theBIGinstitute.Introduction

theBIGinstitute.Introduction

the BIG institute: 11 x TED-style lectures to change the world

“Although we have a very nice picture of how evolution occurred genetically, we still don’t, there’s not yet been a Darwin for cultural evolution. We know a lot about it but we don’t really understand the mechanisms” – Paul Ehrlich

Big is in. You’ve almost certainly heard of Fred Hoyle’s “big bang” of the universe, but did you know that humankind has their own big bang? Neuroscientist William Calvin has written about the big bang of human mind, and anthropologist Richard Klein on the big bang of human consciousness. We’re talking about the dimension of culture here which is a big bang moment in the history of the universe, and we’re still searching for the theory that pulls it all together. Such a theory of culture would do for the social sciences what Newton did for physics (although it was natural philosophy in his time), and Darwin did for the biological and natural sciences. Recently we’ve had David Christian’s Big History (Project), and Sean Carroll’s Big Picture, and even Big Data pulling information and knowledge together but narrative is not the same as metanarrative. Big in this sense is Newton and Darwin big, and that is what I’m proposing…..with your help. 

This Kickstarter project is ‘the BIG institute’ (which is me) with 11 x TED-style lectures that cover 11 BIGs (Big Idea Groups). I’ll outline each BIG in subsequent blog posts but be wary that BIG knowledge isn’t always initially comforting, it can be very disconcerting and for some, very unsettling. Such is the nature of BIG, truly revolutionary theory. This is my 21^st year working on this. I’ve got millions and millions of words of rich theory on this which have been distilled down to law(s), a detailed series of Feynman-like diagrams, even an equation for culture. At this point I could go into any tribe in the world (with a translator) and using just a stick draw the mechanics of culture in the dirt to the point where they get how culture works. With your support here I’d like to do something a little more high-tech and far ranging with these 11 x TED-style lectures which summarise my body of work, now into its 3^rd decade.

First up, we’ll start with the awareness that it’s not cultural evolution we need to understand, but cultural expression. That is to say that when we squeeze all the activity and phenomena across humankind, and all human history, we need to be super-sure that the single word conveying all of that action is the correct one. Evolution is not that term. Expression is. I’ll gladly explain why that is.