[QUOTE=Chief Pedant]
Imagine that you are an alien, absent of any and all preconceived notions. You have nothing at stake in the outcome. You come and study earth’s cultures, populations and achievements. You rank those achievements by the degree of intelligence required to accomplish them; not by whether they are good or bad. (Creating a hydrogen bomb might be an example here.)
Would you come to a conclusion that there is a difference in the amount and degree of achievements among populations?
Assuming you would, to what factor(s) other than inherent abilities across a broad population would attribute those achievements?
Would you be more likely to attribute achievement to opportunity or to inherent ability? If your answer is “opportunity,” would it not then be your expectation that a given genetic pool would be equally likely as any other to succeed in a given area? (i.e., if you looked around the whole world, sometimes Group A is the most successful; sometimes Group B; sometimes Group C, and so on. In general though, wouldn’t the most successful group be totally random if there is no innate difference so that if you were take Iceland, Haiti, St Maarten and Eritrea, it would be completely unpredictable which population pool “owned” which country?)
I, for one, would love to hear some really robust answers from someone as passionate as you…is it possible to write up a summary position in just a few sentences?
[/QUOTE]
This is the exact issue that Jared Diamond addresses in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. I do not claim that all of his information is totally accurate (although he did a pretty decent job of synthesizing most of the relevant previous research), and I will not insist that his thesis is perfect, but he did a very good job of showing how the luck of geography corresponds very closely to the rise (and, to a certain degree, fall) of “civilized” nations.
In a nutshell, (with some errors clearly introduced by oversimplifying his book), he demonstrated that [ol][li] agriculture arose in the areas where there were the largest collection of wild plants that could be domesticated, [/li][li] agricultural based city states, (then nations and empires), arose in the areas where there were animals available to be employed as beasts of burden[/li][li] the transmission of crops and animal husbandry spread most easily where there were large east-west land masses with fewer natural barriers (such as oceans) because changes in climate in north-south axes was a more solid barrier to such transmission[/li][li] writing (providing a way to pass technical information from one generation to another) appeared where an expansion of agriculturally based empires established trade[/li][li] societies with fewer domesticated animals are less likely to develop diseases that jump species and, therefore, fail to develop immunities to such diseases.[/ol]So, a location where there were few high-calorie wild food sources that could be domesticated were going to develop large societies much later than locations where there were numerous such crops.[/li]A location where there was no animal that could be domesticated (or imported) was going to develop empires much later than other societies. Thus, the Americas, with no beast larger than a dog only developed a small number of empires very late in its history–just as Europe was about to overrun that region–and the lack of immunity from animal-borne diseases meant that those diseases served to destroy existing societies when they were introduced.
A location where the climate presented a less permeable barrier than mere mountains would be cut off from sharing the benefits of discoveries in other locations. Thus, the Middle East, India, and China not only had head starts in getting agricultural societies off the ground based on the existence of more plants and animals that could be domesticated, once they developed, their societies expanded in East-West directions to the point where they made contact and shared their technologies, foodstuffs, and animals (as well as immunizing diseases). Europe and Northern Africa (which lacked most of the plants and several of the beasts) benefitted from slow the migrations of agriculture, husbandry, and writing (all of which originated in Southwestern Asia), while Southern Africa was cut off by bands of climate and climate based insect disease that prevented it from from sharing the same benefits of wheat, horses, and a written language. The climate barriers between (what is now) Honduras and Peru prevented exchanges of mutually supporting technology to promote trade, so the stone carved pictographs of Central America and the knotted rope techniques of the Inca never progressed to a more flexible and easily transmitted variety of writing. Examinations of the histories and prehistories of most societies demonstrate that they followed similar paths, either being jumpstarted by the introduction of developments from other places (Europe) or moving more slowly due to a paucity of the necessary factors to grow (the Americas, sub-Sahara Africa).