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You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

Based on a lifetime of observations and a few decades in the markets, I understand that societies, beliefs and fashions all move in long arcs of time. We call these arcs several things: cycles, periods, eras.

The sciences which take socio-historical reality as their subject matter are seeking, more intensively than ever before, their systematic relations to one another and to their foundation.

In the history of science, we often find that the study of some natural phenomenon has been the starting point in the development of a new branch of knowledge.

In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles.

It is in revolutionary periods that the culmination of previous trends and the beginning of new ones appear.

It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole.

Perhaps, when we examine the causes of many social changes and political upheavals, we will find the marks of its presence and its principal ideals.

We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements.

My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.