Monday, April 11, 2011
David Christian's TED presentation now available on-line
David Christian's TED presentation about Big History is now available on-line at http://www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_big_history.html
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Big History in Cliodynamics
David Christian and Fred Spier have each just published articles in a special Big History issue of Cliodynamics, a journal from the University of California.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
The Big History Project
Everything has a history: each person, plant, animal and object, our planet, and the entire universe.
Each history offers valuable insights. Together, they reveal even more. Big history weaves evidence and insights from many scientific and historical disciplines into a single, accessible origin story – one that explores who we are, how we got here, how we are connected to everything around us, and where we may be heading.
Each history offers valuable insights. Together, they reveal even more. Big history weaves evidence and insights from many scientific and historical disciplines into a single, accessible origin story – one that explores who we are, how we got here, how we are connected to everything around us, and where we may be heading.
The Big History Project is dedicated to fostering a greater love and capacity for learning among high school students. Started by Bill Gates and David Christian, their goal is to get big history taught to as many students around the world as possible. Find out more and see how you can join the Project.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
NPR Blog on "13.7"
A fascinating blog on "Big History" themes is at:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/01/the_history_of_nature_why_dont.html
The following post is by Ursula Goodenough, a Biologist at Washington University
(Other contributors to the blog are: Adam Frank
Astrophysicist
University of Rochester
Marcelo Gleiser
Theoretical Physicist
Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy Dartmouth College
Stuart Kauffman
Biologist
University of Vermont Santa Fe Institute
Alva Noë
Philosopher
University of California, Berkeley
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/01/the_history_of_nature_why_dont.html
The following post is by Ursula Goodenough, a Biologist at Washington University
(Other contributors to the blog are: Adam Frank
Astrophysicist
University of Rochester
Marcelo Gleiser
Theoretical Physicist
Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy Dartmouth College
Stuart Kauffman
Biologist
University of Vermont Santa Fe Institute
Alva Noë
Philosopher
University of California, Berkeley
When you first came upon the name of our blog — 13.7 — did you have a reflexive "Oh-of-course" response, or did you have a "Huh?" response? If you were in the latter group, you have lots of company. I've sometimes played the game of asking my kids' college-educated friends how old the earth is, how old the universe is, when life started up, when humans showed up, and the responses have been all over the order-of-magnitude map. When I mix in something like when was the American Revolution or Columbus's first voyage, I get 1776 and 1492 every time.
No surprise here. We all got regular doses of American history in school, and most of us also came away with some sense of Egyptian pyramids and the Roman Empire. But the cosmos? 13.7 billion years? Not so much.
I participated in reviewing the Science Standards of all 50 states a few years ago and, not surprisingly, we found a superficial coverage of biological evolution in most cases, and virtually no hominid evolution anywhere. More surprising, to me at least, was that the history of the cosmos and the history of the planet were often sketchy as well.
So what's taught in K-12 science classes instead? Well, there's coverage of good stuff to know, like the structure of the atom and the parts of a leaf. There are also efforts to teach "the scientific method," and to describe milestones in scientific discovery (Newton, Einstein), and, increasingly, to develop lab exercises that promote "hands-on learning." Sometimes these classes work well — there are some really dedicated science teachers out there — and sometimes kids become fired up about science even when their classes are dreadful.
But every year, millions and millions of kids are alternately bored, alienated, or frustrated by their experience with science education. Nor, usually, do things get better after that. Timothy Ferris has a great quote along these lines: "Some people will do just about anything for the environment except take a science course."
Would things go better if we were also teaching the History of Nature in our schools? I think so.
Humans are narrative beings — we love a good story. We're unique in our use of symbolic language, where symbol usage encodes underlying meanings and understandings that we remember as language-based narratives. The very logic of explanations, descriptions, and instructions all take narrative form.
So it's my sense that science classes would get a lot more interesting if a time line were drawn around the perimeter of every science classroom, like there's a Periodic Table hanging on every wall, and at each grade level, in conjunction with how things work and who made which discoveries and how to work a Bunsen burner, stories were told about that time line. With atomic structure, the story of how there weren't any atoms until 400,000 years after the Big Bang because it was too hot for nuclei and electrons to associate. With leaf parts, the story of how ancient algae came up with leaf-part ideas before the move to land 450 million years ago. And indeed, in my fantasy school system, every high-school senior would take a capstone course in Big History that pulled together the whole story, Cosmos through Culture.
Sure, there'd be a lot of pushback from some religious groups. But a particularly curious objection to this idea comes up as well: some people express concern that material like the Big Bang and our common ancestry with "pond scum" is potentially disturbing, particularly to young children, and they shouldn't be told about "such things" until they're much older (at which point, of course, most have bailed out of science anyway).
Does anyone out there know of kids who are Big-Bang savvy and having nightmares about it? Every in-the-know kid of my acquaintance thinks the Big Bang is really cool. Methinks it may be the grownups who didn't hear about "such things" at their mothers' knee who are having the nightmares.
No surprise here. We all got regular doses of American history in school, and most of us also came away with some sense of Egyptian pyramids and the Roman Empire. But the cosmos? 13.7 billion years? Not so much.
I participated in reviewing the Science Standards of all 50 states a few years ago and, not surprisingly, we found a superficial coverage of biological evolution in most cases, and virtually no hominid evolution anywhere. More surprising, to me at least, was that the history of the cosmos and the history of the planet were often sketchy as well.
So what's taught in K-12 science classes instead? Well, there's coverage of good stuff to know, like the structure of the atom and the parts of a leaf. There are also efforts to teach "the scientific method," and to describe milestones in scientific discovery (Newton, Einstein), and, increasingly, to develop lab exercises that promote "hands-on learning." Sometimes these classes work well — there are some really dedicated science teachers out there — and sometimes kids become fired up about science even when their classes are dreadful.
But every year, millions and millions of kids are alternately bored, alienated, or frustrated by their experience with science education. Nor, usually, do things get better after that. Timothy Ferris has a great quote along these lines: "Some people will do just about anything for the environment except take a science course."
Would things go better if we were also teaching the History of Nature in our schools? I think so.
Humans are narrative beings — we love a good story. We're unique in our use of symbolic language, where symbol usage encodes underlying meanings and understandings that we remember as language-based narratives. The very logic of explanations, descriptions, and instructions all take narrative form.
So it's my sense that science classes would get a lot more interesting if a time line were drawn around the perimeter of every science classroom, like there's a Periodic Table hanging on every wall, and at each grade level, in conjunction with how things work and who made which discoveries and how to work a Bunsen burner, stories were told about that time line. With atomic structure, the story of how there weren't any atoms until 400,000 years after the Big Bang because it was too hot for nuclei and electrons to associate. With leaf parts, the story of how ancient algae came up with leaf-part ideas before the move to land 450 million years ago. And indeed, in my fantasy school system, every high-school senior would take a capstone course in Big History that pulled together the whole story, Cosmos through Culture.
Sure, there'd be a lot of pushback from some religious groups. But a particularly curious objection to this idea comes up as well: some people express concern that material like the Big Bang and our common ancestry with "pond scum" is potentially disturbing, particularly to young children, and they shouldn't be told about "such things" until they're much older (at which point, of course, most have bailed out of science anyway).
Does anyone out there know of kids who are Big-Bang savvy and having nightmares about it? Every in-the-know kid of my acquaintance thinks the Big Bang is really cool. Methinks it may be the grownups who didn't hear about "such things" at their mothers' knee who are having the nightmares.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
IBHA Studies Big History
The International Big History Association (IBHA) exists to promote the unified and interdisciplinary study and teaching of the history of Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity.
Big History is the attempt to understand, in a unified, interdisciplinary way, the history of Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity.
Beginning about 13.7 billion years ago, the story of the past is a coherent record that includes a series of great thresholds. Beginning with the Big Bang, Big History is an account based on testable, falsifiable evidence of emergent complexity, with simpler components combining in new units with new properties and greater energy flows.
Starting with the transition of matter from energy after the Big Bang, quarks established relations due to the gluons of the strong force, forming protons and neutrons. Subsequently, the electromagnetic force connected these with electrons to form hydrogen and helium. Slight asymmetries in enormous gas clouds were sculpted by gravity to form galaxies with stars. The increasing pressure in the increasingly dense balls of hydrogen raised the temperature to the point where protons could be merged into heavier elements (such as oxygen, carbon, and then iron) through nuclear fusion, giving birth to the stars.
When the most massive of these stars ran out of fuel and exploded, the high temperatures formed heavier elements like gold, uranium, and others. Mixing with pre-existing gas clouds that were now disturbed by the remains of supernovae, gravity formed second generation stars from the mix. Because first generation stars had created heavy elements, these were available for gravity to form rocky or terrestrial planets.
The formation of our own sun and the earth took place about 4.5 billion years ago. They are located in one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms, known as the Orion Arm or Local Spur. We are between 25,000 and 28,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which consists of about 100 billion stars. We are traveling around that center at the rate of about 220 kilometers per second, completing one revolution or galactic year every 225–250 million years. Over the past 4.5 billion years, the earth has continually gone through its own history, with changes in atmosphere, the appearance and continual reformation of land masses through plate tectonics, and many other forces.
Elements and molecules on the earth formed various combinations in a process of chemical evolution. About 4 billion years ago, some of them formed membranes, gained access to additional chemicals and energy that became metabolism, and became able to reproduce. What is called life then began its own highly uneven process of evolution, sometimes becoming more complex and diversified. Major transitions led to such features as cell nucleii, photosynthesis, intentional motion, multicellular specialization and cooperation, heads, backbones, four limbs, and many other features.
The rise of mammals following the extinction of dinosaurs some 65 million years ago led to the emergence of hominids. Eventually Homo sapiens emerged 200,00 years ago. Bipedal, largely hairless, large brained, and with opposable thumbs, humans also had developed symbolic and imaginative language, inherited a social nature, and made ethics explicit.
Through our culture, humans shaped some of the natural forces from which we emerged. We added hunting to scavenging and gathering. Beginning about 70,000 years ago, we left our African home and migrated throughout the globe, crossing Beringia into the Americas about 20,000 years ago. We formed bands, kinship groups, villages, chiefdoms, cities, nations, and empires. Our species crossed another major threshold with the emergence of agricultural states and then another with the burning of fossil fuels. We have entered an information era.
We have fought many wars among ourselves and brought about environmental degradation and resource depletion. These and other problems threaten the quality and even survival of our species. We face a current crisis and a possible new threshold. No complex species is likely to survive intact for more than a few million years; we will be lucky if we survive that long.
Does Big History provide a narrative that can help nurture the development of the empathy and cooperation that are part of our social nature? Can humans form a more perfect human community that creates a more complex society than has existed before? Or will our current levels of social complexity face inexorable entropy?
Whichever species may still be surviving some few billion years from now would be well advised to hop a spaceship to another solar system. Those still on earth will face a much hotter sun. About 5 billion years from now as the sun runs out of fuel, it will grow as a red giant, evaporating the oceans and finally engulfing the earth. The other galaxies may keep racing away from our own local group, leaving us with a black sky. Unless they all fall back in on each other as part of an eternal cycle of Big Bangs and Big Crunches - or unless new multiverses continue to pop into being.
Big History is the attempt to understand, in a unified, interdisciplinary way, the history of Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity.
Beginning about 13.7 billion years ago, the story of the past is a coherent record that includes a series of great thresholds. Beginning with the Big Bang, Big History is an account based on testable, falsifiable evidence of emergent complexity, with simpler components combining in new units with new properties and greater energy flows.
Starting with the transition of matter from energy after the Big Bang, quarks established relations due to the gluons of the strong force, forming protons and neutrons. Subsequently, the electromagnetic force connected these with electrons to form hydrogen and helium. Slight asymmetries in enormous gas clouds were sculpted by gravity to form galaxies with stars. The increasing pressure in the increasingly dense balls of hydrogen raised the temperature to the point where protons could be merged into heavier elements (such as oxygen, carbon, and then iron) through nuclear fusion, giving birth to the stars.
When the most massive of these stars ran out of fuel and exploded, the high temperatures formed heavier elements like gold, uranium, and others. Mixing with pre-existing gas clouds that were now disturbed by the remains of supernovae, gravity formed second generation stars from the mix. Because first generation stars had created heavy elements, these were available for gravity to form rocky or terrestrial planets.
The formation of our own sun and the earth took place about 4.5 billion years ago. They are located in one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms, known as the Orion Arm or Local Spur. We are between 25,000 and 28,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which consists of about 100 billion stars. We are traveling around that center at the rate of about 220 kilometers per second, completing one revolution or galactic year every 225–250 million years. Over the past 4.5 billion years, the earth has continually gone through its own history, with changes in atmosphere, the appearance and continual reformation of land masses through plate tectonics, and many other forces.
Elements and molecules on the earth formed various combinations in a process of chemical evolution. About 4 billion years ago, some of them formed membranes, gained access to additional chemicals and energy that became metabolism, and became able to reproduce. What is called life then began its own highly uneven process of evolution, sometimes becoming more complex and diversified. Major transitions led to such features as cell nucleii, photosynthesis, intentional motion, multicellular specialization and cooperation, heads, backbones, four limbs, and many other features.
The rise of mammals following the extinction of dinosaurs some 65 million years ago led to the emergence of hominids. Eventually Homo sapiens emerged 200,00 years ago. Bipedal, largely hairless, large brained, and with opposable thumbs, humans also had developed symbolic and imaginative language, inherited a social nature, and made ethics explicit.
Through our culture, humans shaped some of the natural forces from which we emerged. We added hunting to scavenging and gathering. Beginning about 70,000 years ago, we left our African home and migrated throughout the globe, crossing Beringia into the Americas about 20,000 years ago. We formed bands, kinship groups, villages, chiefdoms, cities, nations, and empires. Our species crossed another major threshold with the emergence of agricultural states and then another with the burning of fossil fuels. We have entered an information era.
We have fought many wars among ourselves and brought about environmental degradation and resource depletion. These and other problems threaten the quality and even survival of our species. We face a current crisis and a possible new threshold. No complex species is likely to survive intact for more than a few million years; we will be lucky if we survive that long.
Does Big History provide a narrative that can help nurture the development of the empathy and cooperation that are part of our social nature? Can humans form a more perfect human community that creates a more complex society than has existed before? Or will our current levels of social complexity face inexorable entropy?
Whichever species may still be surviving some few billion years from now would be well advised to hop a spaceship to another solar system. Those still on earth will face a much hotter sun. About 5 billion years from now as the sun runs out of fuel, it will grow as a red giant, evaporating the oceans and finally engulfing the earth. The other galaxies may keep racing away from our own local group, leaving us with a black sky. Unless they all fall back in on each other as part of an eternal cycle of Big Bangs and Big Crunches - or unless new multiverses continue to pop into being.
IBHA President, David Christian, was recently introduced by Bill Gates at the TED conference where he gave a well received presentation on humanity's collective learning.
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