Fred Spier has been teaching big history in the Netherlands since the mid 1990s. This is the second of two books that he has written in a pioneering attempt to theorize this new field of teaching and scholarship. Spier defines big history as ‘the approach to history in which the human past is placed within the framework of cosmos history, from the beginning of the universe up until life on Earth today’ (p. xi). His engagement with such questions began with his first glimpse of the earthrise photo taken by astronauts on board Apollo 8 and published in Time magazine in 1969. That picture inspired him (as it did many others) to try to understand our earth and its history more holistically, to see the earth and its inhabitants as part of a story both larger and more coherent than the stories that we conventionally learn in school and college, stories that seem to fragment knowledge into disconnected chunks. Spier saw the earthrise photo as an icon for the more coherent understanding of reality that he believed we would need in order to understand the growing impact of humans on the biosphere and the dangers that this might pose for future generations. His own scholarly career began in biochemistry before moving into cultural anthropology. In this second phase he wrote a superb study of religious and political ideas in a traditional village near Cuzco in Peru. In the mid 1990s, the sociologist Johan Goudsblom invited Spier to teach on a course on big history that he had just launched at the University of Amsterdam.

In his first book on big history, published in 1996, Spier focused on ‘regimes’, defining one as ‘a more or less regular but ultimately unstable pattern that has a certain temporal permanence’.Footnote ¹ These, he argued, provide a powerful conceptual framework for big history because they can be found across many disciplines from cosmology to history. They include galaxies and stars, planets, living organisms, and modern human societies. He also incorporated the ideas of the astronomer, Eric Chaisson, who has taught an astronomer’s version of big history in Boston for many years. Chaisson has long argued that it is possible, in principle, to quantify levels of complexity by measuring the flows of energy passing through different regimes. His rough calculations suggested that living organisms are orders of magnitude more complex than non-living structures such as stars, and that modern human societies constitute possibly the most complex structures we know.

In his new book, Spier develops these ideas with sophistication, and never pushes them too hard. But he also takes them in interesting new directions. In particular, he argues that Chaisson’s ideas do apply, but only within boundary conditions that set limits to the environments in which each type of complexity can emerge. (He calls these ‘Goldilocks conditions’ because they are ‘just right’, as in the story of the three bears: not too hot, not too cold, not too much pressure, not too little, and so on.) One payoff to this argument is that, while simpler forms of complexity such as stars arise from conditions that existed throughout the early universe, more complex entities, such as living organisms, can only be found in environments that are rarer and more fragile. His central hypothesis is that: ‘the rise and demise of complexity came as a result of energy flows through matter within certain Goldilocks boundaries’ (p. 189). This is a powerful way of explaining the rarity and fragility of more complex ‘regimes’ such as living organisms (or modern human society). He offers a neat image to suggest how rare life is in our corner of the universe compared with the simpler forms of complexity represented by non-living regimes:

Spier begins his book with a valuable survey of the origins of big history, noting that its roots can be found deep in the past in works such as those of Alexander von Humboldt. Only since the mid twentieth century, however, has modern scientific scholarship provided the tools (such as radiometric dating) and the evidence needed to place big history on a firm evidential and conceptual foundation. Then he leads the reader through the story of increasing complexity, in language that will be easy to understand even for non-scientists. The clarity of his writing is a reflection of Spier’s many years of experience of explaining such issues to undergraduate students. At each stage he describes the increasingly stringent Goldilocks conditions that allowed the emergence of regimes of greater complexity.

He is fascinating on the growing role of information in living organisms: ‘In contrast to cosmic evolution, which has been slowing down after a very energetic start, biological evolution has been speeding up. … A similar acceleration can be witnessed in human history, during which both population numbers and technological skills have increased exponentially’ (p. 83). Why? Because both biological and human evolution depend on learning, which generates positive feedback mechanisms. ‘Biological evolution is based on genetic learning, which is ‘hardwired’ in specialized molecules, while cultural learning takes place within brain and nerve cells, mostly in the form of ‘software’. In the long run, these learning processes have a self-reinforcing character’ (p. 83).

Spier is particularly good at alerting the reader to unexpected but illuminating parallels across disciplines. For example, the ideas of multi-cellularity may have much to tell us about the division of labour in human societies, while the idea of a food chain may teach us important things about social hierarchies: ‘In big history, simple general processes of energy extraction keep reoccurring in different forms. Like the emergence of the social division of labor during the rise of agriculture resembled the emergence of the workings of complex cells, the process of early state formation very much resembled the changes in the biological regime after predators began to emerge’ (p. 157). In other words, states are the products of a new type of food chain: ‘a social food pyramid emerged, in which a small fraction of people collected the resources (food, labor and forms of constructed complexity) that had been produced by great numbers of other people’ (p. 157). The book ends by discussing the vast energy flows made possible by the fossil fuels revolution, and wondering if they may be threatening the Goldilocks conditions needed to preserve the extraordinarily complex structures of today’s global human societies.

I hope these examples give a taste of some of the many fascinating and deep ideas to be found in Spier’s book. If big history is ambitious (and it is, aiming at no less than a complete telling of the history of everything), Spier is no less ambitious in attempting to lay the foundations for a theorization of that history that can link all the major historical disciplines from cosmology to history. Not everyone will agree with all the details of his argument (I myself remain sceptical about the role that he attributes to the use of fire in early human history). However, Spier has mapped out a research and teaching agenda of great significance, whose ultimate goal is to bridge the gap between C. P. Snow’s two cultures. This is a deep and important book that promises to send scholars in many different fields off on new paths in search of a grand unified theory of history.