Big History of Nature
- Rick Bonetti
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
"Big History of Nature is presented in the extent of this spiral. Notable events are illustrated from the center outward, counterclockwise. A 90-degree stretch of the spiral represents one billion years (1 Ga). The last 500 million years are represented in a 90-degree stretch for more detail on our recent history. Some of the events depicted are the emergence of cosmic structures (stars, galaxies, planets, clusters, and other structures), the emergence of the solar system, the Earth and the Moon, important geological events (gases in the atmosphere, great orogenies, glacial periods, etc.), emergence and evolution of living beings (first microbes, plants, animals, fungi), the evolution of hominid species and important events in human evolution." ~ Nature Timespiral
Wikipedia defines an integrative level, or level of organization, as "a set of phenomena emerging from pre-existing phenomena of a lower level. The levels concept is an intellectual framework for structuring reality. It arranges all entities, structures, and processes in the universe, or in a certain field of study, into a hierarchy, typically based on how complex their organization is. When arranged this way, each entity is three things at the same time: It is made up of parts from the previous level below. It is a whole in its own right. And it is a part of the whole that is on the next level above. Typical examples include life emerging from non-living substances and consciousness emerging from nervous systems."
See Nature Timeline for a vertical graphic with hyperlinks to Wikipedia descriptions.
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