David Christian, World History in Context

Journal of World History 14, no. 4 (December 2003): 43752.

Used by permission for Bridging World History, The Annenberg Foundation, copyright 2004
Abstract:
World history can provide a context for regional and national histories, but what is the context for world
history itself? If world history is about the history of human beings, asking this question means asking
about the place of human beings within modern knowledge. While most traditional cosmologies (theories
of the nature of the universe)put humans at the center of the picture, the temporal and spatial scales of
modern science are so vast that humans can seem to vanish entirely. Yet if we order the contents of our
universe by complexity rather than by size or longevity, things look different. This paper explores
arguments suggesting that human societies and their evolution may be among the most complex objects
available for scientific study. Such conclusions hint at the significance of world history beyond the history
profession and also suggest the extraordinary difficulty of the challenges world historians face.
History is all about context.
As Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob have written, what historians do best is to
make connections with the past in order to illuminate the problems of the present and the
potential of the future.1 That is why historians so often complain about fields such as
international relations that focus almost exclusively on current events and issues. However,
historians havent always been so good at putting their own discipline in context. Oddly
enough, this applies even to world history. One of the virtues of world history is that it can help
us see more specialized historical scholarship in its global context. But what is the context of
world history itself? This is a question that has not been sufficiently explored by world
historians.2 Yet it should be, for all the reasons that historians [End Page 437] understand so
well when we criticize other disciplines for neglecting context.
One of the aims of world history is to see the history of human beings as a single, coherent
story, rather than as a collection of the particular stories of different communities. It is as much
concerned with non-literate communities (whether they lived in the Paleolithic era or today) as
with the literate communities that generated the written documents on which most historical
research has been based. World history tries to describe the historical trajectory that is shared by
all humans, simply because they are humans. Understood in this sense, world history is about a
particular species of animal, a species that is both strange and immensely influential on this
earth. So, to ask about the context of world history is to ask about the place of our particular
type of animal, Homo sapiens, in the larger scheme of things. This question encourages us to see
world history as a natural bridge between the history discipline and other disciplines that study
changes in time, from biology to cosmology.

Modern Cosmologies Often Seem To Decenter Human Beings

In most creation stories, humans are reasonably close to the center of the universe. In the
Ptolemaic system, which dominated cosmological thinking in medieval Europe, the earth was at
the center of a series of transparent spheres. Attached to these spheres were the planets, the sun,
and the stars, all revolving around Earth, whose main function, it seemed, was to provide a
home for human beings. However, the evolution of modern cosmologies has decentered the
earth and the human beings who inhabit it. In the sixteenth century, Copernicus offered some
powerful new arguments to suggest that Earth revolves around the sun. In the seventeenth
century, Giordano Bruno argued that every star could be a separate sun, perhaps with planets
of its own. By the eighteenth century, it was common to suppose that the universe might be
infinite in both time and space. The universe of contemporary cosmology has limits in both time
and space, but it is still hugeso huge that it can make our species and the planet we inhabit
seem utterly insignificant.
Some calculations may illustrate how modern cosmologies can appear to diminish our species.
In a Boeing 747 cruising at about 900 kilometers (550 miles) per hour, it would take us almost
twenty years to reach the sun, which is about 150 million kilometers (about 95 million [End
Page 438] miles) away. To reach our closest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, it would take the same
jumbo jet more than five million years.3 This is the distance between next door neighbors in a
galactic city of one hundred billion stars. To get a feeling for the size of our galaxy, the Milky
Way, we need to move at the speed of light. It takes light only eight minutes to reach the earth
from the sun, but it would take a beam of light about four years and four months to reach
Proxima Centauri. The same light beam would have to travel for another thirty thousand years,
or ten thousand times the distance to Proxima Centauri, before it reaches the center of our
galaxy. Yet our galaxy is just one of perhaps one hundred billion galaxies that inhabit a universe
many billion light years in diameter.4
The temporal (time) scales of modern cosmology are as daunting as its spatial scales. Ever since
Edwin Hubble showed, in the 1920s, that the universe was expanding, it has seemed possible, in
principle, to determine the age of the universe by estimating its rate of expansion. The details of
this calculation are tricky, but today cosmologists are converging on an age of about 13 billion
years. 5 We cannot really grasp such colossal periods of time, but, with an imaginative effort, we
can perhaps get some sense of their relationship to human history. The chronology in Table 1
collapses the timescales of modern cosmology by a factor of one billion. It reduces thirteen
billion years to thirteen years, and picks out some of the dates within these scales that are most
significant for our own species.

All in all, it may seem that our earth and our species have no significance at all within modern
cosmology. Indeed, this may be one reason [End Page 439] why so many people feel that
modern science has little to tell them about what it means to be human. This is very different
from the cosmologies of most pre-modern communities, which had plenty to say about humans
and their significance within the wider scheme of things.
Maps Of Complexity Tell A Different Story
However, the spatial and temporal maps of modern science are not the only maps that modern
science offers us. Other maps tell different stories. One of the most interesting is the map of
complexity. Instead of comparing different objects by their size and age, this compares them
by their degree of complexity or order. Neither of these terms is easy to pin down, and
there exists no agreement on their precise definition, but a commonsense definition will take us
a long way. The physicist Eric Chaisson defines order (or complexity) as a state of intricacy,
complication, variety, or involvement, as in the interconnected parts of a structurea quality of
having many interacting, different components.6 Despite the difficulties we face in pinning
down such [End Page 440] notions, there are some powerful lines of argument about order and
complexity that have interesting implications for our own species. The rest of this article will
explore some of these arguments and try to tease out their significance for world history as a
field of scholarship.
There is a close link between the notions of order and complexity and the laws of
thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics is one of the fundamental principles of
modern physics. While the first law of thermodynamics asserts that energy is never lost, the
second law asserts that in any closed system (such as the universe as a whole) the amount of
energy that is available to do work tends to diminish. Entropy is the term used to measure the
amount of energy that can no longer do work, so we can restate the second law to say that in a

closed system entropy tends to increase. The law can be appreciated more easily if it is put
slightly differently. All work depends on the existence of an energy differential, a difference in
energy levels. A charged battery can do work because of the potential difference, or voltage,
between the positive charge at one terminal and the negative charge at the other terminal.
However, as it does work (for example by running a light), the difference between the two
terminals diminishes until, eventually, there is no difference at all. At that point, no more work
can be done. The battery has reached a state of equilibrium. The energy it supplied has not
vanished (the heat and light generated by the light bulb will have diffused into its
surroundings), but the energy no longer exists in forms that can do work. The second law
implies that the universe as a whole is tending toward such a state of equilibrium, a state of
perfect disorder, in which all energy differentials have been evened out, and no more work can
be done.
This end state used to be called the heat death of the universe. The Austrian physicist Ludwig
Boltzmann (18441906) argued that the second law can best be understood as a consequence of
statistical processes. Any system can exist in many possible states. However, the vast majority
of these states are disordered or chaotic. So, if a system starts out with some structure (a tidy
room is a familiar example), random change ensures that over time it will become more and
more disordered, simply because most possible states are disordered. Boltzmann gave the
example of a room in which all the gas molecules were squashed into one corner. This is a
possible but colossally unlikely situation. If the system is left to evolve on its own, it will tend
toward one of the many less ordered states, in which the gas is spread evenly throughout the
room. What this seems to imply is that as the universe moves toward a state of thermodynamic
equilibrium, it will become less and less ordered. Order is rare. As Stuart Kauffman puts it,
The [End Page 441] consequence of the second law is that in equilibrium systems, orderthe
most unlikely of the arrangementstends to disappear< It follows that the maintenance of
order requires that some form of work be done on the system. In the absence of work, order
disappears.7 Understood in this way, the second law seems to mean that complex structures,
from stars to starfish, can exist only if they can tap into a constant flow of new energy.8
Simple structures are easier to create and maintain because they do not require such energy
flows, so it is no surprise that much of the universe appears to be quite simple. Nevertheless,
over the thirteen billion years since the universe was created, complex entities have appeared
and many scientists (particularly biologists) have argued that the upper threshold of complexity
has slowly risen.9 What seems to happen is that where large energy flows are available, they can
sometimes bind independent entities into new and more complex structures, just as
gravitational energy forced simple atoms of hydrogen to fuse into more complex elements
within the first stars. Given the difficulties of pinning down the notion of complexity, it should

be no surprise to find that measuring levels of complexity is tricky. Nevertheless, Eric Chaisson
has proposed an interesting approach to the problem.10 Chaisson argues that the more complex
an object is, the denser the energy flows that pass through it. If it takes energy to create and
sustain complex, far-from-equilibrium systems, it makes sense to suppose that the more
complex a phenomenon is, the more energy it will need to sustain its high level of complexity.
Consequently, if you measure how much energy flows through a given mass in a given amount
of time, and you do this calculation for a number of different entities that inhabit our universe,
you should be able to come up with a roughranking by degrees of complexity. [End Page 442]
The results of Chaissons calculations are summarized in Table 2. They suggest that thereis a
clear hierarchy of complexity, and that within that hierarchy living organisms seem to be much
more complex than stars. As Martin Rees has written, a star is simpler than an insect.11 Yet a
star also lives much longer. Intuitively, this makes sense. Juggling concentrated flows of energy
is a difficult and precarious trick, so perhaps we should not be surprised that those things that
do this do not live long. They are fragile and they are rare. Complexity, dense energy flows,
fragility, and rarity seem to go together. So, if we rank the contents of the universe not by size or
age but by complexity, we find that living organisms loom larger than they do within the
modern maps of space and time. Indeed, they provide a benchmark against which we can
measure this universes creativity, its capacity to generate complex things.

One expression of the complexity of living organisms is their superior ability to adapt to their
environments. Over time, living organisms change in ways that allow them to tap the energy
surrounding them with more efficiency. Adaptation enables living organisms to find more and
more ways of extracting the energy flows they need to maintain their complex structures.

These structures, in turn, provide the machinery that makes adaptation possible. So, in an
elegant feedback [End Page 443] mechanism, complex structures make it possible to tap the
large energy flows needed to sustain complexity. As Darwin showed, living organisms adapt
mainly through a blind process of trial and error. Of the millions of individuals that are born,
many will die before reproducing. Those that happen to have characteristics that improve their
chances of survival are more likely to flourish and have heirs, so the characteristics that helped
them survive will be passed on to their descendants. Over time, Darwin argued, these
mechanisms have given rise to all the species alive on earth today. In the spirit of Eric
Chaissons arguments about complexity, we can argue that natural selection allows species to
adjust to changes in their environment, so they can extract the energy flows needed to maintain
their complex structures. As we now know, the structures that allow adaptation through
natural selection are indeed complex. They are encoded in (at least in this corner of the
universe) DNA molecules that, even in the simplest organisms, contain many billions of atoms
ordered with exquisite precision.
Why Is Human History So Complex? A New Level of Complexity
How do human beings fit into these maps of complexity? Chaissons calculations suggest that
they are central. In the course of two or three hundred thousand years they have learned to tap
larger flows of energy than any other organisms on earth, and this suggests that in some sense
they are more complex. What explains this difference between humans and other living
organisms?
There has been endless debate about what it is that makes us human, but when viewed on a
very large scale, it seems to me that there is a strikingly simple answer. Natural selection has
been the dominant mechanism of adaptation in the biological world, but it is not the only
mechanism. There is a second adaptive mechanism that has evolved among some living
organisms: learning. Many animal species, from earthworms to elephants, have brains, which
enable individual members of the species to adapt to their environment during a single lifetime.
Individuals learn where to hunt for prey, where to hide, how to avoid predators. During their
lifetime, they get better at the job of staying alive. However, when they die, all (or almost all)
the skills acquired during a lifetime of adaptation are lost. A mother chimpanzee can encourage
her children to do some things and discourage them from doing other things, but she has little
ability to pass on complex or abstract information, just as human parents would be very limited
if [End Page 444] they had to teach their children purely through mime. In the animal world,
learned information cannot be passed on with the precision and detail of genetic information.
So each individual starts the learning process more or less from scratch. Individual learning of
this kind affects individuals, but has a limited impact on the evolution of entire species. This is

why in the nonhuman world learning has been a much less important adaptive mechanism
than natural selection.
However, things would be very different if older chimpanzees could pass on their knowledge
as precisely as their genes. This would mean that each individual could inherit the results of
numerous experiments conducted over many generations and pooled in a common cultural
bank.
Furthermore, the store of knowledge in the species cultural banks would increase over time as
more and more ideas were stored. Here we would have a species that learned collectively rather
than individually. The entire species would now be able to cooperate in the task of learning.
And that, more or less, is the sort of species we are. What distinguishes humans from all other
organisms is the evolution of symbolic language the capacity to exchange information with
great precision. Symbolic language marks a revolution in the capacity to communicate
information. As Marvin Harris puts it, Human language is unique in possessing semantic
universality, or the capacity to produce unlimited numbers of novel messages without loss of
informational efficiency. In contrast to gibbon calls, for example, human language has
unrestricted powers ofproductivity.12
Symbolic language made available to humans a third adaptive mechanism, which we can call
collective learning, to contrast it with the individual learning of all earlier learning species.
Because of collective learning, members of our species can inherit knowledge as well as genes.
The difference between humans and their near relatives, such as the chimps, is much more than
a difference in brain size. Human brains are indeed larger than those of chimps, but chimps are
very clever animals, all the same.
The real difference is apparent only when you compare the individual brain of a chimp with the
collective brain of millions of humans. That is what really accounts for the astonishing
differences in the history of these two closely related species. Humans no longer function just as
individuals. Almost every object or idea we use today represents the stored knowledge of
previous generations. [End Page 445] Language links individual humans into the large,
evolving structures that we refer to as societies, just as individual cells once combined into
the larger and more complex structures of multicellular organisms.
The results are transformative. Instead of adapting at the glacial pace of genetic change, our
species can adapt at the much more rapid pace of cultural change. Whereas genes can be passed
on only to ones immediate offspring, knowledge can be passed on to anyone who is willing to
listen, so knowledge can spread much more rapidly than genes. Furthermore, because cultural
adaptation is cumulative, the pace of adaptive change accelerates. The more humans there are,
and the more they interact, the larger the store of accumulated knowledge about how to adapt

to the environment. Here we have an entirely new mechanism of adaptation, one so powerful
that it eventually swamped the underlying genetic mechanisms that made it possible in the first
place. As a result of this new, non-genetic, mechanism of adaptation, humans have acquired
over time an astonishing ecological power, based on an accelerating capacity for finding new
ways of extracting energy and resources from their surroundings. As McMichael puts it:
<the advent of cumulative culture is an unprecedented occurrence in nature. It acts like
compound interest, allowing successive generations to start progressively further along the road
of cultural and technological development. By traveling that road, the human species has, in
general, become increasingly distanced from its ecological roots. The transmission of knowledge,
ideas and technique between generations has given humans an extra, and completely
unprecedented, capacity for surviving in unfamiliar environments and for creating new
environments that meet immediate needs and wants.13

It is collective learning that distinguishes human history from natural history. Collective
learning ensures that human history, unlike that of other species, is a process of accumulation
and acceleration, and it is this process of cumulative and accelerating adaptation to the natural
environment that is traced in world history. All in all, collective learning is so powerful an
adaptive mechanism that there is a case for arguing that it plays an analogous role in human
history to that of natural selection in the histories of other organisms. If so, perhaps collective
learning should be a central theme in any attempt to weave a coherent account of world history.
[End Page 446]
The acceleration in human ecological power made possible by this new adaptive mechanism is
already apparent in the archaeological record of the Paleolithic era. Before modern humans
appeared, technological change occurred, but it was extremely slow. The Acheulian stone tools
characteristic of Homo erectus changed little in a million years. However, as an important
recent survey of African prehistory shows, there are hints that the pace of technological change
began to accelerate from about 250,000 years ago.14 That acceleration may date the first
appearance of modern humans equipped with symbolic language and capable of collective
learning. For perhaps one hundred thousand years or more, modern humans were confined to
the African continent, but innovation is apparent in new types of stone tools, in the appearance
of new technologies such as the use of shellfish, and in evidence of long distance exchanges.
Then, from about one hundred thousand years ago the evidence becomes clearer. Further
innovations allowed groups of humans to migrate to new environments, both within Africa
(where humans began to settle regions of desert and equatorial forests) and beyond. Whereas
our closest relatives, chimpanzees, remained in the ecological niche within which they had
evolved, humans learned how to exploit an increasing variety of niches throughout the world,
despite the fact that each niche required new skills and new knowledge. By one hundred

thousand years ago, some modern humans had migrated out of Africa. This in itself was not
particularly significant.
The environments they found in the southern parts of the Eurasian landmass were not that
different from those of their African homelands, and many other primate and mammal species
(including some of our own hominid ancestors) had made similar migrations. The first
migration that provides clear evidence of a significant increase in human adaptive skills is
probably the migration to Sahul (the ice-age continent of Australia and Papua New Guinea).
This took place between sixty thousand and forty thousand years ago. No earlier mammal had
made this migration; the sea crossing alone suggests remarkable seafaring skills, while learning
to exploit the unfamiliar plants and animals of Sahul must have demanded great ecological
suppleness. The second migration that demonstrates our species growing ecological virtuosity
is the migration into ice-age Siberia that began perhaps forty thousand years ago. To survive in
these cold lands, [End Page 447] our ancestors had to learn new survival skills, including
improved control of fire and new forms of tailoring, as well as new hunting skills. These
migrations continued with the entry of humans into the Americas (perhaps thirteen thousand
years ago), by which time humans could be found in most parts of the world. The process was
completed by the migrations that populated the many islands of the Pacific in recent
millennia.15
Then, a mere ten thousand years ago, humans began to exploit their environments intensively
as well as extensively.16 They found ways of extracting more energy from a given area, by
diverting more of the energy flowing through the biosphere to their own uses. They did this by
manipulating their surroundings so as to reduce the production of species they did not need
(weeds and pests are the generic terms we use today for such organisms) and to increase
the production of species they found useful. Eventually, such manipulation began to modify the
genetic structure of the most favored species in the Neolithic version of genetic engineering that
we call domestication. In these ways, agriculture increased human control over local energy
flows, allowing our ancestors to live in larger and more densely settled communities.
Humans began not just to adapt to new niches, but to create new niches in the villages and cities
of the Neolithic era. As populations grew, interactions between individuals and communities
multiplied, and the process of collective learning itself intensified. In recent centuries, the rate of
change has accelerated once more. The web of human interactions has thickened and stretched
out until in the last five hundred years it has linked all societies on earth. Within the global
networks of the modern era, information can be exchanged faster and more efficiently than
before and processes of collective learning can generate entirely new levels of synergy.17

As humans settled in denser communities they became more interdependent [End Page 448]
and their social networks became more complex. State formation, from about five thousand
years ago, is one of the most striking measures of the increasing complexity of human societies,
as individuals and communities found themselves incorporated into larger and more complex
social machines than ever before. Given Chaissons notion of the link between energy use and
complexity, we should expect to find that these changes correlate with increasing use of energy,
and they do. Population growth is itself a powerful measure of the increasing ecological power
of our species, as it implies the capacity to control more and more of the energy available to the
biosphere. Just to keep their bodies functioning, humans need about three thousand calories of
energy a day. Ten thousand years ago, there may have been six million humans, each
consuming at least this much energy, but not much more. Today, there are one thousand times
as many humans (more than six billion), so we can be sure that our species now consumes at
least one thousand times as much energy as we did ten thousand years ago. At the same time,
as Table 3 and Chart 1 suggest, each modern human consumes on average about fifty times as
much energy as our ancestors did ten thousand years ago. If these figures are correct, they
suggest that, as a species, we now consume about fifty thousand times as much energy as our
ancestors once did (Chart 2). [End Page 449] They demonstrate a control over energy that no
other species can match. The equivalent graph for chimpanzees (or, for that matter, for any
other nonhuman animals) would show no significant change in either total or per capita energy
consumption over the last one hundred thousand years or more.

The accelerating ecological power of humans shows up in many other ways as well. One of the
most powerful measures of human ecological power is summarized in Table 4. The table gives
the dates by which 25%, then 50%, then 75% of several different types of ecological impact had
been reached. For example, the date 1950 in the population row and the 50% column implies
that half of all human population growth occurred after that date (within the lifetime of many

[End Page 450] [Begin Page 452] people alive today). The table shows clearly how human
impacts on the environment have accelerated in the last two centuries.18

On What Scales Are Humans Significant?

Clearly, human history marks something new in the history of our planet. How significant is
the appearance of our species? Can we measure our impact? In rough and ready ways we can,
and these measures offer an important way of appreciating the wider significance of the history
of our species.
Most of the energy that supports life on earth arrives in the form of sunlight. Living organisms
need a lot of energy. So it is no accident that we live near a very hot object, the sun. At its center,
our sun is at least ten million degrees, the temperature needed for fusion reactions to begin. Yet
the average temperature of the universe is about three degrees above absolute zero. Like
campers around a campfire, we live in a cold universe, near a source of heat, and it is this
colossal energy differential that sustains complexity on earth. The torrent of energy that pours
from the sun into the icy surroundings of space provides most of the energy needed to support
our biosphere.
Through photosynthesis, plants tap some of the energy of sunlight and store it in the cells of
their own bodies. Other organisms capture their share of that energy by eating plants, or other
animals that have eaten plants. In this way, like water flowing through irrigation canals, the
energy of sunlight is distributed throughout the food chains of the biosphere. However, in a
powerful demonstration of the effects of the second law of thermodynamics, much of that
energy (often more than 90%) is dissipated at each step in its flow through the food chain, so
that less and less is available to do the hard work of nourishing complex organisms. This is why
food chains normally have fewer than four or five links, and why we normally find fewer
organisms in the later links of the food chain. This is why wolves are less numerous than sheep.
However, the new adaptive mechanism of collective learning has helped our own species to
overcome many of the ecological constraints that check the growth of all other species on earth.
By diverting to [End Page 452] their own use the energy channeled through many different
food webs, humans have multiplied despite their position at the top of many food chains. The
Russian physicist and demographer Sergey Kapitza has argued that the human species now
numbers at least one hundred thousand times more members than any other mammal of
similar size and with a similar position in the food chain.19 Today, humans may be controlling
anything from 25% to 40% of the energy derived from photosynthesis and distributed through
land-based food chains.20 In addition, in the last two centuries, humans have learned to tap the
huge stores of energy buried millions of years ago in the fossilized bodies of ancient plants and
microorganisms, and available today in coal, oil, and natural gas. These statistics indicate the
astonishing ecological power acquired by our species in the course of its history.

Increasing human control over the energy and resources of the biosphere has measurable
consequences for the entire biosphere. If one organism hogs so much of the energy needed to
sustain the biosphere, less will be available for other organisms. So it is no surprise that as
humans have flourished other species have withered. (The exceptions are those plants and
animals that have been invited or have barged their way onto the human ecological team, from
cows and corn to rats and rabbits.21) This means that rates of extinction provide a rough
measure of our impact on the biosphere. Currently, about 1,096 of 4,629 mammal species (24%)
are thought to be threatened; 1,107 of 9,627 bird species (11%); 253 of 6,900 reptile species
(4%); 124 of 4,522 amphibian species (3%); 734 of 25,000 fish species (3%); 25,971 of 270,000
higher plant species (10%).22 The pace of extinctions appears to be accelerating, so we can expect
a lot more in the near future.
But even current rates of extinction are shockingly high. Some paleontologists have concluded
that they are approaching the rates of [End Page 453] extinction during the five or six most
drastic extinction episodes of the last billion years.23 If so, human activity, and particularly
human activity in recent centuries, will be visible on the scale of a billion years. If
paleontologists visit this planet in one billion years time and try to decipher the history of the
planet using the tools of contemporary human paleontology, they will identify a major
extinction event at about the period we live in, and they will notice it was quite sudden. They
will find it comparable to five or six other events of similar magnitude that occurred during the
previous billion years, and they may be tempted to think of it as the equivalent of a meteoritic
impact, such as the impact or impacts that appear to have driven most species of dinosaurs to
extinction about sixty-seven million years ago. Our impact will certainly be detectable on a scale
of six hundred million years (that of multi-celled organisms) and probably on the scale of
planetary history (4.5 billion years). This means that the history of our species is a matter of
planetary significance. To say this of a group of species, such as the dinosaurs, might not be so
remarkable; to say it of a single species really is odd.
There are tentative arguments suggesting that the level of complexity represented by human
societies may be rare, not just on a planetary scale, but even on a galactic scale. Simple life
forms, analogous, perhaps, to earthly bacteria, may turn out to be very common in the universe.
At present, we simply dont know if this is true. However, as we come to understand how
common planetary systems are, how rugged simple organisms can be, and how fast life evolved
on our own earth, it appears more and more likely that there are millions, if not billions, of lifefriendly planets just within our own galaxy, and life may have evolved on many of them.24
However, intelligent, networked species like ourselves that can adapt through collective
learning may be much rarer, because collective learning depends on the existence of more
complex structures than those that power the other familiar adaptive mechanisms of natural

selection and individual learning. On this planet, the vehicle for collective learning is symbolic
language. Symbolic language depends on the evolution of unusually large and powerful brains
(relative to body [End Page 454] size). Yet evolving large brains has been a slow and difficult
process on this planet. On earth it has taken more than three billion years, or almost a quarter of
the entire lifetime of the universe, to evolve very large brains, and it is not hard to see why.
Even simple brains are extraordinarily complex, and require much nutrition and energy to
support them. Each human brain contains perhaps a hundred billion nerve cells, as many cells
as there are stars in an average galaxy. These connect with each other (on average, each neuron
may be connected to one hundred other neurons) to form networks that may contain sixty
thousand miles of linkages. Such a structure can compute in parallel. That means that though
each computation may be slower than that of a modern computer, the total number of
computations being carried out in a particular moment is much, much greater. While a fast
modern computer may be able to complete one billion computations a second, even the brain of
a fly at rest can handle at least one hundred times as many.25 Surely, evolving a biological
computer as powerful as this must have been a good Darwinian move. Yet if brains are so
obviously adaptive, why have so few species evolved really large brains in comparison with
their body size? Part of the trouble is that brains are so complex that they need a lot of energy.
The human brain uses almost 20% of the energy needed to support a human body, but accounts
for only 2% of body weight.26 Bearing large-headed infants is also difficult and dangerous,
particularly for a bipedal species, as bi-pedalism requires narrow rather than wide hips. How
fragile large-brained organisms may be is suggested by hints in the genetic record that our own
species has come very close to extinction.
As late as one hundred thousand years ago, well after our species had appeared but before it
had begun to have a discernible impact on the biosphere, human populations may have fallen
to as few as ten thousand adults. This means that our species came as close to extinction as
mountain gorillas today.27 If our ancestors had perished, there is no guarantee that natural
selection would have created another such creature on our earth. This is a powerful reminder of
the haphazardness of evolutionary processes and of the fragility of complex entities.
The evolution of large-brained creatures such as ourselves was one of the less likely outcomes
of evolutionary processes, because brains [End Page 455] represent a risky evolutionary gamble.
The Emperor Hirohito did research on a type of sea squirt that has a tiny brain early in its life. It
uses its brain to make an epic voyage in search of a rock to perch on. Once it has arrived, it sits
still and sieves plankton, so it no longer needs such an ecologically expensive organ. With
remorseless logic, it eats its own brain.28 As Stephen Hawking puts it, Bacteria do very well
without intelligence and will survive us if our so-called intelligence causes us to wipe ourselves

out in a nuclear war.29 Brains illustrate perfectly why complex things seem to be both fragile
and rare.
If the evolution of creatures capable of collective learning was unlikely within the frame of
planetary history, it may also have been unlikely on much larger scales.30 After all, if such
creatures were common, they should have evolved somewhere else, perhaps even within our
own galaxy with its hundred billion stars, and some of them should have appeared millions,
even billions, of years ago. In principle, they could have appeared within a few billion years of
the first supernovae, which began scattering through the universe the chemical elements that
are the raw material of chemical and biochemical evolution. If species capable of collective
learning had evolved several billion years ago, some of them would surely have achieved the
level of technological sophistication of modern humans and passed well beyond it.
Eventually, some would surely have created technologies vastly superior to those we have
created on Earth, including superior technologies of transportation and communication. By this
logic, there ought to be millions of planets in our galaxy inhabited by intelligent, networked
creatures such as ourselves. Yet we have not a shred of evidence that this is so. As the physicist
Fermi once asked, Where are they?31 In the twentieth century, humans managed to leave their
own planet for the first time. If we do not destroy ourselves, it is likely that in the next few
centuries we will travel to nearby planets and in a millennium or [End Page 456] two we will
travel to nearby star systems. (If it takes us a hundred thousand instead of just a thousand
years, the argument still stands.) As we travel beyond our solar system, we will broadcast our
presence in signals that will travel far ahead of us. At present, we have no reason to believe that
intelligent beings anywhere else in the galaxy have achieved as much. The absence of clear
evidence for extraterrestrials capable of collective learning suggests that human beings may be
unique on a galactic, even perhaps a cosmological scale. So, while the evidence is growing that
life in general may be common in the universe, intelligent, networked life-forms such as ourselves
that can adapt through collective learning may be extraordinarily rare. Perhaps entities as
complex as modern human societies arise close to the limit of our universes capacity to
generate complexity.
These arguments may or may not work. All they are intended to suggest is that the modern
creation story does not necessarily deprive human history of meaning and significance. From
some points of view, the modern creation story suggests that humans are remarkable, unusual,
and profoundly important. In the distant future, many billions of years after we are gone, the
universe will run down. It will continue to expand, but, under the harsh rule of the second law
of thermodynamics, the energy differentials that support life today will diminish. Stars will
flicker out and die, the universe will get colder and colder as it ages, and it will gradually lose
the ability to fashion complex objects such as a fly or a polar bear or a human being. In

retrospect, it will seem that we were among the most complex entities created by the universe in
the youthful period when it had the energy to conjure up such miracles. On the modern map of
complexity, humans are as central as they were within most traditional cosmologies.
For world historians, this conclusion is full of significance. It suggests, first, that world history
the discipline that studies the history of human beings has significance across many scales
and well beyond the conventional boundaries of the history discipline. It also suggests why
compiling world history is so extraordinarily difficult. Constructing a coherent history of a
species as complex as ours is a challenge as daunting as any in modern science. It will require
many different types of historical research and scholarship, on many different scales.
Fortunately, the field is already characterized by a remarkable openness to different
approaches, styles, and methodologies. Yet the argument of this essay suggests that writing
world history well may also require a serious attempt to see the history of our species in the
context of other stories, including those of our planet and our universe. That will mean [End
Page 457] making more use than we normally do of the insights of specialists in neighboring
fields, from biology to cosmology.32 Just as the early pictures of earth taken from the Apollo
missions made it easier to appreciate our own planet, so the view from outside world history
may make it easier to understand the uniqueness and importance of world history, to identify
the themes and problems that set it apart from neighboring disciplines, and to appreciate its
underlying cohesion.
Footnotes
* This essay is based, in part, on a paper given to the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and
Humanities at their 250th anniversary symposium in Haarlem in May 2002: Maps of Time:
Human History and Terrestrial History in Symposium ter Gelegenheid van het 250-jarig Jubileum,
Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen: Haarlem, 2002. My thanks to the
Society for permission to reproduce some passages from that paper.
1. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York and
London: W. W. Norton, 1995), p. 9.
2. Exceptions include William H. McNeill, whose article History and the Scientific
Worldview, in History and Theory, 37, no. 1 (1998): 113, places world history within the context
of other historical sciences, including biology and cosmology; and Fred Spier, The Structure of
Big History: From the Big Bang until Today (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996).
There have also been some remarkable books by scientists that set human history in its
cosmological context; they include Nigel Calders remarkable chronology Timescale: An Atlas of
the Fourth Dimension (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983) and John Gribbin, Genesis: The Origins
of Man and the Universe (New York: Delta, 1981), both of which are now slightly dated. Fred

Spier has compiled a fuller bibliography of such works by historians and scientists. It can be
found at <http://www.i2o.uva.nl/inhoud/engels/bighistorybooks.htm>.
3. I owe these analogies to the late David Allen of the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney
and Coonabarabran, Australia.
4. The universe may be even larger than it appears. The theory of inflation asserts that, for a
fraction of a second, just after the moment of creation, the universe expanded faster than the
speed of light. If so, the real universe may be much bigger than the portion we can observe: If
the entirety of an inflationary universe were the surface of the earth, the observable part would
be smaller than a proton. Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 78. Dmitri Lindes notion of chaotic inflation even
considers the possibility that there may have been multiple Big Bangs, each producing a new
universe. See Ferris, The Whole Shebang, pp. 258264. In a similar vein, Lee Smolin has argued
that we may live in a continually growing community of universes, each one of which is born
from an explosion following the collapse of a star to a black hole. Lee Smolin, The Life of the
Cosmos (London: Phoenix, 1998), p. 110.
5. Evidence from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) released by NASA in
February 2003 implies that the Big Bang occurred about 13.7 billion years ago. This is the most
precise date calculated so far for the origin of our Universe.
6. Eric J. Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 13. As Chaisson points out, there are many subtle problems
in defining complexity or order. One, which can be disposed of immediately, is that there are
two very different types of order. One is the order of a system that is stable because it is close to
equilibrium, and requires no more energy to maintain its present condition, such as the position
of a billiard ball that has dropped into a pocket. This essay is concerned with a different type of
order, which arises in conditions very far from equilibrium, and requires a constant throughput
of energy, such as a whirlpool. (The distinction is described well in Stuart Kauffman, At Home in
the Universe: The Search for Laws of Complexity [Harmondsworth: Viking, 1995],p. 20.)
7. Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, pp. 910.
8. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers have described complex structures as dissipative
systems because of the huge amounts of energy that they use and then dissipate into their
surroundings. They also argue that the appearance of ordered structures is quite likely under
conditions far from equilibrium. In far-from-equilibrium conditions we may have
transformation from disorder< into order. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of
Chaos: Mans New Dialogue with Nature (Glasgow: William Collins, 1984), p. 12.

9. Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution, pp. 1114, discusses other scientists who have held this view; for
a robust statement of this position from a biologists point of view, see J. Maynard Smith and E.
Szathmry, The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origins of Language (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999). The late Stephen Jay Gould was a dissenter on this, as on so many other
biological orthodoxies. See Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York:
Harmony Books, 1996).
10. Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution, p. 139.
11. Martin Rees, Exploring Our Universe and Others, Scientific American 281, no. 6 (Dec.
1999): 46.
12. Marvin Harris, Culture, People, Nature: An Introduction to General Anthropology, 5th ed.(New
York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 155; Harriss chapter on language is a good introduction to the
linguistic revolution that lies at the origins of human history.
13. A. J. McMichael, Planetary Overload: Global Environmental Change and the Health of the Human
Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 34.
14. Sally McBrearty and Alison S. Brooks, The Revolution That Wasnt: A New Interpretation
of the Origin of Modern Human Behaviour, Journal of Human Evolution 39 (2000): 453563.
15. Useful surveys of these migrations include Clive Gamble, Timewalkers (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1995); John Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia (Sydney: Allen and
Unwin, 1999); Brian M. Fagan, The Journey from Eden: The Peopling of Our World (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1990); Ben Finney, The Other One-Third of the Globe, Journal of World
History 5, no. 2 (1994): 273297; J. R. McNeill, Of Rats and Men: A Synoptic Environmental
History of the Island Pacific, Journal of World History 5, no. 2 (1994): 299349.
16. B. D. Smith, The Emergence of Agriculture (New York: Scientific American Library, 1995), is a
good summary of the transition to agriculture.
17. The growth of networks or webs of exchange and communication is the central theme of J.
R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Birds-Eye View of World History (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
18. This acceleration has been explored superbly in John McNeills recent environmental history
of the twentieth century, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the TwentiethCentury World (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000); see also Andrew Goudie, The
Human Impact on the Natural Environment, 5th ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

19. Cited in Johan Goudsblom, Introductory Overview: The Expanding Anthroposphere, in B.

DeVries and J. Goudsblom, eds., Mappae Mundi: Humans and Their Habitats in a Long-Term SocioEcological Perspective (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), pp. 2146, from p. 26.
20. I. G. Simmons, Changing the Face of the Earth: Culture, Environment History, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996), p. 361, adapted from J. M. Diamond, Human Use of World Resources,
Nature 328 (1987): 479480.
21. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900 1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), is all about the impact of this sort of teamwork
in the last 500 years.
22. World Resources 20002001: People and Ecosystems: The Fraying Web of Life (Washington, D.C.:
World Resources Institute, 2000), pp. 246, 248.
23. See, for example, Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and
the Future of Humankind (New York: Doubleday, 1995).
24. Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1999) (particularly chapter 10, A Bio-Friendly Universe?), and Malcolm Walter, The Search for
Life on Mars (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999), discuss how common life may be in the universe.
25. Roger Lewin, Complexity: Life on the Edge of Chaos (London: Phoenix, 1993), p. 163.
26. Roger Lewin, Human Evolution, 4th ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 190.
27. C. Stringer and R. McKie, African Exodus (London: Cape, 1996), p. 150.
28. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 177. In an aside that
all academics will recognize, Dennett adds that this transition is rather like getting tenure.
29. Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell (New York: Bantam, 2001), p. 171.
30. There is a good discussion in Nikos Prantzos, Our Cosmic Future: Humanitys Fate in the
Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 162169.
31. Nikos Prantzos, Our Cosmic Future, pp. 162169. As Prantzos points out (p. 164),
Fermisquestion had already been raised by Fontenelle in the eighteenth century. For a more
optimistic assessment of the chances of finding intelligent life, see Armand Delsemme, Our
Cosmic Origins: From the Big Bang to the Emergence of Life and Intelligence (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), pp. 236244.

32. Recent works by Jared Diamond have shown how fruitful and provocative the insights of a
biologist can be for world historians. See, in particular, Guns, Germs, and Steel, (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1997)