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Comment by floatrock | Hacker News Reader

I mean, sure, if you assume settlement and development patterns in both hemispheres had equal probability to develop a need for standardized mechanized time keeping.

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. :)

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There's a very simple explanation for why most of human history happens in the northern hemisphere.

Take a look at a map.

Notice which hemisphere has 70% of the land.

Just because you can guess at a simple reason doesn't make it true. Nobody in most of that land ever invented a sundial. Something special happened around the middle east/Europe that spawned all this civilization stuff. How do you know it was simply a matter of more land leading to more chance of civilization appearing there? It might have taken a special type of land combined with a special history of human migration or other factors.

In general the hemisphere with more land likely has more land fulfilling any particular properties that are not inherent to the distinction, and we do know that humans are terrestrial. So ceteris paribus, "might have taken a special type of land combined with a special history of human migration or other factors" is more or less a matter of more land leading to more chance.

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.

It's too simple to be interesting. You could obviously divide up the world into some other halves where the half with less land ended up with the sundials and say "even though it predicts the wrong outcome, this explanation is obviously right."

That's the point. It is an explanation reduced enough to suggest that the phenomenon is not particularly interesting.

Other arbitrary divisions don't have the sundial property that north and south have.

> How do you know it was simply a matter of more land leading to more chance of civilization appearing there?

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.

More land _and_ due to current orbital geometry, north hemisphere summers are not as hot and winters not as cold as in the southern hemisphere.

> 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.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

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.

The book suggests Europe had the biggest head start followed by Asia due to geography and plant and animal species, with races being completely irrelevant.

From memory (and it's probably 15 years since I read it) I seem to remember that the argument for European domination as opposed to Asian was because the European landmass favoured smaller city states. That in turn allowed them to avoid the critical mistake of the isolationist Chinese policy of the Ming dynasty right at the moment the European states were beginning to colonise.

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.

I am not claiming race is a developmental or preferential factor but instead was an imposed factor in the consequences of one group achieving dominance comparative to another. National groups were still most strictly ethnically homogenous at that point and frequently used that as a point of identity. I also don’t think comparing European groups to East Asian groups is productive in this context because both were well connected and technologically similar at the point of colonialism. Better comparisons would be European groups to Pacific Islanders of the same colonial period who were often highly isolated aside from immediate neighbors.

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.

I think you're slightly confused about the kind of racism being discussed.

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. :)

> the less you have to think about surviving the more you can think about improving your life.

This is still very much true in our current non primordial "advanced" world.

I wonder at what threshold from between being born into poverty / riches that this reverses due to a lack of the same pressing motivation. Or if that's even the case.

I would say that my comment applies at the aggregate level, not the individual level. Its about how the environment people operate in increases or decreases their odds of advancement.

I have read the book: it explicitly and thoroughly debunks the idea that race was a factor in the development of modern societies. It provides a myriad of geographical and climate-based explanations why the course of history would result societies in the northern hemisphere set the direction of clocks for the globe.

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.

How does it show that race differences weren't a factor? Not how does it show that other factors existed, but how does it exclude race?

It shows that other explanations are sufficient and make much more sense. But it's a historical explanation, not a double blind experiment.

Nothing will ever disprove "scientific racism" to people who are racist unfortunately.

That's not a rigorous answer which is possibly why you felt the need to play the racism card at the end.

There's no way to make a rigorous (to the "prove" level) argument from history on racism (or most social issues) because it relies on counter-factuals. Counter-factuals are inherently untestable.

Thanks for getting back to me. I don't know that the assertions of cause and effect made in that book can be asserted any more confidently than racist ones. Nature doesn't care about our feelings.

Have you actually read the book? There's nothing about feelings in it, and some of the arguments can be stated as irrefutable facts:

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.

Nothing in there even suggests that race wasn't a factor. 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.

I'll just refer you to my previous comment: There's no way to make a rigorous (to the "prove" level) argument from history on racism.

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.

Then Leifcarrotson's claim that it "it explicitly and thoroughly debunks the idea that race was a factor" is false. Just because something agrees with your prejudice doesn't make it a good argument. It just means it feels satisfying to believe it.

As Wikipedia puts it, the academic reaction to the book was "mixed".

> I have read the book: it explicitly and thoroughly debunks the idea that race was a factor in the development of modern societies. It provides a myriad of geographical and climate-based explanations why the course of history would result societies in the northern hemisphere set the direction of clocks for the globe.

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.

I mean, it doesn't take more than a model where the same area of landmass anywhere on the globe has the same chance of birhting a civilization with a need for clocks, for the northern hemisphere to become the most likely candidate to do so simply by virtue of having much more landmass than the southern hemisphere.

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