The ancient dream of being able to predict the future of the human career has retained its seductive allure over the years. For example, the well-known twentieth-century anthropologist Raoul Naroll documented the historical trend toward ever-larger aggregates and concluded that the probabilities for achieving a world state ranged from the year 2125 (a 40% probability) to 2750 (a 95% probability). Robert Carneiro came to a similar conclusion but used a different methodology. He projected forward the historical trend toward a decreasing number of independent political units and declared that, provided nuclear annihilation can be avoided, “a world state cannot be far off.” It's a matter of centuries or even decades, not millennia, he declared.

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, in a 1970s book coauthored by Charles Lumsden (Genes, Mind and Culture), also joined the futurist parade with what he characterized as an “autocatalytic” theory of cultural evolution.