Origin Subtitle: The Great History of Everything Author: [US] David Christian Publisher: CITIC Press·Seeing the City-State

In the ultimate pursuit of mankind, origin is always an unavoidable question.

There are more than 100 origin stories in the world. Almost all human cultures and religious traditions have their own origin stories: The Book of Genesis in the Bible says that everything was created by God. China's traditional mythology says that Pangu created the world and Nuwa created humans. In ancient Greek mythology, the primitive universe began with the earliest gods such as the earth goddess Gaia. Indian mythology says that Brahma, the father of all living things, created the universe. The origin story of ancient Egypt began with Nun, the primitive ocean god, and so on.

These origin stories have a common purpose, which is to find a holistic explanation of the world for people at that time.

Unlike in ancient times, people today no longer resort to traditional myths. Proposing a holistic explanation of the world is what scientists do. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein and others have made subversive contributions to our understanding of the world, but we still do not have a long-term, complete modern version of the origin story based on modern science.

"Origins: A Big History of Everything" reweaves the modern scientific origin story for 7 billion people around the world in this era of globalization, based on the collective knowledge of physics, astronomy, biology, history, etc. accumulated by mankind.

"Origins: A Big History of Everything" returns to the tradition of philosophy and science, integrating new knowledge from various disciplines, telling the 13.8 billion years of history of all things from the Big Bang to the formation of the earth, from the origin of life to the future of mankind. It not only condenses and presents the achievements of modern science in the past century, but also pioneeringly proposes 8 key nodes such as the beginning of the universe, the birth of stars, the generation of new elements by the death of stars, the formation of the solar system, the emergence of life on Earth, the advent of Homo sapiens, the agricultural age, and the advent of the Anthropocene, as well as 6 important concepts such as "collective knowledge", "Goldilocks condition", "complexity theory", "energy", "information" and "time", and many other insights. It also includes human history driven by collective knowledge, the story of the universe is a story about energy, and information allows us to face complexity and follow the torrent of energy to cross the next node.

There are always only a few wise men who ask the big questions of origins, but "Origins: A Big History of Everything" is written for most people. This book weaves a common scientific story of the evolution of the universe for readers all over the world. Although concise, it challenges our "anthropocentric" worldview.

In the 5th century BC, the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras said, "Man is the measure of all things." We take it as a guiding principle, but this book will refresh our cognition. This sentence should be changed to: "All things are the measure of understanding man."

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Insights Series (published by Insights City):

01. "Map of Time: Big History, 13 Billion Years Ago to the Present" by David Christian

02 Something New Under the Sun: Global Interactions between People and the Environment in the Twentieth Century by John R. McNeill

03. The Revolutionary Years: 1789-1848 by Eric Hobsbawm

04. The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 by Eric Hobsbawm

05. The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 by Eric Hobsbawm

06. The Age of Extremes: 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm

07. The Night Watchman’s Bell: The Crisis and the Way Out of Our Time by Rebecca D. Costa

08. 1913, The World Before World War I by Charles Emerson

09 "History of Civilization: The Inheritance and Exchange of Human Civilization over Five Thousand Years" [French] Fernand Braudel

10. Genes: The Origin of Life (Paperback + Hardcover) [US] Siddhartha Mukherjee

11. The Ten Thousand Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochrane and Henry Harpending

12. Interrogating Europe: Collaboration, Resistance, and Retaliation in World War II by István Dick

13. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Impacts after 1492 by Alfred W. Crosby

14. From the Dawn to the Decline: Five Hundred Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (Paperback + Hardcover) [US] Jacques Barzun

15 Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill

16. The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community by William McNeill

17. The End of the Ottoman Empire: War, Revolution, and the Birth of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923 by Sean McMeekin

18. The Birth of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (Paperback + Hardcover) [US] David Wootton

19. The Civil War: A History in Ideas by David Armitage

20. The Fifth Beginning by Robert L. Kelly

21. A Brief History of Humankind: From Animals to God (Hardcover + Paperback) [Israel] Yuval Noah Harari

22. The Dark Continent: Europe in the Twentieth Century, by Mark Mazur

23. "Utopia for Realists: How to Create an Ideal World" by Roger Bregman

24. The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Changed American and European Politics by John Judis

25 The Selfish Gene (40th Anniversary Edition) (Paperback + Hardcover) [UK] Richard Dawkins

26. Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War 1941-1945 by Akira Irie

27. Jewish Civilization: Jewish History in Comparative Perspective, by SN Eisenstadt

28. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman

29 From Elixirs to Guns: China's Military Structure in World History by Ouyang Tai

30. Origins: A History of Everything by David Christian

31. Why Inequality Matters by Thomas Scanlan

32. Cognitive Tools: The Evolutionary Psychology of Culture by Cecilia Hayes

33. A Brief History of the World, edited by David Christian and William McNeill

34. The Death of Expertise: The Rise of Anti-Intellectualism and Its Impact, by Thomas M. Nichols

35. Big History and the Future of Mankind by Fred Speer

36. The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

37. Historic System, François Achtogo

38. The Mirror of Herodotus by François Achtogo

39. "Departure to Greece" [French] François Ahtogo

40. The Lighthouse Operator's Lounge, François Ahtogo