attempts in empowering the common man. The earliest declaration of human rights was by the Persian King Cyrus in 500 or so BC. There were forms of democratic voting in Greek city states in the first millennium BC. There was the Roman Senate in early AD. There was the British Magna Carta in the 13th century. So there were various attempts (mostly lip services) to empower individuals. What turned governance literally on its head was the American Constitution in late 18th century. It was the most unlikely revolution to succeed and at the time no one gave it a snow ball's chance in hell. At those time kings ruled Europe, there was a Shogan in Japan, an emperor in China, a Czar in Russia and a Pasha governing the Islamic world (most of it anyway). All over the world there was a common governmental morphology, a rigid organizational pyramid with the kings/priests on the top a very small elite class in the middle and everyone else was a poor bottom dweller. The American constitution literally turned the pyramid on its head. The collective of individuals were to rule through their elected representatives. Elections were to be held in short scheduled intervals and whoever didn't do the bidding of their constituents got fired. That experiment was unheard of. The biggest gamble was that no one knew how a large number of diverse groups with diverse interests could manage to self-govern. Before that all attempts in democracy where in small homogeneous peoples with common interests, like Greek city states, Algonquin  tribes and alike. But James Madison's argument was that in fact you needed many diverse groups to balance against one another. And with a strong bill of rights to protect the individual against the rights of the states and majority mobs, the gamble actually had a chance to work. Be that as it may the constitution underwent a major bloody correction to right the slavery issue during the American civil war a hundred years later. And again it had to go through the civil rights correction yet another hundred years after that. It wasn't until late 20th century that there was enough racial diversity in the US to actually make Madison's idea of self balancing groups work in earnest.
But that is only half of the story. The other is Alexander Hamilton's (at the time) experimental capitalism. There the economic capacity of all of the individuals in the land could be harnessed to fund projects that no one could dream of. The result of that was the industrial revolution in the 19th century America that opened up the entire north American continent and brought vast riches to bear. By then the American democracy had transformed from Thomas Jefferson's model of an agrarian farming society to Hamilton's Industrial society. We had the advent of Hamiltonian, market driven democracy, which came to a crashing halt in the 1929 depression. Then the system went through a social correction in the 1930s, this is where the purely capitalistic democracy adopted many social programs from the socialist movements (much to the chagrin of the purists) and therefore created a sense of balance between individual rights in capital driven enterprises and social rights of the people as a whole.
And when the first and the second world wars came about the United States was in the position to bank role and implement the biggest military industrial complex the world had seen. That military industrial complex afforded the protection for democracies to flourish in western Europe after second world war. Throughout the cold war and after the collapse of communism, social, market driven democratic revolutions were permeating Eastern Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, in short the globe. And by the time the knowledge revolution came about in the late 20th century, America and the rest of the democracies had the money, the industrial capacity and the brain power to launch the global knowledge and information networks electronically. The result of course is a global economy, multinational entities, global rule of law expressed in trans-national entities such as United Nations, Wold Bank and International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, World Court, etc. It is not difficult to imagine a natural conclusion of the evolution of governance expressed in a formal, unified global governmental structure sometime in the future.

Having said all of that, authoritarian resistance to democracies continue. It is noteworthy that global coalition of democracies are in fact funding a dictatorial anomaly: the Oil States. As a rule we have observed that dictatorship, regardless of their governing philosophies, can not economically compete with democracies. That rule is broken with the Oil States because they live off of the oil revenues generated from the democracies. There, dictatorships literally buy off their populations into submission (much more on this anomaly in the social rift section).

5- Evolution of Arms - Military Evolution

Human history is landmarked by events of conquest and colonization, where the vanquished is absorbed by the victor, and the victor inevitably always writes the history. 
As species go, us humans are poorly equipped when it comes to natural defenses. Human evolution could not have happened without harnessing weapons. Fortunately we were equipped with a brain that was wired to figure things out. The first harnessed weapons were fire and stone. We have evidence of homonid stone tools as early as 2-3 million years ago (perhaps more), way before the age of homo sapiens. By the time our species came out of Africa some 300000 years ago they were equipped with weaponized stone tools. That gave them the ability to hunt, thereby expanding their range to eventually cover the globe. By the time of agriculture and animal husbandry some 10000 years ago, humans could amass the number of individuals to form defensive and offensive capabilities and dominate one another in large geographical scales. Through working bronze (~8000 years ago) and iron (~3000 years ago) the weapons of choice: swords and spears had become quite lethal. Through the combination of all of the above by some 5000 years ago we have civilizations with major military capability and geographic range in Middle East, North East Africa and China.
Lets pause for a moment and look at our legacy of warfare in Mesopotamia, since it is at war yet again (did it ever stop?).
By the Time Alexander reached Mesopotamia some 2300 years ago, the land had seen 3000 years of both measures of war and peace. Lets count them off: Sumerian, Akkdians, Chaldeans, Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians and Persians. And that is just when Alexander got there. Thereafter the story of war and peace continues with the Greeks, Persians, Romans, Caliphates, Mongols, Ottomans, British, Saddam, and for now the Americans. 

The next military quantum leap was the advent of  large scale cavalries probably by Scythians and other related Arian horse cultures of what is now the present day Russian Stepps (~ 3000 years ago, perhaps earlier). Iron clad cavalries were the spear heads of armies right up to the advent of the cannon. Fire arms then became the weapons of choice from the 15th century on. Modern explosives came on the scene by late 18th centry and by 19th century the fire power of European armies and navies gave full rise to colonial empires.
By early 20th century we had the introduction of mechanized armor on the battle field (WW 1). And by mid twentieth century ( WW 2) we had the advent of todays conventional military components of army, navy and air force. Up until this point arms races always involved using the arms to gain ground on the adversary. Nuclear weapons blew that calculus out of water. They gave rise to the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine. Here was a weapon that was so destructive that its use ensured that both sides would be annihilated.  Most likely this is the only reason that the cold war was not a lot hotter. 

Chapter Key: Morphological Flows, entities going through functional constructs thereby creating more complex entities with more complex functionalities:

(note: societal knowledge trees and culture are one and the same thing)

societal knowledge trees: religion + governance == social evolution ==> tribal cultures, societies and governments

societal knowledge trees: science == scientific evolution ==> technological societies and cultures

societal knowledge trees: economics == economic evolution ==> national wealth, trans-national economic alliances

societal knowledge trees: democratic governance == evolution of free societies ==> global coalition of free societies

societal knowledge trees: military arts and sciences == military evolution ==> empires, international military alliances

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 The four pillars of civilization, governance, religion, science and economics have evolved in all manners of ways through out the years. In fact we see a mosaic representation of their evolutionary history in the present day. In the realm of governance we see kingdoms, tribal fiefdoms, military dictatorships, theocracies and various forms of representative democracies. In the realm of religion we see monotheism, pantheism, polytheism, atheism and even paganism, although no one seems to admit to that! In the realm of economics we see various flavors of capitalism, socialism, communism, and even theocratic economics. The realm of science has burgeoned to cover every nook and cranny of thinking (too numerous to mention). We have been part and parcel of this process of evolutionary creation that has been consistently producing increasingly complex morphologies over some 14 billion years (our best present guess). And although our body shapes haven't changed much in the past 300,000 years or so, we've evolved our social morphologies at an exponential rate.
So we have covered the story of how we got here. Now comes the tough question: can we achieve sustainable growth, or do we as a global democratic civilization, like every thing else we've seen in this saga, have an inherent life time, i.e. are we destined to blow it by the virtue of just being us?

Links:

Comprehensive site on Epistemology, so big it'll probably be under construction forever

Religious gateway