Longue Durée History: Science to the Rescue?

Abstract

The explanatory value of seeing things in terms of a long historical sequence has become especially significant since the middle of the last century. Physicists explaining why matter, space, and time have the properties they do, rather than looking simply at microstructure, now consider that the present state of things (such as the direction of time) can be traced to the universe evolving from a highly symmetrical structure in its earliest moments. Biologists have moved from simply considering bacteria in the context of immunology to using the phenomena of bacterial adaptations to their physical environment, their resistance to lethal viruses, and their symbiosis within their hosts to trace the very earliest forms of life and their peculiarly nonDarwinian reproduction and evolution. These and other developments have served to encourage a genre of “big history” with wide application, one that—in the work of David Christian, for example—offers a historical narrative that traces historical sequences from the Big Bang to the present. What gives this narrative coherence as a history, other than the fact that it follows a temporal sequence? We already have a physical and cosmological account of the early stages of the formation of the universe, an account of the chemistry of stars and the production of heavier elements, an account of early marine life, an account of the evolution of terrestrial life, an account of the evolution of primates, an account of the early development of human groups, and an account of the religious, political, and cultural development of human societies. Simply stringing these together in a chronological sequence would hardly be history. Hence the importance of the term “metahistory” in this volume from the Santa Fe Institute, which has brought together scientists, historians, and others to offer guidance on how to impose some form of organization on long-term sequences of events. The enterprise is not helped by the presentation of a very heterogeneous collection of pieces, of very varying merit, ordered alphabetically by author. The collection starts, appropriately but wholly fortuitously, with David Christian’s account of events from the Big Bang to the present in the form of a “single historical continuum.” Douglas Erwin looks at the application of statistical techniques developed in biology to textual evidence. John Gaddis offers a somewhat anachronistic account of nineteenth-