The Great Battle of the Books between the Cultural Evolutionists and the Cultural Relativists: From the Beginning of Infinity to the End of History

The idea that societies or cultures can evolve and, therefore, can be compared and graded has been central to modern history, in general, and to big history, in particular, which seeks to unite natural and human history; biology and culture. However, while extremely useful, this notion is not without significant moral and ethical challenges, which has been noted by scholars. This article is a short intellectual history of the idea of cultural evolution and its critics, the cultural relativists, from the Age of the Enlightenment, what David Deutsch called the “beginning of infinity,” to the neo-Hegelianism of Francis Fukuyama. The emphasis here is on Europe and the Americas and the argument is that the universal evolutionism of the Enlightenment ultimately prevailed over historical partic-ularism, as global disparities in social development, which were once profound, narrowed or even disappeared altogether.

BH678: Big History in the Italian Middle Schools: A Manifesto against the Fragmentation of Knowledge

With the Big History Italia BH678 Project I have introduced the Big History approach in the Italian middle schools, proposing an interpretation of the history of the universe as a way of creating a complex fusion among the sciences and a symbolic path for personal and spiritual growth. Starting from a deep love for complexity, I have written a novel, Storia interiore dell’Universo (now in print for the Italian market), that brings Big History into a poetic and psychedelic landscape. If you want to know the universe, probably, sometimes your body, your brain, your matter are enough; but if you desire to learn from the universe and you work in education, you should consider the whole Homo sapiens, as I believe our species learns only through feeling. Each Big History threshold is an opportunity to feel the echo of some keywords that contribute to developing our Inner Big History, taking off from apparently outer island-moments scattered across spacetime.

Crossing the Threshold of Cyborgization

Cyborgization is a hot topic these days. This is an intriguing process that is the subject of many futuristic novels and which at the same time takes place right before our eyes. In the present article we discuss the development of cyborgization, its place in Big History, its background and future directions, as well as the problems and risks of this interesting process. The authors are concerned about the question of whether the time will come when a person will mainly or completely consist not of biological, but of artificial material. The article also touches upon other problems and risks associated with future scientific and technological progress.

Ethics and Fragmented Knowledge in McEwan's Solar: Implications for Big History

This essay is a reflection on the consequences and outreach of the “two cultures” (as conceived by C. P. Snow) that resorts to a reading of McEwan’s acclaimed novel Solar. Michael Beard, the main character, is a Nobel Laureate who, at a very young age, gained recognition, and who then spent most of his adult years wasting his ingeniousness on futile and personal pursuits. He is unable to understand the ethical and humanitarian implications of his gained knowledge. Even though he ends his career by trying to address the problem of climate change, he does so in a detached manner, as though human and nonhuman lives were not implicated in this Earth phenomenon. At the root of it all lies an assumption that nature and culture belong to distinct ontological spheres. Hence, we aim at investigating how Beard’s worldview can be read as a symptom of epistemological assumptions that no longer serve us. This article explores the ethical implications of a rigid disciplinary perspective in a moment of global urgency – the Anthropocene –, and how Big History can help to narrow the gap between different forms of human knowledge. It also makes brief remarks on how Big History should avoid the ethical perils represented by the idea of a “grand unifying theory of the past” by assuming a permanent and coherent critical stance on its methods and concepts.

The Metapattern of General Evolutionary Dynamics and the Three Dynamical Realms of Big History

The goal of this paper is to formalize better the division of big history into three main stages (phases, eras). In my own work they are “dynamical realms,” 1. physical laws, 2. biological evolution, and 3. cultural evolution. I show a deep similarity in two mighty transitions; first, from dynamical realm 1 to 2, and then from 2 to 3. The common “metapattern” in these transitions is that of generalized evolutionary dynamics, which in both cases opened up vast new arenas of possibility space. I first present relevant conclu-sions from my book, Quarks to Culture. A “grand sequence” of twelve fundamental levels was forged through a repeated cycle of “combogenesis” spanning the dynamical realms as families of levels. Next, I provide examples of other scholars who have similarly weighed in on a three-fold arc; notably Christian, Spier, Chaisson, Rolston, Salk, and Voros (following Jansch). Like me, all have nominally recognized similarities between biological and cultural evolution as important in the dynamics of realms two and three. Generally, these scholars have not placed primary emphasis on general evolutionary dynamics as a multiply-instantiated process. The PVS metapattern for evolution (propagation, variation, and selection) is well established as overarching across many patterns in biology, following life’s origin. In culture the operation of general evolution-ary dynamics is, I suggest, dual-tier, consisting of cognitive PVS of individuals coupled to social PVS of groups. The emergence of realm-forming PVS-dynamics twice (biology, culture) created radically new ways to explore and stabilize patterns in expansive fields of diverse types within the respective dynamics. Thus, we can recognize a fundamental-ly similar reason (i.e., two emergent forms of evolutionary dynamics) for why so many scholars have correctly, in my opinion, discerned a threefold arc of big history. Im-portant as well in the flow of progress from quarks to culture were two only slightly less major instantiations of PVS-dynamics (though both crucial): an era of chemical evolution within the realm of physical laws, which led into the realm of biological evolution, and also the evolution of the animal cognitive learning PVS of trial, error, and success, which was essential to the path into cultural evolution. In concluding remarks, I note several outstanding issues: alternative proposals for five orders or four dimensions (i.e., divisions more than three in the arc of big history); the use of the word “evolution,” and three matrices (cosmosphere, biosphere, civisphere) that contain and are constituted by the varieties of patterns within the corresponding dynamical realms.