CONCEPT
Epoch A and Epoch B
Salk's evolutionary framework naming the inflection point at which the species must transition from competitive expansion to cooperative wisdom — from the S-curve's exponential climb to its bending plateau.
Epoch A and Epoch B constitute Jonas Salk's most consequential contribution to evolutionary thinking: the claim that humanity lives at a biological inflection point where the traits that carried the species through its long ascent have become the traits most likely to destroy it. Epoch A is not a moral category but a biological description — the expansion phase in which every successful species engages in rapid reproduction, resource acquisition, territorial spread, and competition for dominance. Epoch B is the transition to cooperation, restraint, long time horizons, and wisdom, forced by the encounter with the finite limits of the environment. The framework maps onto the classic sigmoid growth curve of population biology, and Salk insisted the species was living precisely at the bend.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework emerged from Salk's observation that every organism placed in an environment with finite resources follows the same mathematical shape: slow growth, then exponential climb, then deceleration as