The conference from which most of the papers in this volume are drawn met at the Makaha Resort in Hawaii on January 3 – 8, 2008. It was organized by Cheryl and Russ Genet. The conference was about a story, and it was the power, the beauty, and the importance of that story that drew the participants together. The story has many different names; Evolutionary Epic is just one. It has also been called a Modern Creation Myth, The Universe Story, Big History. Whatever the name, the core idea is the same: there is emerging today a coherent story, based on modern, scientific information that tells the history of our universe, from its very beginnings to today. That story can help each one of us understand our place in a larger universe. The evolutionary epic links modern accounts of the origins of the universe, the Earth, life, and human societies into a single story about origins, so it can play in modern society a role similar to that of traditional creation stories in all earlier societies.
      Creation stories are immensely important. They provide large maps of reality, and by tracing the origins and evolution of our world, they explain how things came to be as they are. Maps tell us where we are and, in some sense, who and what we are. The largest maps, those attempted in creation stories, are as fundamental to our sense of history as maps of the world are to our sense of geography. Like a world map, the evolutionary epic provides a frame within which we can better understand the smaller maps with which we navigate our way through life. The evolutionary epic is important because it is the largest possible map of time.
      A conference like this would not have been necessary if the evolutionary epic had been widely known. The strange thing (strange, at least, to those at this conference) is that the evolutionary epic is not taught in every school in every country in the world! Instead, schoolchildren throughout the world are presented either with bits of the story (the history of my country, for example, or a bit of geography or geology or astronomy) with little attempt to describe the larger story that threads these smaller stories together. Or they are taught creation myths that worked well for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, but don’t work so well today because we have so much more information, and much of that information contradicts what is said in traditional creation stories. The Earth was not created 6,000 years ago, or just a few generations ago. Nor was it created countless billions of years ago. We now know when it was created: about 4.5 billion Earth years ago. The evolutionary epic builds on a vast amount of new knowledge generated in recent centuries (much of it in recent decades) through careful and rigorous scientific research conducted throughout the world in many different disciplines, from nuclear physics to cosmology, to biology, to human history.
      The fact that so much of the definitive information needed to construct the evolutionary epic has been gathered very recently suggests one reason why the evolutionary epic is not widely taught today (yet!). A modern scientific account of the origins of the universe became available only in the twentieth century, and only in the last decade or two could it be based on a solid foundation of empirical observation, much of it from new, space-based satellites. The modern study of genetics became possible only after the discovery of the crucial role of DNA in heredity by Crick and Watson in 1953; now, genetic knowledge is helping transform our understanding of the origins and early history of our own species, Homo sapiens. A modern understanding of the evolution of our Earth became possible only after the clinching of the theory of "plate tectonics" in the 1960s.
      Above all, we can now date the whole of the past. Before the appearance in the 1950s of new methods of dating, most of them based on measuring the regular breakdown of radioactive materials, it was impossible to assign reliable dates to any parts of the story before the appearance of the first written documents a few thousand years ago. In the last few decades, our timelines have expanded from just a few thousand years to almost 14 billion years, reaching back past the civilizations of Sumer, to the evolution of our human ancestors several million years ago, to the appearance of the first multi-celled organisms almost 1,000 million years ago, to the formation of our Earth itself, some 4,500 million years ago and finally to the origins of our universe, about 13,700 million years ago.
      These recent changes explain the sense of excitement shared by all of us who have been involved in the attempt to construct the evolutionary epic and to make it more widely accessible to others. How can it best be told? How can we link the science with the spirit? How can the story be acted out, re-told and taught so that its power is palpable? What meaning does the story contain for humans today? How can we link the science that underpins so much in our society with our personal experience of life as felt and experienced?
      For me, one of the revelations of the conference was that there are so many questions to be asked about the evolutionary epic, and even more answers. Like all creation stories, the evolutionary epic contains within itself great diversity and can be received and appreciated and taught in many different ways, a bit like a complex crystal being slowly turned and turned and turned in front of many people, each of whom will see in it slightly different things. That diversity is reflected in the diversity of approaches, styles, questions, and struggles in the essays collected here. Don’t be surprised if you find dissenting positions here, or essays that seem to contradict other essays, or essays that raise unexpected questions or approach the evolutionary epic from unexpected angles. The evolutionary epic, we found, is capacious enough to absorb such differences with ease.
      You will find essays on the construction of the evolutionary epic, on philosophical and spiritual ways into it, on scientific approaches to its various components, on what it might mean in different contexts and to different people, on the challenge of bringing out the story’s beauty and the challenge of teaching the epic, on ways of rendering it in poetry, in images and in theatre, and on its implications for the future of our species and our biosphere. This is not a monolithic story even though, like all great creation stories, it has a narrative core that can be recognized in all versions.
      Another revelation was the repeated reminder both of the smallness and insignificance of our species, and of our centrality to the evolutionary epic. We are, after all, the only creatures of which we know that can begin to grasp the story of the universe and infuse it with meaning and feeling. In his paper, Winslow Myers offers a powerful image of this relationship in a wonderful Vermeer painting that depicts a figure (perhaps the pioneering biologist Anthony van Leeuwenhoek) leaning forward and touching a celestial globe.
      For me, Vermeer’s painting inverts Michelangelo’s image of God touching the finger of Adam. However cool-headed we may remain as we try to piece together the scientific evidence for the evolutionary epic, it is hard to resist a sense of awe as we realize that we, in our tiny corner of the universe, represent the universe becoming aware of itself.
       I hope these essays can convey something of the majesty, beauty, and power of the evolutionary epic, and also something of its diversity and capaciousness. Finally, I want to offer my personal thanks to Russell and Cheryl Genet for bringing together this diverse assembly of people to celebrate the birth of a new creation story.

Author of Maps of Time