You could argue that the fact that we use clock face designs derived from sundials built in the northern hemisphere, rather than the southern, is itself an accident of history.
But I would direct that armchair discussion more to the comments section of Guns Germs and Steel and all the TED talks that talk about how geographical differences are suspected to influence societal developments, all while keeping your racism and eugenics radar on maximum-alert.
Really, though, I think it was just some overworked Economist journalist trying to crank out another science summary piece, completely unaware that the top-commented criticism was going to be a bunch of nerds bikeshedding the omission of a mildly-interesting historical anecdote rather than anything substantial about the science being reported on. :)
Take a look at a map.
Notice which hemisphere has 70% of the land.
It is not a comprehensive explanation. It is quite obvious that there are other variables involved!
But as a simple explanation it has the advantage of being conceivably predictable without hindsight.
Human brains are energy intensive. More land means higher likelihood of arable land, more livestock and so better nutrition. It also makes your land more valuable to invaders, which leads to people organising to protect their land, and innovating weaponry, tactics, etc.
Certainly it might have taken some special circumstances like you said, but when there are perfectly plausible reasons suggesting the contrary, there seems little reason to give speculative possibilities much attention until there's evidence.
I really have no idea about those theories but they could perfectly be NOT racist at all just like saying a girl from a poor neighborhood has less chances to be rich as an adult than a kid from a mid-class neighborhood is NOT racist, just stating the (sad) reality.
And as a complete ignorant I guess that in a primordial society, climate had a huge impact on access to food, and the less you have to think about surviving the more you can think about improving your life.
It's honestly pretty refreshing to have a scientific explanation for why Aboriginals or Africans didn't set the direction of 'clockwise'. Without that explanation, I can faithfully assert "all humans are equal" but be confused by the apparent dominance on the world stage of Western societies. Armed with an explanation that has nothing to do with the innate abilities or intelligence or suitability in the modern global economy of the victims of circumstance, I can genuinely believe in equality.
Given that ethnic differences develop alongside migrations into new territories, you'd expect them to be formed by those geographical and climate-based explanations. It's a chicken and egg problem, but it doesn't really help if you're dealing with people who believe in racial superiority, they'll just say "yeah, so we became a super great race because we settled in Whatever Region and they didn't because they didn't".
I believe race is blown way out of proportion by believers, but I found Guns, Germs and Steel to be very hand-wavy and starting from the end, working backwards to tell a story that leads where the author wants it to lead.
Nothing will ever disprove "scientific racism" to people who are racist unfortunately.
There are more species of animals that can be domesticated in the Eurasian landmass than in Africa, the Americas or Australia. 14 out of the 14 large domesticated species are from Eurasia (including North Africa), with the only exception being the Illama/Alpaca. There isn't a single species of large animal in Sub-Saharan Africa or North America that has been domesticated, even in modern times.
There are more plants suitable for cultivation in Eurasia, and the ones that are turned out to be more useful. Rice, barley, wheat and flax are all Eurasian crops. The only major non-Eurasian crops are Maize and Bananas. The East-West orientation of Eurasia proved a major advantage here, because crops domesticated at one latitude could thrive right across the continent, while in Africa and the Americas crops could be successfully locally but were unable to move North/South because of different climates. In Australia there were zero indigenous candidate crops except the macadamia nut, which is slow growing and hard to grow reliably.
Finally, germs: The larger populations and large trade volume in Eurasia meant Europeans were immune to diseases that killed large numbers of native Americans when they arrived. It seems likely the only disease to go the other way was syphilis - which is a lot less contagious and kills a lot slower than smallpox and measles.
However, these factors do appear to provide sufficient non-race based evidence to explain the outcome. That's a reasonable way to read the claim that the book "debunks the idea that race was a factor in the development of modern societies".
> The very fact that you listed multiple factors admits that multiple factors may have combined to cause it. It could just as well have included race too.
Since the factors are based around geography, and race is also based around geography you sure would expect to see a correlation!
The explanations in the book give a causal link between geography and outcomes. There will be a large number of other factors correlated with that. A good example is "was beer drunk in country" - countries where beer was drunk were much more successful than countries where it wasn't. Race appears to be the same - dependant on geography, but not part of the causal chain of factors mentioned in the book.
I haven’t read the book, but my understanding is that racism did play a preferential factor in that an ethic group that achieved geopolitical dominance tended to impose sanctions on more economically primitive people both intentionally and unintentionally. An unintentional example was the case with 1000 years of exposure to many pandemics for Eurasian people that isolated people never experienced, but once exposed suddenly dwindled.
A more interesting comparison is European conquerors to civilizations of the Americas during the colonial era. The Aztecs were only conquered as a result of Spanish exploiting social unrest. They didn’t have the numbers themselves for their technological military advantage to matter, though that wasn’t the case with the Incas further south. Had the Incas developed metal working as advanced as their agricultural refinements they probably could have repelled the Spanish invasion. Conversely, the Spanish were never able to conquer or subdue the Maya communities around Mexico’s current southern border due to the environment, geography, and decentralization.
Chinese and European technology was roughly equivalent at the time, but the huge increase in economic activity by European states associated with colonisation gave them a lead that was impossible to reverse.
And yes, the book make it extremely clear how little race had with anything.
You rightly point out that there has been tremendous exploitation of (for instance) Africa by Europe, and that a lot of this exploitation has been justified by racism.
But separately from that, consider the question: why were Europeans able to do this to Africans in the first place?
If you asked question back in the Nazi regime, you'd probably get answers like, "Europeans are somehow inherently racially superior to Africans, and this superiority allowed them to become dominant."
Guns, Germs, and Steel lays out a different and detailed explanation. The author is quite aware of this history of racist explanations. He provides a competing theory, backed by considerable research and evidence. I found it quite good, but also very dry. :)
This is still very much true in our current non primordial "advanced" world.
another accident of history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homochirality#Symmetry_breakin...
"One supposition is that the discovery of an enantiomeric imbalance in molecules in the Murchison meteorite supports an extraterrestrial origin of homochirality: there is evidence for the existence of circularly polarized light originating from Mie scattering on aligned interstellar dust particles which may trigger the formation of an enantiomeric excess within chiral material in space.[11]:123–124 Interstellar and near-stellar magnetic fields can align dust particles in this fashion."
Take Conway’s game of Life as a cut-down example. It might not be obvious right at the start that many (most?) initial setups will produce gliders. But gliders aren’t a lucky accident, they’re fundamental. Anyone who applies the same rules will quickly discover gliders.
Are you thinking that there could be initial conditions that don’t produce gliders/molecules? Or that the underlying rules/laws might have been different, and not conducive to gliders/molecules? Both of those seem extremely speculative to me. The rules are as they are, and gliders and molecules are inevitable.
So yes I think there are certain initial conditions and rules that don't produce gliders/molecules, but that is only obvious either through simulation or hindsight. In the beginning, as a pundit, or a fly on the wall, it feels like there's everything to play for. So a weird thought experiment is if we could somehow contain a randomly-seeded, massively slowed down Big Bang and have modern day scientists (without recourse to modern knowledge) observe it. I imagine there'd be all kinds of theories, conversations, schools of thought, etc on which direction the universe would take.
So I think the point is that, in fact, we are observing a Big Bang! Just at a later stage. We're trying to understand what's happened and what will happen. A very prescient example of that is Fermi's Great Filter[1], ie does intelligent life necessarily destroy itself?
So perhaps I can summarise my original comment with the thought experiment of those scientists observing the impossibly contained early universe asking themselves in the same way we ask ourselves about the Great Filter, "are protons, neutrons and electrons, capable of stabilising into complex but harmonious structures?"
/s
East is "sunrise", south is "midday", west is "sunset" and north is "midnight". Context and grammatical case differentiate between midnight as time vs midnight as direction.
BTW this is why "decadent west" work so well in Russian propaganda. "Zapad" is west but also "sunset" or literally "falling [sun]".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%92ostre
The word Sun is related to South. North to night.
Otherwise not really.