David Christian Books

Long before humans appeared, nature itself learned to anticipate. Indeed, life could not exist without some form of prediction. At the heart of every organism is a set of instructions, DNA, created through billions of tiny experiments in the deep past—each a lesson about what works in the future. Ev...

From Future Stories: What's Next? How to Live with Uncertainty

If foresight is an evolutionary advantage, how deep in life’s architecture does it run? In truth, every living system is predictive at some level. Molecules anticipate, cells prepare, species adapt. DNA itself is a time machine made of chemistry, storing successful patterns from the past to guide fu...

From Future Stories: What's Next? How to Live with Uncertainty

Thirteen point eight billion years ago, everything—space, time, matter, and energy—erupted into being. To imagine the Big Bang is not to envision an explosion in space, for space itself was what came into existence. In those first fractions of a second, physical laws crystallized out like ice formin...

From Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

As the early universe expanded and cooled, gravity began its subtle work of gathering matter. Tiny fluctuations in density—quantum fingerprints imprinted in the cosmic microwave background—seeded the galaxies. Within those swirling assemblies of gas, the first stars ignited. Stars are engines of cr...

From Origin Story: A Big History of Everything