The big question for this segment is, what is this course about and what will you get from it? [MUSIC] Welcome to this course on Big History, creating innovation. We live in an era of mind boggling innovation. Personally I suspect that on planet Earth there has been more innovation in the last two centuries. Than at any other time in the last 4 billion years. So what is innovation? Why is it so important? And why is innovation so rapid today? This course won't give you an all purpose definition of innovation. Instead, like the other two courses in this specialization. It approaches its theme from many different perspectives within the capacious framework of big history. It'll keep turning the crystal so that you can see innovation in fresh, new ways. Like mathematical fractals, innovation is a shape-shifter with strange new forms at every scale. Big history tells the history of the universe and our place within it. That story is absolutely crawling with innovation, because innovation means creation. The appearance of things that didn't exist before. Creation is always magical. Whether it's the appearance of the first stars or a newborn baby, you always want to pinch yourself and ask, where did that come from? But creation and innovation are not really that mysterious. Both are examples of what is often called emergence. The universe is simply taking things that already exist, such as atoms, or ideas. And spinning them into new patterns, with new Emergent properties. The billions of atoms in your body are ancient. But they're arranged in a very special and particular way. Put them in a blender, and the emergent quality of you-ness will vanish. In this sense, as Ecclesiastes puts it, there's really nothing new under the sun. Henry Ford said, I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago. Well, ditto for atoms. We have no evidence that they've changed over 13 billion years. But the way they're arranged has changed. You are a lot more than a random pile of ancient atoms. Innovations are not always good. New things usually replace something else. We mammals replaced the dinosaurs, and if you're being replaced that's not good. That's why the economist Joseph Schumpeter talked of creative destruction in capitalist economies. Innovation always comes with a price tag. So innovation is not good or bad. It's just the rearrangement of things that already existed Into new configurations that have entirely new properties. Since our universe first appeared 13.8 billion years ago in the big bang, it has absolutely fizzed with innovations. Each one like a new character in a play. The first stars represent innovation at its most dazzling. They also cranked up the pace of innovation by forging new chemical elements that would make new forms of matter, and these would be used to build the first planets, moons and asteroids. On some planets, including our earth, matter rearranged itself in such dazzling combinations that living organisms emerged. Life took innovation to a new level. Stars and rocks are complex physical systems with components that relatively well-behaved. But living cells are complex adaptive systems with billions of components that keep changing in a chemical dance of staggering complexity. And boy, did life innovate. As cells copied themselves their DNA spun variations on just four simple molecules, the so called bases that you find in all DNA molecules. Every species was an innovation. And there were mega innovations as well, such as the emergence of the first multicellular organisms about 600 million years ago. Then, just 200,000 years ago, there was one more mega innovation, us. And that innovation would eventually transform much of the biosphere. The first module of this course looks at innovation and emergence in general. In the early universe there were no innovators and that shows that innovation can happen without an innovator. Given diverse raw materials, some basic rules about how things combine and some energy. Innovation sometimes just happens as the wheel of change spins and spins. We see this mechanism work very clearly in chemistry. As atoms and molecules are rearranged to create dust, rocks, planets. And even living cells. With the appearance of complex adaptive systems and living organisms, we begin to glimpse more purposeful forms of innovation. Unlike rocks or molecules, living cells seem to have goals. And as you watch billions of them over long periods, you start to glimpse a new and more active driver of innovation. This is what Darwin called natural selection. It's the mechanism that has rearranged genes, claws, beaks, and brains over four billion years. To create a dazzling array of new creatures from tardigrades to terrapins and tarsiers. Like all innovation, natural selection can be cruel. Female green turtles lay about a hundred eggs on beaches on the coast of Brazil then they leave the eggs to their fate. When the babies hatch, they run like crazy for the sea. Most are picked off by gulls or crabs before they get there. The natural sprinters have a much better chance of making it. Then reproducing and maybe eventually generating new species. In the last 500 million years, one of the natural selection's more interesting innovations was the brain. In brains, billions of neurons link up in fabulously complicated networks that create sort of simplified models of the real world. Even simple organisms with brains such as bees can learn new things and innovate. But with the appearance of our own species, homo sapiens, learning took a quantum leap and generated an entirely new driver of innovation. A driver more powerful and creative than the gene based mechanism of natural selection. We will call this driver collective learning. Because it depends on the ability of humans to share information and ideas and to learn collectively generation by generation. Collective learning turned us human into a super innovators. And that explain to why today we are beginning to transform an entire biosphere. Most of this course we'll look at innovation and emergence in human history. Collective learning drove innovation from the very beginning of human history. But the pace of innovation accelerated after the mega innovation of agriculture, which appeared at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. Then, in the last few hundred years, innovation accelerated once more to create the world of the Anthropocene. Why was innovation faster in some periods and in some places than others? What factors encouraged innovation and what factors put the brakes on? How important to psychology or the sheer number of humans that are sharing ideas. Or the efficiency of the networks through which they swap ideas. How important is political regulation or commerce or the expansion of trade networks. Can innovation be planned or does it just sort of happen? The final part of the course will remind us that innovation is not always benign. Nuclear weapons, climate change, malicious robots or engineered viruses, how can we ensure that innovation itself does not get us into trouble? What sort of innovations will we need to ensure a good future for future generations? [MUSIC]
