Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

by David Christian

We can all benefit from the maps our ancestors created. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim insisted that the maps lurking within origin stories and religions were fundamental to our sense of self. Without them, he argued, people could fall into a sense of despair and meaninglessness so profound, it might drive them to suicide. No wonder almost all societies we know of have put origin stories at the heart of education. In Paleolithic societies, students learned origin stories from their elders, just as later scholars learned the core stories of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism in the universities of Paris, Oxford, Baghdad, and Nalanda. Yet, curiously, modern secular education lacks a confident origin story that links all domains of understanding.

French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: “Knowledge is like a sphere; the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown.”

The ancient Indian hymns known as the Vedas hedge their bets. “There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond.”3 Perhaps everything arose from a sort of primordial tension between being and nonbeing, a murky realm that was not quite something but could become something.

Joseph Campbell writes: “As the consciousness of the individual rests on a sea of night into which it descends in slumber and out of which it mysteriously wakes, so, in the imagery of myth, the universe is precipitated out of, and reposes upon, a timelessness back into which it again dissolves.”

Stephen Hawking argues that the question of beginnings is just badly put. If the geometry of space-time is spherical, like the surface of Earth but in more dimensions, then asking what existed before the universe is like looking for a starting point on the surface of a tennis ball. That’s not how it works. There is no edge or beginning to time, just as there is no edge to the surface of Earth.

As nanophysicist Peter Hoffmann writes: “Tempered by physical law, which adds a dash of necessity, chance becomes the creative force, the mover and shaker of our universe. All the beauty we see around us, from galaxies to sunflowers, is the result of this creative collaboration between chaos and necessity.”

an important phenomenon noted by the astrophysicist Eric Chaisson: roughly speaking, more complex phenomena need more dense flows of energy, more energy per gram per second. He estimates, for example, that the density of energy flowing through modern human society is about one million times greater than the density of energy flowing through the sun, while energy flowing through most living organisms lies somewhere between these extremes. It’s as if entropy demands more energy from an entity if it tries to get more complex; more complex things have to find and manage larger and more elaborate flows of free energy. No wonder it’s harder to make and maintain more complex things, and no wonder they usually break down faster than simpler things. This is an idea that runs right through the modern origin story and has a lot to tell us about modern human societies.

an individual mobilizes about 120 joules every second. This is the “power rating” of a human being: 120 watts, just slightly greater than the power rating of many traditional lightbulbs.

Energy causes change, so you can usually see it at work, but information directs change, often from the shadows. As Seth Lloyd puts it: “To do anything requires energy. To specify what is done requires information.”

One of the most famous definitions of information is “a difference which makes a difference.”

If more complexity means more information, then when you increase complexity and information, you are reducing entropy and its accompanying uncertainty or disorder. And entropy will notice. Entropy is rubbing its hands at the thought of the energy taxes and fees it can levy as complexity and information increase.7 Indeed, some have argued that entropy actually likes the idea of life (and may encourage it to appear in many parts of the universe), because life degrades free energy so much more efficiently than nonlife.

In such a chemically rich environment, many of the simple molecules from which life is built can form more or less spontaneously. We are talking about small molecules, with less than a hundred atoms, including the amino acids from which all proteins are made, the nucleotides from which all genetic material is made, the carbohydrates or sugars that are often used like batteries to store energy, and the fatty phospholipids from which cellular membranes are built. Today, such molecules don’t arise spontaneously because atmospheric oxygen would rip them apart. But there was hardly any free oxygen in the atmosphere of the early Earth, so these simple molecules could form when given a few jolts of activation energy.

These delicate flows of energy maintained the complex inner structures of cells just as fusion maintains the structures of stars. Like fusion, they allowed the first living cells to pay the complexity taxes demanded by entropy, because in cells, as in stars, a lot of energy goes into keeping complex structures functioning. But also as in stars, a lot of energy is wasted because no reactions are 100 percent efficient, and of course, entropy loves wasted energy. In both cells and stars, concentrated flows of energy are needed to pay entropy’s taxes and overcome the universal tendency of all things to degrade.

Oxygen photosynthesis was much more efficient than earlier forms but still could extract only about 5 percent of the energy in sunlight, which is less than the most efficient modern solar panels. Photosynthesis pays a substantial garbage tax to entropy in the energy wasted inside the cell and the energy and materials carried away by oxygen.

How did the first eukaryotic cells evolve? The biologist Lynn Margulis showed that they evolved not through competition but rather by a sort of merging of two existing prokaryotic species. It is common for different species to collaborate through what is known as symbiosis. Today, humans have vital symbiotic relationships with wheat, rice, cattle, sheep, and many other species. But Margulis was talking about a much more radical type of symbiosis, one in which once independent bacteria, including the ancestors of modern mitochondria, ended up living inside a cell from the Archaea. Margulis called the mechanism endosymbiosis. At first, her idea seemed crazy, because it ran counter to some of the most fundamental concepts about evolution by natural selection. But most biologists now accept her arguments. The most important evidence for endosymbiosis is the odd fact that some of the organelles inside eukaryotes contain their own DNA, and that DNA is quite different from the genetic material in the nucleus. Margulis realized that organelles such as the mitochondria that manage energy in animals and the chloroplasts that manage photosynthesis in eukaryotic plants look as if they were once independent prokaryotic cells.

eukaryotes had one more trick up their sleeve: sex. Like all species, prokaryotes pass their genes on to their offspring. Most just split in two and pass on their genes through asexual reproduction. But, as we have seen, prokaryotic genes can also travel sideways as bits of DNA and RNA jump ship, go on the road, and find new homes inside other cells. Prokaryotic cells share genes the way humans share library books. But eukaryotes have a different and more complex way of passing on their genes, and they pass them on only to their offspring, never to strangers. In eukaryotes, the genetic material is locked inside the protected vault of the nucleus. That material is released only under the most stringent conditions, using rules less promiscuous and more orderly than those of prokaryotes, and these rules affect how eukaryotic cells evolve. When eukaryotes produce germ cells—eggs and sperm, the cells from which their offspring will be formed—they don’t just copy their DNA. They stir it around first. They swap some of their genetic material with another individual of their species so that the offspring of the two parents gets a random selection of genes, one half from one parent and the other half from the other parent. Both the genetic and the physical mechanisms involved in this elaborate dance are exquisitely complex. But the result was to add a new twist to evolution. Slight but random genetic variations were guaranteed every generation, because even if most of the genes wer...

Ecologists talk of a food chain, a sort of queue of energy consumers with plants at the front, followed by herbivores (or creatures that consume plants), then by carnivores, which can consume herbivores, then by fungi, which bring up the rear by feasting on the dead. The whole process delights entropy, which exacts a garbage tax at every step. Approximately 90 percent of the energy captured by photosynthesis is lost at each trophic level, so much less energy is available for the later links on the food chain. That’s why you find fewer animals than plants on Earth, and fewer carnivores than herbivores. But the fungi do well either way, as they recycle corpses.

But as organisms became larger and more complex, they needed more information about their environments. Natural selection equipped large organisms with a desire for more information, because good information was vital to their success. That’s why, when a human solves a puzzle, the brain gets the same buzz it gets from food and sex.

In most mammal species, the cortex accounts for between 10 percent and 40 percent of brain size. In primates, it accounts for more than 50 percent, and in humans for as much as 80 percent.

Aren’t brains obviously a good thing? Not necessarily, because they guzzle energy. They need up to twenty times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle tissue. In human bodies, the brain uses 16 percent of available energy, though it accounts for just 2 percent of the body’s mass. That’s why, given the choice between brawn and brain, evolution has generally gone for more brawn and less brain. And that’s why there are so few very brainy species.

Close observation of primate societies shows that if you get these social calculations wrong, you’ll probably eat less well, be less well protected, get beaten up more often, and lower your chances of being healthy and having healthy children.6 So sociability, cooperation, and brainpower seem to have evolved together in the history of primates. Indeed, there seems to be a rough correlation between the size of primate groups and the size of their brains. Apparently, many primate lineages were willing to pay one more entropy tax, the brain tax, if it allowed them to live in larger groups.

Even the earliest hominin species seem to have walked on two legs, at least some of the time. This is very different from chimps and gorillas, which knuckle-walk. You can tell from bones if a species regularly walks on two legs. In bipedal species, the big toe is no longer used for gripping, so it aligns more closely with the other toes, while the spine enters the skull from below, not from the back (get down on all fours and you’ll understand why). Walking on two legs required rearrangements of the back, the hips, even the braincase. It also favored narrower hips, which made childbearing more difficult and dangerous and probably means that many hominins, like modern humans, gave birth to infants that were not yet capable of surviving on their own. That would have meant that their babies needed more parenting, which may have encouraged sociability and gotten hominin fathers more involved in child-rearing. There were many indirect effects of bipedalism, but we’re not yet sure exactly why hominins became bipedal. Perhaps bipedalism let our ancestors walk or run farther in the grassy savanna lands that had spread around a cooling world in the past thirty million years. It also freed human hands to specialize in manipulative tasks including, eventually, the making of tools.

Extreme braininess was not the first distinguishing feature of the hominins. Bipedalism was.

Many different features make up the human package, from dexterous hands to large brains and sociability. But what makes us radically different is our collective control of information about our surroundings. We don’t just gather information, like other species. We seem to cultivate and domesticate it, as farmers cultivate crops.

Here is how this mechanism is described by a pioneer of the study of memory, the Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel: Although the size and structure of the human brain have not changed since Homo sapiens first appeared in East Africa… the learning capability of individual human beings and their historical memory have grown over the centuries through shared learning—that is, through the transmission of culture. Cultural evolution, a nonbiological mode of adaptation, acts in parallel with biological evolution as the means of transmitting knowledge of the past and adaptive behaviour across generations. All human accomplishments, from antiquity to modern times, are products of a shared memory accumulated over centuries.20

Perhaps there was room for only one species to cross the threshold to collective learning. There is an evolutionary mechanism known as competitive exclusion that explains why two species can never share exactly the same niche. One will eventually drive out its rival if it can exploit the same niche slightly more effectively. So we can imagine several species gathering near the evolutionary threshold to collective learning, but then one broke through and began to exploit its environment so efficiently that its numbers multiplied and grew fast enough to lock out its rivals.23 This may help explain why our closest hominin relatives, such as the Neanderthals, have perished, and our closest surviving relatives, the chimps and gorillas, are approaching extinction.

the Lake Mungo site in Australia, the evidence for religion is compelling. A cremation and burial from about forty thousand years ago and a scattering of other human remains are evidence of rich ritual traditions.

The English anthropologist Robin Dunbar has argued that 150 people represents the largest group size that human brains can normally cope with, so it may be that communities naturally split if they got any larger. Dunbar has argued that even today, most humans are embedded in intimate networks that are no larger than 150, even if they have more fleeting relationships with many other people. Modern communities are huge, but only because of the creation of special new social structures to hold them together.

explanation. In Australia, Siberia, and North America, the megafauna vanished not long after the arrival of humans. Perhaps, like the dodo in Mauritius, the megafauna didn’t fear our ancestors enough, unlike African megafauna, which had coevolved with humans and knew how dangerous we could be.

In the year 2000, the total biomass of all wild land mammals was about one-twenty-fourth that of domesticated land mammals.1

If British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar is right that evolution equipped human brains to cope with groups of no more than 150 individuals, it follows that communities much larger than this would need new social technologies to hold them together.

Archaeologists can track the evolution of a division of labor. In Mesopotamia, pottery provides the classic case study. The earliest Mesopotamian pots are simple and idiosyncratic, and most were probably made in ordinary farming households. But from about six thousand years ago, we find special workshops with potter’s wheels. Potters produced large quantities of standardized bowls, plates, and jugs and sold them over wide areas. These wares look like the work of full-time professionals who had invested in specialist equipment and long apprenticeships. Specialization encouraged new skills and techniques, so it was both a measure and a driver of technological change.

The degree of specialization was limited by the productivity of agriculture and by the number of extra people that each farmer could feed. In most agrarian civilizations it took about ten farmers to support one nonfarmer.

The French economist Thomas Piketty has estimated that in most European countries as late as 1900, 1 percent of the population owned about 50 percent of national wealth, and 10 percent of the population accounted for 90 percent of national wealth. The other 90 percent of the population made do with just 10 percent of national wealth. There was really no middle class in the modern sense because “the middle 40 percent of the wealth distribution were almost as poor as the bottom 50 percent. The vast majority of people owned virtually nothing, while the lion’s share of society’s assets belonged to a minority.”10

By 1850, England and Wales were consuming nine times as much energy as Italy, and English entrepreneurs and factories had access to prime movers of colossal power. Steam locomotives could generate two hundred thousand watts of energy (yes, James Watt gave his name to the unit), or about two hundred times the energy supplied by a two-horse plow team, one of the most important prime movers of the agrarian era. More cheap energy was available than ever before. English industry took off. Coal was generating as much energy as could have been extracted from woodlands covering 150 percent of the area of England and Wales.

England was the first country to benefit from the energy bonanza of fossil fuels, and production took off. By the middle of the nineteenth century, England produced a fifth of global GDP (gross domestic product) and about half of global fossil-fuel emissions.

There were many powerful feedback loops. Improved steam engines allowed access to deeper mines, which lowered the cost of extracting coal, so the amount of coal that was mined increased by fifty-five times between 1800 and 1900. Cheaper coal made steam engines more economical, while steamships and locomotives slashed the cost of transporting cattle, coal, produce, and people by land and sea, which stimulated global trade. Railways increased demand for iron and steel, and innovations in steel production made it economical for the first time to use steel in mass-produced goods such as tin cans, a new way of storing and preserving foodstuffs. There were unexpected side effects. Using steam to spin and weave textiles increased the demand for raw cotton, which stimulated cotton planting in the United States, Central Asia, and Egypt. Industrial production of textiles increased demand for subsidiary products such as artificial dyes and bleaches, which kick-started the modern chemicals industry, many of whose products came from coal.

Large-scale electricity generation became possible in the 1860s with the invention of generators powered by steam engines.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the fastest way of sending a message by land was still by horse courier. The telegraph, invented in 1837, allowed communication at the speed of light. By the end of the nineteenth century, telephones and radios made it possible to transmit real conversations more or less instantaneously over huge distances.

Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his paleolithic ancestors. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN, UNDERSTANDING MEDIA

In the forty years before World War I, according to one influential estimate, international trade increased in value at an average rate of about 3.4 percent a year; from 1914 to 1950, that rate fell to just 0.9 percent; then, from 1950 to 1973, it rose at about 7.9 percent a year before falling slightly to about 5.1 percent between 1973 and 1998.

In the two hundred years since 1800, the number of humans increased by more than six billion. Each additional human had to be fed, clothed, housed, and employed, and most had to be educated. The challenge of producing enough resources in just two hundred years to support an extra six billion humans was colossal.

The total wars of the early twentieth century turned governments into economic managers, as they tried to mobilize all the people and resources of modern industrial economies. We can roughly track the increasing role of government in economic management. In the late nineteenth century, the French government accounted for about 15 percent of French GDP, a very rough measure of total national production. At the time, that seemed like a lot. Contemporary governments in Britain and the United States accounted for less than 10 percent of their GDP. The wars of the early twentieth century forced governments to intervene more actively in economic management, and by the middle of the twentieth century, their economic role had increased everywhere. In the early twenty-first century, the average share of national expenditure controlled or managed by governments in the countries of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, founded in 1960) was 45 percent of GDP, with most richer countries falling in the range from 30 to 55 percent.4 Some governments, such as the Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and China, attempted to micromanage the entire national economy.

In 1900, wild land mammals accounted for the equivalent of about 10 megatons of carbon biomass. Humans already accounted for about 13 megatons, while domesticated mammals—our cows, horses, sheep, and goats—accounted for an astonishing 35 megatons. In the next century, these ratios would get even more warped. By 2000, the total biomass of wild land mammals had fallen to about 5 megatons, while that of humans had increased fast (not surprising, given what we know of population growth) to about 55 megatons and that of domesticated mammals to an astonishing 129 megatons. This is a powerful indicator of the extent to which expanding human activities have squeezed out other species of large animals by taking more and more of the biosphere’s resources.

Perhaps the idea of endless growth is completely wrong. Perhaps the disruptive dynamism of recent centuries is a temporary phenomenon. After all, living life within a framework of social and cultural stability has been the norm for most of human history and for most human societies. And that is why an understanding of what it means to live richly and dynamically in a less changeable world is preserved within the cultures of many modern indigenous communities whose people see themselves primarily as custodians of a world larger and older than themselves.

A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on.

Will new technologies allow humans to exchange ideas, thoughts, emotions, and images instantaneously and continuously, creating something like a single, vast global mind? Will the noösphere partially detach itself from us humans and turn into a thin, unified layer of mind hovering over the biosphere? When, in all of this, will we decide that human history (as we understand it today) has ended because our species can no longer be described as Homo sapiens?