Origin Story, page 32
weak nuclear force: One of four fundamental forms of energy; acts at subatomic scales and responsible for many forms of nuclear decay.
white dwarf: Dense, dead star that has blasted away its outer layers and will cool down over many billions of years.
work: In thermodynamic theory, the ability to generate nonrandom change.
world zones: Large regions of the inhabited world (Afro-Eurasia, Australasia, the Americas, and the Pacific) that were almost entirely disconnected from one another before 1500 CE, so history evolved in distinct ways in each world region.
Further Reading
Notes indicate some of the books I have found most useful for particular topics. However, most works cited in the notes are recent accounts, and they do not include many classic texts that are now dated, such as H. G. Wells’s Outline of History and Carl Sagan’s wonderful Cosmos. The list below focuses mainly on books that train a wide-angle lens on the past, so it can be thought of as an introductory bibliography of works on big history and the modern origin story and books that take up some of the major themes in big history.
Books and Articles
Alvarez, Walter. A Most Improbable Journey: A Big History of Our Planet and Ourselves. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. A personal exploration of the big history story by the geologist who showed that an asteroid did in the dinosaurs.
Brown, Cynthia Stokes. Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present. 2nd ed. New York: New Press, 2012. A version of the big-history story.
Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Doubleday, 2003. A wonderful and highly readable account of the evolution of our modern scientific understanding of the universe.
Chaisson, Eric. Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. This book explores the link between energy-density flows and increasing complexity.
Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. First published in 2004. One of the first modern attempts to tell the big-history story.
. This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing, 2008. A short history of humanity.
. “What Is Big History?” Journal of Big History 1, no. 1 (2017): 4–19, https://journalofbighistory.org/index.php/jbh.
Christian, David, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin. Big History: Between Nothing and Everything. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014. A university textbook on big history.
Macquarie University Big History Institute. Big History. London: DK Books, 2016. A beautifully illustrated account of the big-history story.
Rodrigue, Barry, Leonid Grinin, and Andrey Korotayev, eds. From Big Bang to Galactic Civilizations: A Big History Anthology, Vol. 1: Our Place in the Universe. Delhi: Primus Books, 2015. An anthology of essays.
Spier, Fred. Big History and the Future of Humanity. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. An ambitious attempt to tease out some of the main theoretical ideas behind big history.
Other Sources on Big History
Bill Gates has funded the creation of the Big History Project, a free, online big-history syllabus for high schools. Big history now has its own scholarly organization (the International Big History Association), and Macquarie University has established a Big History Institute to advance teaching and research in big history.
A TED Talk on big history that I gave in 2011 was designed to offer a short introduction to the idea of big history; it is available at https://www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_big_history.
Notes
I have tried to keep endnotes to a minimum except on topics where there is significant controversy.
Preface
1. William H. McNeill, “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,” American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (Feb. 1986): 7.
2. H. G. Wells, Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1921), vi.
3. The great biologist E. O. Wilson has written eloquently about the vital importance of linking modern scholarly disciplines more closely; see E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (London: Abacus, 1998).
4. I first used that term in “The Case for ‘Big History,’” Journal of World History 2, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 223–38.
Introduction
1. On the history of these finds and the very different perceptions of them by archaeologists and those who live today near Lake Mungo, see the wonderful short documentary by Andrew Pike and Ann McGrath, Message from Mungo (Ronin Films, 2014).
2. Superb on the archaeology of inland Australia is Mike Smith, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
3. The Power of Myth, episode 2, Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, 1988, http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-2-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-the-message-of-the-myth/.
4. Alvarez, A Most Improbable Journey, 33.
5. In Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 280.
6. The Goldilocks principle has been explored thoroughly in Spier, Big History, 63–68 and following.
Chapter 1. In the Beginning: Threshold 1
1. Richard S. Westfall, The Life of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 259. Newton later changed his mind about the idea of the universe as God’s “sensorium” but preserved the notion that God was “omnipresent in the literal sense.”
2. Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” lecture given at Battersea Town Hall, London, March 1927.
3. Cited in Christian, Maps of Time, 17.
4. Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness (Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996), 23.
5. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 261.
6. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (London: Bantam, 1988), 151.
7. My thanks to Elise Bohan for this quote from Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies (London: Victor Gollancz, 1992).
8. On paradigms, the classic text is Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
9. Peter Atkins, Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), loc. 722, Kindle.
10. Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012).
11. Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? And Mind and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 73.
12. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 25–26.
13. Peter M. Hoffmann, Life’s Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos (New York: Basic Books, 2012), loc. 179, Kindle.
14. For more on that idea, see Krauss, A Universe from Nothing.
Chapter 2. Stars and Galaxies: Thresholds 2 and 3
1. “From a molecular viewpoint, the raising of a weight corresponds to all its atoms moving in the same direction.… Work is the transfer of energy that makes use of the uniform motion of atoms in the surroundings.” Peter Atkins, Four Laws That Drive the Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 32.
2. See Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution, and Spier, Big History.
3. Andrew King, Stars: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 49.
4. Ibid., 59.
5. Ibid., 66.
Chapter 3. Molecules and Moons: Threshold 4
1. Peter Atkins, Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), loc. 788, Kindle.
2. Robert M. Hazen, “Evolution of Minerals,” Scientific American (March 2010): 61.
3. John Chambers and Jacqueline Mitton, From Dust to Life: The Origin and Evolution of Our Solar System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 7.
4. Doug Macdougall, Why Geology Matters: Decoding the Past, Anticipating the Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 4.
5. , Nature’s Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 58–60.
6. Tim Lenton, Earth Systems Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), loc. 1297, Kindle.
Chapter 4. Life: Threshold 5
1. Both the metaphors and the calculations here come from Peter Hoffmann, Life’s Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos (New York: Basic Books, 2012), loc. 238, Kindle.
2. John Holland, Complexity: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 8. Complex adaptive systems contain “elements that are not fixed. The elements, usually called agents, learn or adapt in response to interactions with other agents.”
3. Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe (New York: Knopf, 2006), 44.
4. Gregory Bateson, cited in Luciano Floridi, Information: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), loc. 295, Kindle.
5. Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996), 82.
6. David S. Goodsell, The Machinery of Life, 2nd ed. (New York: Springer Verlag, 2009), loc. 700, Kindle.
7. “Any process that generates structure increases the latent information inherent in that structure, which corresponds to a decrease in entropy (reduced number of microstates).” From Anne-Marie Grisogono, “(How) Did Information Emerge?,” in From Matter to Life: Information and Causality, ed. Sara Imari Walker, Paul C. W. Davies, and George F. R. Ellis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), chapter 4, Kindle.
8. Hoffmann, Life’s Ratchet, loc. 3058, Kindle.
9. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: Penguin, 1985), 130–31.
10. The power of Darwin’s idea and its capacity to shock are described superbly in Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (London: Allen Lane, 1995).
11. There is a good discussion of the Goldilocks conditions for rich chemistry in Jeffrey Bennett and Seth Shostak, Life in the Universe, 3rd ed. (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2011), chapter 7.
12. Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach: The Evolution of Minds (New York: Penguin, 2017), 48.
13. Science 356, no. 6334 (April 14, 2017): 132.
14. Robert M. Hazen, “Evolution of Minerals,” Scientific American (March 2010): 58.
15. Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink, A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries About the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2016), 65–66.
16. Allen P. Nutman et al., “Rapid Emergence of Life Shown by Discovery of 3,700-Million-Year-Old Microbial Structures,” Nature 537 (September 22, 2016): 535–38, doi:10.1038/nature19355.
17. Nadia Drake, “This May Be the Oldest Known Sign of Life on Earth,” National Geographic, March 1, 2017, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/03/oldest-life-earth-iron-fossils-canada-vents-science/?WT.mc_id=20170606_Eng__bhptw&WT.tsrc=BHPTwitter&linkId=38417333.
18. Madeline C. Weiss et al., “The Physiology and Habitat of the Last Universal Common Ancestor,” Nature Microbiology 1, article no. 16116 (2016), doi:10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.116.
19. Nick Lane, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), loc. 421, Kindle.
20. Terrence Deacon describes this as an autocell; see Grisogono, “(How) Did Information Emerge?”
Chapter 5. Little Life and the Biosphere
1. On the idea of the biosphere, see Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), and Vladimir Vernadsky’s pioneering work The Biosphere (Göttingen, Germany: Copernicus, 1998), with a foreword by Lynn Margulis. For a short summary of the history of the biosphere, see Mark Williams et al., “The Anthropocene Biosphere,” Anthropocene Review (2015): 1–24, doi: 10.1177/2053019615591020.
2. Christian, Brown, and Benjamin, Big History, 46.
3. Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science (London: John Murray, 2015), loc. 2368, Kindle.
4. Jeffrey Bennett and Seth Shostak, Life in the Universe, 3rd ed. (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2011), 130.
5. Robert M. Hazen, “Evolution of Minerals,” Scientific American (March 2010): 63.
6. Bennett and Shostak, Life in the Universe, 134.
7. David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 204.
8. See the discussion of these mechanisms in ibid., 44 and following.
9. Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink, A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries About the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2016), 64.
10. Dennis Bray, Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), loc. 1084, Kindle.
11. Description from Gerhard Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds (New York: Springer, 2013), 70.
12. See Andrew Knoll, Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 20; the book is superb on the staggering diversity of prokaryotic metabolic systems. On the energy flows tapped by the earliest organisms, see Olivia P. Judson, “The Energy Expansions of Evolution,” Nature: Ecology and Evolution 28 (April 2017): 1–9.
13. Tim Lenton, Earth Systems Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 18.
14. Ibid., loc. 1344, Kindle.
15. Robert M. Hazen, “Evolution of Minerals,” Scientific American (March 2010): 63.
16. Lenton, Earth Systems Science, loc. 1418, Kindle.
17. Donald E. Canfield, Oxygen: A Four Billion Year History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), loc. 893, Kindle.
18. Lenton, Earth Systems Science, loc. 1438, Kindle.
19. Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds, 73–75.
Chapter 6. Big Life and the Biosphere
1. Michael J. Benton, The History of Life: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), loc. 766, Kindle, and see Dennis Bray, Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), loc. 2008 and following, Kindle.
2. Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History (New York: Scribner, 2016), loc. 5797, Kindle.
3. Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2011), 71 and following.
4. Much of the discussion that follows is based on Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink, A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries About the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2016), chapter 7.
5. Doug Macdougall, Why Geology Matters: Decoding the Past, Anticipating the Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 132.
6. Ward and Kirschvink, A New History of Life, 119.
7. Ibid., 124.
8. Niles Eldredge and S. J. Gould, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” in Models in Paleobiology, ed. T. J. M. Schopf (San Francisco: Freeman Cooper, 1972), 82–115.
9. A wonderful, if controversial, book on the Burgess Shale fossils is Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (London: Hutchinson, 1989).
10. The term used by Ward and Kirschvink, A New History of Life, 222.
11. Tim Lenton, Earth Systems Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 44.
12. Ibid., 48: “The most pronounced change in atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic time was due to plants colonizing the land. This started around 470 million years ago and escalated with the first forests 370 million years ago. The resulting acceleration of silicate weathering is estimated to have lowered the concentration of atmospheric CO2 by an order of magnitude and cooled the planet into a series of ice ages in the Carboniferous and Permian Periods.”
13. Ibid., 72.
14. Ibid., 24, on the relationship between carbon burial and atmospheric oxygen levels. Robert M. Hazen, “Evolution of Minerals,” Scientific American (March 2010): 58, argues that by four hundred million years ago, Earth had its full complement of over four thousand types of minerals.
15. Gerhard Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds (New York: Springer, 2013), 229.
16. Daniel Cossins, “Why Do We Seek Knowledge?,” New Scientist (April 1, 2017): 33.
17. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, in Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Mind (Calgary, Alberta: Cornerstone Digital, 2011), argues that our sense of awareness is embedded within these constantly shifting maps of reality that begin with sensual, visual, and feeling maps of our own bodies.
18. Dylan Evans, Emotion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), loc. 334, Kindle.
19. Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds, 15–16.
20. Ibid., 162–63.
21. In this discussion, I’ll be following closely the description of this event by Walter Alvarez, the geologist who demonstrated that an asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs; see his wonderful short book T. Rex and the Crater of Doom (New York: Vintage, 1998).
22. Science News, https://www.sciencenews.org/article/devastation-detectives-try-solve-dinosaur-disappearance.
23. Stephen Brusatte and Zhe-Xi Luo, “Ascent of the Mammals,” Scientific American (June 2016): 20–27.
24. Ward and Kirschvink, A New History of Life, 315.
25. Ibid., 316.
Chapter 7. Humans: Threshold 6
1. This is argued eloquently in David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016).
2. Robin Dunbar, The Human Story: A New History of Mankind’s Evolution (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 71.
