GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

THE FUTURE OF HUMAN HISTORY AS A SCIENCE • 417
smaller-scale and shorter-term patterns of history, as well as to history's
broadest pattern.
The histories of the Fertile Crescent and China also hold a salutary
lesson for the modern world: circumstances change, and past primacy is
no guarantee of future primacy. One might even wonder whether the geographical
reasoning employed throughout this book has at last become
wholly irrelevant in the modern world, now that ideas diffuse everywhere
instantly on the Internet and cargo is routinely airfreighted overnight
between continents. It might seem that entirely new rules apply to competition
between the world's peoples, and that as a result new powers are
emerging—such as Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, and especially Japan.
On reflection, though, we see that the supposedly new rules are just
variations on the old ones. Yes, the transistor, invented at Bell Labs in the
eastern United States in 1947, leapt 8,000 miles to launch an electronics
industry in Japan—but it did not make the shorter leap to found new
industries in Zaire or Paraguay. The nations rising to new power are still
ones that were incorporated thousands of years ago into the old centers of
dominance based on food production, or that have been repopulated by
peoples from those centers. Unlike Zaire or Paraguay, Japan and the other
new powers were able to exploit the transistor quickly because their populations
already had a long history of literacy, metal machinery, and centralized
government. The world's two earliest centers of food production, the
Fertile Crescent and China, still dominate the modern world, either
through their immediate successor states (modern China), or through
states situated in neighboring regions influenced early by those two centers
(Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Europe), or through states repopulated or
ruled by their overseas emigrants (the United States, Australia, Brazil).
Prospects for world dominance of sub-Saharan Africans, Aboriginal Australians,
and Native Americans remain dim. The hand of history's course
at 8000 B.C. lies heavily on us.
AMONG OTHER FACTORS relevant to answering Yali's question, cultural
factors and influences of individual people loom large. To take the
former first, human cultural traits vary greatly around the world. Some of
that cultural variation is no doubt a product of environmental variation,
and I have discussed many examples in this book. But an important ques-