From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Apr 14 2002 - 13:44:24 MDT
Curt Adams writes
> You sorted the list by time of Eastern discovery. This creates
> a bias indicating closure of gap since discovereries the East
> made relatively late will tend to be ones with a lesser gap.
> Sorting by time of Western discovery show no obvious trend over
> time. The only thing that jumps out is that the east is developing
> social institutions (states, writing, villages) relatively late.
Thanks very much! I'll take a much closer look, but
you fingered what is probably a fatal mistake. I also
appreciate your effort in writing up result when sorted
by West first.
Greg Burch writes
> [All this may look] like a good example of Kurzweil's "Law
> of Accelerating Returns" perhaps, i.e. that the effect of
> memetic evolution was beginning to overtake the effect of
> other factors, which you would expect, from an extropian
> point of view. In other words, the amplified power that
> cultural factors put at the disposal of humans in the
> Americas was beginning to have cumulative impacts. This
> was enabling the humans to little by little overcome the
> differential impact of the purely physical factors that
> Diamond identifies.
Whether or not my graph was intrinsically suspect, as Curt
claims, what you say here is important.
First, let me digress on geographical determinism, which
underlies Diamond's book. At first blush, geographical
determinism seems unchallengable: surely all the differences
between Earth's population must be traced ultimately to
environmental factors. If one went back to 8000 B.C. and
moved all the people inhabiting Japan to the Phillipines
and vice-versa, then we would expect that it would still
be the northern people off the coast of Korea who would
become a cultural and military powerhouse, and that the
people inhabiting the less challenging tropical environment
would not.
However, Diamond is criticized by at least one person that
I know of: Victor Davis Hanson in "Carnage and Culture".
The only thing that I've been able to glean from criticism
of geographical determinism is the possibility that a
certain set of people in one geographical location may,
through randomness, develop a set of cultural features
that can only be logically associated with *them*, per se,
and not with their environment. For example, the extreme
bloodthirstiness characterizing some primitive tribes may
be a relatively random development; this is substantiated
by the presence of less bloodthirsty tribes in almost the
same geographic location. But if such a bloodthirsty
tribe, to continue this example, were to rise to global
emminence, then this particular trait would have to be
specifically associated with *them*, not their original
environment.
> In other words, the amplified power [of] cultural factors...
> was beginning to have cumulative impacts. This was enabling
> the humans to little by little overcome the differential
> impact of the purely physical factors that Diamond identifies.
So are you and Kurzweil in effect criticizing geographical
determinism in just the same way that I am?
Lee
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