Memory, Imagination, Symbolic Thinking, and Exchange

Virtually all species remember, although in very different ways. The long childhoods in which each person remembers their period of dependency creates long term memories of caretakers. Hominid adults still remember their own childhoods and their caretakers. They remember how these important experiences were carried out by those who are now old or dead. What was so important is now gone, but remains important in memory. Memories of what is no longer may be pondered while going about present tasks.

Being able to remember what no longer is – and imagine what is not yet – is facilitated by symbolic thinking and language. Vervet monkeys will make one call for threats from above such as an eagle, another for threats in trees such as snakes, or those on the ground such as big cats (Johanson and Edgar 2006; Kenneally 2007; Bickerton 2009). When a monkey makes such a call, others in the troop look in the right direction. A screech signifying eagle causes other monkeys to look up. A sound and an expressed/perceived meaning are linked correctly, helping the group's survival. However, the monkey does not make the sound in the absence of the threat. They do not intellectually manipulate or exchange symbols.

The development of syntax or grammar and vocabulary went along with that of symbolic thought. Being able to consider words and meaning in the absence of immediately present referents, adjust them, move them around and think of alternative arrangements, was facilitated by language. Being able to communicate these ideas in novel yet understandable ways meant that new meanings could be created. With language, communication could nurture more complex forms of politics. Remembering and imagining in the absence of the referent is a source of symbolic thinking, planning, and realizing possibilities.

An important step in the road from the communication of monkeys to the symbolic thinking of hominids may have been tool-making. By over two and a half million years ago at the Gona River in Ethiopia, *Australopithecus* or *Homo habilis* was making stone tools. Other species use tools as well. Crows, wolves, chimps and others will use stones and sticks to achieve various purposes. However, the Gona River chipped tools were fashioned by toolmakers. Tool-making was added to older tool-using skills when symbolic thinking and imagination was possible due to eye-hand and brain development (Nowell and Davidson 2010; Shea 2013). Those who had emerged from nature now began to adjust what they found in nature. Hominids could begin to select what helped them survive and live better. Evolution could begin to be not only in response to environment, but determinative of it. Nature became partially self-selecting in hominids.
By the Oldowan period from about 2.6 to 1.7 million years ago, *Aus-tralopithecus* and/or *Homo habilis* had developed more sophisticated tools. By the Acheulean period about 1,650,000 to 100,000 years ago, tools had become bifacial, larger, and more varied. The oval or pear shaped tools were not only functional, they also have shapes that are pleasing to us and, perhaps, to their makers. Natural emergence had become hominids' creativity.

Adjusting nature was done in various ways. Eating meat and tough tubers was hard on the digestive track of early hominids. Cooking them made them easier to digest and taste better. Exactly when this began is not certain, although it seems to have started between 1,500,000 and 790,000 years ago with the fire altered stones at Gesherbenot-Ya'aqov in Israel. The transition from scavenging to hunting had been made at least by a half million years ago, as indicated by spear points and skeletal wounds in prey found at Boxgrove, England and Kathu Pan 1 in South Africa.

Burials indicate a new level of relationship. Other species such as elephants will clearly mourn dead members of the group. But the care- ful burial of the dead is a human activity. Again, exactly when this be- gan is not clear, but there are burials from 80,000 to 120,000 years ago in Qafzeh, Israel. Here, we have living members of the group remember- ing the people who had died and imagining they have an obligation to them even after they die. Burial is a relationship with the dead, requir- ing memory of what is no longer. What is real in the present is only part of what matters. Memories of the past – kept in the electrical/chemical relationships among neurons – can be more important than the hard stuff that one can touch now in the present.

Hunters had long understood the difference between life and death. Causing an animal to bleed from wounds transformed the beast from one running through the woods to one lying on the ground. Did the hunters begin to think symbolically about the 'life' being in the blood that sank into the ground? Does the life of the body go into the earth looking for a new form to inhabit? Is the spirit of the dead animal believed to be an- gry at the hunter, planning to return to the surface world to make trouble if proper steps of propitiation are not taken by the hunter?

Once grave goods become included in the burials, we seem to also have imagination of the future added to memory of the past. Burial goods suggest that people thought they could indeed take it with them. Everything had a spirit: people, mountains, rivers, pots, weapons, etc. The life or spirit of the dead person will need the spirits of various tools or weapons in the next life. Members of the group were socially close to those now dead. They remembered them and valued these memories. They wanted to imagine that their beloved would live on, and that
proper actions by the living could help the dead live well. Ancestor
worship may be one origin of religion. This seems to indicate the pow-
erful social attachments our ancestors had with each other.

The discoveries at Blombos cave in South Africa from about 75,000 years ago include an etched, rectangular rock. A net or diamond-like design is scratched, with diagonal and parallel sets of lines. This is not just aim-less doodling. This is done by a person interested in perceiving and cre-ating patterns. What other patterns were being perceived and analyzed? Seasons? Plant growth? Movements of animals? Behaviors of fellow members of the group? Did the patterned lines have symbolic meaning of some sort in a way that etched crosses, six pointed stars, or crescents often have for us?

Shells with drilled holes were also found at Blombos. The cave is
near the coast, and a diet of sea food sustained them. Did they wear the
shells as a way to offer the spirits of the dead animals a place to live af-
ter their bodies had been ingested? Did they wear necklaces of shells
out of a sense of beauty made possible by using or improving on what
nature offers? What do these artifacts indicate about their symbolic
thinking?

By perhaps 48,000 years ago, at the El Castillo Cave in Spain, an artist painted animals and designs from dots and lines on the walls. This was the case later as well at Chauvet, Lascaux, and elsewhere. The animals that were painted were not modeling for them. The artists worked from memory. What purposes did they have in painting these animals and designs underground? What were the artists thinking about the animals and designs they painted? It is hard not to speculate. Was the cave where the spirits of dead animals went to live after their blood drained from their bodies? Were these spirits looking for new bodies to inhabit? What was the meaning of the paintings for those who drew or first viewed them?

The importance of reproduction and fertility is made explicit by the
so-called Venus figures found at Hohle Fels in Germany from the Upper
Paleolithic period, the Woman of Willendorf from about 24,000 years
ago, the Woman of Laussel from about 20,000 years ago and many oth-
ers. These palm size statuettes of women with exaggerated breasts and
hips may have offered comfort to mothers going through pregnancy or
delivery, or had any number of other possible meanings. Whoever
made the statues did so while thinking about fertility and sexuality ra-
ther than engaging in sex. These statues demonstrate symbolic thinking
about sex in the immediate absence of sexual behavior (Bahn 1998;
Lewis-Williams 2002; Clottes 2003, 2008; White 2003; Curtis 2007;
Whitley 2009).
The evolution of music is noteworthy. The hardware necessary to transforming the waves through a medium such as air into perceived sounds in the brain began with early land dwellers feeling vibrations in their bones. Sight is great, but you cannot see around the bend or over the hill. Sound provides crucially important information. The patterns and tones of sound provide important information about the environment. Many species produce sounds as well as perceive them. Some birds will sing to announce territorial claims or attract mates. Whales and others too will sing to communicate over long distances. Sounds can convey information to others.

With the malleus, incus, and stapes as part of their auditory system, mammals became able to hear in ways that reptiles cannot. Listening to the sound waves caused by ocean waves, lion roars, chirping crickets, and howling winds all had important meanings for hominids. Hearing and responding to a dependent babies cry, parting the lips and calling ‘Ma’ with various inflections of tone elicited powerful responses among caretakers (Bernstein n.d.). Different sounds would have elicited other profound emotional responses, such as fear or sexual desire. Rhythmic music and drumming would have enhanced group identity during kinship groups’ dances. Eventually, fife and drums communicated information and bolstered courage during battle. Campaign theme songs would identify candidates. National anthems would stir patriotism. Perceiving and making music has a long history of the relationships between animals and their environments, and animals such as humans with each other.

Symbolic thinking and imagination made combination beyond natural referents possible. A wonderful example of this is the Löwenmesch or Lion Man from Germany from about 30,000 years ago. A bipedal man’s body with a lion’s head was not something the artist had ever seen. This was work not from memory alone but from imagination and combination. This indicates the ability to manipulate symbols separate from natural perception. It also indicates a crucially important political ability of combining what had not yet been combined in nature.

Nature had combined much in the past through increasingly complex relationships. Quarks, atoms, molecules, minerals, cells, body parts, animal groups, and ecosystems all kept putting things together in larger and novel combinations. Now, humans could do this at a faster pace and self-consciously.

Placing value on symbols for their own sake was exhibited by early artists as well. For example, there is a beautiful ivory horse sculpture from Vogelherd, Germany from about 32,000 years ago. The artist did not try to include all the musculature of a real horse. Instead, it is an
idealized shape with a series of flowing curves. This is not so much a representation of a physical horse as an ideal one expressing a sense of beauty. The artist took delight in abstraction.

Relationships through the exchange of words, music, and symbols developed human relationships. Exchange of goods did too. This also has a long history, going back to sharing food to enhance group relations. Specialized tool production *Homo habilis* sites relatively far from sources of rock that were used to indicate trade as much as two million years ago. Trading routes become increasingly extensive and established, until by 14,000 years ago the obsidian trade in the Near East and then the famous Silk Road established what some see as a central core political system.

## Political Development

### Kinship

The growth of symbolic thinking and exchange of goods, words, glances, gestures, musical sounds, and artistic images facilitated political development. We have discussed the importance of kinship groups. Long term bonding of childcare givers required sophisticated relationships demanding lots of exchanges. Kinship groups within a scavenger-gatherer and then hunter-gatherer economy likely became complex, but were still limited in size to perhaps fifty or a hundred persons. Larger trading routes would have permitted development of complexity of relationship. Family groups needed to exchange offspring for mating in the next generation. This led over generations to complex sets of inter-kinship relations.

In kinship relationships, lineage is important. Loyalties are to caretakers and common ancestors. Family and kinship remains important in our own day. The powerful resonances are indicated by larger groups attempting to appropriate kinship relations. Nationalists sometimes have referred to their country as a Motherland. In the United States, George Washington is referred to as the 'Father of the Country'. Larger, non-lineage groups often seek to call upon the powerful forces of kinship. One of the values of Big Politics is its scientific story of the real lineage of all persons, going back to a small group in Africa about 200,000 years ago; of all life to LUCA, and the Universe to a single point. It turns out that we really do all have a common background. Big Politics is the scientific story for a period of Human Politics.

### Agriculture and Villages

One of the major thresholds of Big History is the Agricultural Revolution. The transition from hunting and gathering to growing crops and raising certain animals is of crucial importance. It also entails a stage of
political development (Wenke and Olszewski 2007). Hunting-gathering went along with kinship polities. With agriculture came the emergence of chiefdoms and settled villages of increasing size, beginning to include different kinship lines. This presented the village with an enormous political problem: how to establish a sustained, structured set of relationships beyond kinship.

One way to do this was to create dynasties; village lineages that all could be persuaded or forced to adopt. Lineage now became a symbolic political category rather than a biological one. In many regions of the world, mounds and other monumental burial sites enshrined the lineage of the village. Those within one lineage might still have the right to rule, but all needed to exchange the symbols that helped nurture loyalty to it.

The political leaders of these settlements or villages during the early agricultural era were sometimes those who had access and control over the best growing areas. We start to see increased social stratification and inequalities in wealth as the agricultural era proceeded. Some residences and some graves are noticeably grander than others. Hierarchy in the hunter-gatherer era was more likely based on strength, size, or cunning. In each period, leadership could also be exercised by those whom we call shamans, or those who could impress their fellows with their special insights and relationships. When some went through fasting, whether by choice or necessity, carried out rhythmic dancing while listening to repetitive rhythmic music, added various hallucinogens, and perhaps inflicted self-flagellation, they likely could report any number of special insights and experiences. Shapes would have shifted, experienced as traveling in other realms. These were similar to dream-like states. Dreams while sleeping and trances while awake offered symbolic connections with what was beyond normal referents. Imagined relationships with abstract designs, ancestors, and the supernormal by some could have impressed others and established a claim to leadership.

Village identity could be developed and expressed through styles of clothing, certain verbal expressions, or other identifiers. Stories about the village could be told at gatherings. It took enormous effort and creativity to incorporate loyalty to the family within loyalty to the village.

## Cities and Empires

Monumental, ceremonial architecture reinforced the claim by some of symbolic leadership that legitimized claims to leadership. Leaders may have preferred subjects to stand in awe not directly of the universe, but of the leaders' special connections with it. From Watson Brake in Ouachita Parish in Louisiana from about 5,400 years ago to Imhotep's Saqarra in Egypt about 4,700 years ago, grand burial sites began to announce
the emergence of full time leading families. Large, stylized burial mounds called attention if not of the gods, at least of the humbled onlookers who stood before them during ceremonies. Equivalents in modern America are the tall, stiff obelisk in honor to the Father of the Country, or the Jefferson or Lincoln Memorials in which political pilgrims can stand reverently in front of larger than life leaders who have mythical meaning and personify the presidential succession that leads to the current national leader.

Large, monumental architecture also announces the emergence of new political units of cities with larger populations and relations of cities within regional associations and nations or empires. The great ancient cities represent a transition to larger, more complex political units. Sometimes these became the hubs of empires; sometimes they were combined with other cities within empires. The modern European empires were transformative through their incorporation of the Industrial Revolution. The British, French, Dutch, German, and Japanese empires were built from steel, oil powered ships, railroads, and gasoline powered vehicles. The Russian and American empires combined these in the Information Age with nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

Empires have survived for various lengths of time, sometimes lasting for a number of centuries. Imperial overstretch often exhausted them. This happened most recently with the Soviet empire, which broke up as many of its satellite states gained independence. It may be happening now with the American empire, with a state that is quickly becoming hopelessly indebted. Hundreds of US military bases add to a military budget that is equivalent to those of the next twenty states combined – and to US budget deficits that, along with entitlements and the interest on previous borrowing, add to the skyrocketing of American borrowing.

The struggles for power within empires and between some of them are the stuff of traditional history. The endless lists of battles and army flanks can make for a depressing account of the human past. Homer's account of the Trojan War is heroic enough, but it is also just another deadly battle scene. And things do not seem to have improved much. We started the twentieth century with a war to end all wars, followed by a horrific Second World War twenty years later. Since the end of WWII, there have been about 250 wars with over 50 million people killed, tens of millions more wounded, and countless made homeless.

## Big Politics?

What will replace America's unipolar moment after the end of its empire? Will it be replaced by another empire? A return to a multipolar world such as existed in Europe in the nineteenth century? Are we with-
in a transition to a new level of complexity which incorporates relation-
ships among quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, body structures, families,
villages, cities, nations within a more closely related humanity within
our common environment?

Some find hopeful evidence for such a transition occurring. The re-
search into missiles starting in the Second World War and continuing
through the Cold War is responsible for much of the technology that
produced the Earth Rise photo, a banner for globalism ever since it was
first taken by astronaut William Anders in 1968 during the Apollo 8
mission. Steven Pinker argues in *Our Better Angels* that we have experi-
enced a promising trend of decreasing use of force. Humans are indeed
capable, he argues, of exercising their self-control, empathy, morality,
and reason. We have seen the emergence of government claiming a mo-
nopoly on force and violence. Many regions of the world have robust
trading and financial relations. We have seen increased literacy, urbani-
zation, mobility, and access to mass media. These have led to greater
familiarity among cultures. There has been some increase in the rule of
various forms of democracy. As bad as the many wars since 1945 have
been, there has been no civilizational ending nuclear war. Twenty years
separated WWI and WWII; we have gone 68 years since WWII without
any WWIII. There is no reason for complacency yet, of course. It was
a century between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI; so we have yet to
equal the successes of the nineteenth century. Still, there maybe come
collective learning about how to keep the peace.

The threat of environmental degradation, pollution, and climate
change may have become more pressing that the threat of war. Decreas-
ing reserves of fossil fuels and the carbon emissions from the use of
those we have combine in an energy crisis. If this crisis cannot be solved
in a sustainable way, the consequences could be negatively transforma-
tive. On the other hand, within the past generation, environmental con-
cerns have gone from marginal to central for great numbers of people.

The hopes of those who established the United Nations frequently
seem illusory, given that body's actual performance since the Second
World War. Yet, the nations of the world continue to belong to it and even
make productive use of it at times. We are very long way from a world
government, but also a long way from international anarchy.

Where are We Going?

What can we conclude from our 13.82 billion year journey so far in this
Universe? The access to high quality energy in certain pockets has per-
mitted increased complexity in relationships between quarks, atoms,
molecules, cells, animals, and humans within families, cities, nations,
empires, and the world. Each of the earlier relationships continues to be part of our current ones, although often in transformed ways. You and I are the beneficiaries of the relationships that have been developed. We are made from the relationships among quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, and many intricately related body parts. We live within kinship groups, nations, and empires. Many of us are connected with others around the world through the almost instantaneous exchange of digital information. We have evidence for a common origin of all of us and indeed everything in the universe. All of us on earth have a common origin and we may perish together in a species wide extinction; all of life on earth will quite certainly come to an end together as the Sun becomes a Red Giant.

Will we continue to have access to high quality energy and remain as the pockets which continue to develop the most complex relationships of which we are aware in the universe? Can we use this energy without polluting our world and making it uninhabitable? Even if the energy crisis is resolved in a sustainable way, do we have the imagination to combine national, ethnic, and other types of groups within new and meaningful relationships? Can we be as creative as nature was earlier when it first combined protons and electrons, atoms in molecules, molecules in cells, cells in plants and animals, and animals in various groupings? Can we be as imaginative as the artist who carved the Löwenmesch, imagining the combination of lions and people? Or the shaman who imagined how to combine kinship groups in the village? Can the study of Big History be formative enough to teach us how to combine families, ethnic groups, cities, nations, empires, humans, and our environment in ways that protect all of them? Can this be done even while there are many in less complex relationships who show little or no interest in participating in Big Politics, who are satisfied with staying at their level of complexity? Can enough people make the transition to the next level of complexity? Can we fashion a more complex sustainable, structured set of relationships? A new Big Politics?

Or will entropy overtake us before it needs to?

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# To See the World in a Building:
A Little Big History of Tiananmen

*Esther Quaedackers*

**Abstract**

This article is about Big History. Yet it is also about something that is, at least as seen from a Big History perspective, very small. It is about one single building, which is now called Tiananmen. It is tiny when compared to many of the other structures Big History deals with, and it has been around for only a fraction of the time that has passed since the Big Bang. Big History will be combined with an analysis of this specific building by linking Tiananmen to aspects of three major phases in Big History: inanimate history, the history of life, and human history. These kinds of combinations have become known as Little Big Histories. Although Little Big Histories can seem a bit odd at first – after all, what could for instance the history of our universe possibly tell us about Tiananmen and vice versa? – Little Big Histories can help us understand both Big History and the small-scale subjects they deal with in new and unexpected ways.

**Keywords:** Little Big History, Tiananmen, architecture, animal building.

Little Big Histories can enrich our understanding of small-scale subjects and also the grand narrative in two ways. One, it connects the rather small to larger processes that have shaped cosmological, biological and human history. Two, it enables us to comprehend how even the seemingly most mundane subjects have been influenced by far-reaching historical processes and in some cases have influenced those very processes. In the words of the English poet William Blake, this can help us 'see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in wild flower' (Blake 2004 [1803]: 15). It can lead to a different kind of appreciation for the small-scale subject that is being analyzed. For instance, in many cases our appreciation for a grain of sand changes after realizing how the sand grains constituents were cooked in the centers of stars, how its minerals travelled through the Earth's mantle, over its surface and perhaps even through the guts of earthworms before being described by a human being in a poem (Zalasiewics 2010: chs 1-3 and Hansell 2007: 32). The sand grain stops being 'just' a sand grain, and becomes something that inspires awe and triggers curiosity. This is one way in which Little Big Histories can change our understanding of the particular subjects they study and of Big History in general.
A second way in which Little Big Histories can change our understanding of both Big History and the small-scale subjects they deal with is best explained with the aid of a short history of the Little Big History approach. I first developed Little Big Histories in 2007 as an assignment for students in the Big History courses I have been teaching for the past years together with my colleague Fred Spier.<fnref n="1" />,<fnref n="2" /> I asked students to link a subject that interested them to an aspect of each lecture in their Big History course.<fnref n="3" /> As a consequence, students started to write about the connections between their chosen subjects (e.g., beer, quantum computing, or the Mona Lisa) and the lectures (e.g., the Solar System, the origin of life, or human evolution). Once they are past the initial confusion ('are you serious you want us to do that?') most students have a lot of fun. Moreover, the ability to recognize abstract Big History concepts in subjects that students cared about helped many of them to understand these concepts better. And, perhaps most importantly, because students were able to see all kinds of connections they had not realized existed, they started to see how rich and remarkable their subjects really were. As a result, they started to ask more and more questions about them. Some students even started to ask questions that few people had ever asked before. In a way this was not surprising, because students were looking at their subjects in ways few people had ever done before. This made it easy for them to discover questions that had been previously overlooked by other scientists and scholars and made it exciting to look for corresponding answers.

This is not only the case for students. Little Big Histories allow anybody to explore the uncharted territories of the sciences and the humanities with greater ease. For this reason, the Little Big History approach cannot only be used as a stimulating pedagogical tool, but also as a fruitful research method that can reveal new things about small-scale subjects and Big History, and therefore change our understanding of both.

Perhaps partly for this reason, over the past years a handful of scientists and scholars have begun to use something quite similar to the

<footnote n="1">¹ Fred has been tremendously helpful during these past years, while I was trying to figure out how to teach and research Big History in my own way. This article has also been greatly influenced by his book on Big History (Spier 2010).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Although I first came up with the idea for the Little Big History approach, Fred later coined the term 'Little Big History'.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ A somewhat similar approach was developed around the same time by Jonathan Markley for his Californian students. At the 2010 conference, Jonathan told me he was asking his students in a history of food class to trace back one food product as far as they could in time. As a result, his students were also trying to link a subject of their choice to several major phases in Big History, albeit in a slightly different way.</footnote>
Little Big History approach, often without calling their work a Little Big History. For instance, in 2002, astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss published a book called *Atom: A Single Oxygen Atom's Journey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth... and Beyond*, a title that speaks more or less for itself (Krauss 2002). More recently paleobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz published *The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth's Deep History*, a book that describes how different characteristics of a pebble have been shaped by billions of years of history (Zalasiewicz 2010). And my Big History colleague Jonathan Markley is currently working on a book on grasses as seen from the perspective of Big History, based on his 2009 article 'A Child said: "What is the grass?": Reflections on the Big History of the Poaceae' (Markley 2009). In this article he describes how different orders of grasses have rivaled each other for world dominance and shaped human history while doing so. These studies are wonderful eyewitness accounts that provide a fresh perspective on atoms, pebbles, and grasses and on the history of everything.

The existence of such studies indicates that in a sense, Little Big Histories are not new. Yet so far, they have not been used for in-depth studies of subjects that, unlike atoms, pebbles and even grasses, have not been around for a significant portion of Big History. They have not been used for in-depth studies of subjects like Tiananmen, which has been around for only six centuries or so (Zhu 2004: ch. 2).<fnref n="4" /> For such a subject, the eyewitness approach that has been used in the previously mentioned publications will not work. Surely, it would be possible to write a fascinating novel by having a subject like the gate tell us what it saw, heard and felt over the past centuries, but because its experience would only cover the final fractions of Big History, its account would not really be a Little Big History. To study a subject like Tiananmen, a different approach that links the building to periods in time in which nothing like human buildings or even building behavior in general existed is necessary. Over the years, such an approach has been tested by hundreds of students, but it has not been used to write a more extensive research article yet. This article on Tiananmen is therefore a bit of an experiment, that aims at testing the limits of the Little Big History approach by tracing to roots of the gate all the way back to the beginnings of Big History – the Big Bang.

<footnote n="4">⁴ When the gate in the Beijing's southern imperial city wall that is now called Tiananmen was first built six centuries ago, it was actually called Chengtianmen and looked rather different than Tiananmen as we know it today.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. Tiananmen, photographed in 2009. Source: Wikimedia Commons</figcaption></figure>

**Tiananmen and the History of the Cosmos, the Solar System and our Planet<fnref n="5" />**

During the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the fundamental forces emerged. These forces split off from one grand unified force that had existed right after the Big Bang. Gravity went its own way first. The strong nuclear force split off a bit later. And the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism split up last (Chaisson 2005: ch. 1). Gravity and electromagnetism are particularly relevant for this story about Tiananmen. In fact, any building, including Tiananmen, can be seen as a pre-carious balancing act between these two forces.

Gravity makes sure that masses attract each other. The strength of attraction between masses is dependent on the amount of mass involved in the attraction. As a result, gravity works on large scales and is responsible for creating stars and planets and for keeping them together, amongst other things. Electromagnetism is much stronger than gravity. It makes sure that opposite electrical charges attract each other and that similar electrical charges repel each other. Yet despite its higher strength, electromagnetism works on much smaller scales than gravity, because electromagnetism leads to a rather homogenous distribution of charges that cancel each other out. The electromagnetic force is responsible for creating and keeping atoms, molecules, and groups of molecules together (Trefil and Hazen 2010: 282).

<footnote n="5">⁵ While trying to connect Tiananmen to the history of non-living things, to the history of life and to human history, I have not focused on all the important processes that have taken place during the 13.8 billion years that have passed since our universe first emerged. Instead, I have been selective and have only discussed things that seem most important for my subject. I think this is a necessary strategy for people writing a Little Big History; after all, not all things are equally interesting for every subject.</footnote>
Buildings are smaller than the scales on which gravity exerts its greatest influence, and bigger than the scales on which electromagnetism generally works. It is not possible to build without both of these forces. But if the influence of gravity becomes either too great or too small compared to the influence of electromagnetism, building becomes difficult as well.

It is probably quite obvious that both gravity and electromagnetism were required for building Tiananmen. Without gravity, the elements from which Tiananmen is built, like the silicon and oxygen on the planet, bricks, plaster, and tiles and the carbon and oxygen in wood would not have been concentrated on Earth. Instead, the predecessors of these elements would still be floating around in space, more or less by themselves, not meeting their fellow elements most of the time.<fnref n="6" />, <fnref n="7" /> Gravity alone is not enough to build though. Earth would have been a rather boring place had it not been shaped by electromagnetism as well. The electromagnetic force made sure that silicon and oxygen and in many cases some other elements as well combined into silicates, that these silicates formed into minerals like, for instance, feldspars and that people were able to glue these minerals together into bricks and even the plastered brick walls and vaults that characterize the base of Tiananmen (Hazen 2012: ch. 5). Likewise, it ensured that carbon and oxygen combined into carbon dioxide, it enabled life to use this carbon dioxide to synthesize organic molecules like lignin and allowed lignin to bond with other organic molecules like cellulose and hemicellulose to form the complex molecular structures that give the wooden post and beams in Tiananmen's gatehouse their strength (McDonald and Donaldson 2001: 9612-9615). Without electromagnetism, no strange clumps of matter protruding from the Earth's surface like Tiananmen's base, Tiananmen's gatehouse and a whole range of other objects would have formed and the Earth would have remained a rather featureless sphere.

It may be less obvious why the influence of gravity cannot become too great or too small when compared to the influence of electromagnetism in order to be able to build. A thought experiment may help. Imagine trying to build Tiananmen on a planet very similar to Earth, but with a higher mass, like on one of the recently discovered Gliese 667C super-Earths, that circle a nearby star some 22 light years away from us (Science Daily 2013). On such a planet, the effect of gravity would be

<footnote n="6">⁶ The word 'predecessors' is used here, because without gravity, elements like carbon, oxygen and silicon would not have existed, but their predecessors, hydrogen and helium, might have.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ After all, on average our universe is rather empty, containing only one proton per four cubic meters (NASA 2013).</footnote>
stronger, which would allow the gravitational force to break down some crucial electromagnetic bonds and to cause the collapse of large parts of Tiananmen. It would be particularly easy for gravity to overwhelm electromagnetism in places where both forces work in opposite directions. For instance, this is the case with Tiananmen's gatehouse, which consists of an elegant post and beam structure topped with a tiled roof. The higher weight of this structure on one of the Gliese super-Earths would lead to a greater curvature in its beams. This would mean that in the base of the beams, bonds between molecules would be ripped apart by the effect of gravity. If too many of these bonds would fail, the beams would crack and the roof structure would disintegrate.

A way to prevent such a collapse would be to make sure that gravity and electromagnetism work in the same direction. This is what the Chinese builders aimed for when they constructed the vaulted passages in Tiananmen's base that provided access to the imperial city north of Tiananmen. These builders tried to make sure that the shape of their construction matched the natural distribution of forces within the construction. The result of such a match was a structure dominated by compression stress, or, in other words, a structure in which both gravitational and electromagnetic forces were trying to keep together the materials the structure was made of.<fnref n="8" /> Tiananmen's builders partly used this strategy because the base of Tiananmen mainly consists of silicon oxygen minerals, in contrast to, for instance, the wooden gatehouse which mainly consists out of carbon oxygen compounds. Silicon is chemically quite similar to carbon but it is a lot heavier. Therefore, the effects of gravity are stronger within silicon-based structures, which make it easier for gravity to overwhelm electromagnetism if these forces work in opposite directions.

The strategy to align gravitational and electromagnetic forces within constructions in order to prevent collapse was not only used by Tiananmen's builders, but is used by many other animals that build with earth or rocky materials as well. Of course, most of these animals do not build elaborate arches, vaults or domes the way humans do. Instead, they burrow.<fnref n="9" /> Burrowing seems to be the default strategy for building with earth or rocks and is used by many arthropods, fish,

<footnote n="8">⁸ For a nice interactive explanation of how forces are distributed within stone arches, see the Nova site Physics of Stone Arches (PBS Learning Media 1996).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ It could be argued that animals like mud daubers or certain types of swallows and martins build something resembling domes in a human-like way (Hansell 2000: 64–67). The technique these animals use is a bit different from human dome-building though, because they rely more heavily on sufficiently strong electromagnetic bonds to keep their structure together than on gravity.</footnote>
birds, and mammals (Hansell 2007). It enables these animals to 'accidentally' create vaults and domes by excavating the space below these arched roofs. Burrowing may be a better option for most animals than actually building vaults or domes because burrowing is technically easier than constructing the arched roofs themselves. The latter task can be quite complex, partly because arch-shaped structures often are not stable until a keystone or similar object is put into place. Only after that is done, the gravitational forces within the structure line up with the shape of the structure, resulting in a structure dominated by compression stress. Before a keystone or something similar is put into place, however, additional support may be required to prevent the incomplete structure from collapsing. This construction process may therefore require an ability to plan ahead that many animals do not seem to possess.<fnref n="10" /> They may therefore have few other choices than burrowing when it comes to building with earth or rocks, even though burrowing has important drawback when compared to constructing the vaults and domes themselves. In many cases, burrowing requires the movement of more materials than building vaults or domes does, and therefore, requires more energy, simply because the interior of a vaulted or domed structure is usually more voluminous than its surrounding shell.

Following the examples set by the builders of Tiananmen's base and by burrowing animals, builders on one of the Gliese super-Earths would probably be able to build something. Yet their options would be much more limited than they are on Earth. This raises questions about the possibilities for building on planets where the effects of gravity are less strong than they are on Earth, like on our sibling planet Mars. Would the potential for building on such a planet be greater, leading to the development of buildings our own planet's inhabitants can only dream about?

Perhaps, it would, but there is one catch. When the influence of gravity becomes too small compared to the influence of electromagnetism, building options increase but building incentives may decrease. To understand why, it is necessary to first consider what building actually is. Many dictionaries mention that building involves assembling materials to form a structure, but these definitions miss an important point.<fnref n="11" /> Building involves assembling materials to form a structure that

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Animals probably do not need large brains to build in general: Mike Hansell has demonstrated in various books and articles that they really do not and can often evolve all kinds of hard-wired complex building behavior. Yet the ability to build arches, vaults and domes in all likelihood does not evolve easily, because the stages leading up to an arch, vault or dome would be useless as they would easily collapse.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ For instance, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary app, building is 'the process or business of constructing something'. According to Merriam Webster, build-</footnote>
its builders can easily leave behind. Such a definition excludes struc-
tures like body parts that organisms usually assemble by growing and
not by building. One could argue that it also excludes clothing.
The definition does include many kinds of webs, nests, tools, roads,
dams, bridges and ‘regular buildings’ that are normally considered to
be built by humans and other animals.

So how does this definition relate to the idea that the incentive to
build is stronger when the influence of gravity is sufficiently strong?
If the effects of gravity are sufficiently strong, it makes more sense to
leave a structure behind. After all, even though in such situations a lot
of energy is required to assemble a building, even more energy is re-
quired to carry it with you all the time. If, in contrast, the effects of grav-
ity are not that strong, carrying a structure around becomes a more sen-
sible option. Carrying a structure around makes it much easier to reach
and use the structure when needed. This benefit may outweigh the costs
of having to carry a structure around, especially when those costs are
fairly limited.

When it comes to building on Red Planet, this may mean that even
though hypothetical builders would have the option to build something
like Tiananmen, or even a much more fantastical version of the gate,
incentives to do so might be lacking. Instead of buildings like Tianan-
men, builders might prefer portable structures. Organisms that rely on
biological evolution to adapt to their environment would, perhaps,
grow such structures instead of building them. After all, that is what
many animals on Earth do. They grow furs to protect themselves from
harsh climates, instead of building a structure that keeps the cold out.
They grow spikes, venom producing organs, or fast legs to defend them-
selves, instead of building structures that protect them from their ene-
mies. They grow powerful beaks or claws to catch prey instead of build-
ing traps. And they grow colorful feathers to impress members of their
own species instead of building ‘monuments’. For organisms that rely on
cultural evolution to adapt to their environment, the situation might be
slightly different. Because through cultural evolution, such organisms
might be able to build structures faster than growing ones (given that one
process happens well within a lifetime and the other over millions of
years of evolution), they might actually prefer such built structures and
construct the hypothetical Martian equivalent of armor and all kinds of
easily transportable tools. Like those theoretical organisms of Mars that

<footnote>ing is ‘the art or business of assembling materials into a structure’ (Merriam Webster
2013). And according to Collins English Dictionary, building means ‘to make, construct,
or form by joining parts or materials’ (Collins Dictionaries 2013).</footnote>
rely on biological evolution though, builders would probably prefer port-
able structures over buildings like Tiananmen.

Of course, it goes without saying that this thought experiment in-
volving building on a Gliese super-Earth and Mars is rather speculative.
Nevertheless, it helps to elucidate some fundamental concepts that have
had an enormous influence on why building is the way it is on Earth.
A few examples of such Earthly building behavior, like burrowing, have
already been mentioned. But there is much more to explore. In order to
do so, the history of life on Earth will be discussed next.

Tiananmen and the History of Life

On our own planet, the incentives to build, caused by the sufficiently
strong (but not too strong) effects of gravity, are particularly critical in
three specific situations.

Protection

First of all, building seems to be particularly useful in some circum-
stances when protection from enemies is vital. This may be the case be-
cause protective structures need to be quite heavy to function properly.
For instance, structures that are too light can be easily picked up or
cracked by predators and other opponents. Heavier structures are much
safer. But they are also much more difficult to move around. It is there-
fore a big advantage if they can be left behind, for instance, when an
animal needs to go on a foraging trip or needs to go out to find a mate.
Heavy protective structures that are fixed to an animal's body and can-
not be left behind would severely limit such endeavors. Snails and tor-
toises, for example, seem to be hampered in their movement by the
shells and carapaces they carry around. It is, therefore, not surprising
that many of these animals are so slow.<fnref n="12" />

This may partly explain why, if animals build something, they usu-
ally build protective structures and not much else. Only humans and
certain invertebrate species, most notably spiders and certain larvae,
build traps (Hansell 2007: 149–150). Hardly any animals, with the excep-
tion of humans, chimpanzees, birds like the New Caledonian crow and
again certain spiders, build tools.<fnref n="13" /> And just two animal species, hu-

<footnote n="12">¹² The fact that tortoises and snails carry around a carapace or shell may not have caused them to be slow. Instead, a reduced need to move around, slower metabolic rates and carapaces or shells may have evolved together.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ There are several more species that use tools, such as gorillas, certain monkeys, dol-
phins, and several insects. Yet these animals do not really build them; they just use
sticks, rocks or other objects the way they find them and do not modify them in any way
(Hansell 2007: ch. 7).</footnote>
mans and bowerbirds, build ornamental structures (Hansell 2007: ch. 8). The fact that most animals do not build such things is often attributed to a general lack of cognitive capacities. Yet that argument may be too simplistic. It cannot account for the fact that many of the most complex traps and tools are built by organisms that do not seem to possess advanced cognitive capabilities. For instance, the complexity of traps built by the tiny sea-squirt *Oikopleura dioica*, that look like mucus houses containing inlet funnels and different kinds of filter nets, seems much greater than tools and traps built by early humans (Ibid.: 69). So, perhaps, something else is going on. Perhaps, in many cases only protective structures are sufficiently important for an animal's survival to assemble and leave behind. Many other structures that are important to animals, like traps, tools, and ornaments, can be lighter and therefore carried around all the time. If there is no need to leave such structures behind, in many cases it may be a better option to grow such structures than to build them. After all, through biological evolution animals are able to synthesize better materials for such structures than materials that are available in nature to build with, such as woody or rocky materials. Wood decays easily and must therefore be protected, while rocky materials are heavy and crumble, and therefore often require gluing them together in one way or another. Grown structures often consist of materials that are better adapted to their function. Of course, not all animals are willing to wait until biological evolution provides them with suitable structures that enable them, for example, to catch prey or impress a mate. For animals that can adapt to their environment a lot quicker with the aid of cultural evolution, building traps, tools and ornaments can be a good option. Yet there seem to be few animal species besides our own capable of this type of evolution.

## Frequently staying in one place

Building is often worthwhile when animals frequently stay in one place. In such situations, it is not necessary to spend a lot of energy just to reach a building that has been left in a specific place. As a result, using the building is cheaper in terms of expended energy. This consideration may have led to the building behavior in animals that stay in one place while metamorphosing or hibernating. It also may have contributed to the development of building in species that are caring for immobile young or attending to the needs of a eusocial colony. Perhaps, it may even mean that animals that roam large areas to find sufficient food or suitable mates will be less inclined to build. After all, if, due to large territories, animals cannot return to a building frequently enough, what is the use of building in the first place?
Thinking about the way animals use their territories may have impli-
cations for ideas about the origin of human building in general, and about
human tool building in particular. Evidence indicates that when our Ol-
dowan ancestors first started to build stone tools, they left clusters of
them in specific places. It has been suggested that these early humans
partly did so because the places where such tools were left served as cen-
ters where food could be processed, thus preventing them to have to car-
ry their heavy tools with them all the time (Potts 1991, 1994). This sugges-
tion fits in quite well with the idea described above and may partly ex-
plain why our Oldowan ancestors started to build tools whereas very few
other animals did so. Unlike other animals, they had come up with a way
of using the landscape that maximized tool use potential. Ultimately, this
may have enabled them and later members of the genus *Homo*, including
ourselves, to use building in a more flexible way than any other animal
does, by creating different types of traps, tools, and protective and deco-
rative structures, positioning them in well thought of places and using
them when needed without too much hassle. According to paleoanthro-
pologist Richard Potts, such flexibility may well have been one of the rea-
sons why our ancestors survived the rapid climate fluctuations that are
characteristic of the Pleistocene, whereas many other animals, including
hominin species who probably did not use tools, such as our robust
*Paranthropus* cousins, went extinct (Potts 1996: 121).

This tale about human evolution is relevant for Tiananmen in
three ways. First of all, obviously, building anything like Tiananmen is
impossible without the varied and elaborate set of tools humans even-
tually developed. Secondly, if the hypothesis about early human
building behavior is correct, such behavior may have contributed to
types of spatial thinking that have been extremely important during
the conception and construction of the gate that would later become
known as Tiananmen. After all, Tiananmen is not just a gate, but part
of a carefully laid out city plan in which different parts had different
functions and symbolic meanings (Zhu 2004: ch. 2). Thirdly and most
importantly, the fact that humans started to use their built structures
in more and more varied and flexible ways could well be one of the
most distinctive features that separates human building behavior from
animal building. It may have given human building a unique dynamic
that has helped shape Tiananmen in critical ways. This dynamic will
be explained in more detail in the part of this article on Tiananmen
and human history.

Once animals start to stay in one place more frequently, whether to
create and use tools or to metamorphose, hibernate, care for offspring,
or attend to the needs of a eusocial colony, protection often becomes
more vital. Such animals may otherwise become easier prey or targets. This also works the other way round – at least when adding building to the mix. If protection is vital, building a protective structure is a good survival option. Once such a structure is in place, animals are likely to stay there more often, especially when animals start to ‘store’ things in their structures like young or food sources. Staying in one place can make protection more vital, and, alternately, building out of greater need for protection can make animals stay in one place more frequently. In some cases a positive feedback loop may have emerged that may have stimulated evolution (e.g., insect cocoons, birds’ nests, rodent burrows and beaver lodes). It may also have helped trigger specialization among members of some social species.<fnref n="14" /> After all, it is difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to support individuals that have specialized duties beyond gathering or producing food without having a fixed and protected place where food can be stored or grown for them. Specialization, either in the form of a simple differentiation between reproducing and non-reproducing community members, or in the form of more elaborate distinctions between all kinds of workers, soldiers, and royalty, only seems to have emerged in social animals whose ancestors were in all likelihood already building defensible structures in which they stored, grew, or had direct access to ample amounts of food.<fnref n="15" /> Examples of such animals include termites, members of the hymenoptera family like eusocial wasps, bees and ants, certain types of beetles, shrimps and mole rats, and, of course, humans living in sedentary communities. It is interesting to note that such specialization, in turn, seems to have stimulated large-scale building projects. The world's most elaborate building complexes, such as termite mounds that are about twice as high to a termite as the tallest building in the world is to us. Elaborate imperial cities, like the one Tiananmen used to be a part of, are all built by animals that created specialized roles for some members of their communities.<fnref n="16" />

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Specialization based on gender differences is probably the result of very different processes.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ For instance: termites seem to descent from type of sub-social roach that lived in and off nests in trees (Korb and Heinze 2008: 162), eusocial hymenoptera in all likelihood descent from groups of primitive hymenoptera that collectively build defensible and valuable nests (Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson 2010: 1062), *Austroplatypus incompertus* is a member of a family of social beetles that live in nests in trees in which they ‘grow’ fungi they eat (Choe and Crespi 1997: 181–215), the shrimp *Synalpheus regalis* lives in group nests in sponges it eats (Duffy 1996: 513) and certain mole rats live in group burrows in which they store tubers (Jarvis and Bennett 1993: 253).</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ This estimate is based on data from Hansell (2007: 93).</footnote>
Conspicuous consumption

At least in human state societies, specialization has led to a third situa-
tion in which building seems to be particularly useful. Building seems
to be a good idea when the costs of building, imposed by gravity
amongst other things, can be used to affirm certain privileged positions
within a society. People in such privileged positions are often able to
command large energy flows and in order to show off this ability to the
people around them, they sometimes consume parts of these energy
flows conspicuously (Veblen 2008). There are several ways to do so, but
building can be a very good option, partly because it requires so much
effort to lift and move large amounts of often heavy materials. For in-
stance, Ming emperors made sure that the pillars of the most important
buildings in Beijing's imperial city were made out of gigantic trunks of
precious Sichuanese hardwood, which had to be transported over thou-
sands of kilometers to Beijing (Barmé 2008: 32, 33 and 159). Likewise,
the floors of the most important halls and gates in the imperial city were
made out of valuable 'gold bricks' that were mainly made in Suzhou,
a city located more than 1000 kilometers to the south of Beijing (Lou and
Li 2002: 22). Of course there are other reasons to consume conspicuously
with the aid of building, besides the wish to demonstrate one's ability to
counter gravity. Buildings, especially tall ones, are very visible compo-
nent of the urban landscape and partly for this reason they are good
places to showcase valuable resources. The citizens of Beijing, for exam-
ple, used to be able to see the gilded sides of the roof of Tiananmen
from many locations in the city.

When talking about ‘gold bricks’ and gilding, it may be interesting
to take a few steps back, back to the history of the cosmos. Most pre-
cious elements like gold formed a long time ago, in dying stars much
heavier than our own Sun. When such stars ran out of fuel, they started
to collapse under their own weight. During these collapses, large
amounts of energy were created, eventually causing the stars to ex-
plode. Only during the brief cosmic fireworks that resulted from such
processes was it possible to form elements heavier than iron, like cop-
per, silver and gold (Chaisson 2005: ch. 3). Since the circumstances un-
der which these elements formed were so exceptional, elements heavier
than iron are very rare. Things that are very rare are often difficult to
acquire, expensive and therefore a good indicator of one's position with-
in a society. It has been suggested by many, including Charles Darwin,
that for this reason, humans have evolved an aesthetic appreciation for
rare things, including rare elements (Miller 2001: ch. 8). So in a way, dy-
ing stars may be responsible for Tiananmen builders' preference for
bricks that shine like gold and roof decorations made of the precious
yellow metal. They may even have caused the Chinese to start to see
golden-yellow as the most important color, which, during the times
when Tiananmen was built, could only be used for imperial purposes.<fnref n="17" />
This explains why the tiles on Tiananmen's roof, like those on the roofs
of other buildings that were part of the imperial city complex, are gold-
en yellow, whereas the roofs of most other buildings in China were
not.<fnref n="18" />

Although humans are the only animals that use conspicuous build-
ing with heavy, exotic or rare materials to affirm their own social status,
they are not the only animals to consume conspicuously with the aid of
building. In rare situations, other animal species do the same, mostly to
confirm their biological rather than their social fitness. Examples of such
builders are bowerbirds that live in Australia and Papua New Guinea.
This bird family features several types of builders, but Vogelkop bow-
erbirds are perhaps the most enthusiastic ones. Some males of this spe-
cies build bowers that consist of a moss platform, on which they erect
a maypole assembled out of hundreds of twigs. They encase their plat-
form and maypole with a hut that can measure up to 1.8 meters in di-
ameter and can become almost 0.8 meters high (Gould and Grant 2007:
241). As if building such a structure is not impressive enough for a
25 cm creature, the bird then goes on to decorate his bower with large
amounts of ornaments. The ornaments, that can range from colorful
fruits and flowers to shiny black stones and insect parts, depending on
the taste of the particular male, are arranged by type and color, dis-
played in and around the bower, and replaced when necessary (Ibid.:
241-246). Assembling such an enormous and elaborate structure obvi-
ously requires a lot of energy. The males seem to spend all this energy
to convince female bowerbirds that they are sufficiently fit and therefore
a good potential mate. In a way, the bowerbirds' strategy is similar to
the strategy followed by the Chinese emperor who ordered the con-
struction of a huge imperial city complex out of rare materials from far
away to demonstrate to his people that he was sufficiently powerful and
could continue to serve as a good ruler. Of course, there is also a differ-
ence. Whereas the bowerbirds are trying to convince females looking for
a mate, the Chinese emperor was trying to convince a broader set of fol-
lowers. Yet both were or are trying to convince others by using restric-

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ There may be other reasons for this choice as well. Joseph Needham, amongst others, has suggested that the central position of yellow in Chinese culture may have been derived from the color of the loess soils that has dominated the heartland of the Chinese civilization for centuries (Needham 1956: 261).</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ There were a few exceptions to this pattern. The predecessors of the Qing emperors, for instance, broke with this tradition (Guo 2000: 350).</footnote>
tions imposed on building by physical forces like gravity and physical
processes like the formation of elements in stars to their advantage.

Only bowerbirds and humans seem to have discovered ways to use
buildings as a means to consume conspicuously. This raises the ques-
tion of what sets these animals apart from other animals that are also
able to build complex structures, but do so for very different reasons.
There may be several answers to this question. One characteristic of
owerbirds that seems particularly intriguing is the fact that they live in
an environment where there are relatively few other species competing
for the same food and relatively few predators (Diamond 1988: 650).
Humans in general, and people in privileged social positions in particu-
lar, often live in a very similar environment. Such an environment may
have enabled both bowerbirds and humans to spend a lot of energy on
conspicuous building behavior. Bowerbirds and humans do not only
live in rather similar environments, both species also possess relatively
large brains. Birds that build bowers generally have larger brains then
birds from the same family that do not, and in birds that build more
complex bowers the brain areas associated with learning from observa-
tion and experience and with exploring new situations tend to be larger
(Hansell 2007: 244). As was mentioned before, such larger brains may
not be required for all types of building. Yet they may be necessary to
build in the varied and flexible ways necessary to consume conspicu-
ously with the aid of building. As was also mentioned before, humans
have become particularly good at building in varied and flexible ways,
possibly partly because positioning their tools, traps, and protective
structures in strategically fixed locations made it easier for them to
reach and use these structures. Humans may have even become too
good at this. It seems that at a certain point in history, the human ability
to build in more varied and flexible ways than any other creature has
created completely novel challenges for human builders, which will be
described in the next part of this article.

Tiananmen and Human History

One of the reasons why I think the human ability to build in such varied
and flexible ways has caused problems for some human builders is the
fact that I have encountered such problems myself as an architect. When
presented with a design task, I often found that there were thousands of
different ways to tackle such a task. This is the case because over the
past few millennia a wide variety of building practices accumulated in
humanity's collective memory.<fnref n="19" /> As a result, all kind of ancient and

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ This is, of course, not only due to the fact that reaching and using buildings became easier for humans during their evolution. It is mostly due to the process that has been</footnote>
modern materials, construction techniques, types of spatial organiza-
tion, aesthetic effects, symbolic meanings and economic considerations
have become available for any builder to use and combine in lots and
lots of different ways. All of these options are a testimony to humanity's
incredible ingenuity and are wonderful resources for contemporary ar-
chitects. But how do you, as an architect, know which ones to choose?
How do you know which combination yields the best results in a spe-
cific situation? Quite often, that question is hard to answer. Neverthe-
less, it is central to the architectural discipline. It is difficult to come up
with a good design without trying to answer the question. Doing so has
been difficult for me, but probably also for builders in the past.

From quite early on in human history, ideas about building were re-
tained in the buildings themselves and in stories, figures, images, and
manuals that circulated widely and could travel long distances. Admit-
tedly, in the case of China, buildings themselves were and are not al-
ways the best source of information, mainly because many of them did
not survive that long since they were built out of perishable woods.
Other Chinese sources of building information were much more persis-
tent though. Stories about ancient buildings like the legendary palaces
of China's first emperors were passed on from generation to generation
long before the oldest remaining buildings were built. Elaborate pottery
models of various buildings that were created during the Han and
sometimes even earlier dynasties also stood the test of time, as did
paintings of buildings that survived in the Mogao Caves along the silk
road (Guo 2010: 1 and Steinhardt 2004: 228-254). Perhaps most impor-
tantly, ideas about building were transmitted from person to person by
informal and formal training programs, and by various building manu-
als. The most famous manual, one that has survived intact until today,
is the Yingzao Fashi. It was first published by a government official
called Li Jie in 1103 CE and commonly used by builders after that time
(Guo 1998: 1). The manual can be seen as a compendium of architectural
knowledge, containing 34 chapters composed of information about for
example materials, technical details, decorations, and labor organization
(Ibid.: 4-6). All of this information from the Yingzao Fashi, other manu-
als and other sources could have easily been combined by Tiananmen's
builders into a number of very different versions of Tiananmen. But for
some reason, the people who constructed the gate chose one specific
design. Why did they do so?

A possible answer to this question involves the emergence of the ar-
chitectural profession and architectural styles. While more and more

<footnote>described by David Christian as collective learning, although the former process could
have influenced the latter (and vice versa) (Christian 2004: ch. 7; see also in this volume).</footnote>
ways to build something accumulated in our societies' memory, architects became more important. It is easy to see why. When more options to build became available, it became difficult to master them all and even more difficult to find the most suitable combination of building options in a specific situation. Therefore, at a certain point in history and for certain building projects, specialized architects became necessary to help people make sensible and in some cases also interesting building choices. An overload of options may not only have created greater need for architects, but may also have led to emergence of building styles. Put a bit crudely, applying a certain building style can be seen as largely sticking to something that structurally, socially, aesthetically, symbolically, and economically 'works' while adding relatively small variations. Therefore, applying a certain style usually results in a fairly safe design solution, even though such a solution may not always be the optimal one given a specific situation. Nevertheless, in many cases people seem to prefer such a safe solution to the application of completely new and experimental combinations of building practices that sometimes work out marvelously and sometimes fail miserably.

When thinking about building styles like this, using them actually seems a bit similar to building standardization in the wider animal world. Most animals use fixed methods and sometimes even standardized materials to construct their building, simply because reinventing the wheel all the time can be risky. Moreover, trying to reinvent the wheel can be costly, because large and energy guzzling 'inventor brains' are required. In contrast, when non-human animals build with fixed methods and materials, such behavior is generally hard-wired and does not require large brains (Hansell 2007: ch. 3). Likewise, in the human world not sticking to established building styles may require expensive expert architects, whereas sticking to culturally hard-wired styles can be a bit cheaper because it requires less innovation and, therefore, fewer innovative specialists.

When it comes to the relation between architects and building styles, it may be interesting to note that overall, the influence of the main architect of the imperial city of which Tiananmen was a part seems to have been rather limited when compared to the importance attributed to building styles and traditions. This situation becomes particularly intriguing when contrasted to the situation on the other side of the Eurasian continent. In Europe, building styles were important too, but they seem to have been much more volatile than the Chinese traditions were. Unlike Chinese traditions, European styles could change drastically within hundred years or so. Famous examples of such transitions include the change from fairly modest Romanesque to extravagant
Gothic and from extravagant Gothic to classical Renaissance styles (Kostof 1995: chs 14 and 17). In China, architectural styles were much more stable. I do not mean to imply that these styles did not change, but changes, like roof lines that obtained slightly different curvatures, were smaller and appeared more gradually (Boyd 1962: ch. 2). The role of architects in China is probably closely linked to this. Architects in China, including Cai Xin and Nguyen An, the people who were responsible for the construction of the imperial city complex, were more or less government officials, intellectuals responsible for the design and planning of large complexes (Zhu 2004: ch. 2; Mallas 2001: 42; Mote and Twitchett 1998: 240; and Boyd 1962: ch. 2). Such people usually did not design individual buildings. That task was left to master craftsmen. While designing individual buildings, such master craftsmen based themselves on manuals like the previously mentioned Yingzao Fashi, which did not only include a long list of all kinds of building practices, but also prescribed in detail which sets of practices should be used in which specific situations. For instance, it contained rules about the exact dimensions of different types of buildings, like palaces, mansions and pavilion halls, should have and which structural details should be applied to which building types (Guo 1998: 8). Master craftsmen, therefore, had little room to experiment with all kinds of new ideas. Consequently, buildings did not change that much over the centuries, and the image of architects as innovative artists did not emerge in China like it did in the West.

There may be several reasons why the values attached to architects and building styles differed in the East and West. To me and many other scholars it seems that during much of Chinese history, people have put greater emphasis on groups and less emphasis on individuals than people, for instance, in Europe did (Nisbett 2003). This greater emphasis on groups has been linked to the types of agriculture that dominated Chinese societies, leading people to be more dependent on the group they lived in than people elsewhere were (McNeill J. and McNeill W. 2003: 32–33). A greater emphasis on groups can, perhaps, also be linked to the geography of China. When you look at China on a map, you can see that the country is bordered by the highest mountains on Earth to its west, by the largest ocean on the planet to its east, by an immense steppe where only nomads could survive to its north, and inhospitable mountainous jungle to its south. Therefore, influences coming from the outside have been fairly limited, at least when compared to the effects ideas from other regions had on the development of, for example, Europe. This may have made it easier to keep Chinese culture unified and Chinese society stable after the formation of the first Chi-
nese empires. Both a greater emphasis on groups, on a unified culture and on the stability of social structures that prevailed during much of the Chinese history may have influenced the development of Chinese architecture, as the need to distinguish oneself from predecessors or competitors was not that great. In fact, distinguishing oneself from the rest of a group or society could easily backfire, because it could negatively influence group dynamics and threaten social stability. This may be one of the reasons why the Chinese, including the emperors who ordered the construction of Tiananmen, may have preferred sticking to traditional styles. For European rulers, on the other hand, distinguishing themselves from their predecessors and competitors with the aid of building often was worthwhile, and one of the main reasons why the French kings became the patrons of early Gothic builders like Abbot Suger and Italian merchants and bankers became the patrons of early Renaissance architects like Filippo Brunelleschi (Kostof 1995: 329 and 403).

A difference in emphasis on individual architects and buildings styles may have put European and Chinese architectural history each onto their own unique paths. The starting points of these paths may not have been too dissimilar. It is remarkable how much many ancient Greek or Roman dwellings resemble traditional Chinese houses. All of these houses generally consisted of a series of one or two-storied compartments or halls, organized around one or a few courtyards and closed off from the outside world by a wall. The way the roofs were supported and the decorations differed in the east and west, but apart from that, ancient housing traditions in Europe and China were quite alike (Kostof 1995: 141, 197–201 and 232; Boyd 1962: chs 2 and 4). It seems that from these starting points, the Western architecture went on to develop lots of different types of buildings and corresponding building styles, introducing new ideas and changing styles with every alteration in social structure. In China, on the other hand, people preferred to refine existing styles instead. As a result, many traditional Chinese buildings, including temples and palaces, still look a bit like the traditional courtyard house.

Tiananmen fits into this tradition: it is part of a wall surrounding a gigantic imperial courtyard complex that housed smaller courtyard complexes like the Forbidden City and gardens, altars, palaces, offices and royal workshops and warehouses (Zhu 2004: ch. 2). Of course, the scale of the complex, the use of materials and the richness of decorations are not comparable to those of ordinary houses, but the spatial organization of the imperial city, the nature of its halls and the applied building techniques most definitely are. Furthermore, the gatehouse itself is quite similar to the halls that are also present in traditional courtyard houses. Like almost all other halls in China it consists of a wooden post
and beam structure that supports a curved roof and envelops one single
space.

It is tempting to expand this argument much further by analyzing
how more detailed characteristics of Tiananmen do or do not fit into this
story. Yet for the purpose of this article, the short description given
above must suffice. For the purpose of this article it has been more im-
portant to demonstrate how the reasons why people built Tiananmen
the way they did can be linked to broader trends, like the emergence of
architects and architectural styles, the varied and flexible building strat-
egies developed by humans, the development of building strategies by
life in general and the fundamental forces and processes that shaped
these strategies.

Reflection

Now that we have completed a journey that covered 13.8 billion years of
history, it may be a good time to reflect briefly on it.

Trying to see ‘a world in a grain of sand’, or in this case in Tianan-
men, definitely changed my appreciation for it, and triggered my curi-
osity. It led to all kinds of questions people who usually study subjects
like the gate have not asked before. For example, architects or architec-
tural historians generally do not wonder about the delicate balance be-
tween gravity and electromagnetism that enables us to build. They also
do not ask themselves why some animals, including humans, build
whereas other animals do not. And few of them think about why archi-
tects or architectural styles exist in the first place. Trying to see a world
in a building also led to some Big History questions big historians have
not asked before. For instance, the question how energy considerations
involved in early tool use and building may have helped shape human
evolution and human history has not been examined yet. This Little Big
History made it easy to discover such questions. It can therefore serve
as an example of how Little Big Histories can be used as fruitful re-
search tools, perhaps in the way Albert Einstein had in mind when he
wrote: ‘To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old prob-
lems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real
advance in science’ (Einstein and Infeld 1938: 92).

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**Abstract**

The article first points out that Big History, according to the Chinese historians' perception, fails to unite natural and human history. In short, it contextualizes without necessarily connecting. It then discusses this failure in light of the traditional Chinese concept and practices of 'unity of Heaven and humanity', which manifests itself in the historiography of Sima Qian and in such technological feats as the Dujiangyan Irrigation System, as well as in scholarly ambitions as exemplified by Zhang Zai of the Song Dynasty. Finally, the paper elaborates on another Chinese traditional notion of diversity and harmony, which, hopefully, can contribute to further development of Big History, especially in China.

**Keywords:** Big History, China, unity of Heaven and humanity, diversity, harmony.

At the Seoul Asian Association of World Historians (AAWH) Congress, April 26-29, 2012, I talked about the reasons why Big History has been, sadly enough, neglected in China so far. For one thing, David Christian's now classic *Maps of Time*, despite being translated into Chinese and published as early as 2007, has not generated much attention. Today, instead of repeating the sad story of looking backwards, I will look forward and anticipate the future of Big History by reflecting on the Tao or the Way of Big History in China.

But anyway, a recap of my major points for why Big History has been neglected seems in order, because these are closely connected with what I am going to talk about in the present paper. First, conceptually, the Chinese concern for unity of natural and human histories is a task which Big History, as practiced in the West, has so far failed to fulfill. Second, in institutional terms, there is a separation of scientific and sociocultural histories in Chinese universities and research institutions. Thirdly, at present in China, pragmatic rather than cosmic concerns grow faster, like the one of sustaining its high economic growth. And fourthly, one can speak about the lack of attention on the side of the Chinese historians to the few Big History books published so far.

I know that many Big Historians, including David Christian, are indignant about the first point, namely, why the Chinese scholars regard
Big History as failing to live up to its promise of uniting natural and human histories, the 'fact' positively confirmed by no less a world history figure than William McNeill! (Christian 2011: xv) Therefore, I will focus on this point in my contribution. In a certain sense, I argue that before human beings are energized and obliged to fly to another planet to colonize and to settle on, they have a lesson to learn, a lesson which is, perhaps, also of value even if they do succeed in colonizing another planet in the cosmos.<fnref n="1" /> And that is the lesson of the Chinese 'unity of Heaven and humanity', something that is often regarded as the very core and kernel of the Chinese civilization. I will substantiate this by an example of how the Chinese deal with human-nature relationship and another example of what Chinese scholars aspire for in their scholarly undertaking. Finally, I will try to elaborate a little bit on the Chinese ideal of harmony in diversity, which may also be of service to Big History on its way to winning the heart and soul of the world's peoples, especially the Chinese.

## Why Big History does not Unite Natural and Human Histories

First, why do the Chinese think that Big History has failed to unite natural and human history? And as you will see, I will not go into details, but only categorically outline the argument structure.

Big History contextualizes but does not necessarily connect. Big History puts all humanity, nay, all living beings, within a larger cosmic context, for sure. But in what ways are human and natural histories united?

Big History, to be sure, does put forward a number of key concepts or central threads in an effort to connect, but these concepts are neither fully elaborated nor effectively employed in its narrative. For example, David Christian, in his *Maps of Time*, does point to 'collective learning' as an 'emergent' property of *Homo sapiens*, but obviously leaves it as such, probably as an indication of possible directions for further research. The same is true of Fred Spier's 'Goldilocks conditions' and Eric Chaisson's 'density of energy flow'. In other words, these, especially the latter two, sound rather more 'scientific' than 'humane'.

If human history is reduced to spasms of 'energy flow', in an obvious attempt to debunk the various kinds of human superiority or centrist rhetoric, it naturally leads to accounts where humanity is seriously

<footnote n="1">¹ David Christian and others have argued convincingly that '[n]o complex species is likely to survive intact for more than a few million years'... and we humans 'would be well-advised to hop a spaceship to another solar system' in due time. See http://www.ibhanet.org/.</footnote>
marginalized, as a pitiably negligible creature in a larger cosmic frame-
work.<fnref n="2" /> These may turn out to be superficial Chinese ‘impressions’, but
they are not at all pleasing to the Chinese, who always insist on putting
humanity first, or at least on a par with the Grand Design of nature.

We can argue that Big History arises in reaction to World History
not living up to its name, rampant postmodernist nihilistic tendencies,
and cycles of prevalent crises confronted by humanity as a whole. But
even so, more thought need to be given to defining human nature and
to coordinating collective human behavior so as to combat these un-
wholesome tendencies and crises in order to realize a more harmonious
and sustainable existence.

The Chinese ‘Unity of Heaven and Humanity’ and Its
Implications for Big History

This failure on the part of Big History is most obvious if we put it under
the spotlight of the Chinese concept and practice of ‘unity of Heaven
and Humanity’ (Zhao 2002: 5–17; Wu 2000: 3–7; Ho 1991: 139–146). In
fact, most recently, three leading Confucian thinkers – Qian Mu of Tai-
wan, Feng Youlan of Mainland China, and Tang Junyi of Hong Kong –
independently made conclusions that the most significant contribution
that the Confucian tradition, in fact, Chinese culture in general, can
make to the global community, is the idea of the ‘unity of Heaven and
Humanity’ (Tu 2001: 243–264).

Now, what is the ‘unity of Heaven and Humanity’? (Chan 2011: 64–77;
Chan 2012: 106–120; Cheng 1984: 95–98)

Sima Qian and His Successors

To understand this concept, let us first turn to the first historian in Chi-
na, Sima Qian (145-90 BCE). In his now much publicized, *Letter to Jen
An* (Sima Qian 1965: 95-102; 1993: 236; Ban Gu 2005: 2068-2069; Chang
1981: 157; Wang 1999: 293) Sima Qian clearly stated his purpose of writ-
ing history:

To inquire into the relationship between Heaven and humanity, to
comprehend the vicissitudes of past and present, and to form a sin-
gle narrative of it all.

<footnote n="2">² *Editors' note:* We have referred the author to several works in Big History, including some major ones, that do not reduce Big History or humankind in such a way, since they classify human society as one of the most complex things in the Universe, rather than being the product of 'a pitiably negligible creature'. We ultimately leave the author's as- sertions to the judgement of the reader.</footnote>
Now, intuitively, the critical issue is our understanding of ‘Heaven’. What does ‘Heaven’ mean? According to one interpretation, the ‘heaven’ here is Nature, and Sima Qian was doing nothing short of uniting natural and human histories to construct his own version of ‘Big History’. Moreover, Sima Qian was ready to justify the relationship between Heaven and humanity, to forge a coherent story of the past and present, and to shape out his own narrative from prevailing narratives (Huang 1997: 72–75).

Of course, besides denoting Nature, ‘heaven’ can mean a host of other things, like ‘God’, the ‘Mandate of Heaven’, ‘morals’, ‘strength’, and ‘strategy’ – and can refer to aspects of each of these things all at the same time, sometimes tinkering with political justification (Wang 2008a: 64–66; 2008b: 80–85). And, as you can see, even the talk of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ entails a ‘correlative’ or ‘coordinative’ relationship between humanity and Heaven. The British scientist Joseph Needham calls this kind of ‘correlative thinking’ or ‘coordinative thinking’ the very heart of traditional Chinese cosmology (Henderson 1984: xiv–xv; Needham 1956: 280–281; Tang 1988: 321–322). Or in his own words:

> In coordinative thinking, conceptions are not subsumed under one another, but placed side by side in a pattern, and things influence one another not by acts of mechanical causation, but by a kind of 'inductance'... The symbolic correlations or correspondences all formed part of one colossal pattern (Needham 1956).

This ‘colossal pattern’ is made most explicit by the sixth century BCE Daoist philosopher Laozi in his *Daodejing* (Sima Qian 2006: 388; Lai 2006: 7; Henderson 1984: 35).

> The ways of men are conditioned by those of earth. The ways of earth, by those of heaven. The ways of heaven by those of Tao, and the ways of Tao by the Self-so [ziran] (Lao Tzu 1998: 53).

Yet, what is our concern here is rather the message and the philosophy underlying it, rather than the exact meaning of those ancient sages. The Chinese philosophy is said to have started, among other things, with the *Book of Changes* (henceforth BC), the ancient Chinese book of prognostication which is often revered as the first of all Confucian classics. Now BC considers a change as the only permanent thing about our world, and that ‘a change communicates with the Dao of nature and the Dao of man’; further explications accredit BC as encompassing the ‘Dao of Heaven’, the ‘Dao of earth’, and the ‘Dao of man’, the first finds its manifestation in *yin* and *yang*, the second – as ‘hardness’ and ‘softness’, and the third – in ‘benevolence’ and ‘righteousness’. What is more im-
portant, the basic principles of the three are united, commonly deter-
mined by forces of *qian* (strength) and *kun* (yielding) (Tang 2008: 484-
491; Mou 2009: 63–64).

Of course, one may easily discredit all this as a superstitious talk of
years gone by, with no room for it whatsoever in our modern temple
of 'sciences'. But do not be so sure. The dualistic pattern of contemporary
science itself may be problematic, while the talk of the 'unity of Heaven
and humanity' involves a totally different mode of thinking, the one that
incorporates the whole humanity, the earth, and Heaven in a grand inte-
grative scheme of Oneness. In other words, the Chinese answer to this
problem of humanity and nature is that nature and humanity mutually
shape and condition each other through numerous rituals, consciously
instituted or unconsciously there, so as to maintain a harmonious sus-
tainability.<fnref n="3" />

So, the Heaven-human relationship continues to call for justification
even nowadays, not necessarily in either the Chinese Tao or in the
Western Logos, but possibly in other transcending alternatives. A more
reasonable attitude is, perhaps, to give the past and the 'other' its own
due, since - following the science writer Robert Matthews - the past
may really be our future, as the past observations may turn out to be
more accurate than we assume (Matthews 1998: 6-9).

More than two thousand years ago, the philosopher Yang Xiong of
the Western Han (53 BCE – 18 CE) said: ‘Only he who knows heaven,
earth and man can be called a scholar’ (Ye et al. 1999: 18; Yang Xiong
2002: 121). This sets a high demand on scholars, yet it is exactly this out-
look towards which generations of the Chinese scholars have been as-
piring – to be fully conscious of one’s place in nature and society, as well
as of the interconnectedness that this consciousness provides, to live out
the meaning of one’s existence in a network of duties and responsibili-
ties, and to crave for a permanent harmony among the three.

One can guess that despite the vicissitudes of history and especially
the turmoil of the modern times, this tradition of ‘uniting Heaven and
humanity’ has never been lost to the Chinese, if not among historians,
though latent. In recent years, it resurfaces again among Chinese non-
historians. In terms of constructing China’s ‘Big History’, a most notable

<footnote n="3">³ These rituals demand more detailed discussions than allowed by a limited scope of the paper, for example, music and rituals representing the harmony and orderliness of Heaven and Earth (Wu 2000: 5–6). With science or logic alone and without these rituals, a harmonious sustainability can never be realized on earth, as Francis Bacon laments in the first of his Essays, ‘Of Truth’: ‘Certainly, it is heaven upon earth, to have a man’s mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth’ (quoted in Fernández-Armesto 1997: 203).</footnote>
non-historian is the environmental scientist and professor Ye Wenhu of Beijing University and others who work with him. Ye unites, or at least, tries to unite natural and human histories as the two main threads of his ‘Big History’, and by doing so, has been able to delineate a miniature world history of barely four pages! (Ye and Mao 1999: 1–6; Ye and Song 2002: 1–4; Wang and Ye 2005: 10–13; Ye 2010: 106–109)

## The Example of Dujiangyan Irrigation System (DIS)

To bolster this notion of ‘unity of Heaven and humanity’, let us take a look at the Dujiangyan Irrigation System.

This ancient irrigation system, located in present-day Sichuan province of China, was built over two thousand years ago between 256–206 BC by Li Bing, the governor of the Shu Shire under the Qin State, in perfect keeping with the principle of promoting harmony between mankind and nature. This is not the place for technical details and the ancient Chinese wisdom of ecology (Li and Xu 2006: 291–298; Cao et al. 2010: 3–13; Tu 2001: 243–264; Fang 2003: 207–217; Sima Qian 1959: 1407); what is relevant to us is that the irrigation system was designed and constructed in conformity with the terrain and topography of the river and the Chengdu plain and thus, it successfully simultaneously solved the problem of silt sedimentation, flood control, and water distribution, so that more than two thousand years later, with its basic structure intact, it still plays a crucial role in flood control, irrigation and water supply for the Chengdu plain in Sichuan province. Thus, it is regarded as ‘a model of harmonious coexistence between mankind and nature’, and was duly recognized by UNESCO as the World Cultural Heritage site in 2000. And amazingly, after intensive and careful researches since the 1970s, it was found that the design and construction of this ancient irrigation system correspond fully to concepts of modern hydraulic sciences. So, despite the inability of the ancient Chinese architects to travel through time to meet with our modern scientists, a due reverence for Heaven does connect great minds.

## Aspirations of Zhang Zai, the Song Dynasty Chinese Scholar

Let us consider another example of the scholarly ambitions of the Chinese Confucians. Zhang Zai or Chang Tsai (1020–1077) was a Neo-Confucian philosopher of the Northern Song dynasty. In a certain sense, Zhang Zai lived a paradigmatic Confucian scholar's life, so when he died he had almost nothing to bequeath this world except a few memo-
rable lines showcasing the aspirations of his scholarly undertaking. According to Zhang, Confucian sages are capable of ‘establishing the mind of Heaven and Earth, determining the destiny of human lives, restoring discontinued traditions of learning from the past, and commencing a period of supreme peace for one’s descendants’ (Tang 1988: 322; T’ang 1991: 55–57; Liu 2007: 69–73, 129).

If this is a little bit vague, we can move on to enjoy his highly esteemed ‘Western Inscription’ (Lin 2009: 58; Zhang 1997: 2–3; Chan 1963: 497–498) which begins with ‘[p]eople are my compatriots; things, my fellow beings’ and ends with ‘[l]iving is following my nature; death, my tranquility’ (Tang 1988: 321–322). Thus, when alive, one should fulfill the responsibility of realizing the ideal of ‘great harmony’, and thus one can enjoy serenity without feeling shame or regret till the end of one’s life. One can argue that this notion of the ‘unity of Heaven and humanity’ probably plays the role of a religion for the well-cultivated Chinese, if not the Chinese in general: it puts them in the domain of eternity; it defines clear duties and obligations for them in life; and it brings them solace and tranquility in death.

## The Chinese Notion of Harmony in Diversity

And finally, let us elaborate on the Chinese notion of harmony in diversity. In the West, especially in academic debates, people would say ‘we agree to disagree’, and to be sure, we also disagree to agree. That is why in my most recent essay I cautioned that ‘Big History should not proceed in such a way that other historians take Big History to be nothing, whereas Big Historians take history to be nothing else’ (Sun 2013). But still that may sound more like a political expediency. If we go deeper, we may find in it the Chinese philosophical position which is more ontological and basic. The expression goes as *heshi shengwu, tong ze buji*, or in English, ‘Harmony generates and sameness stifles vitality’ or in another interpretation, ‘Harmony fosters diversity, homogeneity undermines sustainability’.

There is a story about the emergence of this concept, as recorded in *Guo Yu*, China's earliest history book of the Spring and Autumn Period by historian Zuo Qiuming (ca. 502 – ca. 422) of the State of Lu. It says:

> Duke Huan of Zheng asks: 'Will the Zhou Dynasty fall?' Shi Bo or Count Shi replies: 'This is for sure... Since King You of Zhou has abandoned the upright and virtuous and takes a fancy for those mean and treacherous. He rejects those who disagree with him and accept only those sharing the same opinion as his. Now harmony
fosters diversity, homogeneity undermines sustainability. This
means that the coming together of different things creates har-
mony, which in turn nourishes thing; and if you add up things of
the same nature, they will sustain for a while and then perish'
(Guoyu 1978: 515-516; Zhang 1996: 43).

I hope this lesson is also of service to Big History, for it certainly
wants to sustain in the harmony of diversity.

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# The Universal Breakthroughs of Big History: Developing a Unified Theory

Ken Gilbert

## Abstract

The currently unfolding panoramic view of the eons, which the modern scientific and historical disciplines present, reveals an outstanding series of critical and transformative universal breakthroughs running throughout the history of the cosmos, life, and man. This paper begins to explore and develop an orderly framework for Big History based on this remarkable overall pattern of similarly sudden and rapid outbursts of expansive creative power marking the entire course of evolutionary manifestation. On this basis I consider and propose: (1) 'A Great Story of Origins' with sixteen 'Origin Events', each of which in turn dramatically establishes and defines a new 'Regime' and subsequent 'Evolutionary Era' with emergent qualities; (2) a reconsideration of current issues at the cutting edge of evolutionary theory including 'punctuated equilibrium'; (3) a recognition of the essential 'twofold' or 'biphasic' nature of developmental change in time; (4) an expansion of evolutionary thought in the context of Big History; and (5) approaches towards developing a Unified Theory.

**Keywords:** thresholds, punctuated equilibrium.

## I. Introduction: Origin Events

The Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, along with its profound implications, has been resonating in human awareness for only a relatively short time. It is certainly a striking and uniquely impressive discovery. However, if in addition to that one event we were to examine the currently unfolding Big Picture – namely the scientific and historical story of the cosmos, life, and man – the original Big Bang can be recognized also as the first phenomenal episode in a sequence of similarly outstanding outbursts of expansive creative power marking the entire course of universal evolution. In a sense, there has not been just one Big Bang, but one Big Bang after another! The unfolding panoramic view reveals a marvelous series of comparably critical and transformative breakthroughs running all the way from the Big Bang to the present. Indeed, we may very well be living in such a momentous time.

I will refer here to these awesome universal breakthroughs, during which entire new stages of irreversible evolutionary developments emerge, as the 'Origin Events' (including the eight 'thresholds of in-
creasing complexity' along with several others). This designation high-
lights what I find most significant about them: first, how they present us
with a powerful Modern Origin Story about the emergence of the elements
and qualities that make us what we are; and second, they reveal a pattern
of evolution that unfolds largely as an eventful process, not just a slow,
step-by-step, gradual and continuous one as we are more accustomed to
thinking. These qualities are intrinsic to what the historical evidence in
its entirety seems to be telling us, and ought to be primary factors
in proposing a unifying story and general theory for the discipline of
Big History.

This paper begins to explore and develop an orderly framework for
the emerging discipline of Big History based on this essential ‘Key Con-
cept’ that a fundamental and overall historical change on a grand scale
takes place through Origin Events. Such an episodic pattern has often
been noted in relation to each of the three Realms of Big History indi-
vidually (Cosmos, Life, and Humanity), but never before have they
been synthesized into a unified whole.

David Christian (2011a: 24) has posed the question, ‘Are we on the
verge of a grand unification of historical sciences?’ including a Grand
Unified Story (GUS) and Grand Unified Theory (GUT). A wide range of
source material from diverse specialized disciplines must go into the
making of any Big History theory. However, by treating history as a sci-
ence of origins, a growing synergy and integration can begin to come
forth directly from the historical knowledge itself through a process of
pattern recognition along with inductive generalization. Initial consid-
erations are introduced regarding how our Key Concept provides the
basis for a coordinated approach that can:

* integrate the Realms of Big History;

• facilitate the Periodization of Big History;

* expand the newly emerging global creation story of Big History into ‘A Great Story of Origins’;

* provide elements to consider towards developing a Grand Evolu-
tionary Synthesis and Unified Theory of Big History.

II. The Axial Period and Cultural History

The possibility of envisioning an intelligible structure of world history
as a whole, first occurred to me years ago through a discovery inspired
by my favorite professor, Huston Smith, upon being introduced to Karl
Jaspers' intriguing concept of 'the Axial Period' (Jaspers 1953: 1-21).
The remarkable mid-first millennium BC stands out on the timeline of
history with the sudden, simultaneous, widespread, and independent
appearance of prominent Culture Heroes and memorably innovative
figures across the Old World including: 1) the Buddha along with the many 'heterodox sects' and beginning of the classical schools of philosophy in India; 2) Confucius and the 'Hundred Schools of Thought' in China; 3) the major Old Testament Prophets along with the Exile and Restoration, and the 'new covenant' in Israel; plus 4) the Presocratics, Socrates and Plato, and the Golden Age in Athens.

The Axial Period was a time of widespread crisis and breakdown, but also a breakthrough because within a century or two, there is the beginning of a monumental shift in the orientation of human cognition from the previous mythopoeic type of thought and experience to a more abstract form of conceptual thought based on logic and reason (Frankfort et al. 1977). More recently, Robert Bellah and Hans Joas (2012) have edited an innovative volume of studies, particularly significant for Big History, looking further at the Axial Age in the broader setting of human cognitive and socio-cultural evolution. Some consideration is likewise given here to characterize the 'profound common element', which Jaspers indicated was the essential thing shared by all the movements of the time, as a new self-reflective way of thought and 'theoretic culture' that is more investigative and analytic than the previous more narrative-oriented 'mythic culture'. We are so used to taking our particular way of thinking and operating for granted that it is difficult to imagine how this cognitive orientation, along with its new form of collective learning, came into existence at a certain time in history, and that it did so, in its first appearance, dramatically and universally.

How deep, dramatic and sudden was the axial shift presumably from one cognitive and socio-cultural stage to another? We know this remarkable period well in the West particularly because of the birth of the classical forms of culture and society in Greece. Athens was in a distinctively pivotal position where the former world was culminating while the new one came into being (Finley 1966: 80-108). John Herington, professor of classics at Yale, is one of the many who has marveled at the 'great transition' which took place, describing how archaic society and the universal mythic vision and language, upon which it was based, were beginning to be radically transformed. He notes how a new type of civilization was emerging and the ancient ways were disintegrating under the impact, 'It is hard to measure the world-historical significance of that collapse. Geological analogies might be found in those natural catastrophes that seem to occur so many million years, obliterating entire life systems' (Herington 1986: 15).

In Israel, the exceptional circumstances of the breakthrough involved the destruction of the Temple followed by the Exile and Restoration. The great biblical scholar, Gerhard von Rad emphasized how important it is to realize 'there is this break which goes so deep that the
new state beyond it cannot be understood as the continuation of what went before' (von Rad 1965: 115, 271). He adds, 'we have still to consider the "revolutionary significance of the amazing new factor" the Axial prophets introduced, the prophecy of a "new covenant" no longer communal in emphasis but written in the "heart"' (Hebrew for mind and will) of the individual.

Likewise, in China (Creel 1960: 120-141, 169-170) and India (Thapar 1975: 119-132), with the spread of urbanization having set the stage for greater social mobility, the time was ripe for a new spirit of freedom and empirical inquiry to arise and a leap forward was made, setting the tone for millennia to come. Both Confucius and Buddha ('be ye lamps unto yourselves'), parallel to the other central figures of the time, taught the importance of thinking and arriving at the truth for oneself. In India 'this led to a new perspective on the significance of the individual' where 'Buddhism in particular, turned the earlier perspective inside out, and, and the focus shifted to the individual rather than the social group to which he belonged' (Ibid.: 125-126). In China also, 'a kind of critical, reflective questioning... a new vision', along with the Confucian teachings that made ethical learning available to all men, 'established a range of thought that was to shape all future developments' (Schwartz 1975: 3, 63, 68).

In summary, within the time frame of only a century or two, seeds were planted from the Orient to the Mediterranean, for the increasingly widespread and revolutionary transformation from the archaic, primarily oral and poetic, communal and mythopoeic civilizations to a new world of collective learning based on literacy and the written word (Thapar 1975: 130), education for all, an ethic of individual conscience, personal rights and responsibilities, democratic and egalitarian ideals, rational justice, the development of philosophy, systemization of mathematics, the growth of scientific thought, empirical methodology, and the principles of the world religions. Whatever we prefer to call it, the new type of collective learning emerging in the Axial Period came to inspire, characterize and pervade the cultural, social, artistic, political and technological developments throughout the centuries to come in all these regions.

The mid-first millennium conjunction has been marveled at by generations of historians as a unique phenomenon and a mystery for good reason. In the broader context of Big History, however, it may be seen as not such a singular occurrence after all. Mircea Eliade, the great historian of religion, spent much of his career brilliantly elucidating how people all over the world have memorialized in myth and ritual a series of 'Great Times' or 'Times of Origin' during which 'the central axis for all future orientation' comes into existence all at once (Eliade 1959: 21).
It occurred to me that this might also be the appropriate context for appreciating the outstanding significance of the Axial Period.

As I began to investigate Jasper's concept in more depth along with this larger perspective in mind, I saw that it could perhaps provide a 'Master Key' for the recognition of a universal structure to world history. Considering the nature and meaning of the mysterious mid-first millennium event, we may not be looking at a unique or anomalous occurrence at all, but a typical one. This transitional configuration might in actuality be just the most recent episode in a sequence of comparably dramatic turning points which characterize the entire course of cultural history, and ultimately as we are also beginning to see, Big History.

The key is to recognize and begin to appreciate how, as Giorgio de Santillana, MIT's eminent history of science professor, emphasized, 'Mistaking cultural history for a process of gradual evolution, we have deprived ourselves of every reasonable insight into the nature of culture... no one is willing to imagine that civilization appeared in a thunderclap' (de Santillana 1969: 68–71).

As we survey on the large scale, humanity's historical advance and the evolution of collective learning, it seems that fundamental change is an exception rather than a rule. The outstanding and universal innovations do appear as thunderclaps. There are immense intervening eras when there is little essential change: most societies during these times remain tradition-bound as similar cultural forms and experiences develop accordingly, based on a preceding original breakthrough.

For example, in both the Agricultural Revolution and the Urban Revolution we witness a sudden appearance in several locales of new worldviews and cultural orders, which thereafter spread and become the traditional ways of life for peoples throughout the world. The rapid transition during a few critical centuries to highly complex 'civilizations' has been observed but never explained by several scholars of ancient history. This has been noted by many including William McNeill (1963: 36–41) on Sumerian civilization, and Henri Frankfort (1956: 50–51) on the evidence from Egypt.

In the Narmer Palette and Memphite Theology, we find the arche-
type of Egyptian kingship and its method of artistic representation set
once and for all. Within only a few centuries the conventions are fixed,
and last for millennia; that is, until the mid-first millennium BC when as
Jaspers (1953: 6) points out, 'the thousands of years old ancient civiliza-
tions are everywhere brought to an end by the Axial Period'.

III. Punctuated Equilibrium and the Paleontological Record

A similar pattern of change has become increasingly evident in the
realm of geological and natural history as well. Paleontologists and bi-
ologists are increasingly recognizing that the evolutionary process of life on Earth can best be described at various levels, not only as one of gradual and steady change, but in terms of sudden, rapid and dramatic points of transition or 'punctuated equilibria' (Gould and Eldredge 1977: 115-151). Stephen Jay Gould (1978), in his article entitled 'Evolution: Explosion Not Ascent', explains this changing conception regarding the process of change in nature:

> In short, stasis and sudden replacement mark the history of most species... the history of life... is not as many people assume, a tale of slow progress, leading to greater complexity of forms and greater diversity of kinds and numbers. It is, in important respects, a series of plateaus punctuated by rare and seminal events that shift systems from one level to another.

This pattern has long been evident to paleontologists. It was stasis in the geological strata, interspersed by the abrupt appearance of radi-cally different layers of fossil species that made biostratigraphy work so well in the first place. It is important to underline that stasis during the relatively long stretches in which it occurs, does not necessarily mean no change at all, but that during these times it does not 'accumulate'. 'In-stead, over time, the species wobbles about its phenotypic mean' (Sterelny 2007: 96). In other words, adaptations occur resulting in some minor vari-ations but the basic phenotype remains. For example, proponents of punctuated equilibrium have pointed out how Cambrian species, while demonstrating variational changes, tend to maintain their basic forms through extended stretches of time. In addition, for Big History purposes, noteworthy stasis and punctuation occur at higher levels of taxa than spe-ciation: the major phyla have remained basically stable for the entire Phanerozoic span of geological history since their rapid emergence to-gether in the Cambrian explosion (Valentine 1995: 190-194).

There were basically two main components to Gould and Eldredge's original punctuated equilibria article: simply to highlight the long-standing paleontological evidence that life's history is better described by a picture of stasis interrupted occasionally by episodic events than by the notion of phyletic gradualism, and to offer species selection as a the-oretical explanation for that pattern especially as it could apply to mac-roevolution. In fact, their focus on the overall pattern had been pre-ceded in certain aspects by the Russian paleontologists (Ruzhentsev 1964; Ovcharenko 1969), and their proposed mechanism of speciation theory by their colleagues Ernst Mayr (allopatric speciation) and Steven Stanley.
Ongoing analyses of the data since then have generally confirmed the reality of the pattern, at least for paleontologists (Prothero 2007: 81). In conjunction, the relatively new and growing field of paleobiology has been inspired to explore the wide range of potential insights paleontology can provide towards further developments in evolutionary theory (Sepkoski and Ruse 2009). However clear the evidence may be for the punctuational pattern of the fossil record, the concept of stasis in particular has been a lightning rod for ongoing disagreement and debate even among some paleobiologists, let alone in the larger community of evolutionary biology.

Much of the issue here centers on whether macroevolution can be understood as 'just microevolution scaled up'. There is disagreement even about whether there is any need for expanding evolutionary theory based on the much greater amount of macroevolutionary evidence available today. For example, just regarding the possible role of group selection in evolution at all among prominent evolutionary biologists, David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson are its advocates, while Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins downplay it, still favoring the more traditional view of phyletic gradualism based on organismic gene-level selection. It is in this context that Australian philosopher of science, Kim Sterelny concludes his analysis of the differing views of Gould and Richard Dawkins: 'Dawkins is right about evolution on local scales, but maybe Gould is right about the relationship of events on a local scale, and those on the vast scale of paleontological time' (Sterelny 2007: 178). We will return later in this paper to this important and often charged issue.

There are various approaches now being taken towards understanding and explaining macroevolution in evolutionary biology. Some do take into account the fossil record, often proposing some form of species selection where ecological conditions are radically altered and phenotypic change is accelerated. However, there is not wide agreement on whether this is a sufficient alternative. Donald Prothero (2007: 81), a specialist in mammalian paleontology, is one of those who maintains that the punctuational pattern, and especially the prevalence of stasis in the fossil record, still presents a significant challenge: 'there is not yet any good mechanism in neo-Darwinian theory for it, suggesting we still have a lot to learn about evolution and speciation'.

#### IV. A Great Story of Origins

One of the great achievements of the scientific quest for knowledge is showing us that the universe we live in is quintessentially a story. The cosmos itself, beginning with the Big Bang, has now come to be seen, not as an inert or static backdrop for the planet, but an ever-
changing manifestation in which everything is essentially historical and
developmental. Time and space, matter and energy, atoms and elements,
stars and galaxies, the earth and the diversity of life, our bodies and civi-
lizations, cultures and traditions, ways of thought, the qualities we pos-
sess, everything we see and are made of has had a marked and identifi-
able origin during some salient time of crisis and creative explosiveness.

That is why I believe research and current theories in both the sciences and humanities should begin to consider and investigate the perspective that evolution at all levels of manifestation, as I have emphasized, is not just a process of gradual and continuous development. From the larger universal perspective, it appears to be more like an impressive series of marked 'Threshold moments' or great 'Origin Events', punctuating much longer Eras of gradual elaboration and extension of what the punctuations produced. These outstanding paradigmatic and formative periods beginning with the Big Bang and leading up to the present time, provide the story with its major episodes, and ultimately I would suggest illuminate it with meaning and significance. A Modern Origin Story, featuring the universal breakthroughs of Big History, tells us we are part of a world that is, in some profound sense, still in process of becoming.

Thus, the universal breakthroughs provide not only the structure
that brings the story together, but also mark the identity and duration of
its major chapters as well. Each of the Origin Events in turn can be seen
as a turning point that simultaneously concludes a previous 'Evolution-
ary Era' while rapidly establishing and defining a subsequent one char-
acterized by the extension, with developmental variation, of its newly
emergent 'Regime' as a principal order of being or way of life on a large
scale. I will delineate sixteen Origin Events along with the characteristic
Regimes and ensuing Eras they introduce. They are divided into three
main 'Worlds' of manifestation (Matter, Life, and Mind) that I find to be
a suitable and descriptive classification, corresponding with the three
Realms of Big History and their consecutive phases of evolution (physi-
cal, biological, and cultural).

I am building here on the Big History term 'regime', introduced by
Fred Spier (1996: 14). In this context the term does not refer only to a sys-
tem's outer form or structure, but also to the 'core of the process' (Ad-
ams 1966: 1-2), the very essence of what originates in the universal
breakthroughs, and then proceeds to manifest on a large scale through-
out the following Era. They are each, in the famous words of Vergil,
*novus ordo seclorum*, a 'new order of the ages', bringing a novel forma-
tive principle or quality into the universe at every movement of advance
along the way of the general evolution.
First, in the Realm of Cosmic Evolution we can see marked steps in the increasingly complex organizations of Matter like atoms, galaxies, and higher elements. These are the Regimes at that level. In the Realm of Earth and Life's evolution we also see increasing degrees of complexity in the organic forms and nervous systems arising with each breakthrough, but in the organisms involved at each stage, there are also signs of awakening types of sensitivity and more coherent interactions with their developing ecosystems (eukaryotes; complex multicellular animals having primitive nervous systems, eyes, notochords, and hard parts; reptiles; mammals).

When we enter into the Realm of Human History and the evolution of Mind, where the parameters are not yet as apparent, there are at first some notable anatomical differences, but these are clearly not the essence of the story. The challenge then is to begin to identify the chief features of certain paradigmatic socio-cultural orders, powerful systems of collective learning characterizing distinct Eras, which in this case clearly also involves a particular status of cognition, self-awareness and identity out of which the human experience and overall development unfolds. Colin Renfrew's excellent survey of prehistory (Renfrew 2008) brings together several new approaches that can be useful here, including his 'material engagement theory' and the rise of 'cognitive archaeology'.

Fortunately, with increases in our knowledge of history and prehistory, we are now in the position to perceive, as David Christian (2011a: 23) has said, 'patterns of change so large that they appear to be emergent properties of human history as a whole', so there is a prospect for generalization on a grand scale. Renfrew acknowledges the large-scale patterns initiated by the Neolithic and Urban Revolutions that were originally brought to our attention by V. Gordon Childe. The revolutionary shift in human existence which came with the appearance of agriculture is already a familiar one in Big History, but I believe the breakthrough to the complexity of city-states and the emergence of 'civilizations' should be also considered as an Origin Event. Robert Adams (1966: 1-2) stresses both the comprehensive nature of this change and its relative rapidity in Mesopotamia and pre-Hispanic Mexico, aptly demonstrating how in significant ways they are 'variants of a single procedural pattern' that is 'clearly one of these great transformations which have punctuated the human career only rarely, at long intervals'.

I offer an outline of these sixteen proposed Origin Events here for purposes of further consideration and discussion. In my view they share a number of peculiar qualities or features serving to identify and explain the reasons for why they in particular, and not others, have been chosen for inclusion. Due to space limitations, I will just mention several
of those features to reflect on for now: outstanding, emergent, universal and transformative, sudden (punctuated), and constitutive. In the future, there may also be more events to add as our knowledge of the past increases. This whole topic remains a matter of interpretation that calls for ongoing research, further analysis, deliberation, and prospective revision.

First of all, these events stand out because they are the major historical milestones pre-eminent to and arising out of the subject matter of the many contributing disciplines to Big History. David Christian has noted the beautiful association of the eight Thresholds with a particular discipline, and I am suggesting expanding that a little further.

Secondly, the Origin Events are 'emergent' in the sense that at each stage of the evolution they give rise to a particular quality or principle that is not specifiable or predictable in terms of what came before them. In other words, as Theodosius Dobzhansky put it, they 'surpass the ordinary, accustomed, previously utilized well-trodden possibilities of a system' (quoted in Stebbins 1982: 162). They are certainly prepared for in some necessary way by what came before, but then the breakthrough occurs and a newly emergent quality enters which 'creates the impression of something utterly new appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe' (Christian 2011b).

Thirdly, they are 'universal' and 'transformative' in the largest sense: they change the course of evolution as a whole. These are distinctly discontinuous before-and-after 'Threshold Moments', not explainable as just a continuation or culmination of what preceded them because their newly emergent principle produces an epochal shift in the overall direction of evolutionary change. After a new Regime emerges during each Origin Event, often synchronistically in several places at once, it steadily spreads and develops for an extended Era of time into an entirely new stage of manifestation.

Fourth, with regard to the question of punctuation, it is important to note that degrees of suddenness are evaluated relative to the vastly different time scales in each Realm. Whereas, a century or two may qualify an event for punctuational status in the context of thousands of year long cycles of human cultural evolution, a process of a few or several million years may qualify on the geologic scale for life's evolution where the longer Eras last tens or hundreds of millions of years, let alone of course even much longer on the immense and mind boggling astronomical scales of cosmic evolution.

Fifth, and ultimately, they have been 'constitutive' of our world and our being in a most essential way. Professor Eric Weil (1975: 23) in his article 'What Is a Breakthrough in History?' summed it up well, 'We are what we have become owing to certain events... precisely the break-
throughs, the Axial times, the bifurcations that mark the road that look-
ing backward, we see as meaningful'. In witnessing the eventful emer-
gence of these particular Regimes and their ensuing transformations,
which have ultimately combined to make us what we are today, we
have a unique perspective unprecedented in the history of humanity.
The Modern Origin Story is a global one, and these are our roots on
a grand scale.

'A Great Story of Origins'

In that deep force, the last fact behind which analy-
sis cannot go, all things find their common origin.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A. Evolution of Matter

1) The Big Bang

Space and Time
Matter and Energy
Radiation Era

**2) Recombination Epoch**

Atoms – Hydrogen and Helium
Matter Era

Decoupling and Transparency – Release of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

**3) Galaxy Formation**

Sudden emergence of Galaxies and Stars

'The universe transformed itself from gas clouds to billions of galax-
ies all in what amounts to a cosmological instant' (Swimme 2000).

4) Supernova Explosions

Heavier Elements of the Periodic Table

**5) Origin of Our Solar System**

Earth, Sun and Planets

The stable Solar System was likely born in a dramatic and eventful
climax of long-standing planetesimal accretion when the Sun finally
ignited, releasing a stream of outgoing matter and energy which sud-
denly blew the remaining debris and gas from the system.

B. Evolution of Life

**6) Origin of Life**

Simple Life

7) Oxygen Crisis and Opportunity

Eukaryotes (Complex Cells)

8) The Cambrian Explosion

'Biology's Big Bang'
Complex Multicellular Organisms
Origin of Nearly All the Major Animal Phyla
Organized and Selective Sensitivity
Paleozoic Era

Douglas Erwin and James Valentine (2013: 5, 226), in their new book on the subject, date this event precisely to 'a geologically brief interval between about 530 to 520 Ma'. Many other Cambrian experts, including MIT geochronologist Samuel Bowring and others (Bowring et al. 1993: 1293-1298), have also been focusing on this particular window, or an even narrower one of five-six million years when most of the higher morphological novelty appeared, and defining the explosion as such. Robert Carroll (2000: 27-32) noted that, 'The extreme speed of anatomical change and adaptive radiation during this brief time period requires explanations that go beyond those proposed for the evolution of species within the modern biota'. The Chengjiang site in China, with fossils ten million years older than the Burgess Shale, strongly supports this view. Previous interpretations calling the Cambrian a 'slow fuse' instead (Prothero 2007: 161-171), and redefining it as a series of stages continuous with the Ediacaran, I find to be less refined and possibly outdated.

9) **Permian Mass Extinction**

'The Great Dying'
'Age of Reptiles'
Symbiotic Biosphere (on Land and Sea)
Ecological Sensitivity (Co-adaptation)
Mesozoic Era

10) Cretaceous Mass Extinction

Extinction of Dinosaurs
Golden Age of Mammals
Varieties of Sensitivity
Cenozoic Era

C. Evolution of the Mind

11) Pleistocene Glaciation

Emergence of genus Homo
Origin of the Human Brain

12) Paleolithic Transition

'The Mind's Big Bang'
Emergence of Modern Man (Cro-Magnon)

13) Neolithic Revolution

Origin of Agriculture and Domestication
Settled Societies based on the Mythico-Ritual Fertility Culture

14) Urban Revolution

Transition from Prehistory to History
Origin of ‘Civilization’

City-States and Territorial States based on the Classic Mythico-
Ritual Culture of Sacral Kingship.

**15) The Axial Period**

Emergence of a new type of cognition and collective learning
'Theoretic Culture' (Bellah 2012: 3).

The Axial Regime emerged rather suddenly during the sixth-fifth
centuries BC with the synchronistic but independent appearance of the
central figures and events in each region. This marked the breakthrough
to a more critical, analytic, and self-reflective thought and culture at a
time when the thousands of years old ancient civilizations were break-
ing down, previous communal and ritualistic traditions had lost their
spark and were being questioned, and societal orders were in flux (Weil
1975: 21–36).

T. W. Rhys Davids (1903), one of the great scholars of early Bud-
dhism, reflects on how, ‘In each of these countries similar causes, the
same laws regulating the evolution of ideas, had taken just about the
same number of centuries to evolve, out of similar conditions, a similar
result. Is there a more stupendous marvel in the whole history of man-
kind? Does any more suggestive problem await the solution of the his-
torian of human thought?’

While an economic historian would likely add the Industrial Revolu-
tion next, I interpret it not as an Origin Event in itself but rather, like the
American Revolution and other movements around the same time, as
chiefly a prominent extension and culmination of certain principles of
thought and activity originated in the Axial Period. These two revolutions
shared a common purpose: promoting individual freedom. The United
States was founded on the ideal of a government ‘of the people, by the
people, and for the people’, and the industrial developments of the time
stand out especially because for the first time in history, the living stan-
dards and opportunities available for the masses of common people
experienced steady growth. It was not until the outbreak of World War I
in 1914 that we enter the crises of the Modern Age and are at the thresh-
old of the next Origin Event.

**16) The Twentieth Century**

An extraordinary time of culminating developments, tremendous
change, crisis, opportunity, and emergent possibilities.

Holistic Thinking

Global Identity

Human Unity.
# V. Evolutionary Theory in Big History

## 1. Evolution as History

In a century and a half after the concept of evolution arose to promi-
nence, it has been a keynote of human thought and become increasingly
a central theme for many modern disciplines. One of the leading figures
in the establishment of the 'Modern Synthesis', Theodosius Dobzhansky
(1973), published an essay entitled 'Nothing in Biology Makes Sense
Except in the Light of Evolution'. With the scope of the concept of evo-
lution expanding since to include cosmic and cultural history as well,
the same observation is appropriate to Big History now.

The principles of evolution would seem to be a *sine qua non* to any
grand unifying theory. However, what are those principles? There is no
real issue as to whether evolution as 'developmental change in time' has
occurred, but questions regarding the tempo, mode, source, and mean-
ing of the evolutionary process have continued to swirl since its incep-
tion, and still do today. In this section and the next, I will offer some
suggestions regarding tempo and mode which I find worthwhile from
the scientific angle of establishing as accurately as possible what has
happened in the past, along with briefly considering some of the alter-
native interpretations and perspectives arising recently with regard to
cause and explanation, the how and the why.

One might think that since evolution is essentially about what has
occurred in history, that traditionally the knowledge we have about the
past would have been the foundation stone for constructing any theory
regarding the historical development of life. Remarkably, however, this
has not been the case. The insightful Berkeley historian and social scien-
tist of the early twentieth century, Frederick J. Teggart (1977: 141), em-
phasized that, 'no study of "how things work" to produce something
new in the course of time can dispense with historical inquiry and his-
torical evidence'. He goes on to explain how, 'viewed in this light, the
difficulties and contentions which have occupied so prominent a place
in biological literature since 1859 follow inevitably from Darwin's initial
acceptance of the idea of "progressive change", and his adaptation of
Lyell's "uniformmitarianism", with its negation of historical evidence and
its emphasis on "continuity" and "present process"'.

As we have pointed out, this discussion is still with us – at least for
paleontologists and a growing number of evolutionary biologists – and
I maintain rightly so. Just last year the Smithsonian paleobiologist,
Douglas Erwin (2011), likewise pointed out how ‘the Modern Synthesis
is a curiously ahistorical view of a historical discipline’. From a larger
perspective, the growth of biodiversity is not only a question of altera-
tions in species, but also the origin and relatively rapid spread of higher
taxa during periods when circumstances and ecological relationships
are radically changing and we witness the rise and fall of entire ecosystems. In such a case, and thus without the uniformitarian assumption, the
present is not always the key to the past. Erwin (1999: 626), who specializes in the Cambrian, emphasizes how, whatever caused, such a macroevolutionary event was active in biological systems back then in a certain
way different from today. These higher order changes are not continuously happening all the time and gradually accumulating: they are special
events that occur once-and-for-all, relatively rapidly under certain unique circumstances only at a particular time in history, and thus, in retrospect
remain outstanding on a vaster scale of universal significance.

The modern synthesis has long advocated that macroevolution
takes place like microevolution only faster, as the result of natural selec-
tion operating upon small-scale genetic mutations or variations of or-
ganisms within populations. Nevertheless, this consensus is no longer
so solid, notes Erwin (2007): 'In the past few years every element of this
paradigm has been attacked'. What developmental biologist Scott Gil-
bert once referred to as 'an underground current in evolutionary theory'
has been rising ever since the famous macroevolution conference in
1980 at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. In addition to
numerous paleontologists and paleobiologists like Erwin (2000: 78-84),
many evolutionary biologists and geneticists have also begun to con-
front the same issue of how to explain large-scale macroevolutionary
change from their special vantage points, now that the adequacy of in-
cremental changes at the genetic level ('survival of the fittest') in ex-
plaining large-scale morphological innovation (actually 'arrival of the
fittest') is being widely questioned (Gilbert, Opitz, and Raff 1996; Müller
and Newman 2003).

Such prospects for new approaches to evolutionary theory have
been part of the discussion ever since the concept of 'punctuated equi-
libria' arose in an effort to bring evolutionary theory more in alignment
with the patterns of geological and biological history that are evident in
the fossil record. Punctuated equilibrium theory questioned the suffi-
ciency of phyletic gradualism as a mechanism to account for the punc-
tuations, but its alternative solution of allopatric speciation or species
selection in various forms, rather than the more traditional gene-
centered or organismic selection, has also been found wanting for sig-
nificant reasons.

One of these reasons has to do with a central paradox of life's his-
tory related to how and when the 'diversity' of various distinct species
in a group appear in the evolution, in contrast to the emergence of 'dis-
parity' in the different body plans or higher taxa (Gould 1989: 49). Based
on neo-Darwinian theory, whether evolution occurred via the conven-
tional phyletic gradualism, or a revised version of species selection ac-
celerated by the radical alteration of ecological niches, one would expect
to see species diversity appearing beforehand so that small-scale varia-
tions could little by little accumulate through natural selection to pro-
duce the increasingly complex forms that ultimately led to taxonomic
disparity. The evidence of life's history in the fossil record, however,
reveals an opposite evolutionary pattern. The disparities of each of the
higher taxa emerge before the multiple diversities of the lower taxa, as
Erwin, Valentine and Sepkoski (1987: 1183) explain, 'This is not to say
that each higher taxon originated before species (each phylum, class, or
order contained at least one species, genus, family, etc. upon appear-
ance), but the higher taxa do not seem to have diverged through an ac-
cumulation of lower taxa'.

For example, this remarkable pattern in the Cambrian has proven to
be quite pronounced with evidence now from not only the Burgess
Shale, but also the more recent dramatic finds at Chengjiang in southern
China. These fossil records demonstrate the clear absence of any accu-
mulated multitude of diverse species upon which either neo-Darwinian
mechanisms or species selection could have acted to generate this strik-
ing and relatively sudden first appearance of the higher taxonomic cat-
egories, already distinct enough to be definitively classified. As a result,
Valentine and Erwin (1987: 96-97) have concluded that 'neither of the
contending theories of evolutionary change at the species level, phyletic
 gradualism or punctuated equilibrium, seem applicable to (explaining)
the origin of new body plans' and that a new theory is needed to ac-
count for the 'evolution of novelty'.

Another issue in extrapolating microevolution to macroevolution has
arisen with regard to genetics. Prof. Eric Davidson of Cal Tech is a pio-
neering leader in the field of developmental biology and embryology as
they relate to evolution. He has been investigating interactions between
developmental gene regulatory networks (dGRNs) and the evolutionary
emergence of new body plans, receiving the 2011 International Prize for
Biology in recognition of this work. What he has discovered is that these
dGRNs, which control the development of an organism, are so intri-
cately complex that mutational alterations significant enough to pro-
duce morphological changes on the macroevolutionary level – as dis-
tinct from the microevolutionary level variations of ‘enzymes or flower
colors’ – are not survivable, thus leaving natural selection with nothing
to continuously act upon. Davidson (2006: 195) explains how, ‘contrary
to classical evolution theory, the processes that drive the small changes
observed as species diverge cannot be taken as models for the evolution
of the body plans of animals'.

A paradigm shift may or may not be underway yet within evolu-
tionary biology, but it is in the air with a variety of issues. There have
been growing calls for open-endedness in evolutionary theory and new
approaches to how evolution operates from several angles but a consen-
sus is yet to emerge (Erwin 2007). In this regard, sixteen evolutionary
biologists met in 2008 for a conference in Altenburg, Austria to discuss
some of the possibilities for an extended evolutionary synthesis includ-
ing: evolutionary developmental biology, epigenetic inheritance, niche
construction, symbiosis, systems biology, plus evolution of the brain
and cognition among others (Pigliucci and Müller 2010).

Biologist and genomics specialist, Eugene Koonin (2007: 21), a Sen-
ior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information,
has summed up the present ‘postgenomic era’ in evolutionary thought –
in which ‘all major tenets of the modern synthesis have been, if not out-
right overturned, replaced by a new and incomparably more complex
vision of the key aspects of evolution’ – as a ‘pluralism of processes and
patterns… that defies any straightforward generalization’ (Koonin 2009:
473–475). The alternative he offers, ‘the Biological Big Bang model for
the major transitions in evolution’ (Idem 2007: 21), is remarkably similar
to the punctuated equilibrium pattern highlighted here. It is a biphasic
model of evolution in which novel forms rapidly emerge at higher lev-
els of complexity in the first phase, and then the process slows down in
the second phase where multiple variations on the new forms develop
more gradually.

I find this to be quite a valuable formulation worth focusing on
in the next section as it applies not only to the broadest patterns in the
Evolution of Life, but also – as ‘A Great Story of Origins’ demonstrates –
to Big History overall. In this context then, it becomes a distinctive con-
tributor to a much larger and ongoing effort for considering the basic
structure of Big History in general and how evolutionary changes take
place throughout all of time.

2. The General Biphasic Process of Evolutionary Change

The nature of historical change in such a comprehensive evolutionary
context appears to be a twofold process that occurs by way of what
could be called two different types of time: 1) the rare and opportune in-
between or before-and-after moments of crisis and opportunity, in
which something of special quality happens; and 2) the longer stretches
of chronological time, ordinary and steady with more of a quantitative
nature. Ultimately, the two phases function as complementary facets of
the universal process as it unfolds in time through Macroevolution and
Microevolution. In such a context, the old uniformitarian-catastrophist debate could turn out to be not necessarily a matter of either/or, but a both/and combination of the two.

In 1944, the great American paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson (1944: 206), anticipated punctuated equilibrium, referring to the moments of macroevolutionary change as 'quantum evolution'. He considered this idea 'the most important outcome of (my) investigation, but also the most controversial and hypothetical'. Inductive reasoning, based on the overall view we now have, elicits the general nature of the concept. Outstanding, sudden and relatively brief but very special Origin of Events or Threshold Moments, featuring the emergence of utterly new Regimes, initiate much longer 'Evolutionary Eras' of 'adaptive radiation' and developmental variation, with the more gradual elaboration, extension, diffusion and culmination of each of the new Regimes.

In this view, the relatively brief Origin Events are not created by their previous Eras, but rather they each in turn create their subsequent Era. These universally definitive moments do build upon and incorporate the developments that preceded them, but are discontinuous emergent events in their own right bringing unprecedented principles or qualities into the evolution. We will consider how these thresholds come about in the concluding section.

This principle characterization of evolution in general as a dual or biphasic process has previously appeared in the works of both Professor Teggart, and the prominent American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. Teggart (1977: 148-149) had referred to the two complementary phases as (1) 'advancement', which occurs distinctly through events; and (2) 'fixity', featuring stability and continuity, predicting that with their recognition, 'the conceptual model for the study of change in time will be subjected to a radical alteration'.

Likewise, in the Introduction to their edited volume *Evolution and Culture*, Sahlins and Service (1988: 4-11) sought to embrace both biological and cultural evolution within one overall perspective by proposing just such a biphasic process, based on the work of their great predecessor, Edward Burnett Tylor. They consider the evolution of life and culture to be not just analogous but homologous in the sense that they both can be understood in terms of these same two aspects of the total evolutionary process: general progress and specific adaptation.

Sahlins (Sahlins and Service 1988: 12-44) continues to elaborate this theme in his chapter of the book, referring to the grand and universal macroevolutionary movement as 'General Evolution', in contrast to the adaptive phase of 'Specific Evolution'. The former features the emergence of higher forms of life and is also the means by which culture progresses 'stage by stage'. The more 'specific' microevolutionary de-
developments occur in the latter adaptive, phylogenetic ‘succession-of-forms’ phase, applying also to variations in the ‘evolution of culture along its many lines’.

In the view of Sahlins (Ibid.: 11, 39–40), quoting Julian Huxley before him, the ‘much lauded modern synthetic theory’ of biology, combining genetic principles with natural selection, is devoted primarily to the un-raveling of not the overall progression of general evolution but specific evolution's ‘mere frill of variety… a biological luxury without bearing upon the major and continuing trends of the evolutionary process’. Adding that although a prospective ‘triumphant synthesis’ which would unify the particular and general aspects of evolution did not exist in biology – and still does not as many other scientists have been saying – he did anticipate that ‘a broadly similar course’ towards such a synthesis, embracing anthropology as well, could eventually take place.

Now almost a century later, Gould (2002: 884–885, 951) affirms how this ‘probable generality of punctuation and stasis as a powerful… style of change across all scales must lead us to reassess our previous convictions about “important” and “interesting” phenomena in evolutionary theory and the history of life’. He stresses how the basic problem of evolution itself now needs to be re-conceptualized, since the nature of evolutionary change revisited ‘requires a different set of explanatory concepts and mechanisms – a different view of life, really’.

It is a boon for Big History to be in such a propitious position, due to its comprehensive subject and opportune timing, for contributing towards the development of a new and wider evolutionary synthesis, both by bringing together and integrating whatever developments may already be underway within particular disciplines, and by advancing its own theoretical prospects. I will conclude with some thoughts about what such an approach might look like.

## VI. Towards a Unified Theory: Probing the Mystery of the Universal Breakthroughs

> Every advance in knowledge brings us face to face with the mystery of our own being.

Max Planck

Evolution in the context of Big History, with its three Realms, is certainly about the changes of living forms through time, but it is also about the spectacular unfolding of the cosmos and the epic adventure of human history. The growth of the idea of evolution in our time involves nothing less than the emergence of a new worldview with unique possibilities and unknown dimensions that are still being explored and formulated. Big History gives us a renewed and larger perspective on
both what it is that we see changing throughout time, and the patterns
and principles related to how the changes occur.

In this paper, we have been considering two distinctive perspectives for extending the scope and depth of a newly developing evolutionary worldview. Firstly, evolution in the past has generally been understood as a slow and gradual movement in a straight line with each successive state or condition directly related to and arising from, perhaps even logically or materially necessitated by, what came before it. However, as we have seen, there are many with good reason and standpoint who have been indicating that this interpretation does not fully fit the historical evidence for the cosmos, life, or humanity. Therefore, our whole view of evolution begins to change. Rather than minute and steady graduations developing gradually and continuously from one stage to the next, it is now being suggested that there are also relatively sudden and rapid outbursts, surprising and dramatic punctuations, marking the course of evolutionary transformation not just in the history of life but throughout Big History as a whole.

Secondly, especially when surveying the Big Picture including human history, we can begin to realize that it is not just the physical form, that is the world out there, that is evolving, but also the world inside us. It is about what it is like: to be a trilobite able to see for the first time and react to a world suddenly full of newly complex predators; to be a bat with sonar (Nagel 1974); to construct ‘the world’s first temple’ at the 12,000 year old megalithic site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey (Mann 2011); to recite the Enuma Elish at the Babylonian New Year’s celebration; to reject mythological explanations of the world as a Presocratic philosopher in order to ask questions and reason about the essential unity of things; to behold the wondrous primordial spectacle of the original galaxies bursting forth in the Hubble Deep Field. As Klaus Schmidt, director of the German archaeological team excavating Gobekli Tepe reflects, ‘Twenty years ago everyone believed civilization was driven by ecological forces. I think what we are learning is that civilization is a product of the human mind’ (quoted in Mann 2011: 58).

It has become clear in our time, as advances toward an evolutionary worldview and a Big History perspective show, that in this world we are part of a universal process that is, and has always been, on the move. We are not static beings, but transitional ones; we are becoming. However used to this general idea of formal evolution we have become though, we are not so familiar with the perspective that the inner quality of being itself is something that has also been evolving, and still is. Such a frame of reference can be valuable in exploring alternative ex-
planations for how and why the punctuational breakthroughs of Big History's Grand Narrative occur as they do.

Combining these general indicators together and considering them along with the particular properties and insights we have seen arising out of the sciences and cultural history, I have found that our perspective on evolution can be extended and prospectively transformed. In addition, new light is shed on how to approach the question of cause, and whether this increasingly evident universal evolutionary process even has a cause we can theorize about and begin to comprehend.

All of the great origins and breakthroughs in the history of the cosmos, earth, life, and humanity evoke wonder, and to some degree, mystery. What force drives them, and what is their source and goal? If evolution at large shows a biphasic pattern of punctuated equilibrium, with awesome and unexpectedly new properties or qualities appearing at every critical step along the way, what is the explanation for this? I propose one answer lies in considering what strikes me to be the crux of the matter: the fundamental mystery of 'emergent novelty'.

The idea of 'emergence' was introduced around the time of Aristotle, and has since been discussed by various scientists and philosophers, but it has recently come to the fore and acquired a more solid and scientific footing in both 'complexity theory' (Bedau and Humphreys 2008) and in relation to evolution (Corning 2002; 2005). In Big History, Fred Spier (2011: 36-38) has drawn attention to how the 'Goldilocks Principle' characterizes the circumstances for the emergence of complexity. Morowitz (2004) presents emergence as a new more holistic way for science to view the world's evolutionary unfoldment that is complementary to reduction. I find, as Goldstein (1999: 58) notes, that although complexity theory adds much towards giving us a clearer picture of emergent phenomena in nature, it still functions as more of a descriptive term than an explanatory one. In this case, for now, the causation of the punctuated pattern of emergence in evolution, along with the source of such awesome novelty, remains a mystery.

To further address this question, and consider a possible explanation for the patterns we see unfolding, I would postulate the presence of what could be called an 'evolutionary force' in nature analogous to the force of gravity. We cannot see either of these forces directly, but we can perceive and experience the processes, patterns, and characteristics of their operation in the world. For evolution on a grand scale, the great scientific advances along with the extension of knowledge in all the disciplines have brought this possibility to the human mind. Such a force of evolution could be posited to have not only quantitative characteristics, but also evidently the capacity to kindle the development of the novel
qualities that emerge throughout history. Perhaps, the experience of awe
and wonder that the great story of Big History evokes is indicative of this
force in a similar way that heaviness is an experience of gravity.

The evolutionary manifestation of increasing levels of complexity,
along with the emergent novelty of their Regimes and Eras, is what the
Origin Events all have in common. In a unified theoretical synthesis ap-
plicable at all levels of Big History, the properties of outer form and in-
ner force or quality of being function like the basic factors of matter and
energy in physics which originally burst forth in the Big Bang. Eric Cha-
isson's explanation of rising complexity in 'cosmic evolution', utilizing
the concept of increasing energy flows, is a case in point (Chaisson
2001). I am suggesting adding a qualitative aspect to the conception of
energy in addition to the quantitative measurements of Chaisson's re-
search. But whether using the term 'energy' or 'inherent force', shall we
say that it is the material complexity which gives rise to the en-
ergy/force, or is it the energy/force that evolves the complexity in order
to manifest in the universe?

In this sense, evolution is about not only the development of in-
creasingly complex material forms, but also essentially the 'strong
emergence' of already involved forces or energies of existence at each
stage when the forms and conditions of the time have become ready and
able to manifest them. I submit that this is – in addition to whatever the
other physical mechanisms or explanations turn out to be – a considerable
cause of the Origin Events, each appearing with their definitive Regimes
intact. Taking an evolution of inherent forces or qualities of being into
account contributes to a fuller elucidation of the punctuated pattern we
see where these indelible universal breakthroughs burst forth so impres-
sively in brilliant flower the way they do, and then are followed by
a wide-ranging but relatively stable development of the various potenti-
alities they contain throughout their microevolutionary Eras.

Such an extended view of the evolutionary process ultimately ex-
plains how the spectacular organizations of matter and energy in the
cosmos, the existence of living organisms with their increasing sensitivi-
ties, plus the cognitive and collective learning capacities of humanity, in
all their manifold expressions have emerged in the world; not after all
as accidents or contingencies, nor necessarily as the result of some hy-
pothesized intervention from without, but rather out of a deep force or
essential energy contained within all along. Novel principles and capa-
bilities can be seen to arise with each ascending level of complex order
in the universe. A grand evolutionary synthesis for Big History, rather
than remaining solely based in a reductionist approach to complexity,
can embrace a more pluralistic and ultimately holistic outlook, a variety
of complementary perspectives, and the reality of multiple levels of
causation.

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# The Future of Global Civilization: Commentary of Big Historians

Ekaterina Sazhienko

## Abstract

This article analyzes the views of big historians on the current state of civilization, its future, and possibilities of global regulation. The conclusions are based on the results of the content analysis of the original research papers published in two journals as well as of the interviews with 16 people involved in Big History. The findings indicate a certain variation with regard to the forecasts for the future.

**Keywords:** intelligence as an evolutionary factor, forecasting, global crisis, regulation, global problems.

## The Current State of Civilization and the ‘Singularity’ Point

In the present paper we describe some possible scenarios of social development in the next decades and some possible mechanisms of global regulation that we have identified based on the opinions of 16 big historians received via interviews in the autumn of 2010. In addition, for our content analysis we have selected articles from the journals *Vek globalizatsii* (Age of Globalization) and the *Journal of Globalization Studies*. We have analyzed articles from issues of the journal *Vek globalizatsii* published from 2008 (the first issue) to issue 1(7), 2011 (see Appendix 2), and the *Journal of Globalization Studies* (volume 1, numbers 1 and 2, 2010) (see Appendix 1). Articles irrelevant to the objectives of the study were excluded from the analysis. Thus, we analyzed 63 articles in Russian from *Vek globalizatsii*, and 16 articles in English published in the *Journal of Globalization Studies*.

The tools for content analysis were tested in August-September of 2011. Based on those tests, the categories and units of analysis have been defined. We have analyzed 22 articles selected using a random number table. Modern society faces many challenges that threaten its development and human survival in general and that can reduce living standards, deepen political tension and environmental degradation, as well as increase the number of social conflicts. The content analysis indicates that sociocultural issues are more frequently discussed than any others.
In our opinion this proves that they are of utmost importance, especially the ones related to religious contradictions of the global civilization. The religious factor can cause serious problems, such as terrorism, wars, ethnic, and confessional conflicts. One can argue that we are dealing with a collision not just between two world religions, but between traditional Islam and Capitalism, between the Eastern and Western civilizations that are based on different values and life goals.

The articles under study pay little attention to environmental and socio-economic issues. Probably, the reason is that people have already gained positive experience in solving the problems associated with various restorative measures for environmental management and protection, as well as humanitarian relief to the poorest of the developing countries.

The units of analyses in the category of demography, especially those related to overpopulation, are less frequently used than all others. This may probably indicate that the problem of overpopulation is considered less urgent than it used to be. One can explain this by the fact that the population growth-rates have been decreasing, although the population decline is still too slow. Meanwhile, the migration increases, which probably leads to numerous ethnic conflicts and to the change of ethnic composition of Europe and North America. The words and phrases somehow associated with Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' (Huntington 1993) are more frequently used than the words and phrases from other categories of analysis (Table 1).

<table><caption>**Table 1.** A comparison of various aspects of life of modern civilization (the data of content analysis)</caption><thead><tr><td>Categories</td><td>The number of units of analysis</td><td>The total number of usages</td><td>Median</td><td>Average</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Environmental aspects</td><td>16</td><td>1,273</td><td>24.5</td><td>79.6</td></tr><tr><td>Demographic aspects</td><td>12</td><td>802</td><td>15.5</td><td>66.8</td></tr><tr><td>Sociocultural aspects</td><td>27</td><td>3,899</td><td>43.5</td><td>144.4</td></tr><tr><td>Socio-economic aspects</td><td>16</td><td>1,000</td><td>24</td><td>62.5</td></tr></tbody></table>

*Notes:* Averages were used because of the difference in the number of units of analysis. Median is the middle of the ordered series of numbers (the number
of uses of each word in this category). Arithmetic average is the ratio of the total number of uses to the number of units of analysis.

The word ‘crisis’ was used 736 times in the articles on economic, cultural, environmental, political, and social issues. Thus, one can suppose that many participants of our survey believe that modern society runs into systemic crisis. According to Akop Nazaretyan (2008), this crisis is more dangerous than the previous ones because of globalization processes, and it means that the next generation will probably decide the fate of the whole civilization. This hypothesis is supported by a series of mathematical calculations that are summarized below.

Professor Graeme Snooks has developed a theory, according to which the output of one phase (genetic or technological) becomes the input leading to the next phase. The result of these processes generates an accelerating rate of change (Snooks 1996). A few years later, Russian scientist Alexander Panov came to the same conclusion in independent studies based on different data. Panov finds that ‘the duration of each subsequent stage in the evolution of planetary system is on average $a = 2.67 \pm 0.15$ times shorter than the previous one’ (Panov 2005: 39). This is a simple logarithmic equation, and the rates of social and biological evolution tend to infinity at certain points. Nazaretyan (2008) calls this phenomenon the ‘Snooks-Panov vertical’. Some scholars call the point at which the rate of evolutionary change tends to infinity ‘the point of singularity’ (Kurzweil 2005; Nazaretyan 2008). Nazaretyan (2008) considers this ‘point of singularity’ as a ‘bifurcation point’ of a system in general and of the social system in particular. In other words, according to Nazaretyan, in the middle of the twenty-first century the world will reach a bifurcation point. Of course, different ways of system development (future scenarios) are possible, for example, a destruction of global civilization, a stabilization of development, or a transition to a qualitatively different level of system complexity.

According to Panov, ‘the development of crisis coincides with ... the completion of the scale-invariant attractor of planetary evolution. Therefore, the approaching evolutionary crisis is, apparently, not a usual evolutionary crisis, of which there have been many; it is a crisis of the very evolution of intelligence on Earth, stretching back four billion years. One might say that this is ... the crisis of crises’ (Panov 2005: 44–45). Moreover, according to Panov, one cannot totally exclude that not only the civilization itself will change, but the human inherent mechanisms of evolution, the biosphere of Earth, and the Universe on the whole will also change. Snooks thinks that the vertical is ‘a pattern of the past – which
cannot be extrapolated into the unknown without the very real risk of
making erroneous and, hence, misleading predictions' (Snooks 2005:
51), but some non-trivial predictions of the future are still possible
(though, of course, they may well be entirely wrong). In his concept
the vertical will continue indefinitely, since the rate of the basic proc-
esses remains unchanged.

The Future of Civilization: The Interview Data<fnref n="1" />

Most of the interviewed big historians (14 out of 16) also assess the present state of civilization as a crisis or pre-crisis. The question to the respondents was: 'What are the possible consequences if the crisis is not resolved?' The answers can be divided into two main categories: 1) the extinction of *Homo sapiens* and possible mass extinction of most life forms, and 2) survival of some people. The respondents offered several possible outcomes in case the humanity fails to overcome the crisis: a) fragmentation of societies around individual capitalist leaders with the rest of the population living in extreme misery; b) war of all against all; and c) general deterioration of living conditions, destruction, pandemics, endless wars, scarcity of freshwater, forced migration of millions of people to more prosperous regions due to environmental pressures, and depletion or extinction of some natural resources. And there is another vision, which summarizes all of the above - a gradual return to earlier forms of social organization and social reproduction.

Big historians have provided some ideas how to overcome this poten-
tial crisis. Please, note that the ideas offered by some of those interviewed,
by no means, are representative of the opinions of all the interviewees.
Barry Rodrigue considers building a sustainable global community as
crucial for the survival. David Christian sees education of people as citi-
zens of the world, not of a certain state, as an important step for human-
ity's survival. He confirms that this may contribute to the formation of
a broader worldview which can help find a way to avoid competition
between states as well as to concern not about any particular country, but
about the whole planet. Jonathan Markley considers scientific and techno-
logical progress to be the crucial point. Robert King suggests a restructur-
ing of social organization towards more egalitarian forms of property, in
other words, it is necessary to create a class of united producers who are

<footnote n="1">¹ *The list of informants:* Robert Drury King, Esther Quaedackers, David Christian, Craig Benjamin, Dan Stasko, Kathryn Begg (undergraduate student), Alexander Panov, Frederick Paxton, Jonathan Bruce Markley, Barry Rodrigue, James Tierney (undergraduate student), Eric Joseph Chaisson, Tom Gehrels, Akop Nazaretyan, Andrey Korotayev, and Richard Blundell.</footnote>
free to manage their own work and who plan to achieve common goals necessary and useful for society. Alexander Panov considers the transition from an extensive to intensive development as an important pathway toward stability. He also suggests some indirect measures of state regulation: the use of taxation and subsidies to encourage corporations and consumers, reducing global social differentiation through developing the poor countries by substantial financial, technical and intellectual support, and, finally more vigorous SETI programs. Akop Nazaretyan predicts the diminution of religious and ideological outlooks that inspire groups to look at others as enemies and considers this to be an important step.

Some respondents think that it is necessary to reduce the rate of consumption, to create products and services that are less harmful to the environment, and to slow the population growth. Thus, in the opinion of our interviewees, we need some changes in people's outlook and also in economic and political systems to solve global social problems. Suggestions are offered to solve these problems (if the name of a Big History expert is not indicated, it means that several of them offer this suggestion):

1. To create a system of taxation that will encourage the respect for the environment (Craig Benjamin).

2. To reform political systems in the developing world in order to establish forms related to liberal democracies that can contribute to solving demographic problems (Alexander Panov).

3. To reorient governments from competition (in which the increasing consumption of energy and natural resources serves the criterion of 'growth') to progress of human creativity and intelligence (David Christian).

4. International organizations and developed countries should support the poor countries both in terms of finance and technology. (These measures imply that we should contribute to the technological development of these countries, because it can be the key factor for their successful development and thus, it will safeguard our own development in the future).

5. To reform the system of education and training, this can contribute to the formation of a global outlook and better critical thinking. Such reform may be based on the working out the global educational standards.

The scholars, whom we interviewed, expressed their opinions on the future social development. Some of them think that a new technological revolution is coming that will change the whole world (Jonathan
Markley). Many talk about changes in the sphere of economic relations and forms of production (Robert King, Dan Stasko, and Barry Rodrigue). Some argue that there may be changes in the political structure of the state (Eric Chaisson, Andrey Korotayev). This can be some new laws and regulations that will restrict freedoms, or, conversely, increase the democratization of political systems. Finally, some suggest that demographic problems should be solved (Craig Benjamin, Andrey Korotayev).

Thus, the experts suggest two ways of overcoming the crisis: 1) a restriction of production and consumption that can lead to stabilization of development, and 2) a breakthrough in technologies that should become more environmentally friendly and efficient. Of course, one may also imagine various combinations of both (Andrey Korotayev).

Basing on the content analysis and the interviewees' opinions, we have selected some of the most important actions that can help overcome the crisis in social development. These ideas are preliminary, and they should not be regarded as a fully-fledged manifesto:

1. Creation of uniform educational standards for the sake of the formation of critical thinking and global outlook, which eventually can help solve environmental and sociocultural problems. Big History might serve the basis for such educational standards.

2. Technological assistance to the poor countries.

3. The most important management actions can hardly be realized by the middle of this century. The creation of a single coordination center, which is not a political institute, can help realize these actions. It could be an international organization capable to work out some recommendations for national governments.

Our content analysis has shown that current social and economic problems are also urgent ones, particularly those associated with inequality between different countries in terms of unequal access to technologies. The interviewees advocate the acceleration of financial and technological support to poor countries. Maybe, we should not just 'drop boxes' with humanitarian assistance, but create modern research centers and establish high-tech manufacturing instead of multinational corporations' subsidiaries to those countries, because it may create the basis for independent socioeconomic development.

## The Possibility of Global Regulation: Intelligence as a Cosmological Factor

According to some of our informants, the opportunities engendered by the impact of intelligence are not limited by social systems, and it seems