Evolution: A Big History Perspective 2011 20–25 20 I. EVOLUTION AND UNDERSTANDING OF BIG HISTORY 1 The Evolution of Big History: A Short Introduction David Christian Abstract Big history represents a modern scientific form of an ancient project: that of constructing unified, coherent and universal accounts of reality. Such projects can be found within the origin stories of most human societies. But in the late 19 th century, the universalistic project vanished within both the humanities and the sciences, as scholars in field after field coped with the modern tsunami of information by narrowing the scope of their research. The sciences began to re- turn to larger and more universalistic perspectives from the middle of the 20 th cen- tury as new unifying paradigms emerged in field after field, and physicists even began talking of ‘Grand Unified Theories’ of everything. New information and new dating techniques made it more reasonable than ever before to attempt scientifically grounded universal histories and such attempts began to re- appear in the 1980s. But not until the first decade of the 21 st century has that project really begun to take off. The website of the International Big History Association defines Big History as ‘the attempt to understand, in a unified, interdisciplinary way, the history of Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity’ (http://www.ibhanet.org/). It seems likely that most human societies have tried to construct unified histo- ries that embrace all areas of knowledge. We often refer to these as creation myths or origin stories. Such stories, or cycles of stories, can be found within all religious traditions. They could even be found within the more secular intel- lectual traditions of Europe as late as the 19 th century, within attempts such as those of Hegel or Marx to construct unified and coherent accounts of how the world had evolved to be as it was. Origin stories are powerful precisely because they aim at a sort of com- pleteness. They attempt to link all areas of knowledge into a more or less