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Is social change on the scale of the human species a millennial learning process? The authors answer in the affirmative, demonstrating that world system evolution, viewed as a cascade of multilevel, nested, and self-similar, Darwinian-like processes ranging in “size” from one to over 250 generations, exhibits power law behavior, which is also known as self-organized criticality. World social organization, poised as it is on the boundary between order and chaos, is neither subcritical nor supercritical, and that allows for flexibility, which is a necessary condition of evolution and learning, and these in turn account for the major transitions marking world history and serving as the general framework for long-range forecasting. A literature review confirms the close affinity between evolution and learning, mathematical analysis reveals the crucial role of the learning rate as pacemaker of evolutionary change, and empirical …