IBHA Conference

June 28-30, 2024 Norman Oklahoma

2024 IBHA Conference Abstracts

Friday, June 28	Room 1	Room2
9:00	Keynote Speaker: Kyle Harper - "Information Theory and Complexity in Social Evolution"
10:00	Measuring Complexity	Object-Oriented Ontology And Big History: How Do The Cosmos, The Earth, Life And Humanity Become “One”?
10:45	What Can Big History Learn from the Dark Matter Problem?	The Anthropocene and Big History as a Historical Paradigm
11:30	What kind of Universe do you want?	Agent-Based Modeling Methodologies For The Analysis Of Complex Ancient Trade Systems
1:00	Unifying Big History into one science by means of Macrocosmic Quantum Theory	Deepening Of The World-System Crisis And Its Potential Impact On Destabilization And Environmental Degradation
1:45	Evolution And Chaos Theory Made Simple	Social Strategies As A Response To Climate Change In 14th Century England And The Origins Of Capitalism
2:30	Exploring energy rate density as a quantitative complexity metric in a big history context	Property, Exchange And Human Evolution: An Investigation Through The Lenses Of Big History
3:15	Complexity Growth Patterns in the Stelliferous Era of Big History. Preliminary Observations	The Pattern of Agrarian Civilization Survivorship and Its Consequences
4:00	Emergence of Life: Importance of Formation of Organic Molecules of Life	Historical Evolution: Mechanisms, Concepts And Time
7:00	Keynote Speaker: Mary Evelyn Tucker - "Ecological Civilization in China and Beyond"

Sat. June 29	Room 1	Room2
8:30	Cosmic Humanism, Information-based Ethics, and Complexity – How Do We Guide our Actions?	Untold Implications of Origin Story: Evaluating David Christian’s Theory beyond His Intent
9:15	Complex-Information Ethics & Big History	Expanding Perspectives on Religion, in Ordinary Language
10:00	Complexity & Ethics	Symbolic Communication and Trance: Continuities and Discontinuities with Earlier Forms of Information Storage and Retrieval in Nature
10:45	Identity Cones and Donation to the African Big History Association	The American state revealed through fiction: A journey down the river of experience and imagination
11:30	Evolution = Exchange	Self-Organizing Small Teams at Scale As a Potential Solution to Some Central Problems of the Moment
1:00	New Directions In Big History Teaching And Research: Place-Based Big History	Geological evolution: some preliminary ideas
1:45	Future Studies of Big History	Oklahoma’s Dynamic Place within the North American Continent
2:30	Pioneering The Dissemination Of Astroscience In Sub-Saharan Africa	Change is OK: The Geographic Evolution of Oklahoma
3:15	Ecological History Of Europe: Towards And Unifying Perspective	3:30 WHA-IBHA Joint Panel The Tragedy of Francis Bacon: How his Vision of the ‘Empire of Man’ Became Our Existential Nightmare Complex Flows of Historical Complexity Integrating the Flow of Ideas into Big History Frameworks The Interplay Between A World of Currents And The Currents of Humanity
4:00	Kapampangan Language: The Place of a Mother Tongue in Globalization

Sunday, June 30	Room 1	Room2
8:30	Let's Start The Big History Class!	Secondary Historical Sources: Problems and Issues
9:15	A Pedagogical Proposal for Enhancing Undergraduate Biology Education through Complex Systems Thinking (CST)	What Is Social?
10:00	How to Understand Everything in 10 chapters	Ancient Cultures, Women's Oppression, and Frequent Pregnancy
10:45	ChronoZoom Relaunch: A New Big History Dataset
11:30	Cybernetic Revolution and Global Aging: Humankind on the Way to Cybernetic Society, or the Next Hundred Years?
1:00	IBHA Members Meeting

Thomas Burr

Illinois State University

tburr@ilstu.edu Back

Secondary Historical Sources: Problems and Issues

The issue of methodology in Big History is understudied, partly because it is a new and growing field, partly because of its extreme interdisciplinary. However, one issue all writers of Big History face is sources of data for writing Big History. The scope of world history, and even more so Big History, is simply too vast to write from any sort of primary data. One must use what historians call secondary historical sources: articles and books written using primary sources. However, there are almost no guidelines or standards for using secondary historical sources. I will briefly discuss how historians produce secondary sources (historical articles and books). I will then more fully trace debates about the problems of using secondary historical sources in in the historical social sciences. Finally, I will pose (probably ignorant) questions about how natural scientists use secondary sources in writing Big History.

Thomas Burr is a global and comparative historical sociologist at Illinois State University in Normal, IL (USA).

Daniel Barreiros

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

daniel.barreiros@ie.ufrj.br Back

Object-Oriented Ontology And Big History: How Do The Cosmos, The Earth, Life And Humanity Become “One”?

Big History is traditionally understood as the study that seeks to understand the integrated history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity, using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods. This approach has resulted in constructing narratives based on chronological sequences of events, delineated by the notion of Thresholds (D. Christian) or Regimes (F. Spier). However, after thirty years of development, Big History seems to be evolving towards becoming a Lakatosian research program, moving away from a unifying "grand narrative" from the Big Bang to the present day. While this narrative was crucial in the early stages of Big History's development, its centrality now seems outdated. As a research program, Big History is increasingly becoming a set of objects, perspectives, theories, and techniques shared by a community of scholars, regardless of their disciplinary backgrounds. In its capacity as a set of theories and techniques, Big History is becoming more of an analytical resource for investigating the transformation of various objects over time. Given the wide range of analyzable objects in Big History, the program inevitably encounters ontological issues: what do the objects of Big History have in common that makes them the subject of a single research program? Traditionally, historiography viewed the object of history as human societies, seen as expressions of free will, volition, subjectivity, and cultural primacy. By disregarding human exceptionalism, Big History struggles to find a unifying ontological element for its objects of analysis. In this presentation, I propose that Big History necessarily needs to adopt a "flat ontology" and object-oriented approach, in dialogue with authors like Graham Harman and Timothy Morton.

Daniel Barreiros is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Economics, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Professor at the Comparative History Graduate Program (PPGHC-UFRJ) and at the International Political Economy Graduate Program (PEPI-UFRJ). He received a PhD in Social History from the Fluminense Federal University, Niterói, Brazil, and is a U.S. Department of State Alumni from the Study of the US Institute on United States Foreign Policy (Research Fellow at the Department of Political Sciences and International Relations, University of Delaware). His research is centered on the Big History of intersocietal conflict and cooperation. Daniel founded the Big History Lab at UFRJ-Rio de Janeiro, the first Big History research group in his country.

Ken Baskin

Independent Scholar (Philadelphia PA)

Baskinman@protonmail.com Back

The Tragedy of Francis Bacon: How his Vision of the ‘Empire of Man’ Became Our Existential Nightmare

Four hundred years ago, Western Europe was tearing itself apart, as armies of Protestants and Catholics slaughtered each other to prove which way of worshipping the Prince of Peace was true. One reaction to the resulting devastation was Francis Bacon’s vision of experimental, analytic science that could discover Nature’s secrets, allowing people to reinvent society as a welcoming “Empire of Man.” Much of Bacon’s vision was prophetic, producing an explosion in knowledge in everything from quantum particles to galaxy clusters. But the culture that emerged from Bacon’s vision also produced a series of crises that threaten the existence of civilizations across the globe. And even though leaders have understood these threats, for decades these crisis have continued to worsen. This presentation will examine one of the unintended consequences of Western culture that have made these threats so challenging – the way the West’s dis-integrated culture encouraged our society to “go to war” with itself. This analysis will begin with an examination of the achievements of Bacon’s vision, as well as how it led to a fragmentation of social thinking between the spheres of science, economics, and politics, as opposed to other societies where that thinking is woven into a single pattern. It will then explore how this fragmentation led to the current worldwide inability of leaders to address problems such as global climate change and income inequality. Finally, it will consider what we, as scholars, can do to contribute to the current efforts to heal this dis-ease by working toward a culture that will facilitate a more unified approach to social thinking.

Ken Baskin is an independent writer and speaker who specializes in examining issues from the perspective of complexity science and the emerging worldview of which it is a part. He has written essays, in both scholarly journals and books of collected essays, in fields ranging from healthcare and anthropology to organizational and religious studies. His works include a guide to thinking about organizations as living things, Corporate DNA: Learning from Life, and a comparison of the Axial Age and Modernity, The Axial Ages of World History: Lessons for the 21st Century, co-written with anthropologist Dmitri Bondarenko. He is currently reinterpreting religion, as a neurobiological imperative by which groups of people come to know and respond to the powerful, sometimes-mysterious invisible forces that surround them. Baskin earned a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Maryland, teaching for several years at Temple University in Philadelphia. He has written for several corporations, both as a staff member and as a consultant. He still lives in Philadelphia, PA.

Robert Bedeski

University of Victoria

reb1206ck@gmail.com Back

The American state revealed through fiction: A journey down the river of experience and imagination

Philosophers, historians and social scientists have described the state in general and abstract terms, with little concern of how it affects the living experiences of individual persons. American

novelists, in contrast, write about people living with virtually no consciousness of the effects

of the state in their lives. My paper will attempt to reconcile this gap by describing an

imaginary journey down an imaginary river marked by stops inspired by several novels. The

journey begins in the watershed of mountains named for the various philosophers, including

Hobbes, Marx, Rousseau, Hegel, Toynbee and Huntington, whose writings described

civilizations and states. The river trip begins with Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and the role of

religion in American consciousness. Next are Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and Babbit, two

works that capture the economic and social essences of interwar America. James Dickey’s

Deliverance and Jack London’s Sea Wolf complete the imaginary journey with their portrayals

of man’s dark side and the quest for order in nature. Each book captures elements of the

American state – a concatenation of economy, government, metaphysics, and organized

knowledge. My intent is to demonstrate the underlying power of individual action and

thinking in forming the state which structures existence and experience. In my reading, the

unasked question is whether American consciousness has replaced God with worship of the

state. Literature is an ignored window to this question.

US Army, with private Chinese language study in Taiwan, 1958-1962.

PHD, University of California, Berkeley, Political Science, 1969.

Teaching career (1969-2018): Ohio State University; Carleton University (Ottawa Canada); University of

Victoria, Canada; University of Washington. Courses on East Asia.

Writings: Books and articles on state-building, government, international relations, and political theory

of China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Mongolia.

Currently writing: Apotheosis of the State: China, America, and Russia.

Current residence: Oro Valley AZ, United States

Carl Johan Calleman

Mayacal (Santa Fe, NM)

carljohan.calleman@gmail.com Back

Unifying Big History into one science by means of Macrocosmic Quantum Theory

The concept of “Big History” was introduced into the modern world by David Christian through his monumental Maps of Time. This approach places what we normally call history into the context of the entire evolution of the universe by bringing together information from a large number of scientific disciplines. In his book Christian however keeps the door open that it is possible that a unified coherent science which synthesizes all of the information from the different subdisciplines of Big History can one day be developed.

What I am proposing here is exactly that such a unified coherent science can be developed if we base ourselves on Macrocosmic Quantum Theory, which would shift our point of departure from the evolution of matter to that of consciousness. Such a consciousness-based theory must however address a number of phenomena in the current understanding of evolution that are inconsistent with a unified approach. Hence, for instance, by definition random processes cannot play a prominent role in such a theory as it would break up the flow of the evolution of consciousness. Chief in a fundamental re-evaluation of evolution to provide for a unified science will then be to provide a new understanding of the origin of life and the causes of the fine-tuning of the constants of nature for the evolution of this life. This is a re-evaluation that has consequences for all scientific disciplines and examples of will be provided ranging from the birth of the universe to our current time.

Carl Johan Calleman is a scientist and philosopher who has devoted his past thirty years to understanding the evolution of life and consciousness. Born in Stockholm, Sweden he gained a Ph.D. in Physical Biology and spent twenty years doing laboratory research into toxicology and cancer research. In this capacity he was a Senior Researcher at the Department of Environmental Health at the University of Washington in Seattle and has served as an expect for the World Health Organization in addition to having given lectures at places like MIT, Institut Pasteur, Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine and the National Cancer Institute in Tokyo.

In 1994 he left his carrier in the hard sciences behind and took on to elucidate one of the greatest mysteries of our time: The Mayan Calendar. He has since lectured across the world and written seven books on this topic with the aim of making his theory about Big History accessible to modern people. Examples are The Global Mind and the Rise of Civilization (2016), The Nine Waves of Creation (2016), Quantum Science of Psychedelics (2020) and the most recent The Living Universe– The New Theory of Origins: Explaining Consciousness, the Big Bang, Fine-tuning, “Dark Matter” the Evolution of Life and Human History (2023). His focus has been on explaining both biological and mental evolution up until the current time within the same unified framework.

Mark Ciotola

San Francisco State University

ciotola@sfsu.edu Back

The Interplay Between A World of Currents And The Currents of Humanity

The idea of currents is expressed in the context of cosmology and Big History, then focused upon the Earth and the people who live there. Physical currents, such as concerning water, air and light, are identified, categorized and analyzed. A literal tapestry is woven from these patterns into dynamic imagery of currents of humanity in terms of the movement of people, goods and information, and ultimately power. Examples will include several fortuitous combinations of current, such as water versus wind, and several seemingly esoteric currents, such as the transport of the excretions of a simple worm that is becoming transformed into a new world system.

Mark develops resource-based case studies and models of historical societies. He is a lecturer at San Francisco State University. Recent works include: Workshop: Characterizing Historical Macro-Material Utilizing Satellite Imagery, Remote Sensing and GIS, World History Association Annual Conference, Milwaukee, June 2018. “Using thermodynamic potentials as the prime driver of historical processes”, International Big History Association Conference—Building Big History, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, 14-17 July 2016. Workshop: Characterizing Historical Macro-Material Utilizing Satellite Imagery, Remote Sensing and GIS, World History Association Annual Conference, Milwaukee, June 2018.

Emergy and Efficiency Analysis of Historical Bubbles, Emergy Synthesis 10 Conference Proceedings (U. of Florida), 1 June 2019. “Workshop: Feeding Empires—Quantitative, Digital & Graphic Simulations for History Using Food Cases”, World History Association Annual Conference, 22 – 23-25 June 2022. “Irreversible Processes in History”, World History Association Annual Conference, Remote, Bilbao, Spain, June 23-25, 2022. “Modeling Historical Dynasties as Emergent, Dissipative Mechanisms”, Thermodynamics 2.0 Conference, International Association for the Integration of Science and Engineering, Boone, North Carolina, July 19, 2022. “Panel: Unity of Sciences”, Chair, Thermodynamics 2.0 Conference, International Association for the Integration of Science and Engineering, Boone, North Carolina, July 20, 2022. “A Comparison of Emergy, Exergy, Entropy and Carbon Accounting: Histories, Definitions, Methodologies, Significance and Synergies”, Emergy Synthesis 11 Conference Proceedings (U. of Florida), 12–14 January 2023. Education: J.D., University of New Hampshire. B.A., Economics from University of Wisconsin-Madison. B.A. Physics & MBA, San Francisco State University. Graduate Certificate in Space Sciences from University of Southern Australia.

Wendy Curtis & Annika Ringen

GeoBook Studio

wendy@geobookstudio.org Back

Oklahoma’s Dynamic Place within the North American Continent

Beginning with the creation of the continents and the North American continent in particular, this presentation zooms in on Oklahoma and follows its development, traveling step-wise through deep, geologic time until arriving in the early Holocene, just past the peak of the last glacial period. Continents stand at a higher elevation than the denser crust that paves the ocean floors. Continents amalgamate. They come together and separate again in super-continent cycles. A brief overview of the mechanics of continental processes sets the foundation to describe Oklahoma's varied rocks and resources.

Following the creation of the basement rocks that underlie the state, Oklahoma and neighboring lands periodically subsided and were inundated by water, allowing sediment to collect. During times of uplift, those sediments were exposed and began to erode. Repeated cycles of subsidence and uplift and the coming and going of ocean waters allowed, at various times, for the accumulation of carbon-rich layers that would become the source of petroleum reserves and the laying down of sands and gravels that would eventually house the Ogallala Aquifer. The evolution of grass with its more efficient method of photosynthesis changed the area’s ecology and eventually supported grazing animals such as horses and mammoths, setting part of the stage for Native American hunting pathways. This presentation continues through the last glacial maximum, even though the ice sheets do not reach this latitude, with a discussion of changes to drainage patterns and climate.

Wendy Curtis is the founder and president of GeoBook Studio and author of The Biggest Picture; From the Big Bang to the Development of the Big Bang Theory. Wendy studied geology at Smith College, entering through the Ada Comstock program for women of ""non-traditional college age,"" and is a frequent participant in geology conferences and field trips. She has presented at previous IBHA conferences and has explored numerous topics through a Big History format, including producing a Big History in Flight, which was presented at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s conference in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. GeoBook Studio has several additional works in progress on North America and more specific regions of the continent. Wendy lives in the Five College area of Western Massachusetts with her husband Mike.

Timothy D. Doran

California State University- Los Angeles

tdoran2@calstatela.edu Back

Ancient Cultures, Women's Oppression, and Frequent Pregnancy

The advent of the Anthropocene has coincided with improvements in an age-old human syndrome, the oppression of women. To understand this ancient cultural practice, the previous demographic and medical regime before the Anthropocene's advanced medical knowledge is examined: in many settled agricultural societies from the ancient period onwards, surviving evidence indicates that half of the human species, the female half, underwent restrictions in the social roles they were expected and allowed to undertake. While irrational misogyny can be identified as one culprit in these restrictions, demographic research indicates that a stronger determinant has simply been the necessity of frequent pregnancy and nursing caused by high mortality rates after the Agricultural Revolution and before the advent of advanced vaccines, inoculations, and germ theory. Here, a Big History perspective, allowing an intersection of biological and historical research, allows a rare holistic explanation for the phenomenon of female role restriction in pre-industrial agricultural societies: human biology explains a long strand of the socio-cultural human phenomenon of female role restrictions in human history. Military factors also enter as a strong determinant in this nexus of necessity: high populations ensured resilience against outside threats, and necessitated high birthrates, and citizenship in ancient states was strongly linked with military service, condemning those who did not serve in the military to second-class citizen status. With the medical advances of the late industrial period, these restrictions have eased, but understanding them is essential to eliminating them.

Timothy Donald Doran is Full Professor of Ancient History and Big History at the California State University, Los Angeles. tdoran2@calstatela.edu.

Timothy Doran is Professor of Ancient History and Big History at California State University - Los Angeles. He earned his PhD from the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California at Berkeley where he studied Greek, Roman, and Phoenician history and culture, and ancient demography. At California State University - Los Angeles, he is Full Professor and teaches regular courses in Ancient Greek history, Roman history, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Near East, Historiography, and also Big History, which he brought to Cal State Los Angeles several years ago and has been teaching regularly ever since. His primary publication specialty concerns the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta. His articles on Sparta have appeared in Ancient History Bulletin, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, and other places. He currently has a contract with Routledge to produce a new university textbook on the history of Sparta, and another contract with Palgrave-MacMillan for a research monograph on Spartan eugenics. He collects antiques and vintage neckties, primarily from the 1930s and earlier.

Ernesto Dominguez Lopez

Center for Hemispheric and United States Studies-University of Havana

edominguezlopez76@gmail.com Back

Historical Evolution: Mechanisms, Concepts And Time

Change is the nature of human societies, as in any other complex open system. As such, traditional history is the observation of the evolution of historical societies, albeit often through fragmented and insufficient lenses. This paper proposes and examines a series of mechanisms to explain historical evolution, based on a refurbished conceptual framework and a wide spectrum of theoretical perspectives synthesized on a trans-disciplinary platform. These are placed within a multilayered temporal framework that focuses on the rhythm of change and the structural complexity of human societies. This proposed as a path to explain some observed phenomena, like the increased frequency of major transformations in cultural contexts, which in turn corresponds to similar processes in natural contexts.

Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1976. He studied nuclear physics and history at undergraduate level. He holds a PhD in Historical Sciences from the University of Havana (Cuba), and currently is doctoral candidate in political sciences at the University of Rostock (Germany). Dominguez Lopez is full professor of history and political sciences at the Center for Hemispheric and United States Studies-University of Havana and a visiting professor at the universities of Buckingham (UK) and Sancti Spiritus (Cuba). He has held visiting positions at the University of Rostock, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (France), the University of Wisconsin-Madison (US), Arcadia University (US) and the Carter Presidential Center (US).

Guest lecturer, guest professor and guest speaker at 30 universities and academic institutions in Cuba, United States, United Kingdom, Colombia, Argentina, Spain, Germany, Greece, Belgium, Finland and Hungary. His research interests include theory of history, political theory, global and regional geopolitics. US-Cuba relations, post-industrial (knowledge) capitalism. His work has been published in academic journals and books edited in Cuba, United States, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Mexico, Argentina, Italy and Venezuela.

Martin van Duin

martin.vanduin@hotmail.com Back

Exploring energy rate density as a quantitative complexity metric in a big history context

Dissipative systems are a class of complex systems, which are characterised as open, out-of-equilibrium systems that are maintained by energy flows. A database has been set up containing values of mass, energy rate (ER), and corresponding energy rate density (ERD = ER / mass) for almost 4000 systems. These systems cover the biological realm (active proteins, cells, organs, living organisms), cultural realm (devices, machines, production plants, cities, human society) and cosmological realm (stars, planets, black holes, galaxies). The mass and ER data range from 6x10-25 kg and 3x10-25 W for a molecular nano-machine to 2x1053 kg and 1048 W for the observable universe itself, thus spanning a range of 78 and 73 orders of magnitude, respectively. It will be shown that there is an ERD threshold of approximately 105 W/kg for all realms, separating stable systems, such as mentioned above, from unstable, “explosive” systems (technical explosives and atomic weapons as well as super-novae and other cosmological transients). Above this ERD limit the strengths of the system’s structure and boundary is insufficient to withstand the high internal temperature and pressure. ERD has been proposed by Chaisson [1] as a metric for the complexity of dissipative systems, so one may wonder whether this ERD threshold puts a limit to the development of complexity over big time ?

Complex systems typically consist of a large number of smaller systems (parts), that interact and connect. New functions and behaviour emerge on a system level, which are not observed for the parts on the previous level. The complexity pyramid is a concept introduced by Reeves [2], that allows the hierarchical ordering of systems. Complexity pyramids will be presented for the physical, cosmological, biological and cultural realms with the systems at the various levels of the different pyramids being quantified by their ERD values. It is intriguing, to say the least, to observe that ERD decreases when going upward in all pyramids, while complexity is considered to increase in the same direction. The ERD decrease is the result of the convergence of parts in a larger system (for example, combining car parts to an automobile), including active parts with a certain mass and ER (for example, engine), but also of inactive parts with just mass and zero ER (for example, chassis, bumpers and panels). To prevent pars-pro-toto issues, systems from different pyramids should not be compared on the basis of their ERD values. The pyramids themselves can be compared though: their ERD ranges increase from the cosmological via the biological to the technological realm, but not for the social realm. Note that ERD of a social system (bee colony, city, human society) is calculated by including the mass not only of the living organisms, but also of the infrastructure and architecture that facilitate its energy flow and, thus, complexity. Finally, an overlay of pyramids is presented to show the development of complexity and ERD over big time .

[1] E.J. Chaisson, “Cosmic evolution: The rise of complexity in nature”, Harvard University Press (2002).

[2] H. Reeves, “The hour of our delight – Cosmic evolution, order and complexity”, W.H. Freeman and Company (1991).

After my PhD study in organic chemistry at the Technical University of Delft (NL), I have worked in an industrial R&D/innovation environment. I have performed scientific/technical studies in polymer/rubber chemistry/technology, both in companies and in collaborations with academia. Main theme of my work has always been the understanding of structure/reactivity/properties relationships as the starting point for solving problems as well as developing new product and application solutions. I am a (co-)author of 180 scientific and technical publications and (co-)inventor of 10 patents.

While closing my professional/scientific career, it felt like a final, intellectual challenge to contribute in some academic way to the field of Big History (BH). As in my professional career, my main goal in BH studies is to make efforts towards enhanced understanding and structure. With a natural sciences background, I have a strong preference for quantitative approaches, such as Eric Chaisson’s energy rate density as metric for complexity. My ambition is to prepare a series of papers to be published, which may eventually be combined into a second PhD thesis:

What can we learn from a master plot of energy rate versus mass for a very wide variety of (complex) systems ?: JBH early 2024;
Energy rate (density) of complex systems over their lifetimes: a comparison of our Sun, a modern human, and the Roman empire;
An overlay of complexity pyramids showing the tortuous path of big history”
Total energy density as a measure to distinguish (un)stable complex systems

Todd Duncan

Pacific University

tduncan@pacificu.edu Back

What Can Big History Learn from the Dark Matter Problem?

Big History offers a universal framework within which many different ways of describing and experiencing reality can be considered and compared. This framework helps highlight both incompatibilities and common themes among narratives. The incompatibilities provide important opportunities to expand and deepen our overall understanding. In this presentation I'll give an overview of the dark matter problem in cosmology, and then build on the analogy to see what the field of Big History might learn from this scientific problem. I'll argue that Big History can serve as a much-needed prototype for the "dezoning" of knowledge, along the lines described by Sarah Bray, Clifford Siskin, and William Warner.

Todd Duncan is an Associate Professor of Physics at Pacific University in Oregon. He combines a research background in physics & astronomy with experience teaching science concepts to a wide range of audiences. His education includes a Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics from the University of Chicago and Physics degrees from the University of Illinois and Cambridge University. His core interest is understanding the fundamental nature of reality as best he can, while helping others discover their own ways to explore deep questions. Todd's publications include a college astronomy textbook (Your Cosmic Context: An Introduction to Modern Cosmology, with Craig Tyler), and his presentations include a TEDx talk on the value of a cosmic perspective. In 2019 he received an Outstanding Educator in Science & Mathematics award from the Oregon Academy of Science.

Anton Grinin

Research Fellow of HSE University and Moscow State University

Senior Research Fellow for International Center for Education and Social and Humanitarian Studies.

algrinin@gmail.com Back

Deepening Of The World-System Crisis And Its Potential Impact On Destabilization And Environmental Degradation

Since 2008, that is, since the beginning of the Great Recession, the World System has become increasingly noticeably in a state of crisis, which continues to deepen. This is a systemic crisis, and it is associated with a gradual change in the balance of power, the weakening of American dominance, with the rise of new powers whose political regimes are not democratic. This accordingly leads to increased tension, contradictions and a slowdown in globalization, which has now begun to rapidly roll back. Thus, the World System and world order are undergoing considerable transformations. We call these transformations “the World System reconfiguration”. Our idea is based on our theory of the periodical catch-ups experienced by the political component of the World System, which tends to lag behind the economic component. Such gaps are eventually bridged, but not in a smooth way. On the contrary, this catch-up would usually be rather complex and turbulent. This catch-up provokes strong structural transformations. We think that with the Arab Spring there started a reconfiguration of the World System that will remain associated with revolutionary processes in the 21st century.

Since February 2022, the World-System has entered a new phase of development. The uncertain outcome of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine (SMO), the split in the world, the break-up of the global economy into a few economic zones, the prospect of financial and currency zones and other processes open up other options for the world order transformation apart from what seemed to dominate yesterday. It is possible to consider several possible scenarios for changes in the World System in connection with the SMO in Ukraine, as well as several other aspects of the transformation of the world order.

But for the purposes of this report, it is important to emphasize the following. The geopolitical aspects of the world-system crisis and the results of military conflict are now being actively considered, but there is almost no research on how these crises affect and will continue to affect the environmental situation in the region and in the world as a whole. Meanwhile, the impact of military actions is already absolutely destructive for the ecology of Ukraine. Take, for example, the destruction of the Kakhovskaya Hydroelectric Power Station. We believe that, in general, the deepening of the described crisis of the World System will have a negative impact on the ecology of the world for a number of reasons: 1) the inevitable weakening of coordination in environmental policy; 2) destabilization in many countries, which inevitably leads to environmental degradation; 3) crisis phenomena always force governments to solve environmental problems on a residual basis; 4) the consumption of resources and carbon energy inevitably increases (including in connection with military operations or preparations for them).

We would like to conclude this report with the important idea that in connection with the indicated crisis of the World System and its impact on the destabilization of many regimes and processes, it is necessary to pay special attention to Africa. We believe that, on the one hand, many African societies have a great future ahead of them, and Africa as a whole is the continent of the future, where for a long time there will be strong dynamics of development and growth in various aspects, including economic processes that are important for the world. However, on the other hand, we forecast that Africa will become the most restless continent of the World System in the future. The process of rapid modernization in any state creates an increased risk of destabilization, but in African conditions the risk increases greatly. Increasing general destabilization in the World System, that is, its continuing reconfiguration, will further intensify destabilization processes in Africa. Meanwhile, the environmental situation in Africa is critical. Both processes: economic recovery (together with rapid demographic growth) and increased risks of destabilization will negatively affect the environment, which could cause a serious environmental crisis. In the context of the destruction of connections and coordination in the World System, we think that the environmental situation in Africa will not be the focus of attention of the leading world system players, who are now more interested in promoting their geopolitical and economic interests on this continent.

Thus, the growing crisis in the World System, which has taken the form of its reconfiguration, can very seriously affect the ecology of the regions and the world as a whole.

Anton L. Grinin, PhD in Biological Sciences, is Research Fellow of HSE University and Moscow State University Senior Research Fellow for International Center for Education and Social and Humanitarian Studies. His main research interests include biotechnologies, global technological transformations and forecasts. He is the the author more than 150 woks, including of five monographs in English and Russian, « From Bi-faces to Nanorobots. The World on the Way to the Epoch of Self-Regulating Systems [History of Technologies and Description of Their Future Development]. 2015 in Russian), Reconsidering the limits to growth. A report to the Russian Association of the Club of Rome (pp. 169–190). Springer (2023; with co-authorship with Andrey Korotayev and Leonid Grinin), Cybernetic Revolution and Global Aging. Humankind on the Way to Cybernetic Society, or the Next Hundred Years. Springer (2024; with co-authorship with Andrey Korotayev and Leonid Grinin).

Leonid Grinin Back

Geological evolution: some preliminary ideas

Geological evolution within the framework of Big History is clearly insufficiently studied. However,

cosmic evolution is much more interesting within the framework of Big History, though the analysis of many problems of cosmic evolution is extremely difficult due to insufficient facts and knowledge. This interesting contradiction calls for more attention to geological evolution, which is either absent in Big History courses or is explained in a very cursory and superficial way.

The study of geological evolution as part of mega-evolution has significant peculiarities compared to cosmic and planetary evolution. The fact is that historical geology has accumulated a huge amount of facts, so the main problem here is to select and systematize the processes and facts that are most suitable for evolutionary analysis.

At the same time, geological evolution in the general view of Big History is not sufficiently integrated into mega-evolution and general evolutionary laws and rules, although geological evolution is well studied in co-evolution with biological evolution (and vice versa). Geological evolution has many similarities with other evolutionary phases . In particular, the report will present synchronous comparisons made with the evolution of other planets

at certain periods In addition of course, geological evolution has its major peculiarities. Let us point out just two of them. Firstly, we are dealing with a single object, not a mass of objects. Of course, one can also speak of the evolution of a single object with regard to the biosphere and mankind. But this unity is still (or at least to a great extent) theoretical. And the unity of the Earth as a system is quite obvious. Secondly, only the evolution of the Earth’s outer shell (crust, lithosphere and oceanic crust), partly the magnetosphere and the atmosphere have

really been explored. With regard to the asthenosphere, the mantle and, even more so, the Earth’s cores (outer and inner), there are only a few facts (or rather indirect evidence) and hypotheses about their evolution.

Leonid E. Grinin is Director of Uchitel Publishing, Volgograd, Russia. Beginning as a teacher in rural schools, he founded his publishing firm to develop educational materials in the 1980s. He then completed a Ph.D. at Moscow State University and expanded Uchitel to serve a global market in Russian and English. A sociologist, philosopher of history, and economist, his work focuses on identifying regularities of macroevolution. Among his thirty monographs are From Confucius to Comte: The Formation of the Theory, Methodology and Philosophy of History (2012, in Russian); Macrohistory and Globalization (2012); and The Big History of the Universe’s Development: Cosmic Evolution (2013, in Russian). Leonid co-authored Great Divergence and Great Convergence: A Global Perspective (2015) and co-edits the international journals, Social Evolution and History and Journal of Globalization Studies. A founding member and Deputy Director of the Eurasian Center for Megahistory & System Forecasting, access to his portal, Social Studies.

Heitor Groisman

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

heitor.groisman@graduacao.ie.ufrj.br Back

Property, Exchange And Human Evolution: An Investigation Through The Lenses Of Big History

This work's intention is to contribute to the debate surrounding the origins of economic behavior related to property and exchange. It will do so by considering Steven Mithen's theory of the cognitive evolution of the human mind, aided by economic experiments conducted with non-human primates, in order to further understand the nature of the mind of our last common ancestor. This approach will facilitate the formulation of hypotheses regarding which aspects of contemporary economic behaviors are supported by cognitive mechanisms that have persisted throughout the evolution of our species. Additionally, it will draw support from archaeological findings concerning hunter-gatherer societies, including their economic systems, as well as the ceremonial and symbolic aspects of their practices. Texts by political economists such as Polanyi will also be relevant to the discussion of economic behavior. The main conclusions proposed in this text are that the concept of property, throughout human cultural evolution, has been supported by unconscious cognitive modules related to possession—a behavior inherited over millions of years of our species' evolution. However, the behavior of trade is only made possible due to the specific characteristics of human cognitive architecture and plays a prosocial role in hunter-gatherer societies, particularly in intergroup communications.

Heitor Groisman is currently an undergraduate student in the Economics program at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is a researcher at LABH (Big History Laboratory), also affiliated with UFRJ.

Lowell Gustafson

Villanova University

lowell.gustafson@bighistory.org Back

Future Studies of Big History

It is now about fourteen years since the IBHA was founded. Given where we have been and where we are, what is the future of studies of big history? How should we organize our association, the relationships of those who share an interest in big history? What are our goals at this point?

Lowell Gustafson is Professor of Political Science at Villanova University, editor of the Journal of Big History, and board member of the IBHA.

Lowell Gustafson

Villanova University

lowellgustafson@gmail.com Back

Complex Flows of Historical Complexity

Complexity, a unifying theme, responds to fundamental questions about the structure of the universe, human significance, and the potential existence of extraterrestrial life. It provides a framework for diverse academic fields to contribute to a comprehensive understanding. Disciplines across natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities converge, offering evidence from quarks to global societies. The journey through emergent complexity is multidirectional, encompassing various historical patterns, civilizations, and cultures. The narrative acknowledges complexity stasis and reversal, with units within complex systems remaining in equilibrium or regressing to simpler forms. Emergent complexity leads to both endings and rebirths. In summary, this exploration serves as a catalyst for interdisciplinary collaboration, inviting scholars to contribute to a unified and substantiated account of the universe's intricate evolution, fostering a deeper understanding of our place in the cosmos. Complexity, a unifying force across disciplines, enriches the intellectual landscape and offers insights into the nonlinear nature of universal development.

Lowell Gustafson is Professor of Political Science at Villanova University, editor of the Journal of Big History, and board member of the IBHA.

Cal Hale & Annika Ringen

GeoBook Studio

calhale6@gmail.com Back

Change is OK: The Geographic Evolution of Oklahoma

Many of the demographic, economic, and cultural phenomena that define modern-day Oklahoma were shaped by a unique combination of evolving geographic and political factors. This evolution was driven in part by a physical environment undergoing concurrent material changes and shifts in understandings and perceptions of economic utility. Coupling with these geographic drivers, broader political forces within the United States and globally have played a fundamental role in building dynamic migration patterns and defining social and economic structures of life in the state. Multiple cycles of both forced and voluntary migration to and from Oklahoma, as well as significant fluctuations in the viability of agricultural production, oil extraction, and other economic engagement with the land, suggest that perhaps change is the state's greatest constant. Big History offers an approach to understanding the intersections and progression of these phenomena. This presentation, which serves as a sequel to Wendy Curtis's presentation entitled Oklahoma’s Dynamic Place within the North American Continent, will take a Big History approach to Oklahoma's development from the Last Glacial Maximum to the present, working forward chronologically to explore the connections between Oklahoma's people, natural resources, and geographic position. In building an understanding of Oklahoma as an intersection between the American South and West, this approach offers the opportunity to analyze the circumstances that have made Oklahoma unique while exploring its place in an evolving nation and world.

Cal Hale supports the work of GeoBook Studio as a researcher, writer, designer, and editor for their Big History publications on numerous topics. He studied geography and political science at the University of Vermont, where he wrote a cross-disciplinary honors thesis entitled: Does Vermonter Matter? Cultural Identity and Belonging among Longtime Residents, Newcomers, and Political Candidates in Vermont. He lives in central Vermont with his partner Annika.

Antony Harper

Independent Scholar

ajdharper@gmail.com Back

The Pattern of Agrarian Civilization Survivorship and Its Consequences

The pattern of survivorship is derived from the data of Kemp. This pattern is then matched to the standard survivorship curves, i.e. types I, II, & III, and found to match most closely a type II survivorship pattern. These results are compared to those of Sandberg, who approached the problem from a different perspective. Further, it is shown that at the level of organization of empire, the potential for further survival is constant. The implications of this result will be discussed at the level of scale.

My initial training was in ecology and evolutionary biology, I taught high school sciences at New Trier High School for over thirty years, during that time developed a relationship with a number of Russian scholars, e.g. Andrey Korotayev and Leonid Grinin, who shared my interest in the application of math models to the patterns of human history, and over the past almost twenty years have had the privilege of conducting and publishing research in this general area. Currently, I am an independent scholar with an interest in the pattern of urbanization over historic time, and by default, an interest in the demise of urbanization patterns. Since urbanization is intimately tied to the advent of agriculture and the production of surplus, and since the production of surplus is in turn related to the level of technology, that triad of urbanization, surplus, and technology has led me to investigate a number of topics, one of them being the collapse of humans social structures at scale. At the present time, this in turn has directed my research focus to the pattern of survivorship of empires; ongoing, I am also considering survivorship patterns at lower levels of societal structure, e.g. city-states.

Ma. Rubeth Ronquillo-Hipolito

Holy Angel University, Philippines

rhipolito@hau.edu.ph Back

Kapampangan Language: The Place of a Mother Tongue in Globalization

"Filipinos take pride in their rich history, which gave birth to unique and diverse cultures spread all throughout the archipelago. These cultures are home to hundreds of languages cultivated and passed down from one generation to another, and one of these is the Kapampangan language, the mother tongue of Pampanga. However, in an era marked by globalization, a phenomenon that makes the world seem smaller by its nature of bridging gaps and connecting countries together, the fate of these indigenous languages hangs in the balance. This presentation shall dive into the Kapampangan language, acknowledging the debates on whether it is dying as it sits in a globalized society. It will analyze the threats posed by dominant global languages and how their dissemination can harm a native language. Through the Kapampangan language, the complexities of identity, belonging, and cultural preservation in an interconnected world will be discussed.

Through the lens of Big History, we can apportion the realities of the cosmos, earth, community, and humanity as we zoom into the Philippines, the Filipinos, its rich culture, especially the Kapampangan language. Ultimately, by safeguarding this mother tongue, mankind gets to honor the contributions of the Kapampangan community to the grand design of human civilization and ensure that they thrive for future generations.

Ahyenne Neleah C. Estacio acestacio@student.hau.edu.ph
Kurt Keino S. Garcia ksgarcia4@student.hau.edu.ph
Adley B. Gonzales abgonzales1@student.hau.edu.ph
Kendrece Carl M. Montoya kmmontoya2@student.hau.edu.ph
Jenica Andria C. Pineda jcpineda2@student.hau.edu.ph
Laurence S. Sagun lssagun@student.hau.edu.ph
Gabriel Ephraim T. Simsuangco gtsimsuangco@student.hau.edu.ph
Justin Rieko S. Tolentino jstolentino2@student.hau.edu.ph

These young big-historian Filipino presenters from Holy Angel University are incoming sophomore students who journeyed through the beauty of big history for one academic year. Equipped with various ideas and insights brought forth by this worthwhile endeavor, they will attempt to show how big history shaped them and their perception of their roots as a Kapampangan and as a Filipino. Be mesmerized as they showcase their talents to discuss language and culture through the lens of big history.

Nick Hoggard

Independent Scholar

nick.hoggard@gmail.com Back

Evolution And Chaos Theory Made Simple

At the previous IBHA conference I presented a proposal for a theory of evolution based on Chaos Theory. The article was very technical and Chaos Theory is not easy to understand. This year I would like to explain it in non-academic terms, and also why this theory is significant.

Bachelor's degree in Electrical Sciences at Cambridge University, England, 1977-1980.

Software Engineer 1980-2027.

Research on Knowledge-based Control Systems, Lund University, Sweden, 1990-1991.

Jess Hollenback

University of Wisconsin- LaCrosse

jesshollenback@gmail.com Back

Symbolic Communication and Trance: Continuities and Discontinuities with Earlier Forms of Information Storage and Retrieval in Nature

This paper explores the deeper implications of how our species' unique, fully developed capacity for symbolically mediated communication and thought (i.e., human language) shows both continuities and discontinuities with earlier forms of information storage and retrieval such as the genetic (DNA/RNA -based), neurological (brain-based), and immunological systems that have evolved earlier in the history of Earth's biosphere. This paper focuses on the ways that deep trance states such as hypnosis and yoga can sometimes activate extraordinary powers and energies latent in our capacity to symbolize that are normally hidden in our normal linguistic communications. More specifically, I want to explore a remarkable case of healing that appeared in the prestigious peer-reviewed British Medical Journal in 1952. This involved the dramatic and lasting amelioration by means of hypnotic suggestions given under trance of a loathsome, normally incurable congenital skin disease known as ichthyosis or fish-scale disease. How did the English word symbols uttered by the hypnotist and understood by the entranced patient bring about the complex chain of physiological, biochemical, and even genetic changes---properly sequenced---that enabled the patient to enjoy a lasting and massive amelioration of his formerly wretched condition?

I am an emeritus professor who worked for 28 years in the University of Wisconsin --La Crosse History department where I taught world history and various courses on the history of the major world religions and a theory and methods course on the nature of religion. I am also the sole author of a book on comparative mysticism entitled Mysticism: Experience, Response, and Empowerment that was published by Penn State Press in 1996 as part of its Hermeneutics Series. My most recent publication was an article entitled "Materializing the Symbolic in Paranormal Experience" published in a volume edited by Alex Kohav entitled Mysticism and Experience: Twenty-First Century Approaches that was published by Lexington Books in 2020. I am currently working on a book about the nature of paranormal phenomena and their linkages to our species' capacities to symbolize. It is tentatively entitled Infinity's Children: The Paranormal Dimensions of Human Experience. It is concerned with both quasi-physical phenomena such as poltergeists, ectoplasms, and psychokinesis as well as extraordinary "mental" manifestations such as out-of-body, near-death experiences, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and paranormal forms of luminous manifestations such as the capacity to see auras and other peculiar light-forms. I am convinced that our understanding of both physical nature and human nature is incomplete if the study of these phenomena continues to be marginalized.

Kenji Ichikawa

Aletheia Shonan High School

fumimaya001@gmail.com Back

Let's Start The Big History Class!

The Big History class that I have started in Japan in 2016 is being offered in my high school world history class. World history education in Japanese high schools started after World War II. And 2023 marked the beginning of a new world history course called World History Inquiry. In the first part of this presentation, I will give an overview of world history education in Japan and the features of the new World History Inquiry. The best way to introduce the new Big History class is to make use of the World History class and textbooks. In this presentation, I would like to report on how I made improvements while utilizing world history textbooks from the viewpoint of research and development of teaching materials. This presentation will also report on the overall plan for introducing Big History classes and the impact of the introduction of the classes. The purpose of this presentation is to share my experience on how I developed a world history class into a Big History class.

Kenji Ichikawa市川賢司 is a teacher at Aletheia Shonan High School in Chigasaki, Kanagawa, Japan. He teaches world history and began the first high-school Big History class in Japan in 2016. He has published numerous world history study reference books for high school students. In 2022, he presented titled “A Little Big History of Silicon”at the first global big history webinar in Japan. In 2023, he presented titled “Layered Structure of Little Big History: Case Study of Enoshima, Japan” at the IBHA Conference. In March 2024, he co-translated into Japanese , Cynthia Stokes Brown , Big History , Small World : From the Big Bang to You , 2017. シンシア・ストークス・ブラウン（著）片山博文・市川賢司（共訳）『ビッグバンからあなたまで：若い読者に贈る138億年全史』亜紀書房，2024年. He may be contacted at <fumimaya001@gmail.com>.

Sohan Jheeta

NoRCEL

sohan@sohanjheeta.com Back

Pioneering The Dissemination Of Astroscience In Sub-Saharan Africa

Astroscience on the sub-Sharan Africa is practically non-existent; a prime reason being that Africa is still emerging out of the shadows and legacies of the colonial past. There are several other reasons for the lack of astroscience education at any level and these are as follows:

Not enough appropriately qualified teachers and lecturers;
Insufficient appropriate experimental opportunities for hands on experience of;
General lack of infrastructure for laboratory and access to appropriate state-of-the-art apparatus;
Unreliable or intermittent electricity supply and internet connectivity;
A general lack of continuity in astroscience education programmes, even at university level; and
Upon qualification, lack of employment prospects in the astrosciences field.

However, this does not mean that modern young Africans are averse to wanting to study subjects such as astrophysics, astrochemistry and astrobiology (and perhaps, even including geochemistry and geobiology). On the contrary, those young Africans who are lucky enough to be armed with the latest tech (mobile phones, tablets etc.) have their fingers on the pulse of what is happening with astroscience in the West and keenly wanting to take on the challenges. In short, there is a lack of opportunities in Africa in relation to astroscience. What to do to attempt to redress the balance? We at NoRCEL have inaugurated an innovative initiative under the framework of Astroscience Exploration Network (ASEN) and for this project we have launched the astroscience educational systems on the sub-Saharan African continent.

Dr Jheeta defended his PhD entitled “Experimental studies in prebiotic chemistry” at The Open University, UK in 2010, having been supervised by Professor Nigel J Mason OBE. His initial studies largely comprised of astrochemistry. Dr Jheeta’s writing has now progressed to include topics related to the emergence of life on Earth, astrobiology and astrophysics. To this effect, he has written over forty scientific peered reviewed papers, as well as one invited authorship paper and five book chapters and has been published in twenty-four international journals. Internationally, across forty institutes, he has delivered over one hundred and twenty oral presentations including nineteen keynote speeches and has also given thirty-six poster presentations.

He is an editorial member of MDPI’s Life journal; an advisory board member of MDPI’s Sci journal, and an academic editor of Hindawi’s Advances in Astronomy. In addition, he has been a guest editor five times on three journals.

On the African continent Dr Jheeta has been active since 2015, delivering inspirational talks in schools, polytechnic, colleges and universities in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe (as well as in Jordan, the UAE, India and Ecuador). To supplement his involvement with outreach on the African continent, he has written several articles with regard to the promotion of astroscience education to African students.

In 2013 Dr Jheeta created NoRCEL (the Network of Researchers on the Chemical Emergence of Life), of which he is currently Chairman. The group has now evolved into five projects including Astroscience Exploration Network (ASEN); Blue Earth Project (BEP); Frontiers of Sciences (FoS); Latin America Hub (LatAm Hub) including NoRCEL Sessions (NS); and Microbial World Network - with the focus of these projects being on educational and outreach programmes serving the global south.

Sohan Jheeta

NoRCEL

sohan@sohanjheeta.com Back

Emergence of Life: Importance of Formation of Organic Molecules of Life

It is believed that some of the necessary organic molecules may have been formed in specific areas of space (namely dark molecular clouds, eg Horsehead nebula) and delivered on to the Earth during the early heavy bombardment period of its history, approximately 4.3-4.0 billion years ago. These organic molecules may have played a pivotal role in the formation of life on Earth. In addition, it is believed that life on Earth was formed within a very short geological time frame of only 200-300 million years. So, it is not unreasonable to suppose that these molecules were initially made in space which in effect could be, metaphorically speaking, a huge chemical

laboratory.

Hirofumi Katayama

J. F. Oberlin University, Tokyo

katayama@obirin.ac.jp Back

Cosmic Humanism, Information-based Ethics, and Complexity – How Do We Guide our Actions?

With a few exceptions, ethical theories propose different ways to help us decide what actions ought to be taken for the good of a person or other persons (i.e. anthropocentric). However, the basis of Complex-Information (C-I) ethical theory extends to complexity science, information theory, and even thermodynamics. The result is a rationale for helping to make ethical decisions that are not restricted to anthropocentric concerns, but to the well-being of complexity at large, including other species and the biosphere. Ken Solis@drjump.com

While I see complexity as important to Big History changes, there are many drawbacks to accepting more complexity without significant evaluation. Here the historical context of increasing complexity is reviewed including the disadvantages incurred along the journey. Analogies are developed to both natural ecosystems dynamics and IT systems development. A challenge is to maintain a sense of simplicity while still accounting for the various perspectives and consequences. Approaches and questions to the practical application are considered for new technologies and climate change. dlepoire@anl.gov

Mainstream big history, which is constructed based on the concept of complexity, has a bias toward complexity chauvinism and anthropocentrism. This problem is characteristically manifested in two positions regarding the future of humanity: transhumanism and accelerationism. Transhumanism is a view of humanity found in Julian Huxley's evolutionary humanism and Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere, both of which result in eugenics claims. Accelerationism, on the other hand, includes Ray Kurzweil's singularity, which uses technology to overcome death, and Nick Land's dark enlightenment, which envisions the birth of a new human species using bioengineering.

Accelerationism arose against the background of the “Great Acceleration'' phenomenon in the Anthropocene, and is the culmination of the lineage of anthropocentrism in human history. I think there are few big historians who have transhumanist sensibilities, but I don't think big historians have provided a clear prescription for accelerationism.

The “cosmic humanism'' I propose is a concept for overcoming the pitfalls of mainstream big history, the pitfalls of modernity, and even “the karma of egocentrism” of life in the history of the universe (Arnold Toynbee). This is not a big history based on complexity, but a view of humanity based on cosmic perspective and deep time, and seeks the essence of humanity in ""deep time identity."" Cosmic humanism seeks to overcome the karma of egocentrism through the vision of “human being in the universe”. katayama@obirin.ac.jp

Hirofumi Katayama is a Professor of Environmental Economics and the Director of the Oberlin Big History Movement (OBHM) at J.F. Oberlin University in Tokyo. He introduced the first formal Big History course in Japan in 2016. In 2019, he organized the inaugural International Big History Symposium in Japan. His commitment to advancing Big History continued with the establishment of the interdisciplinary Big History Collegium in 2020. Katayama and Kenji Ichikawa co-translated Cynthia Stokes Brown's “Big History, Small World: from the Big Bang to You” into Japanese, which was published in April 2024. Katayama’s research centers on challenging anthropocentrism in mainstream Big History, proposing an alternative perspective known as Buddhist Big History.

Andrey Korotayev

Eurasian Center for Big History and System Forecasting

Russian Academy of Sciences & Moscow University

akorotayev@gmail.com Back

Complexity Growth Patterns in the Stelliferous Era of Big History. Preliminary Observations

In our previous work, we have found that for about 150 million years after the Big Bang Singularity one could observe a hyperbolic deceleration of the universal complexity growth driven by hyperbolically decelerating cooling of the Universe. However, around this time, with the end of the cosmological Dark Ages and the start of the Stelliferous Era, the further cooling of the Universe stopped playing any significant role in the further growth of the universal complexity. Against this background, a new driver of the universal complexity growth emerged. We propose possible proxy measures of complexity that could help us to estimate the universal complexity dynamics in the Stelliferous Era of the Big History in more detail then we did this earlier. One such measure is what the astronomers call “metallicity”. Astronomers define as “metals” any elements that are heavier than hydrogen and helium (thus, according to them, oxygen, or carbon are also “metals”). Then, the “metallicity” turns out to be a measure indicating the ratio of “metals” (all the elements that are heavier [and, thus, more complex] than helium [let alone hydrogen]) to the “non-metals”. We suggest that the mean metallicity of the Universe can be regarded as a measure of universal chemical-physical complexity (reflecting the universal complexity of the element base for the chemical evolution). Our analysis also suggests that that, since 150 million years after the Big Bang Singularity, the universal metallicity experienced exponential acceleration with subsequent quasi-logistic acceleration getting to the maximum level around 10–11 billion years BP, which was followed by hyperbolic deceleration.

Andrey V. Korotayev is Senior Research Professor at Eurasian Center for Big History & System Forecasting at Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. He is also Director of the Center for Stability and Risk Analysis at HSE University and Professor at Faculty for Global Processes, Moscow State University, Russia. Beginning as an historian of Arabia, he made focused studies, such as seen in ‘Two Social Ecological Crises and Genesis of Tribal Organization in the Yemeni North-East’ (1996). Andrey researches topics in quantitative cross-cultural anthropology and seeks to understand biological and social macroevolution, as in ‘A Compact Macromodel of World System Evolution’ (2005) and ‘Mathematical Modeling of Biological and Social Phases of Big History’ (2014). He is a founding member of the Eurasian Center for Megahistory & System Forecasting and founder of Evolution, an almanac dedicated to the study of Universal Evolution, and thus is closely linked with Big History. Most recently, he has produced, with David LePoire, a collective monograph, The 21st Century Singularity and Global Futures: A Big History Perspective (2020). He serves as a board member of the International Big History Association.

Andrey Korotayev, Leonid Grinin and Anton Grinin

Eurasian Center for Big History and System Forecasting

Russian Academy of Sciences & Moscow University

akorotayev@gmail.com Back

Cybernetic Revolution and Global Aging: Humankind on the Way to Cybernetic Society, or the Next Hundred Years?

The authors introduce their monograph titled ‘Cybernetic Revolution and Global Aging’, present its main ideas and findings and describe its structure which consists of four parts and fifteen chapters. Grinin et al. point out that the current volume, while characterizing in many aspects and details the present state of the world, is mostly devoted to the future, presenting analysis and description of how our world will change over the next hundred years. They deeply analyze two powerful trends, which make up the title: ‘Cybernetic Revolution and Global Aging’ and, as it will be shown, they are tightly interconnected. The authors hope that this research will be interesting for those who study the issues of technological development, global aging, and society, which in their forecasts, by the end of the twenty-first century, will transform into cybernetic society. In this chapter the authors describe the main problems and issues of the monograph. Then they discuss the increasing possibilities to transform the biological nature of the human organism (all this is defined as the Post-Human Revolution) and point out great and unpredictable dangers of this process. Finally, authors present extended annotations to every part and chapter.

Lucy Laffitte

lucy.laffitte@gmail.com Back

How to Understand Everything in 10 chapters

A version of big history in ten thresholds for educators and for the future--10 years in the making.

Lucy B. Laffitte, M.Ed., Ph.D. teaches science in context from the Big Bang to the future, both in-class and online. She has published in print, on air, and on the web—writing a newspaper column, founding an award-winning environmental radio program, creating certificate programs, and developing digital learning objects for public television. She has a bachelor’s degree in natural science from the University of Oregon, a Master’s in adult education/instructional design, and a PhD in environmental resource management from North Carolina State University. She has developed courses and curricula at the Oregon Museum of Natural History, Tall Timbers Ecological Research Station, North Carolina Museum of Natural Science, New England Wildflower Society, Rachel Carson Institute, the Nicholas School of the Environment, the Forest History Society, KQED, UNC-TV, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina School of Math and Science. She served on the Board of IBHA from 2016-2021.

Gustavo Lau

Simon Bolivar University, Venezuela

gustavolau@gmail.com Back

Identity Cones and Donation to the African Big History Association

Starting from a Big History Project (www.oerproject.com/Big-History) lesson about modern identities I will share a few personal experiences that led me to some Big History ideas. I will present a pedagogical graphic tool, the identity cones, that allows us to easily discuss relationships between histories and identities at numerous levels including humanity, life, Earth and the cosmos. I will finish with an update on a donation project to the African Big History Association.

Gustavo Lau was born in Lima, Peru in 1964 and immigrated to Caracas, Venezuela in 1976. Since 1994 he has worked in finance in London, UK where he is currently a principal of Episteme Capital. He holds a PhD in Computer Science (2019) from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain, an M.S. degree in Computer Science (1988) and two B.S. in Mathematics (1988) and Computer Science (1986) from the Simón Bolívar University, Venezuela. In January 2022 he founded the Big History Club of Simón Bolívar University. Since then he has been teaching informally the Big History Project course (www.oerproject.com/Big-History) in that club. Since January 2024 he has been coordinating the newly formed IBHA Teaching Group.

David LePoire

Argonne National Laboratory

david.lepoire@gmail.com Back

What kind of Universe do you want?

Despite significant advances in understanding our universe and its history, we still do not know the answers to the most fundamental questions, such as why is there a universe, why is there matter, how did life start on earth, why is there life on other planets, what is the evolutionary driving force towards intelligent life, what is the trajectory of technological civilization, what is consciousness? Here we take a different perspective by asking what kind of universe (that is, forces, particles, and rules) might lead to an interesting universe. Fortunately, our universe is governed by laws that are much more flexible than the dry, predictable Newton's laws of physics. The universe is governed by quantum physics, whose more flexible rules have been discovered yet are not fully understood. It is evident that our common sense understanding would not suffice to create such an interesting universe, but we can try to understand the kind of rules necessary for a such a universe to grow.

David LePoire researches, develops and applies science principles in environmental issues, Big History evolutionary trends, and particle scattering. He has a BS in physics from CalTech, a Ph.D. in computer science from DePaul University, and over thirty years experience at the Argonne National Laboratory in the development of scientific analyses, software, training, and modeling. His research includes Big History synergistic trends among energy, environment, organization, and information.

David LePoire

Argonne National Laboratory

david.lepoire@gmail.com Back

Complexity & Ethics

David LePoire

Argonne National Laboratory

david.lepoire@gmail.com Back

Integrating the Flow of Ideas into Big History Frameworks

The ideas in the field of Big History have been discussed long before the field had its current name. While the scientific revolutions in the 20th century of both basic and natural historical sciences saw rapid advance, the attempt to organize them to make sense of a coherent history of the universe to our present circumstances on earth were explored by the likes of Herbert Spencer in the mid 19th century to Carl Sagan, and Erich Jantsch in the later 20th century. These explorations were not just of stapling together the histories of the cosmos, life, humans, and civilizations, but instead included searching for common mechanisms, trends, and causes. Along the way many unusual trends were discovered in the relationship of evolution and development, fundamental physics and the structures of history, and the roles of energy, information, and organization. The field of Big History now has the opportunity to assimilate these hard-earned insights into its integrative conceptual framework, sparing itself the need to "reinvent the wheel" as various strands of historical knowledge converge.

Davidson Loehr

Independent Scholar (North Carolina)

davidsonloehr@gmail.com Back

Expanding Perspectives on Religion, in Ordinary Language

Expanding Perspectives on Religion, in Ordinary Language”

The deepest concerns of religion become alive , available, and easily understood by the average 18-year-old when jargon and special words like ""God"", ""salvation"", ""theology"", etc. are forbidden. If we can't say what we mean in ordinary language, then we really don't KNOW what we mean. This has been the case in religion for millennia. It may seem surprising to be told that when the deepest meanings of religion are taken out of religion's special jargon and put into ordinary language, the real concerns of religion become bigger, more alive, exciting, and easily open to all alike: theists, atheists, agnostics and the rest. However, it's true, as you'll see, feel, and finally understand.

Musician, combat photographer and press officer in Vietnam, carpenter/woodworker, B.A. in Music Theory (University of Michigan), M.A. in "Methods of Studying Religion" and Ph.D. in theology, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and Wittgenstein's "language philosophy" (University of Chicago(). Fellow in the liberal Jesus Seminar since 1992, Served 23 years as a Unitarian minister, retired in 2009. Author of Hollow Gods: Why Liberalism Became A Destructive Religion, also the chapter "The Nature of Humans, Science, and Religion" in the 2023 IBHA book Science, Religion And Deep Time.

Paul Narguizian

California State University- Los Angeles

pnargui@calstatela.edu Back

A Pedagogical Proposal for Enhancing Undergraduate Biology Education through Complex Systems Thinking (CST)

This presentation is centered around the key question: how do we address teaching about biology, based on complex systems? In the dynamic landscape of biological sciences, the exploration of life's intricacies demands a holistic and interconnected approach. Complexity science and systems thinking offer a transformative framework for understanding the dynamic and interconnected nature of biological systems. As educators in the field of biology, it is imperative to equip undergraduate students with the tools to navigate and comprehend the ever-growing complexity of living systems. Traditional reductionist views, while valuable in understanding specific components of biological phenomena, often fall short in capturing the intricate interconnections and emergent properties that characterize living systems. In the pursuit of understanding these complexities, undergraduate biology education must transcend traditional reductionistic silos and embrace holistic interdisciplinary approaches such as complexity science and systems thinking. This presentation delves into the integration of Complex Systems Thinking (CST) in undergraduate biology courses, highlighting its significance, pedagogical implication, and practical strategies for implementation. Furthermore, it describes the key characteristics, and proposes a few pedagogical concepts associated with complexity, emergence, and systems thinking. The primary goal is to provide biology educators with the tools and enough basic information about the ‘features of complexity’, utilized in Big History, so that they can consider why and how such an approach might be applied in the education of both biologists and a scientifically literate citizenry.

Paul Narguizian is Professor of Biological Science and Science Education at California State University, Los Angeles. His courses on ‘General Biology’ and ‘Global Change’ uses a Big History approach. He specializes in biology education and Big History research, alternating his time between the classroom and various natural history museums and science centers. He develops pedagogical strategies and curricula for educators and for scientists and works at the intersection of science and science communication to make science more meaningful and exciting for his students and the public. Using examples from Big History and the Journey of the Universe projects, popular films, science fiction, documentaries, the nature and history of science, and data from scientific research, his Big History Science Education research lab develops curricula for non-science and science majors.

In doing so, Dr. Narguizian's lab develops and maintains educational materials to assist current and future scientists and educators explore and explain the composition, structure, and evolutionary processes and nearly 14-billion-year history of the universe and the nearly five-billion-year history of the Earth, its geobiosphere, and its diverse kingdoms of life. The second law of thermodynamics allows simple building blocks to evolve into stable complex systems when energy flows export entropy. In other words, when energy flows, complexity grows. We build on this fundamental practice of increasing complexity over the 3.8-billion-year history of life on Earth by developing a pedagogical model that reflects the process of biology while helping students organize their biological knowledge and develop system thinking skills. In addition, using biocomplexity and complex systems thinking (CST) frameworks we are developing an instructional approach that distributes learning opportunities within and outside of the traditional classroom. He may be reached at <pnargui@calstatela.edu>.

Jaume Noguera

University of Barcelona

jaume.no.vi@gmail.com Back

ChronoZoom Relaunch: A New Big History Dataset

In the realm of Big History, the interconnectedness of events across vast timescales is paramount. As a consequence, the development of interactive timeline applications such as Chronozoom stand as a powerful tool to help drive scholar inquiry and public engagement.

This presentation delves into the challenges of building and organizing a dataset that combines data from multiple disciplines (astronomy, geology, prehistory, history...) for timeline applications to display. When providing visual access to the underlaying data, timeline applications must represent historical events accurately, also ensure the usability for a wide range of audiences.

I hold degrees in History and Music Composition, along with a master's in Digital Humanities. Currently I'm pursuing my Ph.D. My research focuses on developing software and managing datasets to improve and expand the use of interactive timelines.

Emilio Padoa-Schioppa

University of Milan-BIcocca (Italy)

emilio.padoaschioppa@unimib.it Back

Ecological History Of Europe: Towards And Unifying Perspective

The term Anthropocene has evolved from being a technical term to becoming widely recognized in society. Although in 2024, the decision of the International Stratigraphic Commission not to formalize the commencement of a new geological epoch named the Anthropocene was met with criticism and partial contention, the reality of the Anthropocene is now acknowledged. The impact of human activities on various environmental domains is so profound that humans can indisputably be considered a significant climatic, geomorphological, chemical, and biological force.

In the trajectory that has led to this circumstance, Europe's role is both evident and significant, with the examination and analysis of historical events, both distant and recent, enabling the identification of its influence. By integrating natural and environmental history, ecological history emerges prominently. Analyzing various contexts (such as forests, plains, mountains, islands, or aquatic environments) or key actors (including plants, animals, and humans) allows for the extraction of essential lessons to comprehend how we arrived at the current situation and to identify potential pathways forward.

Specifically, among the lessons learned from Europe's ecological history are the importance of interconnectedness, the notion of environmental surprises, the concept of intermediate disturbance, and a proper appreciation of the necessity for intervention to address issues caused by humans themselves.

PhD in Natural and Environmental Sciences, Associate Professor of Ecology, at the Department of Environmental and Earth Sciences, University of Milano-Bicocca.Teaches Landscape Ecology (master's degree course in Science and Technology for the Environment and Territory); Biology: fundamentals and teaching with laboratory, Didactics of Biology (Primary Education Sciences), Introduction to sustainability, Sustainability through lens of historical sciences, Ecosystem Services and Advanced Human Ecology (courses of the Doctoral School and the Doctoral course in Chemical, Geological and Earth and Marine Sciences). From 2017 to 2020 deputy coordinator of the Doctoral Program in Chemical, Geological and Earth and Marine Sciences.

In November 2023 appointed director of the teacher certification course. Class A28 (mathematics and science for secondary school).

Lines of research have developed along these lines:

- classification and monitoring of European habitats and landscapes;

- assessment and analysis of ecosystem services in urban and natural settings;

- biodiversity conservation, with special regard toward herpetofauna;

- teaching biology and environmental education.

In total, he has authored more than 130 publications (among them 56 scientific papers, 3 books in Italian). Active in a number of scientific societies (IALE, IALE-Europe, SIEP IALE, Conservation Biology, Society Human Ecology, Societas Herpetologica Italica, Italian Society of Ecology), also holding directorial or executive roles. President of SIEP-IALE (Italian Society of Landscape Ecology 2020-2026). In 2019 he organized the 10th IALE world congress (Milan, July 2019).

Esther Quaedackers

University of Amsterdam

e.quaedackers@uva.nl Back

New Directions In Big History Teaching And Research: Place-Based Big History

This paper presents two new directions in which big history teaching and research has been developing at the University of Amsterdam. These directions are linked by the fact that they both focus on place.

A new big history course, obligatory for the more than 100 first-year students of the bachelor program Global Arts, Culture and Politics, focusses on the immediate surroundings of the place where the course is taught, which is the old inner city of Amsterdam. The course requires students to analyze how the astronomical, geological, biological and various cultural layers of big history have jointly shaped specific parts of that city. The result will be bundled in the form of a walking tour that will become part of the celebration of the Amsterdam’s 750th birthday.

Big history has not just affected places; there are indications that attachments to places have also affected the course of big history. Examples from the history of life as well as from human history indicate that when humans, other organisms and even (organic) molecules were stuck in place with few options to leave, they often developed innovative ways to collaborate, which sometimes even led to the development of new forms of complexity. How exactly did that work? And is it possible to turn this general question into a viable research question that is not just relevant for big history, but also for our present and future society? This is currently being discussed at the University of Amsterdam: conference participants more than welcome to join that discussion.

I am a big historian, and have been involved in big history education and research at the University of Amsterdam for the last 15 years. During that period, I have taught and tailored big history to a wide variety of audiences. I have developed new course materials, new types of big-history-related courses and perhaps most importantly, the little big history teaching method. I have also used my background in architecture and architectural history to conduct research on little big histories of building. Such little big histories connect aspects of building to major processes in the history of the universe, our planet, life and humanity and reveal how building has both been shaped by such processes and has shaped some of them. I just finished my book about the little big history of Tiananmen, which will be published in 2024. I am a curious person, interested in and enthusiastic about many aspects of the sciences and humanities, but most notably about the surprising synergies that often occur when bringing together ideas and people from different disciplines, and from teaching and research.

Gabriel Gonçalves Ribeiro

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

gabrielgr0191@gmail.com Back

Agent-Based Modeling Methodologies For The Analysis Of Complex Ancient Trade Systems

Agent-based modeling (ABM) can be understood as the simulation of models based on autonomous computational agents under particular settings, which define its properties and actions. As a methodology for ancient trade analysis, it allows us to better understand the complexity of its systems, which are subjected to a series of micro and macroscale variables that can’t be efficiently calculated manually. Examples of uses for agent-based models include the exploration of aspects related to intra-community or inter-community exchange systems and logics through settings based on quantitative and qualitative data that give us the settings of such complexities and that can be derived from careful analysis of archaeological and ethnographic interpretations. Considering such a context, the objective of this research is to condensate and present the main methodological aspects of agent-based modeling for the analysis of complex ancient trades, including which kinds of information to gather, how to classify them and how to apply them through a NetLogo model. The proposed methodology for this research is bibliographical, focusing on a few main examples of well-succeeded works that have used ABM for ancient trade analysis. “Ancient” here is not considered as chronologically part of the Ancient time period, but a system of trade that’s not influenced by the modern capitalist interpretation of self-regulated market.

Gabriel Gonçalves Ribeiro is a student of Daniel Barreiros. Bachelor's degree on Defense and International Management; Master's on International Political Economy; Doctorate student on International Political Economy - all by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)

Bryan Routon

Independent Scholar

bryanrouton@gmail.com Back

Self-Organizing Small Teams at Scale As a Potential Solution to Some Central Problems of the Moment

While it's become nigh-unto-axiomatic that the complexity of the modern social world far exceeds our brains' capacity for interpersonal social cognition, it is less-commonly argued that the modern social world long ago exceeded our cognitive capacity for abstract social cognition, e.g. the creation of norms, expectations, and rules that fit the lived realities of everyday people. While the current dis-integration of shared mental referents in societies around the world is distressing, its arguable catalyst — the internet — hints at a solution.

The explosion in availability and convenience of video conferencing opens the possibility of organizing ourselves, informally and/or formally, in small groups coordinated with one another into groups-of-groups, which can be coordinated into groups-of-groups-of groups, and so forth, allowing for dynamically self-organizing groups at any and every scale. This could restore social bondedness and intimacy; re-establish social trust and reintegrate disparate narratives and sets of facts; enhance representation in government; and address the ""culture wars"" by eliminating the need to choose between tight social coordination and the acceptance of diverse ways of experiencing, and living in, the world.

Bryan Routon is an independent scholar with longstanding interests in group and organizational dynamics; political theory; interpersonal communication; and the inclusion and well-being of all people. He received his BA in Political Science in 2014 from the University of Washington, Seattle and currently works as a Software QA Analyst. He presented at the 2018 IBHA Conference and is excited to return!

Bernardo Sá

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Back

The Anthropocene and Big History as a Historical Paradigm

In the view of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009), the Anthropocene debate about anthropogenic climate change is a challenge for historians. Traditionally, the history discipline has separated humanity from nature, describing nature as a mere background where the history of civilizations develops. Therefore, historians lack the theoretical knowledge to make a meaningful contribution to this debate about anthropogenic climate change, where mounting evidence points to a direct causation between rising global temperatures and human action. Chakrabarty is not the only historian to acknowledge the need to bridge humanity and nature again. Daniel Lord Smail (2008) offers a view of the deep history of the human brain, arguing about the necessity for historians to accept scientific evidence from other disciplines as historical evidence, such as genetic and paleontological evidence. Also, in accepting a timeframe of longer duration than human civilization, Smail is able to build a history of the mind utilizing the evolution of the human brain since the last common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees. As with Smail's example, for a historian to truly grasp the complexity and challenges that the Anthropocene brings, it’s not only a matter of researching longer durations like the deep past; there must be an interdisciplinary approach in a coherent methodology. And this is David Christian's (1991, 2004) proposal with Big History, accepting all time since the Big Bang and all of space allows historians to understand and research all kinds of phenomena, not bound by the point of view of humanity. By doing so, historians will be engaging with the scientific paradigms of these other disciplines, so it is possible to argue that Christian’s (2005) "The Play of Scale" offers a historical paradigm within Big History.

Bernardo Sá holds a master 's degree in Comparative History from UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). He is currently a researcher at LABH (Big History Laboratory), also affiliated with UFRJ.

Ken Solis

MD, MA

kensolis@drjump.com Back

Measuring Complexity

Two recent papers in the “Journal of Big History” raise concerns regarding how well the “free energy rate density” (FERD) can serve as a metric for a system’s degree of complexity. Over 40 other metrics have also been proposed which a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist and engineer, Seth Lloyd, divides into 3 main types: 1. Difficulty of description 2. Difficulty of creation, and 3. Degree of organization We will briefly review FERD, Lloyds types of metrics, and examine some of their advantages and disadvantages for measuring complexity.

Ken Solis is a retired ER physician with a master’s degree in bioethics. His long trips to and from work over the years also gave him many hours to listen to lectures on other fields in the sciences, philosophy, and history. By coincidence, he was teaching “A Brief History of the Universe” to adults before he encountered David Christian’s big history lectures for “The Great Courses.” His special interest in big history is what thermodynamics, information theory, and complexity science might reveal about how systems have, depending on the circumstance, progressed, regressed, and diversified over time. He has also applied these disciplines to the formulation of an information-complexity based ethical theory that was published in JBH.

Ken Solis

MD, MA

kensolis@drjump.com Back

Complex-Information Ethics & Big History

Nobuo Tsujimura

J. F. Oberlin University, Tokyo

palettehole@gmail.com Back

Untold Implications of Origin Story: Evaluating David Christian’s Theory beyond His Intent

Marnie Hughes-Warrington once noted that David Christian reached big history by teaching rather than theoretical endeavors. While that’s true, he has also shaped his own theory of big history over time. From Maps of Time (2004) to Origin Story (2018), we can see some theoretical developments in his narratives of big history. Among them, this talk focuses on three key points to evaluate David Christian’s contribution as a theorist.

Firstly, Christian’s endeavor to grasp the unity and principles of historical changes across disciplines culminates in a fourfold structure framing Origin Story – a structure not identified by other readers. This layered framework comprises nine thresholds of increasing complexity, five “paradigm ideas” including one concealed, four parts of the book uniting previously separate histories of the Earth and life, and two kinds of information directing change.

Secondly, Maps of Time describes modernity as the triple “Modern Revolution” that has political, economic, and cultural aspects. Later Origin Story renamed it the “fossil-fuels revolution.” This shift underscores a greater emphasis on the economic facet, particularly in relation to energy resources. Integrating this shift with the related descriptions in the book unveils an emerging “energy-information view of history,” supplementing the prevailing view of increasing complexity.

Lastly, Tsujimura argues that thresholds, as a mean of periodization, have two potentials. One radical proposal is to divide periods by choosing the most important events in history instead of naming periods (periodization without period names). The other is about when new periods really start. Christian’s tendency to assign multiple dates to a single threshold invites a reframing – viewing thresholds as fuzzy transitional phases spanning from the inception to widespread diffusion of novel phenomena (periodization with dual dates).

All of this aims to shed light on implications of Origin Story that have not been overtly recognized, by readers and even by Christian himself.

Nobuo Tsujimura has been serving as the President of the Asian Big History Association since 2018. He is also an adjunct lecturer at J.F. Oberlin University, Tokyo, where he has taught three big history courses since last year. In 2019, Professor Hirofumi Katayama and he organized the inaugural international big history symposium at Oberlin, hosting scholars from Pune (India), Angeles (Philippines), Hong Kong, Beijing (China), Seoul (Republic of Korea), Sydney (Australia), and Japan. Tsujimura contributed an introductory essay to the Japanese edition of Origin Story: A Big History of Everything and examined it with other colleagues in Japan for about three years. His presentation at this conference is part of its result and a broader project aimed at writing a book that elucidates the structure, key concepts, backgrounds, and implications of Origin Story for a general audience.

James Tierney

Independent Scholar (Maine)

run437@hotmail.com Back

What Is Social?

In this paper, I will look at two of the structures that are emerging as we humans build the culture and the habitat that will sustain us as we emerge as a species here on planet Earth. It should be noted that there are many such structures, maybe hundreds or even thousands, which are evolving in concert. I only look at two today because we can overwhelm ourselves with the data and I want to emphasize it is the process not a particular structure that makes the social systems we depend on so critical to our sustenance. I pick these two because I know them and I like them and you all know them too although you probably seldom, if ever, think of them as driving who we are becoming as a species. And, alone, they are not the drivers, it is only together, with all the other structures, and the transactions between those structures, that define who we are becoming. That is what social means.

First let’s look at the Internal Combustion Engine, (ICE). The Internal Combustion Engine is remarkable. Then, let’s look at Child Protective Services, (CPS). We do have a history of child welfare, and transportation via the internal combustion engine that covers approximately the same era, 1900-2024.

The history of CPS is one component of child welfare and it is at least as complex as the Internal Combustion Engine. And it is about the same age historically. It is, however, emerging. It is not a finished product as is ICE. It may, however, be a good model for how such systems become functional within enormous complexity. Maybe we have to accept five or six child deaths per day in the country for now as the best we can do but acknowledge that coevolution demands a precise mix of all the components of each system to be functional and set the goal of the system to be All children, for human culture to continue to drive the emergence of a habitat that can sustain humans to the degree that we might wish to be sustainable.

The point is that with 8 billion people on the planet one would think there is room for error when it comes to something as widespread as raising the children. But we do pretty well given how many children survive and thrive. As we go forward, we, social workers, at least, are more than likely to be taking a more and more active role in protecting the at risk child. How might we prepare for that, and what role does big history have?

Interestingly, the current issue, February 2024, of Scientific American, has a fascinating report on the history of our galaxy which suggests that our HOME galaxy is quite different than even the most sophisticated scientists, or fiction writers have guessed, so history, and IBHA, in particular, may have a brand new role to play even in child welfare. And, as far as we know, we are the only galaxy we know of that has a species that makes an organized effort to consciously protect its off spring from their caretakers.

Right now, there is no group assigned to maintaining the functionality of Child Protective Services. As a social worker, I managed a CPS program for 10 years but was unable to convince very many others that the confidentiality requirement was contrary to the best interest of the child. I have not maintained current with the data, so I do not know what the incidence of child deaths but I know that, here in Maine, and elsewhere in the country, far too many children die at the hands caretakers, many of whom, love them dearly. Social work has a role to play here and we need to help those who care find a way to actualize that role. IBHA also has a role to play and the function of history might best be embraced as the avenue through which issues of social concern can find common understanding.

I had a long career in social work in both advocacy and academia. I watched social welfare develop from charity to a major government function. With all that I have seen over the years, I developed an interest in studying how governments work and how they devolve from functional to unfunctional. For the past ten years I have been focused on the study of Big History as a context within which governing can be seen on a continuum as opposed to four-year bursts. My blog focuses on human culture as the driver of evolution in concert with natural selection and can be found here, www.evolutionandhistory.com and at the International Big History Association web site. Please join me and let me know your thoughts on cultural evolution.

Daniel Vainfas

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

danielvainfas@gmail.com Back

Social Strategies As A Response To Climate Change In 14th Century England And The Origins Of Capitalism

This work aims at exploring climate change as a decisive element for the transition from feudalism towards capitalism as it addresses the interactions between medieval English society, and the conditions imposed by nature, particularly the change in rainfall and the transformation of ecological conditions around the North Sea Basin, especially on England’s east coast. Through the course of this research, we found out that the climate change which happened in the 14th century is one important condition for the rise of capitalism as it creates certain pressures on both peasant and manorial economies which exacerbate their contradictions and sets a course for profound societal change.

Climate acts primarily as a source of uncertainty to which the historical agents must respond; even in an unfavorable condition farmers can devise a soil management strategy aligned with their material needs, including the obligation to pay tribute to the feudal lord. As climate change progressed in England, the ecological pressures on medieval English society created a set of specific circumstances in which the climate hedge strategies of the peasant economy proved to be functional for the processes of intra-class differentiation within the peasantry and the lesser nobility. Simultaneously, these strategies provide a foundation for capitalist accumulation processes from the 15th century onwards.

When we consider the relationship between agriculture and climate, it's possible to fall into the misconception of framing the issue based on a certain antithetical binary. For example, if the absence of rainfall causes agricultural losses, then the presence of rainfall is a positive aspect for farming, or alternatively, if low temperatures shorten the growth phase of a crop, then high temperatures ensure significant growth, increasing the harvest. Although these pairs may hold true in some specific circumstances, they do not constitute a rule that allows us to predict the relationship between climate phenomena and agricultural productivity. Therefore, the same phenomenon can bring gains or losses, depending on a myriad of factors. Since, the end result is unpredictable.

As climate is an inherently unpredictable phenomenon, any society with a minimum level of stability must have a strategy to protect itself from this uncertainty. This set of strategies that serve to minimize losses in the face of climatic uncertainty is what we call climate hedging. While the expansion of grain cultivation was a movement led by feudal lords, various climate hedging strategies can be identified in peasant economies, such as polyculture, for example. Cultivating multiple food crops ensures a broader nutritional coverage in the event of an abrupt climate change that leads to crop failure for one of the specific crops. The real challenge that medieval European societies faced was reconciling the manorial economy with some climate hedging strategy that would minimize their losses in the event of an adverse climate variation.

Daniel Vainfas holds a master's degree in International Political Economy and a Ph.D. in Economics from UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). He is currently a researcher at LABH (Big History Laboratory), also affiliated with UFRJ.

Andre de Vinck

Independent Scholar

jdv327@earthlink.net Back

Evolution = Exchange

A brief summary of my article, "Evolution = Exchange," with a focus on the sciences of exchange.

Ph.D. Binghamton University