The paper will outline a proposition of a synthesis of the two different angles of observation of the same global processes by two traditions of thought, conceived in opposition from its origins. The main focus is to explain that this synthesis, if not clearly enunciated and not clearly put in relationship with the question of social evolution, are in function at least from the 1980's.
For this task we will to explain how the mechanism proposed by structural cum historic anthropological theory explains effectively the cultural transformation, and how by this way the transformation of social structure is explained. We proposed also the observated variability of the patterns of the archaic complex societies, which is better understand, results also in a fully historical phenomena.
Then we go further in the question of the origin of the difference of the evolutive pattern of the ensemble of societies which we aggregate by the name of occidental societies to formulate a unified theoretical view and to complete the puzzle.

In addition to energy flows and complexity, the presence of an algorithm of random variation and nonrandom selection in many physical processes in the universe from inflationary theory, quantum physics, geology, biology, and culture, may prove to be yet another unifying theme of big history. My paper will survey how this algorithm has been spotted in various fields of scholarship and comment on its historical, social, and philosophical significance.

This presentation will integrate work currently being done in Complexity Studies, Evolutionary Biology, and Big History to construct a dynamic, non-linear theory of evolution that reflects the worldview of post-Newtonian science. Pre-20th Century Newtonian science depicted a linear world of distinct ‘things’, interacting deterministically, by cause-and-effect. The 20th Century post-Newtonian sciences, especially Quantum Mechanics and Complexity Science, showed us a nonlinear world, where interconnected energy storage systems at many scales, continually responding to each other, creating systemic cascades of change and transformation in which unexpected events could emerge. This presentation will explore the resulting theory of evolution, in which both biological and culture evolution – and perhaps even cosmic evolution – are systemic, multiscaled cascades of change. In this way, biological evolution occurs at the scale of genes, organs, organisms, herds, ecosystems, geologic and even cosmic events; similarly, cultural evolution occurs at the scale of individuals, families, communities, organizations, religions, nations, geologic and even cosmic events. The result is a model of evolution that can be both gradual and subject to punctuated equilibria, depending on the scale one attends to. This model of evolution offers Big History a comprehensive, dynamic image of evolution, grounded in extensive work in the physical sciences in a way that adds depth to existing work, ranging from Foucault's examination of the evolution of the Western episteme to Arrighi's analysis of the cycles of Western Capitalism.

The most appealing aspect of Big History is its view of change in the Universe as a continual process. Complex demarcations and named epochs are no longer useful. Nevertheless, higher levels of organizational complexity do emerge – sometimes rapidly, often gradually, in a stepwise, syncretistic, or deviation-amplifying fashion, or in some other pattern of change. One of the latest ‘new levels’ is the appearance of sentience in the hominid evolutionary line. It is critically important for Man, and makes Big History possible.
Psychologists, ethologists, philosophers, theologians, and science fiction writers have explored the nature of human sentience. Anthropologists speculate on when and how the conglomeration of traits called ‘sentience’ emerged in Man, and in response to which evolutionary stresses. Sentience includes awareness (especially self-awareness), desire, will, consciousness, ethics, personality, intelligence, and what we call ‘sensibility’ (in another recent paper), which includes social sensitivity, empathy, sympathy, insight about the self, others, and even machine intelligence. Some authors maintain that ‘sensibility’ is ultimately the foundation of rational scientific, religious, and artistic thought. We ask: Do religious and scientific thought have some common roots and ongoing connections? Is scientific thinking enhanced by a coexisting capacity for religious or artistic thought?
Within a Big History framework, we explore the emergence of religious thought as a component of sentience. As an anthropologist and a Catholic priest, we see the evolution of religious thought as a specific complex of human cognitive, emotional, and perceptual features. Sentience may look like a ‘bright white line’ from a vantage point 40–60,000 years later, but it is far more likely that a capacity for religious awe and reverence, and the belief in supernatural forces, had a jerky, uneven development, with some components very old and some, newer. We propose a helpful chronology of the emergence of the components of sentience.

The cognition is the only social process which is actually ‘evolved’ as manuscripts are evolved. That process goes in objective direction and through objective levels of complexity because evolution of knowledge is adapted by practice to the objective reality. However, every step (act, case, change, etc.) of cognition is open and undetermined. Other social developmental processes, such as production, religions, ideologies and social practices, are only correlated with human understanding of reality and with understanding of human role in the reality. This leads to the fact that social practices have tendency toward more complete realization of natural human needs in freedom and self-realization. However, the understanding of these goals is different at different evolutional levels of knowledge. Within this ‘general’ process there is ‘specific’ but also objective social dynamics related to natural human needs in competition and cooperation. This dynamics is not necessarily evolutional and is realized in cyclical geneses of societies. Length of society's genesis cycle and the maximum size of the society in each cycle depend upon the evolutionary level of consciousness, material production and social relations. This dynamics has a logical conclusion in the evolutionary sense – the formation of a global society.
The combination of ‘general’ social and ‘specific’ societal processes creates multilinear and intermittent paths of societies' development which we may interpret as social evolution only if we observe this process in overall, in other words regardless of the cyclical geneses of societies and thus regardless of particular social changes.

The present Sole Super Power World is deadly dangerous for both Peace and Humanity. The antidote to it is Democratic Pluralism and Multipolarity for the Global Balance of Power for Perpetual Peace. That will enable Peace to be Globalized. The Globalization of a Multipolar Democratic World essentiates, critically, the Geosociological Imperative. The world we live in, and humanity, itself, are naturally plural, and need to be kept so, for consistently continuous peaceful progress and prosperity, persistently.

Energy and environmental factors have often driven transitions in natural evolution and human history to more complex states which are further from equilibrium. Most of the early transitions were based on sustainable non-equilibrium states using renewable energy resources. However, the industrial revolution saw the transition from this sustainable growth pattern to one based on limited non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels. This second-level non-equilibrium condi-tion includes not only a complex organization dependent on energy flow but also energy flow which is extracted from a non-renewable stock. Eventually, this latter pattern will stop when the energy stock is empty. Recent studies have indicated 1) the importance of energy along with la-bor and capital in determining economic productivity; 2) the potential slowdown of growth in economies and sciences; and 3) the relatively increased pace of global technology diffusion compared with concentrated technology breakthroughs. This paper identifies indicators in energy, economic growth, and global economic disparities to connect historical trends with potential scenarios to the transition to an expanded sustainable non-equilibrium society. By transitioning back to a sustainable non-equilibrium pattern, the required complexity changes may also slow down as suggested by interpretations of Big History major events. Similar transitions have been observed and modeled in natural dynamic ecological systems.

Big History is the story of new types of being that emerge in the universe. Physical being (mat-ter) and life are two of the types whose creation stories belong here. But what of human culture? What is its story? What new type of being is associated with this phase of Big History? It is my opinion that thought – first human and then machine thought – is such an element of being. By the time of the conference, a newly published book will be available with a complete history of emerging matter, life, and thought. New conceptions of history guide the chapters on civilization.
There are actually four separate chapters in this part of the story. The first has to do with durable thought (written language); the second, with thoughts of eternal being; the third with machine-reproduced thoughts and the invention of machines; the fourth with thoughts of success and having fun. Each phase is associated with a dominant communication technology. Institutionally, they are related to government, world religion, business and secular education, and entertainment. The final two chapters describe periods of history yet to be completed. The first has to do with computers, which are thinking machines. The second has to do with robots having computer brains that are able to maintain themselves in an environment as an independent form of life.
That environment may well be outer space. Humanity does not find this environment congenial for living but robots could live there. For us as humans, the challenge is to maintain suitable conditions for life on earth. We seem to be failing in that purpose. Will our destiny be to become a kind of parent to a new species of computer-driven robots which could keep our own heritage of thought alive while we become extinct?

Since the 19th Century science has gained a new understanding of the intraatomic and galactic systems that point to the unity of the Universe, including the insight that the Universe carries within itself non-material as well as material dimensions. The almost mystical attraction of the wonder, mystery, and dynamic interactions in nature lures many scientists to reach beyond their experience of tangible reality in anticipation of fulfillment and meaning. It appears that both the myths of religion and the laws of science are symbolic expressions of cosmic truths.
Christian (2005) points out that the inanimate forces and impersonal scientific laws discovered and implemented by science and technology cannot offer the moral and ethical guidance of traditional religions. Kauffman (2010) says that to develop a global ethic we need to break the Galilean spell of reductionist science and ‘reinvent the sacred’ – develop a worldview that fosters the novel and creative choices for life we make in the face of uncertainty.
This paper presents a model that helps make sense of the entanglement of science, spirituality and religion by identifying the fundamental reality of the universe as relational information. The exchange of information effects the composition of all systems and establishes their functional characteristics within the larger whole. The non-reductionist model is based on the theories of supervenience and dynamical systems (Yoshimi 2012) that describe the inter-level dependency of autonomous domains such as science and religion. The model combines supervenience and dynamical change using a graded approach based on degrees of coupling between the domains. For example, the dynamics of spiritual processes ‘piggyback’ on the dynamics of physical processes, assuming mentalphysical supervenience.
Using the model presented in this paper can help students of Big History unpack the current sci-encereligion debates that have been ongoing since the 14th Century.
References
Christian, D. (2011). Maps of time: An introduction to big history. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-27144-9.
Kauffman, S. A. (2008). Reinventing the sacred: A new view of science, reason, and religion. ISBN 0465003001.
Yoshimi, J. (2012). Supervenience, dynamical systems theory, and non-reductive physicalism. Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 63, 373-398.

North, Wallis and Weingast (NWW) develop a parsimonious general theory of the relationship between political order and economic development in their book Violence and Social Orders). NWW argue that most states in human history have been ‘limited access orders’ or ‘natural states’. Natural states are elite arrangements made to control struggles over rent and to limit access by the population generally to resources held by the state. All non-democratic states are limited access orders but some can evolve into democratic ‘open access orders’. This paper argues that NWW's schema captures something of the character of non-democratic states and that it offers a potential means to integrate studies of regime change across different time and space. However, fulfilling this potential requires a fuller conceptualization of the range of interests within ‘natural states’. NWW's conceptualization of natural states is based on a small N of cases from early-modern Europe. This limits their schema's utility for thinking about non-democratic systems in the modern world and their transition to open access orders. It is argued that the interests that exist in natural states may be regressive as well as progressive, are not shaped solely by endogenous factors as NWW assume, and can create elite-society relations that are very different to the pattern identified in NWW. The paper uses cases from the former Soviet bloc to illustrate the different ways in which corporate interests can be created in modern natural states, and to theorize the range of effects that they can have on transition to an open access order. It argues that the patterns of corporate interests found within the Soviet bloc correlate to different transitional outcomes. The paper thus offers a means of developing the applicability of the NWW explanatory schema to a wider range of cases geographically and temporally.

With the emergence of Big History as a field of interdisciplinary scholarship, there have arisen innumerable perspectives from which to examine its themes. This is a proposal to critically examine Big History through the prism of the sociological study of history. The Sociology of His-tory can be best summarized as the comparative study of the emergence and long-term developments of human social systems and their wider impact upon history. This would include the analysis of socio-cultural dynamics, social evolutionary processes, macrosocial structures such as civilizations and world-systems, world religions, and globalization; and how they relate and interact with one another. Examples of such relationships would include the important role of religions in forging the basic mentalities of civilizations, worldsystems being the major means for inter-cultural exchanges, as well as the evolution from one sociocultural dynamic to another. There is also the possible sociological study of Big History itself as a reflection of current social developments, as well as the examination of the social implications of Big History. With the rise of globalization, as well as the Space Age, a certain level of global and even cosmic consciousness has emerged helping to forge the foundations for the study of Big History. The implications for Big History include the potential to help further develop such foundations by bringing awareness to such global and cosmic dimensions to human existence and understanding. Altogether, this can present itself as arguments that Big History can indeed be understood as a form of the sociology of history.

Because of the Internet we are now in a world that is zillions times more complex, than even 10 years ago. As a result, we are to expect the world - and thus social behavior – to be very different from what Humanity experienced in the past. The paradoxical thing is that humans are the primary processors of complex information but also core problem solvers. The biggest communicating advantage of the contemporary world is the Internet, an essential engine of environment's complexification. The symbiosis of human intelligence and IT-enabled communication networks is our new context. A context that is going to become more and more complex, beyond the current imagination of most humans. And while let’s by all means try to find a framework to assess its influence for the next centuries, why not also try to do it today?

There are a lot of similarities between the strategies various animal species use when building, and the strategies our own species uses. Like other animals, humans often create buildings to either protect themselves temporarily (in contrast to for instance exoskeletons or furs that provide more permanent protection), or to protect things they do not want to carry around. Like other animals, they use buildings as signals of biological or social fitness. Both humans and other animal species have found ways to deal with the weight of rocky building materials and with the decay of organic building materials. They have learned to create their own building materials. And they have learned to standardize both the production of these materials and their building behavior in general.
What seems to distinguish human building from the building behavior of other animal species is that in contrast to these other these other species, humans invented many different variants of the strategies mentioned above. Collective learning then ensured that these strategies accumulated, leaving human builders with large numbers of building strategies to choose from in any given situation. Even early in human history, builders were usually able to choose between numerous ways to fulfill certain functional requirements, lots of options to consume conspicuously when building, dozens of materials to choose from and multiple methods to actually construct the building. These large numbers of different strategies could be combined in many different ways and into lots and lots of different types of buildings. So how did and do humans know how to pick and combine strategies without being overwhelmed by the options? Did they perhaps unconsciously or consciously set some ground rules that limited their options and facilitated this process?
This paper will examine to what extent architectural customs, styles, manuals and treatises, and in particular the customs, styles, manuals and treatises that developed or were written in Western European states and in the Chinese state before the Industrial Revolution, represent such ground rules.

Big History provides a very powerful framework for understanding the broad contours of the past, from the beginning of the universe in the Big Bang to our present globe-spanning information-based technological civilization. It allows us to identify major forces and drivers of change operating over a number of very different spatial and temporal scales, which provides an insight into how the globalized world we know today has come to be the way it is. But to what degree, one wonders, can this framework also be used to draw potential insights into the contours of the possible future of humanity at the global scale, as it emerges from the complex dynamics of the present?
In this paper, we will make use of the ‘Threshold’ formulation of Big History (due to David Christian) as a framework to generate ideas for further exploration about the emerging dynamics shaping the coming global future – not in a prescriptive or predictive sense (for prediction in social systems is logically impossible) – but rather as a means of, in essence, producing ‘hypotheses’ which can then be used to structure and inform further investigation and research into the interplay between, and possible emergent properties of, these complex social dynamics. In other words, we will be examining some of the conceptual possibilities that arise when we consider the question of what the contours of the next major threshold in Big History – what we might call ‘Threshold 9’ – might look like in broad outline, when we consciously and systematically take a ‘Big History perspective’ on the future of humanity at the global scale.

This paper investigates the relationship between the occurrence of global volcanic events (GVE's) and the integrity of the world system. Tree ring data recording GVE's is used as a context for comparing the response of the world system one through four centuries after any given GVE. Data on changes in the ratio of rural to urban populations and changes in the logtransformed values of maximum urban area magnitude are compared with respect to the occur-rence of GVE's. It is found that there is no significant effect of GVE's in the succeeding century, but two, three, and four centuries hence, there is. Further, this effect is counterintuitive, as the world system became more urbanized, not less. Rank size-frequencies were constructed of each data set to show that effectively all changes fit with in a linear series not uncharacteristic of systems exhibiting self-organized criticality. Finally, it is shown that a threshold effect with respect to the number of year-equivalents of GVE's exists whereby reduction in world system urbanization does occur in the immediately succeeding century of such threshold events. These results are then put in the context of both physically induced and endemically induced societal collapses.

This essay discusses Universal Darwinism: the idea that Darwinian mechanisms can explain interesting evolutionary change in many different domains, in both the Humanities and the Natural Sciences. The idea should appeal to Big Historians because it links research into evolutionary change at many different scales. But the detailed workings of Universal Darwinism vary as it drives different vehicles, just as internal combustion engines differ in chain-saws, motor cycles and airplane engines. To extend Darwin’s ideas beyond the biological realm, we must disentangle the biological version of the Darwinian mechanism from several other forms. I will focus particularly on Universal Darwinism as a form of learning, a way of accumulating information. This will make it easier to make the adjustments needed to explore Darwinian mechanisms in human history.

Changes in biodiversity through the Phanerozoic are shown to correlate much better with a hyperbolic model (widely used in demography and macrosociology) than with exponential and logistic models (traditionally used in population biology and extensively applied to fossil biodiversity as well). The latter models imply that changes in diversity are guided by a first-order positive feedback (more ancestors, more descendants) and/or a negative feedback arising from resource limitation. Hyperbolic model implies a second-order positive feedback. The hyperbolic pattern of the world population growth has been demonstrated to arise from a second-order positive feedback between the population size and the rate of technological growth. The hyperbolic character of biodiversity growth can be similarly accounted for by a feedback between the diversity and community structure complexity. It is suggested that the similarity between the curves of biodiversity and human population probably comes from the fact that both are derived from the interference of the hyperbolic trend with cyclical and stochastic dynamics. The paper also discusses the implications of those models for the forecasts of global dynamics.

This paper maps an approach to big history and global evolution that focuses particularly on human choices in the Holocene period. It highlights the ways that scholars in natural-physical sciences (naturwissenschaften, естественные науки) and human-social sciences (geisteswissenschaften, гуманитарные/общественные науки) differ on how they observe the topic of ‘change-over-time’ using various time scales. A comparison of the terms ‘evolution’ and ‘extension’ is presented to help distinguish between non-teleological and teleological change when human beings are involved. In contrast to taking a reductionist approach to humanity, this paper displays a new understanding of what is ‘anthropic’ (cf. anthropic principle) that is defined not by cosmology or astrophysics, but rather by anthropology, economics, politics, culturology and sociology. The notion of ‘human extension’ is employed as a useful method for exploring the measurable effects of decision making and acting in society that impact nations and peoples over the long-run. By offering a language built by electronic-information age theorist Marshall McLuhan, the ‘extensions of man’ provide an approach to little history that shines light from a humanitarian perspective on the larger big history discourse.

Big History is the story of new types of being that emerge in the universe. Physical being (matter) and life are two of the types whose creation stories belong here. But what of human culture? What is its story? What new type of being is associated with this phase of Big History?
It is my opinion that thought - first human and then machine thought - is such an element of being. By the time of the conference, a newly published book will be available with a complete history of emerging matter, life, and thought. New conceptions of history guide the chapters on civilization.
There are actually four separate chapters in this part of the story. The first has to do with durable thought (written language); the second, with thoughts of eternal being; the third with machine-reproduced thoughts and the invention of machines; the fourth with thoughts of success and having fun. Each phase is associated with a dominant communication technology. Institutionally, they are related to government, world religion, business and secular education, and entertainment.
The final two chapters describe periods of history yet to be completed. The first has to do with computers, which are thinking machines. The second has to do with robots having computer brains that are able to maintain themselves in an environment as an independent form of life.
That environment may well be outer space. Humanity does not find this environment congenial for living but robots could live there. For us as humans, the challenge is to maintain suitable conditions for life on earth. We seem to be failing in that purpose. Will our destiny be to become a kind of parent to a new species of computer-driven robots which could keep our own heritage of thought alive while we become extinct?

Big History provides a unique opportunity to consider the development of the Universe as a single process. Within Big History studies one can distinguish some common evolutionary laws and principles. However, it is very important to recognize that there are many more such integrating principles, laws, mechanisms and patterns of evolution at all its levels than it is usually supposed. In the meantime, we can find the common traits in development, functioning, and interaction of apparently rather different processes and phenomena of Big History. Of special importance is the point that many principles, patterns, regularities, and rules of evolution, which we tend to find relevant only for the biological and social levels of evolution, may be also applied to cosmic phase of evolution. The present article attempts (within such a framework for the first time in the Big History field) at combining Big History potential with the potential of Evolutionary Studies. It does not only analyze the history of Cosmos. It studies similarities between evolutionary laws, principles, and mechanisms at various levels and phases of Big History. Such an approach opens up some new points for our understanding of evolution and Big History, their driving forces, vectors, and trends; it creates a consolidated field for interdisciplinary research.