Arrows of Historical Time

Abstract

So far, the domains of thermodynamics, evolution and historiography have rarely found a common, coherent platform. Following a recent wave of literature on the parallelism between cosmic and evolutionary history, the present article follows two basic objectives. First, it attempts to show how the two seemingly contradictory arrows of time, namely the arrow of increasing order and complexity in evolutionary time and of decreasing order in thermodynamic time can be integrated into a new framework which views »evolution as entropy« (Daniel R. Brooks, E. 0. Wiley) and affirms a strict parallelism between cosmic and evolutionary history. Second, the article tries to demonstrate that current historiography would profit enormously by using these new approaches to the arrows of evolutionary and thermodynamic time. To this end, seven different research fields are introduced which are direct!y connected to the new frameworks of cosmic evolution (Eric J. Chaisson) or, alternatively, cosmogenesis (David Layzer). In each of these seven areas, several heuristic devices will be offered by means of which research in these areas can yield highly promising and cognitively stimulating results that will clearly go beyond the available literature on nonlinear history or on the end in every sense of the word (e.g., Francis Fukuyama's »end of history« or John Horgan's «end of science«.)