ABSTRACT
The conclusion recapitulates the evolution of those industrial societies responding to external and internal constraints by reforming and extending their research and innovation capabilities. This new evolutionary trajectory emerged in the 1970s. Beside the expected economic and social benefits, its historical meaning was difficult to evaluate. It became an anthropological mutation when various groups in those societies realized the magnitude of these advances, when they started to learn how to overcome the modern alterity between human societies and the biophysical environment, and how to internalize the ecology in their conception and governance of their social organizations. This anthropological mutation is a silent but disruptive transformation of the conception, organization, and role of knowledge activities. An epistemic sphere is emerging: it binds a social organization to its ecology and environment. This fifth sphere of activities modifies interactions with the other spheres, with the religious domain, political institutions and practices, civic society, and the economic sphere. Each sphere is modified; the social structure is altered; the evolution redirected. Our daily lives and values have already changed. Resistance is fierce; many different routes are to be explored. Nevertheless, a new modernization process is opened.
