Europe's chronic disunity: 1000 AD – ?

Why, then, did the Fertile Crescent and China eventually lose their enormous leads of thousands of years to late-starting Europe? One can, of course, point to proximate factors behind Europe's rise: its development of a merchant class, capitalism, and patent protection for inventions, its failure to develop absolute despots and crushing taxation, and its Greco-Judeo-Christian tradition of critical empirical inquiry. Still, for all such proximate causes one must raise the question of ultimate cause: why did these proximate factors themselves arise in Europe, rather than in China or the Fertile Crescent?

For the Fertile Crescent, the answer is clear. Once it had lost the head start that it had enjoyed thanks to its locally available concentration of domesticable wild plants and animals, the Fertile Crescent possessed no further compelling geographic advantages…

Why did China also lose its lead? Its falling behind is initially surprising, because China enjoyed undoubted advantages: a rise of food production nearly as early as in the Fertile Crescent; ecological diversity from North to South China and from the coast to the high mountains of the Tibetan plateau, giving rise to a diverse set of crops, animals, and technology; a large and productive expanse, nourishing the largest regional human population in the world; and an environment less dry or ecologically fragile than the Fertile Crescent's, allowing China still to support productive intensive agriculture after nearly 10,000 years, though its environmental problems are increasing today and are more serious than western Europe's.

These advantages and head start enabled medieval China to lead the world in technology. The long list of its major technological firsts includes cast iron, the compass, gunpowder, paper, printing, and many others mentioned earlier. It also led the world in political power, navigation, and control of the seas. In the early 15th century it sent treasure fleets, each consisting of hundreds of ships up to 400 feet long and with total crews of up to 28,000, across the Indian Ocean as far as the east coast of Africa, decades before Columbus's three puny ships crossed the narrow Atlantic Ocean to the Americas' east coast. Why didn't Chinese ships proceed around Africa's southern cape westward and colonize Europe, before Vasco da Gama's own three puny ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope eastward and launched Europe's colonization of East Asia? Why didn't Chinese ships cross the Pacific to colonize the Americas' west coast? Why, in brief, did China lose its technological lead to the formerly so backward Europe?

The end of China's treasure fleets gives us a clue. Seven of those fleets sailed from China between A.D. 1405 and 1433. They were then suspended as a result of a typical aberration of local politics that could happen anywhere in the world: a power struggle between two factions at the Chinese court (the eunuchs and their opponents). The former faction had been identified with sending and captaining the fleets. Hence when the latter faction gained the upper hand in a power struggle, it stopped sending fleets, eventually dismantled the shipyards, and forbade oceangoing shipping. The episode is reminiscent of the legislation that strangled development of public electric lighting in London in the 1880s, the isolationism of the United States between the First and Second World Wars, and any number of backward steps in any number of countries, all motivated by local political issues. But in China there was a difference, because the entire region was politically unified. One decision stopped fleets over the whole of China. That one temporary decision became irreversible, because no shipyards remained to turn out ships that would prove the folly of that temporary decision, and to serve as a focus for rebuilding other shipyards.

Now contrast those events in China with what happened when fleets of exploration began to sail from politically fragmented Europe. Christopher Columbus, an Italian by birth, switched his allegiance to the duke of Anjou in France, then to the king of Portugal. When the latter refused his request for ships in which to explore westward, Columbus turned to the duke of Medina-Sedonia, who also refused, then to the count of Medina-Celt, who did likewise, and finally to the king and queen of Spain, who denied Columbus's first request but eventually granted his renewed appeal. Had Europe been united under any one of the first three rulers, its colonization of the Americas might have been stillborn.

In fact, precisely because Europe was fragmented, Columbus succeeded on his fifth try in persuading one of Europe's hundreds of princes to sponsor him. Once Spain had thus launched the European colonization of America, other European states saw the wealth flowing into Spain, and six more joined in colonizing America. The story was the same with Europe's cannon, electric lighting, printing, small firearms, and innumerable other innovations: each was at first neglected or opposed in some parts of Europe for idiosyncratic reasons, but once adopted in one area, it eventually spread to the rest of Europe.

These consequences of Europe's disunity stand in sharp contrast to those of China's unity. From time to time the Chinese court decided to halt other activities besides overseas navigation: it abandoned development of an elaborate water-driven spinning machine, stepped back from the verge of an industrial revolution in the 14th century, demolished or virtually abolished mechanical clocks after leading the world in clock construction, and retreated from mechanical devices and technology in general after the late 15th century. Those potentially harmful effects of unity have flared up again in modern China, notably during the madness of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, when a decision by one or a few leaders closed the whole country's school systems for five years.

China's frequent unity and Europe's perpetual disunity both have a long history. The most productive areas of modern China were politically joined for the first time in 221 B.C. and have remained so for most of the time since then. China has had only a single writing system from the beginnings of literacy, a single dominant language for a long time, and substantial cultural unity for two thousand years. In contrast, Europe has never come remotely close to political unification: it was still splintered into 1,000 independent statelets in the 14th century, into 500 statelets in A.D. 1500, got down to a minimum of 25 states in the 1980s, and is now up again to nearly 40 at the moment that I write this sentence. Europe still has 45 languages, each with its own modified alphabet, and even greater cultural diversity. The disagreements that continue today to frustrate even modest attempts at European unification through the European Economic Community (EEC) are symptomatic of Europe's ingrained commitment to disunity.

Hence the real problem in understanding China's loss of political and technological preeminence to Europe is to understand China's chronic unity and Europe's chronic disunity. The answer is again suggested by maps (see Backmatter). Europe has a highly indented coastline, with five large peninsulas that approach islands in their isolation, and all of which evolved independent languages, ethnic groups, and governments: Greece, Italy, Iberia, Denmark, and Norway / Sweden. China’s coastline is much smoother, and only the nearby Korean Peninsula attained separate importance. Europe has two islands (Britain and Ireland) sufficiently big to assert their political independence and to maintain their own languages and ethnicities, and one of them (Britain) big and close enough to become a major independent European power. But even China’s two largest islands, Taiwan and Hainan, have each less than half the area of Ireland; neither was a major independent power until Taiwan’s emergence in recent decades; and Japan’s geographic isolation kept it until recently much more isolated politically from the Asian mainland than Britain has been from mainland Europe.

Europe is carved up into independent linguistic, ethnic, and political units by high mountains (the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, and Norwegian border mountains), while China’s mountains east of the Tibetan plateau are much less formidable barriers. China’s heartland is bound together from east to west by two long navigable river systems in rich alluvial valleys (the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers), and it is joined from north to south by relatively easy connections between these two river systems (eventually linked by canals). As a result, China very early became dominated by two huge geographic core areas of high productivity, themselves only weakly separated from each other and eventually fused into a single core. Europe’s two biggest rivers, the Rhine and Danube, are smaller and connect much less of Europe. Unlike China, Europe has many scattered small core areas, none big enough to dominate the others for long, and each the center of chronically independent states.

Once China was finally unified, in 221 B.C., no other independent state ever had a chance of arising and persisting for long in China. Although periods of disunity returned several times after 221 B.C., they always ended in reunification. But the unification of Europe has resisted the efforts of such determined conquerors as Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Hitler; even the Roman Empire at its peak never controlled more than half of Europe’s area.

Thus, geographic connectedness and only modest internal barriers gave China an initial advantage. North China, South China, the coast, and the interior contributed different crops, livestock, technologies, and cultural features to the eventually unified China. For example, millet cultivation, bronze technology, and writing arose in North China, while rice cultivation and cast-iron technology emerged in South China. For much of this book I have emphasized the diffusion of technology that takes place in the absence of formidable barriers. But China’s connectedness eventually became a disadvantage, because a decision by one despot could and repeatedly did halt innovation. In contrast, Europe’s geographic balkanization resulted in dozens or hundreds of independent, competing statelets and centers of innovation. If one state did not pursue some particular innovation, another did, forcing neighboring states to do likewise or else be conquered or left economically behind. Europe’s barriers were sufficient to prevent political unification, but insufficient to halt the spread of technology and ideas. There has never been one despot who could turn off the tap for all of Europe, as of China.

These comparisons suggest that geographic connectedness has exerted both positive and negative effects on the evolution of technology. As a result, in the very long run, technology may have developed most rapidly in regions with moderate connectedness, neither too high nor too low. Technology’s course over the last 1,000 years in China, Europe, and possibly the Indian subcontinent exemplifies those net effects of high, moderate, and low connectedness, respectively.
– Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel.

Any similarity to actual people or events in current Europe is purely coincidental. Via the Cartoteca, the clip “Epic time-lapse map of Europe” was made by Till Nagel with Centennia Historical Atlas.

What new thing under the sun you're planning to work on now?

I sometimes dream of situations that can't possibly come true. I audaciously imagine, for example, that I get a chance to chat with the Ecclesiastes, the author of that moving lament on the vanity of all human endeavors. I would bow very deeply before him, because he is, after all, one of the greatest poets, for me at least.

That done, I would grab his hand. “'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun. And the poem you created is also new under the sun, since no one wrote it down before you. And all your readers are also new under the sun, since those who lived before you couldn't read your poem. And that cypress that you're sitting under hasn't been growing since the dawn of time. It came into being by way of another cypress similar to yours, but not exactly the same. And Ecclesiastes, I'd also like to ask you what new thing under the sun you're planning to work on now? A further supplement to the thoughts you've already expressed? Or maybe you're tempted to contradict some of them now? In your earlier work you mentioned joy - so what if it's fleeting? So maybe your new-under-the-sun poem will be about joy? Have you taken notes yet, do you have drafts? I doubt you'll say, 'I've written everything down, I've got nothing left to add.' There's no poet in the world who can say this, least of all a great poet like yourself.”
– Wislawa Szymborska.

I have been struggling with Ecclesiastes for several years (my previous blog was in fact once called “Something new under the sun”), and I can tell Wislawa Szymborska's 1996 Nobel Lecture is one of the most compelling arguments I have read against the “there's nothing new under the sun's philosophy” that, maybe unwittingly but unavoidably, belittles the value of innovation.

Notwithstanding, I remain yet to be thoroughly convinced, and I believe Ecclesiastes' reasoning withholds strong (hence the change of hearth reflected also in the change of my previous blog's name) despite its obvious implications for innovation's advocacy and policy.

Growing gap between Latin America and Asia patent registrations

New figures from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show that Asian countries increased their number of patent registrations by 73 percent over the past 10 years, while Latin American countries increased their registrations by only 34 percent.

In overall numbers, the gap is staggering: Asian countries registered 76,000 patents of new products in the United States in 2011, while all Latin American countries together registered only 500 patents in the same year.

South Korea, a country that five decades ago was poorer than virtually all Latin American countries, registered 13,000 patents last year in the United States, compared with Brazil's 230, Mexico's 115, and Argentina's 50, according to the U.S. figures. The U.S. figures are considered a key indicator in the world scientific community because they tend to match trends of foreign patent registrations in Europe, Japan and other major markets.
– Andres Oppenheimer.

Andres Oppenheimer for Nola. Among five reasons proposed by Oppenheimer that could explain the gap in patent registration between Asian and Latin American countries, he blames scarce research carried by private companies in Latin American and the focus of its universities in producing more graduates in social sciences and humanities as two of these reasons.

A sixth reason can be proposed: the believe by Latin American governments that net growth, not relative growth in the international system, is the adequate way of measuring technology development such as patent registration. Indeed, Latin American patent registration rate is higher today than it was a decade ago. However, that doesn't matter as much as relative growth when compared to other countries (Gapminder), given that in reality Latin American and Asian companies are going to compete in the global market at the same time.

There is a net economic value in patents – its nominal value if they are sold –, however the real value of patents rests in ensuring effective deterrence or the likelihood of success on litigation if it can be avoided. Assuming the quality of patents is equally distributed – an important if, but a reasonable assumption among developing countries –, then quantity will dictate the winner among a struggle between two companies in the global market, and this pattern will eventually be reflected too between the countries those companies are from.

Iran's nuclear “skirmish”

Like three previous Iranian scientists ambushed on their morning commute, the latest nuclear expert to die on his way to work was a victim of Israel's Mossad, Western intelligence sources tell TIME. Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, an expert on a phase of uranium enrichment, perished on a Tehran street on Wednesday after an assassin in a passing motorcycle attached a magnetized explosive to the side of his Peugeot 405. "Yeah, one more," a senior Israeli official said with a smile. "I don't feel sad for him."

Wednesday's attack followed the pattern of previous operations planned by Mossad and carried out over the past two years by Iranians trained and paid by Israel's spy agency, according to intelligence sources. The targets were chosen from the ranks of scientists seen as crucial to Iran's nuclear effort — the country's top physicist, Majid Shahriari, was killed by a magnetized bomb in October 2010 — then shadowed for weeks to determine their routines and points of vulnerability.
– Karl Vick and Aaron J. Klein.

Karl Vick and Aaron J. Klein for Time reporting on the death of a Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan on January 11. Add this incident to the ongoing technological arms race between Iran, Israel and the US, specially in the last two years: the killing of nuclear physicist Majid Shahriari and several others; the hack attacks aimed at Iran's nuclear centrifuges; as well as the allegedly hijacked US stealth drone by Iran using a GPS exploit.

Iran also accuses the CIA of being involved in Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan's death, despite the U.S. denying any role in the assassination. Whichever the truth, giving the high stakes in game it has become clear that at least one party involved sees killing scientists as a case were the end justifies the means.

The first comprehensive record in history

Say what you want about privacy, it's remarkable that this is going to be the first generation in history to leave a comprehensive record behind. Not only our records are richer, including photos, audio and video; we are recording everything possible to us, from major events such as elections and wars, to everyday life and common people opinions. Even sensible leaked information. It will be a a breakthrough in history, much like writing and printing were.
– Marfil.

A reflection on the social networks wars, likely spurred by a sense of defeat to Google's recent policy on Google+.

Spain Science Ministry cut

Spain's ministry of science is the latest casualty of changes to the country’s government. Mariano Rajoy, leader of the newly elected right-wing People's Party that took over last month, pledged to reduce the number of ministries from 15 to 12 to save money and improve governance. Responsibility for science and research will now fall to the minister of economy and competition, Luis de Guindos.

Carlos Andradas, president of the Confederation of Spanish Scientific Societies (COSCE), warns that the change of government “should not imply a break or a downgrading in promoting scientific research”. Scientific organizations including COSCE are urging the new government to apply the science law passed in May. “A strong, independent state research agency should be implemented to allow continuity in science policy beyond political changes,” says Andradas.
– Michele Catanzaro.

Michele Catanzaro for Nature, reporting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's decision of cutting the short lived Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (2008 – 2011).

The consensus among spaniards researchers seems to be that this decision represents a symptom, rather than the cause, of an already weakened support to R&D in the country. Furthermore, while is truth that a successful science policy doesn't necessarily require a ministry, Spain's government has yet to address in a straightforward manner the issue of how the Ministry of Economy is going to carry on the functions previously carried by the Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Thoughts on maps

It wasn’t surprising that rural people had little understanding of maps, but this was also true for educated Chinese. Even professional drivers with years of experience could be hopelessly confused by a simple atlas. Maps simply aren’t part of modern culture, despite the fact that the Chinese have an impressive ancient history of cartography. The earliest known maps date to the second century BC; these documents are printed on silk and were excavated from tombs in Hunan Province. They are contemporary with the maps of ancient Greeks and Romans, and the Chinese diagrams are technically quite advanced. They were developed for use by military and government, and they are abstract, viewing landscapes as if from above. The sense of scale is remarkably good. They use consistent symbols for key features, and they show rivers getting progressively wider downstream—a critical detail for any army commander who needed to stage a troop crossing. By the third century AD, an official named Pei Xiu outlined many principles of surveying and mapmaking, and the Chinese had a good technical foundation for cartography.

These early Chinese maps were well drawn, but the fundamental approach was narrowly practical rather than scientific. In ancient Greece, cartography developed out of astronomy, as people applied principles from tracking the stars. This is how Western thinkers came up with the concepts of longitude and latitude, which were missing from ancient Chinese cartography. And over the centuries the Chinese began to ignore even Pei Xiu’s guidelines, until maps became less analytical and more descriptive. They relied heavily on words rather than symbols. Landscapes were warped to emphasize whatever happened to be of prime interest. On Ming maps of the Great Wall, for example, huge towers loom atop steep cartoonish peaks, whereas the surroundings lack detail or scale. These diagrams represent a step backward from what the Chinese had been doing sixteen centuries earlier.

There are a number of reasons why cartography developed in this manner, and the most important factor was a lack of government interest in exploration and trade. Chinese emperors rarely encouraged expeditions, and officials traditionally disdained the merchant class. In contrast, the greatest advances in European and Arabic cartography were tied to trade. During the thirteenth century AD, the introduction of the compass—originally a Chinese invention—allowed merchants to create meticulously detailed charts of the Mediterranean. Two hundred years later, as the Portuguese tried to open southern trade routes, they mapped the coast of Africa with remarkable accuracy. This project depended on both government and private merchants—Portuguese princes coordinated the surveying efforts of traders, until finally they created a diagram of the African coastline.

But there weren’t any equivalent breakthroughs in Chinese cartography, which developed out of very different motivations. In ancient China, maps served military needs, and the army had little incentive to create detailed diagrams of the interior and the coastline. Wars tended to be fought in the north and the west, in the regions of the Great Wall, where geography is vast and often featureless. For an army in such a landscape, specific points matter more than context, and Chinese maps usually focused on key passes or important forts. In the end, any map describes not only a region but also the key interests of the mapmakers themselves. During the same century that the Portuguese were trying to access the gold trade of East Africa, the Ming dynasty was protecting itself against northern nomads, and these very different goals created very different schematic views of the world.
– Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory.

Great book by Peter Hessler, an American journalist who drove around China – a lot of it, from Inner Mongolia to the Tibetan plateau, and more following the Great Wall – from 2001 to 2007 and wrote about the fast and constant changes in modern China.

In one passage he gets lost, a frequent occurrence in the book, and while he reflects on how to get back on the road, he builds momentum to expose one of the deepest, yet seemingly obvious, reckonings on the epistemology of cartography:

In the end, any map describes not only a region but also the key interests of the mapmakers themselves… and they create very different schematic views of the world.
– Peter Hessler.

On a slightly related note: Do not miss Edushi's isometric maps of China major cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, as well as other small and lesser known cities.

All people are good people

For all its apolitical, joyful, empty headed zaniness and experimentation, Community is a passionately humanitarian show. Its only religious and political point of view is that all people are good people, and while we often play the roles of villains and stereotypes to each other, it is always an illusion, shattered quickly by the briefest moment of honest connection.
– Dan Harmon.

Not only Community is a great show, but after last week letter addressing some critics of the show for its cliche portrayal of gay people, its creator, Dan Harmon, has earned my genuine admiration.

Shake-up time for Japanese seismology

It is time to tell the public frankly that earthquakes cannot be predicted, to scrap the Tokai prediction system and to repeal the Large-Scale Earthquake Countermeasures Act of 1978. All of Japan is at risk from earthquakes, and the present state of seismological science does not allow us to reliably differentiate the risk level in particular geographic areas. We should instead tell the public and the government to ‘pre- pare for the unexpected’ and do our best to communicate both what we know and what we do not. And future basic research in seismology must be soundly based on physics, impartially reviewed, and be led by Japan’s top scientists rather than by faceless bureaucrats.
– Robert J. Geller.

Robert J. Geller advice after March earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific coast of the Tohoku district, an area that the Japanese government had deemed of relative low risk for 30 years. The hypothesis was that zones where no large earthquakes had occurred for a while were were more likely to experience a big one sooner. However, since 1979, earthquakes that caused 10 or more fatalities in Japan actually occurred in places assigned a relatively low probability.

Robert J. Geller advice is actually very similar to Richard Feynman's famous conclusion to his report on the shuttle Challenger accident, “for a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

I kind of divide the world into two groups

Sir Ken Robinson, a leading expert on innovation and human resources, picks up from last time 2006 TED talk, and discuss our current crisis of human resources in a very anew TED talk. So, as he was saying…

I believe, fundamentally, as many speakers have said during the past few days, that we make very poor use of our talents. Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. I meet all kinds of people who don't think they're really good at anything.

Actually, I kind of divide the world into two groups now. Jeremy Bentham, the great utilitarian philosopher, once spiked this argument. He said, "There are two types of people in this world, those who divide the world into two types and those who do not." Well, I do.

I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do. They simply go through their lives getting on with it. They get no great pleasure from what they do. They endure it, rather than enjoy it, and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else. If you said to them, "Don't do this anymore," they'd wonder what you were talking about. Because it isn't what they do, it's who they are. They say, "But this is me, you know. It would be foolish for me to abandon this, because it speaks to my most authentic self." And it's not true of enough people. In fact, on the contrary, I think it's certainly a minority of people. I think there are many possible explanations for it. And high among them is education, because education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents.

Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them. They're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine education would be the way that happens. But too often, it's not. Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment. And it's not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that's simply improving a broken model. What we need is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else.
– Sir Ken Robinson.