Abstract
The domains of thermodynamics, evolution, and historiography have rarely found a common, coherent platform, but following a recent wave of literature on the parallelism between cosmic and evolutionary history this article makes two basic points in this regard. First, the two seemingly contradictory arrows of time, namely, one of increasing order and complexity in evolutionary time and one of decreasing order in thermodynamic time, can be integrated into a new framework that views "evolution as entropy" (Daniel R. Brooks, E. O Wiley) and affirms a strict parallelism between cosmic and evolutionary history. Second, the field of historiography would profit enormously by using these new approaches to the arrows of evolutionary and thermodynamic time. As an example, seven different research fields are introduced that are directly 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 are 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").