Another one, popular with inhabitants of northern Europe, invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland’s cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human...
1) Risk-taking behavior, essential for efforts at innovation, is more widespread in some societies than in others. (2) The scientific outlook is a unique feature of post-Renaissance European society t...
Proposed as appropriate compensation. This reminds me
When you have seen the errors in which you live, you will understand the good that we have done you by coming to your land by order of his Majesty the King of Spain. Our Lord permitted that your pride...
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 al...
The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.
The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau speculated that states are formed by a social contract, a rational decision reached when people calculated their self-interest, came to the agreement that...
One of the conclusions that we saw emerging from our discussion of Maya kings, Greenland Norse chieftains, and Easter Island chiefs is that, in the long run, rich people do not secure their own intere...
Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world's actual food producers, aren't necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers. Time budget studies show that they may sp...
Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenla...
For example, the great Italian Jewish author Primo Levi, who did survive Auschwitz, said afterwards, The experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away whatever legacies of my religious educ...
Each year, the United States issues about 70,000 patents, only a few of which ultimately reach the stage of commercial production.
Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalized religion brings two other important benefits to centralized societies. First, shared ideology or religion helps solve the pr...
We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.
Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive a...
The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.
People with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A.
Four suggested explanations are ideological, rather than economic or organizational: (1) Risk-taking behavior, essential for efforts at innovation, is more widespread in some societies than in others....
Explanation of causes
Yes, world history is indeed such an onion!