Abstract
“Big History” tries to view the past on the largest possible scales. This paper argues that the wide-angle vision of “Big History” suggests some interesting perspectives on the nature of modern science. First, it suggests that modern science is more than a bag of technological tricks. Within the modern scientific disciplines there lurks a modern creation myth, a general account of origins that can help us better understand our place in time and space. Second, the broad perspective encourages us to see what the modern sciences share with many different kinds of “knowledge systems”. Knowledge systems consist of modifiable “maps of reality” that allow organisms to adapt during their lifetime, rather than at the slower pace of genetic change. Human knowledge systems are unique because language allows humans to construct their maps of reality collectively. So human knowledge, unlike that of all other organisms, can accumulate from generation to generation. That is why human knowledge systems have changed so greatly in the course of human history.
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Notes
The classic formulation, by Hilary Putnam, reads: “The positive argument for realism is that it is the only philosophy that does not make the success of science a miracle.” Stathis Psillos, Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth (London: Routledge, 1999) 71. The argument is that: “unless the theoretical entities employed by scientific theories actually existed and the theories themselves were at least approximately true of the world at large, the evident success of science (in terms of its applications and predictions) would surely be a miracle.” Arthur Fine, “Scientific Realism and Antirealism”, in Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy 10 volumes (London: Routledge, 1998) vol. 8 581–4, from 581. In other words, if a system of knowledge works, the simplest explanation may be that it does so because it offers a reasonably good description of reality.
H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1994) 13; however, my own position on the rise of modern science is very different from that of Cohen; in particular, I am less impressed by the distinctiveness of modern science, and less inclined to see it as an outgrowth of “Western” or European culture.
Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? (Cambridge: CUP, 2000) 1 [1st publ. 1944].
David Christian, “The Case for ‘Big History’,” The Journal of World History 2 (Fall 1991) 2 223–238; reprinted in Ross E. Dunn and David Vigilante (eds), Bring History Alive! A Sourcebook for Teaching World History (LA: National Center for History in the Schools, UCLA, 1996) 21–30; in Ross E. Dunn (ed.), The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion (Boston and New York: Bedford Books, 2000) 575–87; see also Fred Spier, The Structure of Big History; From the Big Bang until Today (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996); hints of a growing interest in the very large scale can be found within the booming field of “World History” (see Dunn, The New World History) and in many other fields; three more or less random examples are Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (London: Bantam, 1988); Johan Goudsblom, E.L. Jones and Stephen Mennell, Human History and Social Process (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1989); Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge (London: Abacus, 1998).
McNeill, “Mythistory”, in Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) 3–22, from 19.
Barbara Sproul, Primal Myths: Creation Myths around the World (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991) 15.
“Creation Myths”, Britannica CD 98® Multimedia Edition © 1994–1997; strictly speaking, we should refer to “Cosmogonic Myths”, a phrase which includes all Myths of origin, even those which do not posit a Creator, but the phrase, “Creation Myth”, has such wide currency that it would be pedantic not to use it.
This is the basic insight of the “modular” theory of the mind, inspired by the work of Chomsky and developed in the work of Jerry Fodor; for a summary, see Henry Plotkin, Evolution in Mind: An Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology (London: Penguin, 1997) ch. 4; S. Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996) discusses how it may apply to the evolution of the human mind.
“The new, neuronic problem solving worked not by Darwinian methods..., [but] by means of behaviour modification. Instead of being stored in DNA, the variable behaviour and selective reinforcement from the environment was stored in selective interactions among excitable cells or neurons, which respond directly to the environment.” Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987) 233.
Plotkin 172.
For a difficult, but up-to-date account of the instrumentalist/realist debate within the Philosophy of science, see Psillos, passim, which tracks the borderline between the two approaches, while ultimately opting for a realist position.
Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1993) 177; in an aside that all academics will recognize, he adds that this transition is “rather like getting tenure”; much of the original research on sea squirts was carried out by the late Emperor Hirohito.
Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996) 93.
Though Nicholas Humphrey has come close to arguing just this: “To be conscious is essentially to have sensations: that is, to have affect-laden mental representations of something happening here and now to me.” Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992) 97.
“Icons are mediated by a similarity between sign and object, indices are mediated by some physical or temporal connection between sign and object, and symbols are mediated by some formal or merely agreed upon link irrespective of any physical characteristics of either sign or object.” Terence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997) 70.
Deacon 423.
Deacon 402.
This is why the mechanisms of Darwinian natural selection provide an inadequate model for historical explanation. The time scales are normally too short for genetic change to count; transmission of cultural information does not depend on genetic inheritance; and if collective knowledge itself is a significant force for change, it follows that we cannot follow the Darwinian model of explaining long-term changes in the species as the result of changes in the statistical distribution of the features of individuals. Of course, human history is “embedded” in natural history, just as natural history is embedded in chemical history, but the rules of the domain in which it is embedded cannot help explain the distinctive properties of human history, just as chemical rules cannot explain the distinctive features of living organisms. For a powerful critique of attempts to model human history too closely on natural selection, see Joseph Fracchia and R.C. Lewontin, “Does Culture Evolve?” History and Theory 38 (1999) 4 52–78.
Richard G. Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 395, on the possible survival of hominids distinct from modern humans in Java as late as 53–27,000 BP; and see 477 ff. on the survival of Neanderthals in W. Europe to perhaps 30,000 BP; two articles in Science, in June 2001, offer powerful support for the notion that early humans were largely responsible for the extinction of many species of large mammals, by dating the extinction events more precisely; in Australia, it now seems, all land species over 220 pounds disappeared about 46,000 years ago, soon after the best dates for the arrival of humans.
E. Szathmary and J. Maynard Smith have argued that the emergence of human culture counts as one of the great thresholds in the history of the biosphere, as significant in its way as the emergence of sexual reproduction or multicellularity; Maynard Smith and E. Szathmáry, The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origins of Language (Oxford: OUP, 1999) ch. 13.
In a recent history of technology and science, James McClellan and Harold Dorn have drawn a sharp distinction between technology and science; here, I deliberately blur the distinction to argue that Palaeolithic knowledge was like modern science in so far as it combined general ideas about reality with considerable empirical rigour; see J.E. McClellan III and H. Dorn, Science and Technology in World History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) 13.
Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 2000) 5.
In a fascinating study of Aboriginal Australian cosmologies, Tony Swain has argued that the sense of locality and place (“ubiety”) was more fundamental than the sense of time; Tony Swain, A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being (Cambridge: CUP, 1993).
This is clear from modern studies of shamanism. There is a good popular account in Piers Vitebsky, The Shaman (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995) and a classic account by Mircea Eliade, Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); the best general survey of the literature on Siberian shamanism is Caroline Humphrey, “Theories of North Asian Shamanism” in E. Gellner (ed.), Soviet and Western Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) 243–54.
McNeill, “History and the Scientific Worldview,” 1.
Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996) 29.
The classic account is: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene 2nd ed. (Oxford: OUP, 1989). Animistic or, more properly, “anthropomorphic” language, seems hardest to escape in biological thinking, which is why so many people have difficulty grasping the logic of natural selection.
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997) 321–327 discusses some of the evidence for such a “mental organ”.
Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History (London: Paladin, 1991) ch. 2.
Gellner 40.
Recently, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall have offered an extremely valuable typology of human exchange networks, distinguishing between exchanges of information, prestige-goods, political/military exchanges, and bulk-goods; here, the important point is that information and prestige-goods networks tended to be much more extensive much earlier in human history because information and prestige-goods usually combine light weight and high value; Chase-Dunn, Christopher and Thomas D. Hall, Rise and Demise: Comparing World Systems (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1997).
Elias, Norbert, Time: An Essay (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Tony Swain has argued that Aboriginal Australian cosmologies shifted in similar ways when exposed to wider networks of exchange; Swain, A Place for Strangers, passim.
Andrew Sherratt, “Reviving the Grand Narrative: Archaeology and Long-term Change,” Journal of European Archaeology (1995) 3.1 1–32, cited from 25.
Shapin, 79–80; Margaret Jacob writes of the huge travel literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that “the cumulative effect of that literature had been to call into question the absolute validity of religious customs long regarded, especially by the clergy, as paramount.” The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988) 109.
Cited in Shapin 33.
Cited in Shapin 105.
This is the central argument of Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (London: Allen Lane, 1995).
Gellner 61.
Gellner 74.
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Christian, D. (2002). Science in the Mirror of “Big History”. In: Stamhuis, I.H., Koetsier, T., De Pater, C., Van Helden, A. (eds) The Changing Image of the Sciences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0587-6_7
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