Giambattista Vico was an Italian 17th century academic who wrote about history scientifically. His thesis is that history is a helix, and that the we can know history better than we can know nature because we make history. It is the New Science.
History is iterative design, in short. We are creating our cultures through spiral cycles of successive approximations. There is no overarching strategy, only tentative approaches, herding of instinct by the powerful, and some imperfect knowledge of the past that gets better as we approach the present.
Iterative design is the norm. Anything else is just so much hubris.
Waterfalls mostly create entropy.
