Quotes About Progress

THE LIMITED USES and users of early writing suggest why writing appeared so late in human evolution.

If one defines "big" as "weighing over 100 pounds," then only 14 such species were domesticated before the twentieth century

This very unequal distribution of wild ancestral species among the continents became an important reason why Eurasians, rather than peoples of other continents, were the ones to end up with guns, germs, and steel.

We thereby know that states arose around 3700 B.C. in Mesopotamia and around 300 B.C. in Mesoamerica, over 2,000 years ago in the Andes, China, and Southeast Asia, and over 1,000 years ago in West Africa.

But big mammal domestication virtually ended 4,500 years ago. By then, all of the world's 148 candidate big species must have been tested innumerable times, with the result that only a few passed the test and no other suitable ones remained.

What is it that promotes an invention's acceptance by a society?

Who today remembers that gasoline, the fuel of modern civilization, originated as yet another invention in search of a use?

Without diffusion, fewer technologies are acquired, and more existing technologies are lost.

BECAUSE TECHNOLOGY BEGETS more technology, the importance of an invention's diffusion potentially exceeds the importance of the original invention.

Different rates of development on different continents, from 11,000 B.C. to A.D. 1500, were what led to the technological and political inequalities of A.D. 1500.

Perhaps the biggest of these unsolved problems is to establish human history as a historical science, on a par with recognized historical sciences such as evolutionary biology, geology, and climatology. The study of human history does pose real difficulties, but those recognized historical sciences encounter some of the same challenges. Hence the methods developed in some of these other fields may also prove useful in the field of human history.

A horizontal arrow indicates that the attribute varies between less and more complex societies of that type.

Thus, we can finally rephrase the question about the modern world's inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history's broadest pattern and my book's subject.

Hence the greatly increased life expectancy brought by modern medicine may have contributed to the recently accelerating pace of invention.

That contrast between the immediate virtues of wheat and barley and the difficulties posed by teosinte may have been a significant factor in the differing developments of New World and Eurasian human societies.

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

Only after about 20 years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music.

1) The availability of cheap slave labor in classical times supposedly discouraged innovation then, whereas high wages or labor scarcity now stimulate the search for technological solutions.

and went on to colonize the next island again. It was a hitherto unprecedented

1885 did engines improve to the point that Gottfried Daimler got around to installing one on a bicycle to create the first motorcycle;

he waited until 1896 to build the first truck.

Each year, the United States issues about 70,000 patents, only a few of which ultimately reach the stage of commercial production.

Until around A.D. 1450, China was technologically much more innovative and advanced than Europe, even more so than medieval Islam. The long list of Chinese inventions includes canal lock gates, cast iron, deep drilling, efficient animal harnesses, gunpowder, kites, magnetic compasses, movable type, paper, porcelain, printing (except for the Phaistos disk), sternpost rudders, and wheelbarrows. China then ceased to be innovative for reasons about which we shall speculate in the Epilogue.

Tasmanya'n?n Avrupal? kaÅŸiflerce MS 1642 y?l?nda ilk keÅŸfedildiÄŸi zamanki taÅŸ teknolojisi,Yukar? Avrupa'n?n on binlerce y?l önce Yontma TaÅŸ Ça??'ndaki teknolojisinden daha basitti.