As mentioned earlier, innovation can be seen in the context of complex adaptive systems as recognition and exploitation of dynamic patterns. In many if not all early societies many types of observed patterns in the environment have been attributed to gods or other super-natural beings and led to the emergence of religions that could provide a stable explanatory framework to interpret all phenomena as being ultimately the acts of gods. From the movement of celestial bodies to the flight of birds or the patterns of thrown objects (coins, sticks, seeds) people were able to extract some regularity in those complex observed patterns. It was then a natural step to create systems of divination that could interpret those patterns and give advice in many situations of private and public life.
It is no surprise that empirical science and technology had some of their roots in esoteric studies. It is interesting to note that rigorous empirical verification and experimenting was a rather late development. Especially in the Greek society it seems that there was a bifurcation in the procedure of interpreting natural phenomena: One branch led to more theoretical analysis and abstract logic and geometry. The other branch led to a highly sophisticated divination system that used concepts now familiar from chaos theory to avoid the potential problem of falsification: Divinations became so complex that their forecast depended in a very sensitive way on a growing number of conditions. If one outcome was against the expectation a new, more subtle condition was invoked to reverse the outcome into its opposite: "The sign X is a good omen but if it comes with a feature x1 it changes into a bad omen."