Why is the 'west' so far ahead of the rest?

[Holsety]

A more interesting question is why the Old World developed faster than the New World. We have here two separate petri dishes of cultural evolution, so there was no (or extremely little) possibility of mutual influence (including everything from sharing ideas to war). The "American Indians" did indeed invent many of the social structures which Old World societies invented, too. Yet, they still moved slower.

I hear the Bering straight area freezes over every winter and inuits can actually walk across it, so I wonder if god actually separated his two samples before sitting back and watching the experiment.

If they were, though...the land bridge closed off around 10500 BC, which was around the same time agriculture developed. Back in mesopotamia. So if the bering strait did isolate eurafrasia from the americas, the american peoples would have been set back quite a bit, closed off from the acculturation of farming, which sorta starts the whole city thing, which sorta starts the whole civilization thing. Not only that, but the population would have been far more limited, the small land area of the bering strait acting as a slowdown for the rate of migration, which means that the starting population of america would have been much smaller than the number of humans who would have been around in asia by that time.

Did the american indians move slower or just start slower? I wonder whether the first people to cross the bering strait were post-neolithic peoples; since they were still in the process of migration to new areas, presumably looking for better territory or following game, they hadn't yet developed agriculture.

[Gil galad]

i never knew it even existed. maybe the moderators can migrate some related topics there and perhaps lay down some guidelines about what is appropriate for either forum?

Neither did I or i'd have put it there.

[Lord Mhoram]

Malik,

The idea that humans are self-interested - which you defined as the "zero-sum tendency," presumably an aspect of "game theory" - is, in my opinion, exceedingly obvious. A ten-year old could tell you it. As for game theory as a whole, again, as I said, I don't know enough about it to comment. But meta-explanations for history are often trendy, and often wrong, or at least flawed, but it's apparently the only explanation you're comfortable enough with to discuss this topic.

But, really, don't bother. What do I care? Stay entrenched with what you already believe, if that makes you comfortable.

That was unnecessary. It was also ironic.

Murrin,

I agree that this should be shifted to the History forum.

[Cail]

Moved.

[Montresor]

But meta-explanations for history are often trendy, and often wrong, or at least flawed . . .

I certainly agree with that.

Quite often, as a historian, it frustrates the hell out of me. Once, I was asked the complex question: "Why did the Conquistadores so easily conquer the Aztec Empire?" My answer was fairly in depth, and I argued for a variety of different factors. A historian criticised my argument on the sole grounds that it was multi-causal! And they even said I shouldn't do that because it's not currently popular in the field! Ugghh, that's always stuck in my mind since as ridiculous.

[Zarathustra]

Malik,

The idea that humans are self-interested - which you defined as the "zero-sum tendency," presumably an aspect of "game theory" - is, in my opinion, exceedingly obvious. A ten-year old could tell you it. As for game theory as a whole, again, as I said, I don't know enough about it to comment. But meta-explanations for history are often trendy, and often wrong, or at least flawed, but it's apparently the only explanation you're comfortable enough with to discuss this topic.

But, really, don't bother. What do I care? Stay entrenched with what you already believe, if that makes you comfortable.

That was unnecessary. It was also ironic.

Murrin,

I agree that this should be shifted to the History forum.

You're right: you don't know enough to comment. So why are you calling it "exceedingly obvious" and a "trendy explanation?" It's only "exceedingly obvious" because you've reduced it to one phrase--in terms which I've never defined it (as you asserted). Why would you reduce it so drastically when you admit you don't know enough to comment about it? Your language is dismissive.

As long as we're comparing each other's points to the behavior of 10-yr-olds . . . the tendency to dismiss something of which you are (as you admit) ignorant, and then to wrap it with a one-sentence summary, is much more likely to be done by a 10-yr-old than developing game theory and applying it to cultural evolution.

I didn't come here to tell you that people are self-interested. If that's all you got out of it, then you're simply ignoring everything else I've said (which goes right along with your dismissive language). Game theory applies to cultural evolution, economic systems, and even biological evolution (down to the realm of molecules themselves).

[Correction: I had the wrong "John" when I mentioned A Beautiful Mind. John Nash was the Nobel prize winning game theorist portrayed in that movie, while John von Neumann kick-started the field with Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. He is described in Wikipedia as: "a mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, continuous geometry, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics (of explosions), and statistics, as well as many other mathematical fields. He is generally regarded as one of the foremost mathematicians of the 20th century. Most notably, von Neumann was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics, a member of the Manhattan Project and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (as one of the few originally appointed — a group collectively referred to as the "demi-gods"), and a key figure in the development of game theory and the concepts of cellular automata and the universal constructor. Along with Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann worked out key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb." He is also, along with Alan Turing, one of the most important developers of the logical architecture behind modern computers. Nearly all of today's computers use von Neumann architecture.]

[duchess of malfi]

This is almost an historical question concerning economic and social development, but i've never seen a convincing argument explaining why the 'west' has ended up achieving such universal dominance over the rest of the world.

I'm thinking that it is mostly due to the avaliability of natural resources throughout history, but i'd be interested to understand how different societys and thier values contributed to the overall state of the world today. I dont believe that on average the people are smarter in the west, at least in terms of capability to learn given appropriate resources.

As Lord Mhoram said, I would highly recommend Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel as a beginning place to find your answer.

The author was doing field work on the island of New Guinea and a man who was from the island asked him pretty much that very question. Diamond started out with the thought that the majority of humans are quite similar genetically, and are close in average intellect. He spent many years exploring such fields as history, archaeology, etc. in figuring out an answer.

Of course, it is a little more complicated than that - he is better at explaining the roots of the problem than explaining things closer in time.

But there are plenty of more recent books dealing primarily with specific areas of the world (such as 1491 and Mayflower for the Americas and Scramble for Africa for Africa) that can and do go more specifically into the events of the last few centuries.

Take the Americas as an example. Sure - horses and guns and steel helped out the conquistadors. But germs were quite probably their mightiest weapon. The pandemics wiped out huge numbers of the Native Americans (some historians now think that up to 90% of the native peoples in the Americas died from pandemics caused by Eurasian diseases - millions upon millions of people, many of whom never lay eyes on a European). And unrest (a civil war) in the Incan Empire and other first peoples being willing to ally with the Spanish against the Aztecs were also of importance in the conquests of those empires.

[duchess of malfi]

A more interesting question is why the Old World developed faster than the New World. We have here two separate petri dishes of cultural evolution, so there was no (or extremely little) possibility of mutual influence (including everything from sharing ideas to war). The "American Indians" did indeed invent many of the social structures which Old World societies invented, too. Yet, they still moved slower.

I hear the Bering straight area freezes over every winter and inuits can actually walk across it, so I wonder if god actually separated his two samples before sitting back and watching the experiment.

If they were, though...the land bridge closed off around 10500 BC, which was around the same time agriculture developed. Back in mesopotamia. So if the bering strait did isolate eurafrasia from the americas, the american peoples would have been set back quite a bit, closed off from the acculturation of farming, which sorta starts the whole city thing, which sorta starts the whole civilization thing. Not only that, but the population would have been far more limited, the small land area of the bering strait acting as a slowdown for the rate of migration, which means that the starting population of america would have been much smaller than the number of humans who would have been around in asia by that time.

Did the american indians move slower or just start slower? I wonder whether the first people to cross the bering strait were post-neolithic peoples; since they were still in the process of migration to new areas, presumably looking for better territory or following game, they hadn't yet developed agriculture.

Actually, agriculture developed independently in many parts of the world. It is just that different parts of the world had different plants (and animals), some of them being much easier to domesticate than others.

One of the areas where domestication in the Americas happened was eastern Kentucky. Most of the plants the people there managed to domesticate are considered little more than weeds today. The people just did not have anything better in that area. As soon as the bean-squash-corn triad of crops moved into that area from Mezo-America, those people abandoned what they had beeen growing for the easier to grow and more nutritious triad.

Many of the main plants we grow - corn, tomatoes, and potatoes, do come from the Amercas. Most of the other grains such as wheat and barley come from the middle east.

Again, much of this is very well covered in Guns, Germs, and Steel. There is also a fun and interesting little book called The Botany of Desire that follows the history of four major crops of various sorts - tulips, apples, potatoes, and marijuana.

[Lord Mhoram]

Malik,

I don't know enough about the mechanics and mathematics of "game theory" to comment on it as a theory. I only know about it from your representation of it, and from cursory reading up on it after you brought it up. Again, one of your representations of it, what I thought was the chief example that you gave, was that humans are self-interested, and this is a principle that governs human history. I know enough about human nature and about history and the study of history to know that this is not in itself an interesting theory, nor an interesting meta-explanation for human history. Do you agree that a ten-year old could tell you that humans are self-interested creatures?

I didn't come here to tell you that people are self-interested. If that's all you got out of it, then you're simply ignoring everything else I've said (which goes right along with your dismissive language). Game theory applies to cultural evolution, economic systems, and even biological evolution (down to the realm of molecules themselves).

Fantastic.

[Damelon]

If they were, though...the land bridge closed off around 10500 BC, which was around the same time agriculture developed. Back in mesopotamia. So if the bering strait did isolate eurafrasia from the americas, the american peoples would have been set back quite a bit, closed off from the acculturation of farming, which sorta starts the whole city thing, which sorta starts the whole civilization thing. Not only that, but the population would have been far more limited, the small land area of the bering strait acting as a slowdown for the rate of migration, which means that the starting population of america would have been much smaller than the number of humans who would have been around in asia by that time.

This article from The Economist about how hunter gatherer societies weren't the Eden that people like Rousseau thought they were, and is quite an interesting article on its own, mentioned that agriculture came about quite independently in at least six different places over a few thousand years.

[Montresor]

. . . hunter gatherer societies weren't the Eden that people like Rousseau thought they were.

Yeah, very far from it. One needs to only look at the indigenous population of Australia at the time of the white invasion, to see that Hunter Gatherer existences were full of uncertainty, hazard, and very little genuine proserity. Nor were hunter gatherer's 'in touch' with nature (as in, in some kind of idealistic symbiosis with the environment), as many of the naive victorian-era romanticists would claim.

And, thanks for the link, btw.

[Holsety]

Actually, agriculture developed independently in many parts of the world. It is just that different parts of the world had different plants (and animals), some of them being much easier to domesticate than others.

One of the areas where domestication in the Americas happened was eastern Kentucky. Most of the plants the people there managed to domesticate are considered little more than weeds today. The people just did not have anything better in that area. As soon as the bean-squash-corn triad of crops moved into that area from Mezo-America, those people abandoned what they had beeen growing for the easier to grow and more nutritious triad.

Domestication in KY, now I know the history of KFC started with indigenous americans.

[/humor] My point wasn't that agriculture didn't develop in america or something; I am well aware that corn wasn't first harvested on the banks of the tigris and euphrates. What I was trying to say was in response to...someone wondering why native americans developed "slower." I was thinking that since they were just entering into america around the time that the sumerians first came up with agriculture, it's possible that they simply took a longer time to get to it. I guess what I'm wondering about is how long it took the guys who crossed the bering land bridge to get to the areas where they then developed agriculture, and how long it took them to develop it.

I'm also wondering whether the americas and eurafrasia are really two different "petri dishes" of human evolution, since the bering strait freezes every winter.

This article from The Economist about how hunter gatherer societies weren't the Eden that people like Rousseau thought they were, and is quite an interesting article on its own, mentioned that agriculture came about quite independently in at least six different places over a few thousand years.

I definitely wasn't classifying hunter gatherer societies as paradise. If it was, I don't think agriculture would have happened in the first place. Though...I think I do remember hearing the hunters had incredibly short work weeks.

Anyway, "a few thousand years" is what I am getting at; that's a fairly significant gap when you're talking only 10,000 years back from year 0. Humanity was just getting into the americas around the time that agriculture in the middle east was beginning. As the article says, homo sapiens had actually overhunted a number of animals, but was the same true for North and South America when humans first got over there? I was assuming things would be more abundant there, and perhaps there would be a less rapid jump to agriculture.

[duchess of malfi]

Actually, there is some pretty credible evidence that the settlement of the Americas came a lot earlier than has been widely believed by academics for the last few decades. There are some pretty old sites in South America that are looking pretty credible right now that are much older than Clovis.

The "Clovis-first" theory is looking increasingly shakey.

Some historians are now theorizng that the First Peoples might have come in seperate waves of colonization - following he ice bound coasts at the top of the world in the last Ice Age - someven think that they came from both Asia AND Europe - following the coast, following seals and other prey.

It's actually a pretty exciting time to be following pre-Columbian history and archaeology, as many old school of thought and theories are being shaken up a bit. Even if the old stuff ends up being proven true, it is good for the field to have this stuff dusted off and studied anew.

Te main thing - if yo uread the Diamond book, you will find that the big problem with the Americas is that these continents simply did not have the large domesticable animals and the easily domesticated plants that Eurasia did.

North America had dogs and turkeys - and the turkeys were domesticated only in the desert southwest ratehr than continent wide. South America was a bit luckier in that they had the various lama species and guinea pigs (whch were originally kept as meat animals rather than pets) as well as dogs.

As for the plants, I recently read an article about the domestication of corn. the modern scientist who wrote it said it was more or less a miracle that the people were able to get anything useful out of the original ancestor plant and wonderd if we could do as much today, even with our high tech genetic techniques.

other areas of the world has much better wild species to work with - whether rice and chickens (Asia), cattle (now thought to have bveen independently doemsticated as many as two or three times in Eurasia and India), and horses, sheep, goats and various grains from Eurasia.

the only place where domestication did not independently arise was Australia, where no suitable wild things could be found. and even there it is thought that the first people tried to farm fish

[Montresor]

This article from The Economist . . .

Just read the article. It was, on the whole, very good. There was one small issue which has made me wonder, however:

From the
!Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year.

I am hoping, for the writer's sake, it was a typo and they really meant were, not are - if not, they really need to do some fresh research. There has been no tribal warfare in Australia for a very long time, and there are no Australian Aboriginals still living in a pure hunter-gatherer exitence, and nor has there been since about 1950 at the very latest.

[Damelon]

This article from The Economist about how hunter gatherer societies weren't the Eden that people like Rousseau thought they were, and is quite an interesting article on its own, mentioned that agriculture came about quite independently in at least six different places over a few thousand years.

I definitely wasn't classifying hunter gatherer societies as paradise. If it was, I don't think agriculture would have happened in the first place. Though...I think I do remember hearing the hunters had incredibly short work weeks.

The reason I cited the article is that it mentioned that agriculture came about as a necessity, the big and medium sized game was hunted out and something had to be done to survive. But the fact that it happened later in the Americas doesn't, to my mind, mean much in the larger question. The Vikings came to North America 500 years before the Spanish and didn't gain a lasting foothold there. Even the fire arms of the Spanish weren't that great of an advantage since they were extremely slow loading. Disease crippled the resistance of the native peoples more than technology.

[Montresor]

Even the fire arms of the Spanish weren't that great of an advantage since they were extremely slow loading. Disease crippled the resistance of the native peoples more than technology.

Absolutely. Cortes had a grand total of 20 of them when he arrived in Tenochtitlan.

[exnihilo]

Actually, there is some pretty credible evidence that the settlement of the Americas came a lot earlier than has been widely believed by academics for the last few decades. There are some pretty old sites in South America that are looking pretty credible right now that are much older than Clovis.

The "Clovis-first" theory is looking increasingly shakey.

Some historians are now theorizng that the First Peoples might have come in seperate waves of colonization - following he ice bound coasts at the top of the world in the last Ice Age - someven think that they came from both Asia AND Europe - following the coast, following seals and other prey.

It's actually a pretty exciting time to be following pre-Columbian history and archaeology, as many old school of thought and theories are being shaken up a bit. Even if the old stuff ends up being proven true, it is good for the field to have this stuff dusted off and studied anew.

Te main thing - if yo uread the Diamond book, you will find that the big problem with the Americas is that these continents simply did not have the large domesticable animals and the easily domesticated plants that Eurasia did.

North America had dogs and turkeys - and the turkeys were domesticated only in the desert southwest ratehr than continent wide. South America was a bit luckier in that they had the various lama species and guinea pigs (whch were originally kept as meat animals rather than pets) as well as dogs.

As for the plants, I recently read an article about the domestication of corn. the modern scientist who wrote it said it was more or less a miracle that the people were able to get anything useful out of the original ancestor plant and wonderd if we could do as much today, even with our high tech genetic techniques.

other areas of the world has much better wild species to work with - whether rice and chickens (Asia), cattle (now thought to have bveen independently doemsticated as many as two or three times in Eurasia and India), and horses, sheep, goats and various grains from Eurasia.

the only place where domestication did not independently arise was Australia, where no suitable wild things could be found. and even there it is thought that the first people tried to farm fish

Increasing skeletal evidence from the U.S.A., Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil strongly suggests that the first settlers in the Americas had a cranial morphology distinct from that displayed by most late and modern Native Americans.... The Paleoamerican morphological pattern is more generalized and can be seen today among Africans, Australians, and Melanesians. Here, we present the results of a comparative morphological assessment of a late Paleoindian/early archaic specimen from Capelinha Burial II, southern Brazil. The Capelinha skull was compared with samples of four Paleoindian groups from South and Central America and worldwide modern groups from W.W. Howells' studies. In both analyses performed (classical morphometrics and geometric morphometrics), the results show a clear association between Capelinha Burial II and the Paleoindians, as well as Australians, Melanesians, and Africans, confirming its Paleoamerican status.

www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003784.html

[The Dreaming]

There are probably as many correct explanations as there are minds to imagine them. The era to look at, however, begins with the enlightenment, in the age of sail, and the dawn of the colonial era. At the cusp of this era (roughly 16th century) China was still at an equal or greater level of technology than the west. Chinese Junks (a type of ship, and a pretty weird language twist in English) were more than capable or exploring, colonizing, and conquering . But why did China (and the muslim empire for that matter) recede into it's own naval while Europe conquered the world?

I remember hypothesizing in a world civ class that in this case, China's political unity prevented it from expanding the way Europe, with it's intense rivalries and constant feuding, could. What reason would a unified and totalitarian (to be fair, extremely enlightened) state the size and power of china have to go conquering? By way of comparison, look at England, a small Island country, almost constantly at war with it's neighbors, is seriously afraid of the economic power of Spain's exploitation of the Americas, and wants her own piece to keep her influence from waning.

Technology seems to be a self-accelerating thing. It really didn't take the west much time at all to radically outdistance the rest of the world, and start exploiting it, thereby increasing their own power and reducing the power of the east. (and Britain's domination of China certainly retarded it's progress)

Like I said, history is a tricky thing. The human experience is just such an enormous thing to look at, and looking at it from a global perspective, at an era 500 years in the past makes it nearly impossible to know real, absolute truth,

[Brasidas]

I find it interesting that we are all coming at this topic from a western viewpoint. I imagine a history of the Greek - Persian wars would read very differently if written by a Persian rather than a Greek historian. Would an African or Aboriginal Australian take on world history be the same as an American or British one?

[Avatar]

Wow, this is a great topic. Really sorry I missed it until now. Some excellent points raised, including ones I've often thought about, like the whole "Why didn't China do it?" issue.

I really think that KT makes an excellent point about the competition among nation-states in a relatively limited area drove development considerably.

However, if I can return to the geography question, I've long had a pet theory that climate is a major factor in the development of "culture." Especially coupled with population density.

In places like Europe, with a population density that quickly precluded a nomadic hunter-gatherer existance, agricultural activity was severly limited by the climate. You could only farm in the warm months. In the cold months, you had plenty of time to sit around figuring out how to make the next winter more bearable.

In places with more temperate climates and lower population density, (more space), food was usually readily available all year round, simple shelter sufficed for protection from the elements, and basically, continual innovation wasn't necessary to improve their lives.

They were happy with what they had, it worked for them with minimal effort, and met their needs adequately.

Is the dividing line east / west? Or is it hot / cold?

--A