This paper argues that Big History needs a clearer explanation of who—or what—tells its story and why that matters for society. To do this, it brings together insights from the philosophy of science and a broad account of how Homo sapiens evolved psychologically and socially. The paper describes Big History as a layered story of the universe, life, and human societies, showing how each stage builds on earlier physical and biological conditions. Rather than presenting history as a simple march of progress, it emphasizes key turning points when new forms of organization, energy use, and ways of living emerged.A central part of the argument is that humans became a species capable of understanding and shaping their own history through the long co-development of tools, fire, language, and social cooperation. The paper also explains science as a collective human activity that combines discovering how the world works with inventing new ways to act within it.From this perspective, the “narrator” of Big History is not a godlike observer but humanity itself—reflecting on evidence gathered across many fields. The paper concludes that Big History is not only about explaining the past; it also helps clarify our responsibilities today as a species whose technological power now influences the future of the planet. To discuss this narrator, three suppositions are necessary: Big History, Philosophy of Science, and Psychology as paradigmatic established disciplines.
This article evaluates current Standard Big History (SBH) presenting some of its borders, limits and restrictions. Then, a kind of Extended Big History (EBH) is examined to enlarge our understanding and comprehension of the past. This complementary approach to Big History is based on the addition of logical orbits, structures of reasoning to infer about multiverse.
Can our understanding of evolution be used to make predictions, both within biology and on larger historical scales? Opinions diverge. Skeptics emphasize that contingency and chance—such as random genetic variation and drift— preclude detailed prediction. In contrast, proponents point to recurring patterns and general trends, such as the evolution of consumers in the presence of food, and the long-term increase in organismal complexity and information processing from bacteria to multicellular life. This article introduces a new perspective on complexity increase based on a stepwise process termed dual closure. Dual closure refers to the couplings, one after the other, of the combinations of a cyclic process with its containment. For example, the transition from molecular to bacterial systems involved the closure of catalytic reaction networks, coupled with their encapsulation by a membrane. The result is a hierarchy linking physical and biological evolution. Extrapolating from this hierarchy suggests that the emergence of technical beings is a likely next step.
The article analyzes foundational concepts of the framework of Big History, which requires examining certain relationships between the perspective of the philosophy of science, conventional disciplinary traditions, and Big History as a method and theory. The discussion examines how the nexus of the inter-related concepts Information, Complexity, Emergence and Entropy mediates between specific paradigm domains and their respective epistemic and ontological commitments, each of which is supported by long traditions of research in science and the philosophy of science. To simplify the pertinent, voluminous scholarly provenance on these topics, and the historical controversy amongst them, I organize the enquiry using a quasi-axiomatic methodology, to exemplify my view of a framework for Big History. The principal subtopics research used to illustrate these traditions includes the history of math and logic, cosmogony-cosmology, biology, and the neurosciences including consciousness research. The article’s title uses the verb form of the topic to mention the noun form, a reminder to the reader of the degrees of abstraction useful in the article’s exegesis. In English, the use of the verb is ubiquitous, a spectrum of classifying interpretations of observations. This spectral hierarchy itself exemplifies the pragmatics of the process-use of “emergence”, scaled from the micro to macro, and underlies the knotted puzzle imbedded in the contemporary conceptual nexus of the concepts Information, Complexity, Emergence and Entropy.
Kant argues that we can’t know the thing-in-itself or the self-in-itself. However, that’s not only because we merely glimpse the apparent qualities of things and selves through the glass darkly of our cognitive categories, but also because the thing-in-itself and the self-in-itself don’t actually exist-in-themselves. They only exist as co-incidental and co-evolving articulations of the long evolutionary-history of the relative signifying relations of exchange: e.g. energy↔mass↔ time↔space↔force↔particle and atom↔molecule↔gene↔cell↔synapse↔mind. “To exchange,” means, “to put in relation,” and therefore, “to signify,” the relative value of whatever is being exchanged and whatever is exchanging it. Here we arrive at the protean semiotics of exchange↔signification↔value. A radical theory of the evolutionary-semiotics of exchange, therefore, leads to a radical theory of the evolutionary-history of exchange which leads to a radical theory of the evolutionary-science of exchange. In this way a radical theory of no-thing becomes a radical theory of every-thing.
The main purposes of this article are to modify the Big History framework to maximize its effectiveness and to resolve the many conflicts within our discipline. Also, to use it to create a powerful context to understand how to solve some of society’s dreadful intractable problems and to leverage the enhanced Big History structure to form the possibility of a big future.
In this article, Andrey Korotayev advances a complexity-based periodization of the BiologicalEra within Big History, addressing significant deficiencies in existing models proposed by Modis, Panov, Aunger, and Glötzl. He argues that these prior periodizations contain factual inaccuracies (e.g., misdating the Great Oxidation Event and the Cambrian Explosion) and conceptual inconsistencies. To establish a more rigorous framework, Korotayev introduces the minimum genome size (MGS) in the lineage from prokaryotes to primates as a quantitative proxy for biological complexity – comparable to Kolmogorov complexity. MGS reflects the essential non‑redundant genetic information required for organismal existence. Based on this metric and updated fossil evidence, he delineates eleven epochs within the Biological Era, ranging from the RNA World and simpler prokaryotes through eukaryotes, multicellularity, animals, chordates, vertebrates, tetrapods, mammals, and finally primates. These boundaries correspond to major complexity jumps. The resulting periodization is integrated with the subsequent Biosocial and Sociocultural Eras in a comprehensive table. Korotayev then mathematically analyzes the rate of complexity jumps. While original Modis‑Kurzweil and Panov series exhibit an almost perfect fit to a hyperbolic equation (implying continuous acceleration toward a 21st‑century singularity), his corrected series for the Biological Era reveals a different pattern. The apparent hyperbolic acceleration before 1 billion years BP is shown to be an artifact of the Weber‑Fechner effect – perceptual time compression rather than a real trend. For the first three billion years after prokaryotic life emerged, the growth of biological complexity is better described as exponential. Instead of a single continuous acceleration, Korotayev identifies two distinct waves of hyperbolic acceleration. The first wave occurred during the Neoproterozoic and Early Paleozoic (c. 1 billion – 460 million BP), closely linked to the Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event (NOE) that enabled complex animal life. The second wave took place in the Mesozoic and Cenozoic (from c. 250 million BP onward), driven by a non‑linear second‑order positive feedback between biodiversity growth and community structure complexity – analogous to the collective learning mechanism in human social evolution. These findings suggest a pulsating rather than a uniformly accelerating pattern of global biological complexity growth (with the overall hyperbolic pattern only detectable at the highest hierarchy level, becoming unequivocally clearly detectable only closer to the Singularity), with important implications for understanding the dynamics of Big History.
Big History seeks to understand the integrated history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity by synthesizing evidence across the sciences and humanities. While its dominant strength has been the construction of large-scale narratives, narrative synthesis alone does not provide a systematic method for comparing emergent domains across radically different scales of reality. Responding to concerns that Big History may drift toward “mythopoeic scientistic rhetoric,” this paper proposes two complementary tools for strengthening comparative analysis: the historiography grid and the syntopicon. The historiography grid examines how Big History narratives are constructed through scale, evidence, structure, mechanism, arc, and normativity. The syntopicon compares emergent domains themselves through recurring analytic dimensions such as prior conditions, mechanisms of emergence, capabilities, energy flows, constraints, information storage, persistence, scientific discovery, and fragility. Together, these tools do not replace Big History’s narrative ambition but provide analytic scaffolding for making comparison more explicit, disciplined, and generative.
The Axial Age (800 to 200 BCE) remains one of the most transformative periods in human history, giving rise to the major world religions and shaping the foundations for human thought. It has been tackled by generations of brilliant scholars ranging from Max Weber, Karl Jaspers, Eric Voegelin, S.N. Eisenstadt, and others. However, the question of how this period also impacted our underlying conceptions of war, strategy, and geopolitical world order (that is Meta-Strategy) has not been studied in great depth. This paper analyzes this question by introducing the concept of Deep Axialization, an ongoing process through which Axial traditions deeply penetrate both the consciousness and material aspects of diverse cultures and civilizations. From this process emerges the Military-Ideational nexus, which further contributes to the emergence and evolution of distinct meta-strategic cultures (expanding upon the concept of strategic cultures as pioneered by Colin S. Gray to include deeper existential questions) across these civilizations. Key strategic thinkers such as Sun Tzu, Thucydides, and Carl von Clausewitz each demonstrate this dynamic in their works. This study of the relationship between different axial points (Greek philosophy, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Confucianism, etc.) of strategic cultures will better understand our world, both historically as well as our present circumstances. This demonstrates that strategy reflects these axial traditions. Clausewitz famously declared “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” this paper expands this to suggest that war is perhaps the continuation of civilization by other means. This will also assist in further developing the strategic study of civilizations, as well as deepening the scholarly convergence between Big History and the Civilizational Sciences.
In today's increasingly globalized world, the spatial and temporal distances between nations are steadily shrinking, and human interaction is becoming ever more frequent. The world increasingly feels like “one entity.” Yet at the same time, the international community is deepening divisions and conflicts through the outbreak of new wars, territorial disputes, the strengthening of nationalism, and the rejection of immigrants. Amidst this, the political ideology of cosmopolitanism deserves renewed attention. Cosmopolitanism is an endeavor to overcome narrow-minded xenophobia and conflict arising from an excessive sense of identity tied to specific nations, ethnicities, religions, or classes, by promoting dialogue and communication among people through viewing humanity as inhabitants of the “cosmos.” Cosmopolitanism has its long history. Focusing solely on the West, as early as the 4th century BC, Diogenes of ancient Greece declared himself a citizen not of the polis but of the cosmos, marking the origin of the term “cosmopolitanism.” This idea was later inherited by Stoics such as Cicero, whom we will examine in this paper. Even in the medieval Christian world, cosmopolitan elements can be found in the writings of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. The cosmopolitanism of the Stoics and Thomas Aquinas profoundly influenced Enlightenment philosophers like Grotius, Locke, Voltaire, and Kant. Among them, Immanuel Kant developed the most elaborate arguments, and it can be said that modern cosmopolitanism began with Kant. Furthermore, in recent years, faced with various global challenges such as the progress of globalization and climate change, many influential thinkers, including Ulrich Beck, David Held, and Martha Nussbaum, have emerged as new cosmopolitans.
For bit over 14 billion years since the Big Bang, the cosmos has been churning along, and then one day “recently” life on Earth emerged, humanity emerged, humanity woke up and then Big History emerged. The framework and resources that allowed these recent events formed over billions then millions of years. Recorded human history alone can’t scientifically explain that framework, so Big History turns to the physical and biological sciences to set the stage for the conditions that allowed for the development of anthropology, economics, sociology, and psychology. These disciplines can only be fully understood within the context of Big History, which in turn makes it evident that the products of emergence come and go, and their endurance as they currently exists is rather fragile. At about the time Big History began to be well-known, the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s partially began to transform into the sustainability movement. Sustainability has been a major issue for society over the past few decades. Recognizing that physical sustainability involves petroleum (with its CO2) and other resources and toxins that have been built up over million of years, along with other long-term factors, then sustainability becomes a “Big” sort of issue. There have been activist movements related to sustainability and nonrenewable resources, and are hence implicit “Big”. Since the 1930s, the Technocracy organization has discussed sustainability in terms of moderately Big factors such as water, metal sand energy. The energy crisis of the 1970s elevated discussions over M. King Hubbert’s Peak Oil concerns and the worry of running out of high-grade energy resources. Albert Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth book raised awareness about how the consumption of fossil fuels could possibly end advanced human society through runaway climate change and damage. In 2016, several activists discussed explicitly putting the Big into sustainability, and held a Winter Institute titled Big Sustainability. This presentation will discuss society within the framework of Big History and the physical universe. Then it will discuss several of the activist movements related to Big History. It will also discuss the Big Sustainability approach and how this approach can be used and developed in the future.
After a 50-year flood of scientific discoveries in fields from neurobiology to astrophysics, we seem to be in the middle of a Kuhnian paradigm shift. Those discoveries suggest that the mechanical Clockwork Universe, composed of distinct “things” that unfold in linear causal chains, is too limited. Reality now appears far more like an ecosystem than a machine, with components that are deeply interconnected unfolding through emergence. This shift offers the opportunity for Big History to become a leader in helping develop the new paradigm. But to do so, we must overcome the obstacles of the mechanical paradigm that most of us learned in school. What we need is new ways to think about the world. This paper examines one possible model for exploring the world through the lens of the new paradigm. Current neurobiology tells us that, in perception, the subconscious mind transforms the chaos of everyday life into story-like models that enable us to make decisions. On a social scale, this translates into the myth, by which whole communities negotiate mythic poetry to examine survival challenges members don’t understand. From a new-paradigm perspective, such challenges drive a positive feedback loop. In that loop, attempts to meet survival challenges lead to a new worldview – and way of thinking about the world – which, over time, will result in innovation and, often, other survival challenges. This paper will explore this cycle as “cognosis,” a word coined to capture the way the cycle leads to a new way of knowing the world and then “hypnotizes” members of the community to believe that the new way of knowing is not merely an interpretation of the world “out there,” but actual reality, itself. The paper will illustrate this cycle with the Chinese example from the Axial Age and that of Western Modernity. In this way, the paper suggests one way in which Big History can explore the world in light of the new paradigm, breaking through the mechanical separation of academic silos by integrating the dynamics of human cognition and social adaptation to a world that is continually changing. Moreover, it suggests how societies around the globe might better understand the survival challenges we all face today.
As Big History evolves beyond its original narrative structure, it must also evolve methodologically and pedagogically to equip learners with tools to understand multi-causal, dynamic, and emergent phenomena. This paper argues that Complex Systems Thinking (CST) provides a robust framework for reorienting Big History beyond a chronological “grand narrative” and toward a methodological paradigm capable of analyzing emergence, contingency, and feedback across scales. Drawing on the integration of CST within undergraduate biology curricula (Narguizian 2025), I demonstrate how students can engage major thresholds, not merely as historical events, but as emergent transitions resulting from structured interactions among components under specific energy and informational conditions. Focusing on biological thresholds such as the origin of life, the rise of multicellularity, and the Anthropocene, I argue that biology serves as a methodological bridge between cosmic, planetary, and cultural evolution. This approach reframes Big History as an epistemic practice grounded in systems reasoning and the Nature of Science (NOS), while also opening ethical and bioethical questions about information, agency, and technological power in the Anthropocene.
This article by Grinin and Korotayev advocates universal evolutionism in the Big History perspective — a framework that views cosmic, biological, and social development as a single, continuous process from the Big Bang to the present and the future. While evolutionary ideas have ancient roots, the authors clarify that Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, first formulated a universal concept of evolution applicable to all domains of nature. Despite its potential, integrated evolutionary studies remain underdeveloped. This is attributed to a historical crisis caused by early, simplistic unilinear models and, more critically, a modern tension between necessary specialization and the overwhelming complexity of macroevolutionary research. The authors argue that an evolutionary "megaparadigm" is essential in our globalizing world to unify knowledge across disciplines, providing common analytical tools and terminology to compare different evolving systems. It is also essential for the development of Big History. The proposed approach is based on several common aspects, including fundamental concepts (matter, energy, complexity, self-organization, self-regulation, multilinearity etc.), general system properties, shared trajectories, and overarching vectors like increasing complexity. It focuses on qualitative transformations and seeks to identify large-scale patterns while respecting the unique drivers of each evolutionary domain (cosmic, planetary, geological, biological, social). The authors conclude by championing interdisciplinary collaboration and comparative studies as the path forward, aiming to synthesize knowledge and advance evolutionary theory to a new, more integrated level.
The earliest domains of human knowledge, which include history, were founded in a context in which the sciences were unformed and inchoate. Mathematics and cosmology, also among the earliest disciplines, have been repeatedly transformed by conceptual revolutions in their foundations. History as a discipline, however, has not experienced any revolution in its foundations comparable to the foundational transformations of the natural sciences since the scientific revolution, or even the social sciences since the twentieth century. History, then, is ripe for a re-founding that would set the discipline on new foundations. This re-founding of history would constitute a Copernican displacement in which historical knowledge previously understood to be central is displaced to the periphery of knowledge and the heretofore unknown periphery comes into focus as the normative basis of history. This results in changes both to the traditional conception of history and the implicit conception of history in big history. Big history has been understood as a multidisciplinary effort, but the re-founding of history as big history (which should properly be understood as history simpliciter) means its conception as a multidisciplinary science is replaced by a univocal science with a theoretical foundation adequate to the indefinite expansion of historical knowledge.
A key feature of Big History is that it offers a universal framework within which different ways of describing and experiencing reality are actively considered, compared, and integrated into a coherent narrative. This framework helps highlight both incompatibilities and common themes in what is seen through different disciplinary lenses. The incompatibilities provide opportunities to expand and deepen our overall understanding, while the common themes help identify fundamental and universal principles. This paper builds on past discussions within the Big History community, to argue that we should emphasize and further articulate this integrating role of Big History within the academic ecosystem, as a complement to the specialization of traditional disciplines.
The present article is devoted to social evolution both as a part of universal evolution / Big History and as a specific process that have led humanity to outstanding successes and heights (while creating in the meantime serious crises and major problems). It considers differences and similarities between social evolution, on the one hand, and cosmic as well as biological evolution, on the other. It analyzes main rules of evolution and proposes definitions of evolution, in general, and social evolution, in particular. Grinin & Korotayev examine its most important mechanisms, introduce the concept of social aromorphosis, and analyse the concept of unilinear and multilinear evolution. They show that only by considering the evolution as multilinear one can identify the major trends and patterns of social evolution and evolution in general. The authors view social evolution both as changes in not so long-term perspective and as a larger process that we call social macroevolution. In their understanding, social macroevolution is a special dimension of social evolution that encompasses a series of the most important and milestone transformations that have led to the emergence and development of the World System (and, accordingly, a theory that focuses on their analysis). The genesis of the World System and a number of its further changes are the key elements of the social macro-evolutionary process. The main trends of macroevolution, such as the irreversibility of evolution, its particular direction, variability, are expressed both in the systemic features and in the transformations of the World System.
