Quotes About Progress

One reason why technology tends to catalyze itself is that advances depend upon previous mastery of simpler problems.

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them. Part

Larger populations mean more inventors and more competing societies.

diseases represent evolution in progress, and microbes adapt by natural selection to new hosts and vectors.

Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.

Why did history unfold differently on different continents?

IN SHORT, SOME COUNTRIES are much richer than are other countries. The reasons why are multiple and complicated. If you insist on a simple answer to this important question, you'll have to find some place in the universe to inhabit other than our planet Earth, where life is really complicated.

Descendants of those societies that achieved centralized government and organized religion earliest ended up dominating the modern world. The combination of government and religion has thus functioned, together with germs, writing, and technology, as one of the four main sets of proximate agents leading to history's broadest pattern.

technology was less advanced in western Europe than in any other "civilized" area of the Old World until the late Middle Ages.

For instance, the mass production of bronze tools, which was just beginning in the South American Andes in the centuries before A.D. 1500, was already established in parts of Eurasia over 4,000 years earlier.

Peoples of the Fertile Crescent domesticated local plants much earlier. They domesticated far more species, domesticated far more productive or valuable species, domesticated a much wider range of types of crops, developed intensified food production and dense human populations more rapidly, and as a result entered the modern world with more advanced technology, more complex political organization, and more epidemic diseases with which to infect other peoples.

One suggested function of the first gardens of nearly 11,000 years ago was to provide a reliable reserve larder as insurance in case wild food supplies failed.

food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel.

As a result of that confined distribution, peoples who pride themselves on being civilized have always viewed writing as the sharpest distinction raising them above "barbarians" or "savages.

Different peoples acquired food production at different times in prehistory.

My own impression, from having divided my life between United States cities and New Guinea villages, is that the so-called blessings of civilization are mixed. For example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span, but receive much less social support from friendships and extended families.

For instance, today almost all Japanese and Scandinavians are literate but most Iraqis are not: why did writing nevertheless arise nearly four thousand years earlier in Iraq?

Two million years ago, several proto-human lineages had coexisted side by side until a shake-up left only one. It now appears that a similar shake-up occurred within the last 60,000 years, and that all of us alive in the world today are descended from the winner of that upheaval. What was the last missing ingredient whose acquisition helped our ancestor to win?

Those nations are Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States.

averaged over many cases, leadership does tend to affect economic growth.

Benjamin Jones at Northwestern University and Benjamin Olken of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

On this voyage, you will witness the marvels that this city has brought the world. It

To really live a life in search of knowledge, you must admit when you are wrong.

Until you actually start making something, your brilliant idea is just that, an idea.