We Need A Modern Origin Story: A Big History

Link to: Edge #441 - A Conversation With David Christian

In modern science, and I include the humanities here, science in a German sense of science—rigorous scholarship across all domains—in modern science we've gotten used to the idea that science doesn't offer meaning in the way that institutional religions did in the past. I'm increasingly thinking that this idea that modernity puts us in a world without meaning—philosophers have banged on about this for a century-and-a-half—may be completely wrong. We may be living in an intellectual building site, where a new story is being constructed. It's vastly more powerful than the previous stories because it's the first one that is global. It's not anchored in a particular culture or a particular society. This is an origin story that works for humans in Beijing as well as in Buenos Aires. 

It's a global origin story, and it sums over vastly more information than any early origin story. This is very, very powerful stuff. It's full of meaning. We're now at the point where, across so many domains, the amount of information, of good, rigorous ideas, is so rich that we can tease out that story.

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That is the key to what makes us different. You can ask what it is that allows us not to be locked within a limited, metabolic repertoire, but to keep expanding that repertoire. There may be a very simple answer. One should expect a simple answer because, on Paleontological time scales, this happens in an eye blink. It happens so fast that arguments that say, well, humans are different because of this, and this, and this, and this, and this, they don't work. There's got to be one thing that, like a key, unlocks a door. I suspect it's linguistic.                

Chimps, we know have language. We know they can communicate ideas. We know that chimp mothers can teach their young to use sticks to extract termites from mounds. We also know that information does not seem to accumulate generation by generation in other species. If it did, we would see evidence of it. We would see a species that was gradually widening its niche. We don't see that. Humans have crossed a linguistic threshold. It's as if suddenly human language is more efficient. It's crossed a threshold beyond which information accumulates faster than it's lost. That means something profound. It means we're the first species in 4 billion years in which information accumulates across generations, through the cultural mechanism, not through the genetic mechanism. The cultural mechanism, of course, is orders of magnitude faster than the genetic mechanism.                

Here, you have a species where information can accumulate across generations. That's it. That is the foundation for explaining everything that makes us different. If you add in that more information for a living organism gives you more control over resources and energy flows, then what you're doing is watching a species whose control over the energy flowing through the biosphere increases, and increases at an exponential rate. As information accumulates, some of that information speeds up the process of the accumulation of information. Printing is an obvious example, or the Internet. And basically that's it.                 

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Related recent post: Davos 2015 - How Did We Get Here? Big History 101

Related link: Big History Project

Related book: Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History

Davos 2015 - How Did We Get Here? Big History 101

Link to video

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Related links:

Big History Project

David Christian: The history of our world in 18 minutes

So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class

Link to article: So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class 

In 2008, shortly after Bill Gates stepped down from his executive role at Microsoft, he often awoke in his 66,000-square-foot home on the eastern bank of Lake Washington and walked downstairs to his private gym in a baggy T-shirt, shorts, sneakers and black socks yanked up to the midcalf. Then, during an hour on the treadmill, Gates, a self-described nerd, would pass the time by watching DVDs from the Teaching Company’s “Great Courses” series. On some mornings, he would learn about geology or meteorology; on others, it would be oceanography or U.S. history. 

As Gates was working his way through the series, he stumbled upon a set of DVDs titled “Big History” — an unusual college course taught by a jovial, gesticulating professor from Australia named David Christian. Unlike the previous DVDs, “Big History” did not confine itself to any particular topic, or even to a single academic discipline. Instead, it put forward a synthesis of history, biology, chemistry, astronomy and other disparate fields, which Christian wove together into nothing less than a unifying narrative of life on earth. Standing inside a small “Mr. Rogers"-style set, flanked by an imitation ivy-covered brick wall, Christian explained to the camera that he was influenced by the Annales School, a group of early-20th-century French historians who insisted that history be explored on multiple scales of time and space. Christian had subsequently divided the history of the world into eight separate “thresholds,” beginning with the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago (Threshold 1), moving through to the origin of Homo sapiens (Threshold 6), the appearance of agriculture (Threshold 7) and, finally, the forces that gave birth to our modern world (Threshold 8). 

Christian’s aim was not to offer discrete accounts of each period so much as to integrate them all into vertiginous conceptual narratives, sweeping through billions of years in the span of a single semester. A lecture on the Big Bang, for instance, offered a complete history of cosmology, starting with the ancient God-centered view of the universe and proceeding through Ptolemy’s Earth-based model, through the heliocentric versions advanced by thinkers from Copernicus to Galileo and eventually arriving at Hubble’s idea of an expanding universe. In the worldview of “Big History,” a discussion about the formation of stars cannot help including Einstein and the hydrogen bomb; a lesson on the rise of life will find its way to Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. “I hope by the end of this course, you will also have a much better sense of the underlying unity of modern knowledge,” Christian said at the close of the first lecture. “There is a unified account.” 

As Gates sweated away on his treadmill, he found himself marveling at the class’s ability to connect complex concepts. “I just loved it,” he said. “It was very clarifying for me. I thought, God, everybody should watch this thing!” At the time, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had donated hundreds of millions of dollars to educational initiatives, but many of these were high-level policy projects, like the Common Core Standards Initiative, which the foundation was instrumental in pushing through. And Gates, who had recently decided to become a full-time philanthropist, seemed to pine for a project that was a little more tangible. He was frustrated with the state of interactive coursework and classroom technology since before he dropped out of Harvard in the mid-1970s; he yearned to experiment with entirely new approaches. “I wanted to explore how you did digital things,” he told me. “That was a big issue for me in terms of where education was going — taking my previous skills and applying them to education.” Soon after getting off the treadmill, he asked an assistant to set a meeting with Christian.

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Related links:

Big History Project (site)

Big History Project (YouTube videos)

Related previous post: TED Talk - David Christian: Big history