Strange bias in a "Big History" textbook
A publisher's rep put a strange textbook into my mailbox the other day. I gave it a quick look and found some very strange errors. Or maybe they aren't errors, just lapses of scholarly judgment. Or perhaps they show deliberate anti-scholarly biases. It's not clear to me. The textbook is: Christian, David, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin 2014 Big History: Between Nothing and Everything . McGraw-Hill, New York. "Big History" is an unusual approach to "history." Here is how the gushing article in Wikipedia begins: Big History is an emerging academic discipline which examines history scientifically from the Big Bang to the present. It examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach based on combining numerous disciplines from science and the humanities, and explores human existence in the context of this bigger picture. It integrates studies of the cosmos, Earth, life and humanity using empirical evidence to explore cause-and-...