Quotes from David Christian

Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals.

We, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility.

We inhabit an obscure planet, in an obscure galaxy, around an obscure sun, but on the other hand, modern human society represents one of the most complex things we know.

In literature classes, you don't learn about genes; in physics classes you don't learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.

The primordial gases accounted for 98 percent of the material in the cloud from which our sun formed (hydrogen made up ca. 72 percent; helium, ca. 27 percent). But many other elements were also present, including carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen (which now account for 1.4 percent of all matter in the universe), and also iron, magnesium, silicon, sulfur, and neon (which account for another 0.5 percent).

Robert de Balsac, ended a study on warfare with the remark that "most important of all, success in war depends on having enough money to provide whatever the enterprise needs.

The explosive properties of gunpowder were first used in war by the Jin, the northern rivals of the Song, in 1221.

Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.

the elements of a modern creation myth are all around us. It is harmful because it contributes to the subtle but pervasive quality of disorientation in modern life that the pioneering French sociologist Émile Durkheim referred to as "anomie": the sense of not fitting in, which is an inescapable condition of those who have no conception of what it is they are supposed to fit into.

In mechanical terms, humans are quite efficient converters of food into energy, so human slaves were often more valuable than animal slaves, if one could afford them.21 The importance of human beings as a source of energy helps explain why forced labor was so ubiquitous in the premodern world, just as the existence of fossil fuels helps explain why human slavery has largely vanished today.

typical modern households live in urban environments where they earn incomes through some form of wage work and buy food produced by others. In the more industrialized economies, ca. 65 percent of populations lived in towns in 1980, and globally, ca. 38 percent; it is probable that even global levels of urbanization will cross the symbolic threshold of 50 percent early in the twenty-first century.

new forms of contraception, new methods of child rearing, and new forms of education and public welfare have provoked a fundamental renegotiation of gender roles.

though they are on the whole less violent, personal relations in modern urban communities also lack the intimacy and continuity of those in most traditional societies. Increasingly, they are casual, anonymous, and fleeting.

If modernity is, as I will argue, a global phenomenon, a Eurocentric approach is bound to mislead us. More recently, historians interested in world history have tried to see modernity as a global problem that requires a global explanation.

There were African slaves in China from at least the seventh century CE, and, Wolf reports, "by 1119 most of the wealthy people of Canton were said to have possessed Black slaves.

no complex, nonlinear system can be adequately described by dividing it up into subsystems or into various aspects, defined beforehand.

People must therefore get away from the idea that serious work is restricted to beating to death a well-defined problem in a narrow discipline, while broadly integrative thinking is relegated to cocktail parties. In academic life, in bureaucracies, and elsewhere, the task of integration is insufficiently respected.

Paradoxically, the flows of energy that sustain complex things (including you and me) are helping entropy with its bleak task of slowly breaking down all forms of order and structure.

H. G. Wells wrote a history of humanity as a response to the carnage of World War I. There can be no peace now, we realize, but a common peace in all the world; no prosperity but a general prosperity. But there can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas.… With nothing but narrow, selfish, and conflicting nationalist traditions, races and peoples are bound to drift towards conflict and destruction.2

Innovation ensured that each cycle normally reached a higher level than its predecessor, but innovation was normally too slow to prevent an eventual collapse within each cycle, as populations outstripped available resources.

Increasing global inequalities fueled resistance to Western values. In 1960 the wealthiest 20 percent of the world's population earned about thirty times as much as the poorest 20 percent; in 1991 the wealthiest 20 percent earned sixty-one times as much. The successes of the most highly industrialized

defines domestication as "the human creation of a new form of plant or animal—one that is identifiably different from its wild ancestors and extant wild relatives.

Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth.

Bioarchaeologists have linked the agricultural transition to a significant decline in nutrition and to increases in disease, mortality, overwork, and violence in areas where skeletal remains make it possible to compare human welfare before and after the change.