David Christian (1)Critiques

All the goods, well told; right from the big bang to the present. Makes me want to turn around immediately and reread this book just to get more of it permanently lodged between my ears. Nicely done Mr. Christian.½

If humans shared an origin story rather than a cultural reference point, this would be that story. It's the story of the universe from the Big Bang to the first signs of life to today’s complex societies. It shows how everything is connected to everything else, weaving together insights and evidence from across disciplines into a single, understandable narrative.

buenisimo. muy completo. desde BIG-BANG hasta el dia de hoy en nuestro planetra, pasando por formacion de vida, evolución, etc...

One of the official definitions of Big History is: "an academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present" (copied from Wikipedia in this case). The main idea is that the history of humanity or even of Earth is part of something bigger and not an isolated story - so looking at it on its own misses some of the long trends. The lecturer, David Christian, invented the term "Big History" while teaching one of the first such courses at Macquarie University (and he talks about it in these lectures as well) so there is probably no better lecturers for this topic. The biggest issue of the course is its length - it is just too short for its broad theme (even if that is part of the point of the whole discipline) so quite often I want to hear more than is in these lectured - more about the history, more about the people, more anecdotes from the first time he taught the class or from his other research - as weird as this may be for a 24+ hours set of lectures. Of course, as most of the courses in this series, it has a very long bibliography so one can go and explore - and I suspect I will - and here I was planning on these courses helping to reduce some of my TBR.

So what is the course about? It starts with a Big Bang and then slowly start moving from there. On its path to humanity, all sciences get born (you do not have chemistry before the first elements for example; botany until the first vegetation shows up and so on). That's part of what the whole point is - history is not an isolated science, it steps on the shoulders of earlier disciplines and cannot exist without them and the usual separation of the sciences while useful for some things (due to the difference in how you look at them and study them) hides the big picture.

Humans don't show up until lecture 21 (of 48); the first literate civilization (Sumer) shows up at lecture 30; the Industrial Revolution does not show up until lecture 41. That trend continues in the 2 lectures about the future as well - human history may be the important one in the short term but in the long term, things look different (and even in the short one, there is a lot more than humanity to consider).

The lectures can get very technical in places - it is an overview but if one does not understand most of the basic science, it can be a steep learning curve in some places, especially before humanity shows up (after which there isn't much left besides our history).

The recordings are from 2008 so some of its science is not exactly current - 13 years is a long time in some disciplines. At the time when they were recorded the Large Hadron Collider was just being finished so you get a warning to watch out for it because it has the ability to teach us a lot about the universe (and that turned out to be correct of course). But despite that, it is worth listening to - catching up with what is new once you have the base is not that hard after all.

If you rather read a book instead of listening (or in addition to the audio), "Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History" covers the same ground (and each audio lecture is tied to a specific chapter in the book as essential reading (sometimes combined with other books).

The lectures list:
1. What Is Big History?
2. Moving Across Multiple Scales
3. Simplicity and Complexity
4. Evidence and the Nature of Science
5. Threshold 1: Origins of Big Bang Cosmology
6. How Did Everything Begin?
7. Threshold 2: The First Stars and Galaxies
8. Threshold 3: Making Chemical Elements
9. Threshold 4: The Earth and the Solar System
10. The Early Earth: A Short History
11. Plate Tectonics and the Earth’s Geography
12. Threshold 5: Life
13. Darwin and Natural Selection
14. The Evidence for Natural Selection
15. The Origins of Life
16. Life on Earth: Single-celled Organisms
17. Life on Earth: Multi-celled Organisms
18. Hominines
19. Evidence on Hominine Evolution
20. Threshold 6: What Makes Humans Different?
21. Homo sapiens: The First Humans
22. Paleolithic Lifeways
23. Change in the Paleolithic Era
24. Threshold 7: Agriculture
25. The Origins of Agriculture
26. The First Agrarian Societies
27. Power and Its Origins
28. Early Power Structures
29. From Villages to Cities
30. Sumer: The First Agrarian Civilization
31. Agrarian Civilizations in Other Regions
32. The World That Agrarian Civilizations Made
33. Long Trends: Expansion and State Power
34. Long Trends: Rates of Innovation
35. Long Trends: Disease and Malthusian Cycles
36. Comparing the World Zones
37. The Americas in the Later Agrarian Era
38. Threshold 8: The Modern Revolution
39. The Medieval Malthusian Cycle, 500–1350
40. The Early Modern Cycle, 1350–1700
41. Breakthrough: The Industrial Revolution
42. Spread of the Industrial Revolution to 1900
43. The 20th Century
44. The World That the Modern Revolution Made
45. Human History and the Biosphere
46. The Next 100 Years
47. The Next Millennium and the Remote Future
48. Big History: Humans in the Cosmos½

4.5 Stars
Other than some out of date anthropological information (since this was published in 2008), this is a fascinating course. Big History has always been an interest of mine [blame that on Doctor Who? ;0)].
I will definitely go back to listen again.

Resenha em breve no Papo de Quadrinho. Vamos (Eu vou) voltar a fazer algumas resenhas de livros por lá: papodequadrinho.com.br

ORIGIN STORY, A Big History of Everything by David Christian (audiobook 12 hours). Reading this book was a bit of a lark in that I have a natural aversion to science. It’s not that I don’t like science, or that science doesn’t like me, but rather, my brain is singularly incapable of understanding all but the most superficial elements of it. Because the publisher described Christian’s book as “A captivating history of the [entire] universe - from before the dawn of time through the far reaches of the distant future,” I was fairly confident it HAD to be superficial. Sadly, there was far more detail than I was looking for, but nonetheless, the book was pleasantly engaging. The book begins at the beginning of time—-an admittedly human construct—-initially describing The Big Bang, and then proceeding to the present where (when) the earth’s human inhabitants are rapidly changing the biosphere in ways that may doom mankind. (NOTE: As I continue to plow through Will Durant’s 11 volume History of Civilization, it was refreshing to read an expansive history largely devoid of battles, artists, murder, religion, intrigue, and lust.) The author describes the latest theories of the cosmos, including the creation of matter and the miracle of life. And by miracle, I don’t mean the product of wizardry, but rather the sheer odds against a speck in the universe having conditions that both induced and sustained what we know as carbon-based life forms. Of course, there is no big reveal about why the universe happened to be: he doesn’t even speculate about that. But the author does describe the relatively short history of life on earth, and describes how an even briefer existence of human life is leading to a potentially dire eventuality. But the fun is in reading about how everything came about, a tapestry of physics, astrobiology, archaeology, molecular biology, economics, ecology, chemistry, societal history, and other disciplines. Students of science will surely understand far more of this book than did I, but I can honestly say that my ignorance did not keep me from enjoying it.

Very interesting. About the birth of the universe, how life started, and the evolution of humans. Extraordinary how the many necessary Goldilock conditions and energy flows got us to today. At least as good and interesting as Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (and covers the whole period from The Big Bang until today).

My Book of the Decade -- teens

This first volume of the Cambridge World History limps on two legs: it provides a general introduction to the movement of World History, and an overview of human history up to approximately 10,000 years ago. As always with a work made by different authors, the level of the contributions is quite uneven and there are many overlaps and inconsistencies. For example, the method of dating: most authors use the BCE-notation (Before Common Era, corresponding to the Christian era), others the BP-notation (Before Present). Personally, I’m a fan of the latter, because the chronological distance to the period involved is so large that it is strange to take a fairly arbitrary date from about 2,000 years ago as a benchmark. And while we're at it, another oddity: none other than David Christian is the editor of this book; he is the father of the Big History (see Maps of Time and Origin Story) that fits human history into that of the universe in its entirety and thus takes the Big Bang as a starting point. But this World History only begins with the appearance of the homo sapiens, about 200.00 year ago.
Recommended reading, for sure, but with a few major issues. More about that in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3457747447½

Big History is becoming a familiar concept. Since it was launched in the 1990s by the Dutchman Fred Spier and in Australia by David Christian himself, it has taken on a life of its own. Christian first summed up his way of looking at history "on a large scale" in 2004 in his "Maps of Time," which was an impressive book. Since then, variants and additions have been published by himself, but also by many others. Big History also has become a separate discipline within the academic world, with its own institutes and journals (not to confound with ‘Global History’). And the movement was especially impacted by the enthusiasm with which Bill Gates and his Foundation endorsed this approach, which resulted, among other things, into a comprehensive package of didactic material that historians and others can use in education.
The great merit of Big History is that human history is fitted into that of the universe, an extreme bird's eye view that allows to see the broad lines and thus distinguish the important from the secondary. David Christian does this in this book with much more emphasis than in his first ones. The relative place of man in the universe is constantly emphasized, while at the same time highlighting the enormous impact of human activity on the own planet. The book is much more didactic and therefore more accessible than ‘Maps of Time’ (although there are certainly tough passages, with a lot of jargon).
But over the years Big History has also received a lot of criticism. As said before, the extreme bird's eye view has its advantages, but it ignores the ultra-contingent character of historical evolutions. Christian tries to compensate for this by constantly underlining the complex convergence of coincidence and necessity, highlighting the importance of emergent phenomena and unexpected feedback loops. But, of course, a glimpse into the history of the universe from such a great distance inevitably gets a certain deterministic undertone, as if everything went as it should have gone.
A second major criticism of Big History is that the emphasis is a little too much on the physics-cosmological approach: a lot of time is spent on sketching the origin and development of the universe, of our solar system, of life on earth and so on , and that is clearly at the expense of human history. In this book, for example, mankind only appears halfway through, so that human history is limited to a few rough lines of evolution. The criticism is correct, of course, but - as said - it is precisely the merit of Big History that it places human history in that broader context.
A final criticism is that Big History is implicitly based on a form of belief in progress. David Christian doesn't even make a secret of it. Like many physicists, he expresses his fascination for the impressive process of evolution that our universe has gone through, in an ascending line of increasing complexity. And he immediately emphasizes how fascinating it is that in our age we have obtained a reliable picture of that evolution through science (in contrast to religious and other creation myths). "Because it is based on a global heritage of thoroughly controlled knowledge and information, and because it is the first genesis of human societies and cultures from all over the world." Big History exudes the unshakable belief in the cumulative progression of knowledge and insight through science, with a specific emphasis on the connecting and overarching elements. Christian is well aware of how much that positive perspective has faltered in our recent time period, precisely because of the enormous possibilities that man has acquired to intervene in his environment, even to annihilate that environment. Hence the very pedantic tone in the epilogue, with a call to change tack, but also with a strong belief in technological possibilities.
I can only recommend reading this book, although it has some tough chapters, and you have to deal with the caveats I mentioned above. But Christian has managed to summarize his "universal" history in a very engaging way. See also my review in my History-alias on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2581107640.

I was in love with Big History before it was formally inaugurated by David Christian with his influential book Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History in 2004. Christian espoused a view of history that I’d unknowingly held since a small child: that a history that starts with written language is a very small one; that one that begins with the human career is only slightly larger. That a human-centric history is in fact parochial.

Though Christian’s work has motivated an academic discipline, he was far from the first nor only exponent of its essentials. A very abbreviated list, if you’re a lumper and not a splitter, might include Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Sagan, William McNeill, and Jared Diamond. Big history has since become incorporated into many high school curricula, influenced by Bill Gates who was so gobsmacked that he founded the Big History Project in collaboration with Christian as a worldwide effort to promote the teaching of the subject.

Big History is history writ large. It encompasses all we know about the past, starting with the Big Bang, through the formation of galaxies, solar systems, our planet Earth, the origin and evolution life on Earth, human evolution, and eventually the human spread around the globe and human society. It seeks universal patterns of explanation and is by nature necessarily multidisciplinary.

Origin Story is Christian’s updated account of this discipline, and his claim is that Big History represents a modern creation story, a secular creation story. In this way of seeing things, a species-wide narrative of our origins is still being elaborated, is continuing to unfold. But its elements are visible. And if we are able to make the transition to a sustainable future — far from certain as, human conflict aside, 10,000 years of unguided human geoengineering careen toward a global environmental confrontation — our descendants may well tell much the same story.

how I wish I understood chemistry and physics so books like this wouldn’t give me splitting headaches. Yet every year or so I pick one up determined to understand the universe. As Chris says “oh you are in your ‘I will prove I’m smart enough to understand this’ frustrated mood.” He says it’s from my lack of imagination. (I still argue with him about those stupid worms in Dune.)
Back to Origin Story, I did have a non-headache mind-blown moment during the chapter about the first photosynthesizing one-celled organisms that output so much oxygen we went into a 1 hundred million year ice age until the Earth’s plates moved and enough volcanoes erupted...this was about 3.5 billion years ago.
The book is split perfectly in half with 155 pages pre-humans and 155 pages human life. Most of the human section is similar to books like “Guns Germs and Steel” and “sapiens” but his last chapter about the near future is worth reading.

Every culture and tradition has had its origin story, its understanding of how the world came to be as they knew it, which formed the basis for their further understanding of how to live, interact with others, get food, make clothes. Our origin stories are the basis of how we understand everything.

Now, in the early 21st century, we know far more about the origin of the universe, our sun, our planet, and life on Earth. We live in a society of unparalleled complexity, and in the last two hundred years, we have gained the ability not just to support more human beings, but to improve the daily lives of most humans on the planet, not just an elite 10% or so.

What we haven't done yet is integrate this knowledge into a new, shared origin story that helps us cope with this new, complex, and rapidly changing world.

Christian intends this as at least a first pass at a modern origin story. In a lively, highly readable or listenable style, he lays out the basics of our new knowledge of the origins of the universe, our planet, and life on Earth, as well as an overview of the evolution of our species and development of our societies, right down to how we made the transition from strictly agrarian societies to today's high-tech, rapidly changing world.

And he looks at the challenges as well as the benefits of that transition and our current power to affect our planet.

Christian makes the point, as others have in the last few years, that we now have, in essence, the controls for our only habitable planet. We decide what species live and which ones die, and we are playing with the climate controls. If we understand and master those controls in time, we have the potential to give our species the best and most comfortable lives we have ever had.

Or we could make the planet uninhabitable for such an energy-consuming culture, and drive ourselves back to the early agrarian or even hunter-gatherer level.

Or we could render the planet uninhabitable for our species altogether, and leave Earth to start over again, with other species in a climate unlike any that has existed since the first primates evolved.

Despite that potential grim outcome, I found this overall a lively and interesting book, well worth the time I spent listening to it. Recommended.

I bought this audiobook.

This was every bit as interesting as Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything although the writing itself wasn’t quite as engaging. But that’s to be expected, not everyone shares Bryson's skill as a writer. On the plus side, this book’s structure in organizing ‘Big History’ into distinct thresholds, along with its focus on energy flows helped make the concepts and information it presented easier for me to understand. I especially liked that it held out some hope in its projection of possible futures for us and our planet.

Only barely justified reading to the end. Shockingly badly written, but with a few startling insights that made the going a bit easier. Not recommended.

A smaller summary volume of the material from 'Maps of Time'. A great overview of the complexity thresholds we have crossed to get where we are today, from elementary physics to chemistry, to life, dinosaurs, their extinction and the rise and rise of intelligent mammals and the noosphere.

Los libros de historia tradicionales tienen ciertas historias, pero olvidan la gran historia. Este libro trata acerca de eso, la gran historia, acerca de la evolución del conocimiento y como llegamos aquí, pagando siempre el impuesto a la entropía del universo. Este libro combina física, química, biología, historial, ecología y prácticamente todas las áreas del saber. Entrega la sabiduría de la perspectiva universal. Algunas perlas: "la riqueza nunca consiste de cosas, sino de control sobre el flujo de energía que permite hacer, mover y transformar cosas." Es la versión resumida de Mapas del Tiempo del mismo autor y combina a la perfección con Sapiens de Yuval Norah Harari.

Debería ser un libro de lectura obligatoria en cualquier curso de historia: educación básica, media y universitaria.

An astonishing history, from big bang to the present. The author is a professor of history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His background was in Russian history, but over 20 years ago he developed an interest in world history, history across the globe. That wasn’t enough for him, so he began teaching big history, beginning with the physics of the big bang. Bill Gates funded this to be taught in schools, and David Christian taught it at university in a modern history department. Science merges with history as he argues that analogous forces were at work in the development of the universe, the creation of earth, the formation of life, and then human epochs. His insight is that this is an origin story, one not just for one nation or one language, but for all people.

An introduction to big history

The book's existence is more important than the contents herein. Maps of Time acts as a guiding text for the Big History movement, and thus spends its time trying to narrate the universe's history within its bindings. Because of this fact, Maps of Time has issues. This isn't saying its a bad book - it's far from it - rather the book as an object and as a text is more important than the book's actual message - a problem with Big History from a philosophical standpoint.

Over dit 500-pagina dikke boek heb ik ruim twee maanden gedaan, intensief notitie nemend. Dat wil zeggen dat het zeker de moeite loont. Hoewel ik zelf gevormd ben als historicus, en dus wel hecht aan degelijke detailstudies, ben ik toch ook gevoelig voor auteurs die proberen de grote lijnen te zien. Daar is moed voor nodig en natuurlijk ook een grondige voorbereiding, zin voor nauwkeurigheid, en vooral een talent om uit de chaotische hoeveelheid details een verhaallijn te distilleren. Christian heeft in dit boek gekozen voor het hoogst mogelijke vogelperspectief, te beginnen bij de Oerknal, en uiteindelijk uitkomend bij het heden, met zelfs een blik vooruit naar de komende eeuwen en millennia.
Ik ben onder de indruk van de belezenheid van de auteur en zijn vermogen om daadwerkelijk de grote lijnen te vatten en begrijpelijk te presenteren; tegelijk doet hij moeite om niet in de ijle hoogte blijven, en om zijn verhaallijnen concreet te stofferen. Ronduit impressionant was het hoofdstuk waarin hij de grote tendensen binnen de agrarische samenlevingen, gaande van ongeveer 3000 voor Christus tot 1500 na Christus, in 1 enkel hoofdstuk samenvat.
Maar uiteraard bevat zo'n ambitieus werk ook een heleboel zwaktes. De belangrijkste vind ik dat Christian, hoewel hij dat zelf bestrijdt, toch uitgaat van een bovenbouw-onderbouw-model: in bijna alle hoofdstukken is het de economische inrichting van de samenleving die de belangrijkste motor is van verandering, politieke en vooral culturele ontwikkelingen komen nauwelijks aan bod. In de tweede plaats springt Christian nogal gemakkelijk mee met modieuze trends in de historiografie: zo hangt hij zijn hoofdstuk over het ontstaan van de moderne mens helemaal op aan 1 enkel wetenschappelijk artikel waarin het ontstaan van die homo sapiens om plausibiliteitsredenen rond 250.000 jaar geleden wordt gesitueerd; in dezelfde lijn gaat hij vlotjes mee met de recente publicaties die stellen dat de Chinese economie vanaf het jaar 1000 tot en met de 18de eeuw vele keren groter en diverser was dan de West-Europese/Atlantische economie (daar zijn inderdaad wel aanwijzingen voor, maar de bewijskracht ervan blijft voorlopig toch nog problematisch). En tenslotte heb ik ook mijn bedenkingen bij zijn laatste, futurologische hoofdstuk dat neerkomt op een zuiver ecologisch manifest (waar natuurlijk wel goede redenen voor zijn, maar als historicus huiver ik bij politieke stellingnames die het verleden als bewijsmateriaal ge(mis)bruiken.½

A new way of looking at history. Sweeping in scope. An ambitious pverview.

Excellent!

I hardly know where to begin with this book, because it gathers so many threads and gives the reader so many directions to think about and investigate. I’ve taken the last year to read a couple of chapters a month, and I still find myself going back over some of the observations and connections made and seeing the world around me in different ways.
David Christian is probably the best-known teacher of Big History, and this book is possibly the Bible of the field. Big History looks at ALL of history, from the Big Bang to modern life and its trajectory, as one area of study encompassing all fields of scientific and historical research. This book approaches our present by beginning with the formation of the universe, through the development of galaxies and our solar system, our sun, and our planet, and then life itself. As the narrative moves forward in time the history slows down, so that life on Earth, especially human life, is examined in more detail. A major focus is the impact of humanity on the pace of natural changes to the planet and other species (most obviously in climate change and species extinctions), but much of Christian’s emphasis is on the extraordinary swiftness of the evolution of humanity itself and consideration of whether we can survive our success. The last chapter takes an admittedly weak stab at forecasting the future, but the rest of the book is a treasure trove.½