My head is full of big history questions after spending two days at a related workshop. How did humanity become so influential and powerful? Apparently we found a growth groove that let us keep on accumulating power-enhancing innovations. But what key features make this growth groove possible?
It's the mechanisms for coordinating dispersed activities to new spatial and temporal scales that put limits on exponential growth. Occasionally, new ones get introduced and new scales become feasible.
Yes, Robin, I am saying that we are not influential and powerful. We can observe that there are many more of us than several thousand years ago and that we have made a lot of things. Past that we are confined by our own point of view. Influence and power are normative and your question presumes human norms for a world that is much more than that.
Will Pearson wrote:"How many competitors did china have? I'm thinking that the push from the rulers for better military and naval technology could have kick started the IR by creating specialists and improving ships and metal working techniques on a large scale."
nick szabo wrote:"(2) China never controlled the world's oceans and merchant marine, but the British just prior and during its IR did. If this explains the IR, then to explain our explanation (i.e. why did Brtain come to control the world's ocean-going trade) we have to step back and solve the even more puzzling question of how a tiny country of fishing-folk, Portugal, and not an advanced superpower like China, was the first country to take over most of the world's oceanic trade routes (later to be beaten back by other Western European countries and eventually Great Britain)."
One of the most important episodes for people interested in the Industrial Revolution & China are the famous voyages of Zheng He they demonstrate that China had seafaring ability on the order of Portugal or Britain, and long before them. The executive summary for those not already familiar with Zheng He: he lead expeditions of dozens/hundreds of truly enormous junks all over East Asia and the Indian Ocean, trading and fighting, in the early 1400s; the expeditions were ended by imperial fiat.
In particular, it's worth noting that the Chinese had already developed the compass and techniques like water-tight compartments. This was in the earlier Song dynasty; the Songs were fighting the incursing Mongols, and their navy was one of their key advantages, so they sponsored and generally supported naval innovation.
Given this, 'lack of competition' is a viable explanation for why naval expeditions & technology stagnated or were abandoned in the later Ming.
Robin, like everybody else I'm just making hopefully informed guesses, but Clark gives a good graph of the rise in literacy in England in the 16th-19th centuries. It's a fairly steady rise. During this period manufacturing productivity was increasing at about the same rate as it was during the IR. The exponential growth in manufacturing productivity in Western Europe dates to at least 16th century and probably earlier, starting from the very low level of the depths of the Dark Ages in the 9th century. The increase in literacy had been steady since the introduction of paper in Europe and got new energy and reached much higher levels because of the spread of printed books.
So part of my explanation (based on Clarks' data) is that the IR was much less of a "spurt" than commonly believed -- it was mainly just a long-standing exponential trend becoming the largest percentage of the economy. The rate of growth in that productivity, and in agricultural productivity that allowed manufacturing to come to dominate the economy, was higher than China due to a faster growth of literacy and growth of that literacy to a much higher percent of the population -- of which literacy the rise of science, the engineering profession, some of the legal and political changes, etc. were effects.
It's as if electronics became the dominant sector of our economy such that economic growth was dominated by Moore's Law, because we became satiated with our service sector (analogous to the fact that we only need so much food, so the agricultural sector was able to drop as a percent of the economy as Great Britain started to violate Malthusian limits). I don't expect that to happen for a variety of reasons, but if it did, and if it were fully monetized (i.e. inernalized into the measurable economy), we'd see our GDP doubling every two years. At some point it would look like an economic revolution is happening as Moore's law came to dominate the economy, but the actual reason would be just a long-standing trend not a revolution in the specific decade when electronics came to dominate the economy. (I've just been reading your 1998 paper on exponential trends. Ah, the Internet Bubble, those were heady days. :-)
Robin: "Steve, are you postulating specific genetic innovations at the key 10KBC and 1800 dates?"
More accurately: the rapid spread of specific genetic innovations.
With that caveat: In the centuries leading up to those lift-off dates, yes--with a concurrent/resultant exponential leap.
As an example: Cochran and Harpending posit strong selection for intelligence among a particular genetically and professionally isolated European group during the late middle ages/early renaissance. Since I am one-half Ashkenazi Jew and hence am likely to be biased, I hesitate to give any endorsement for this view.
bill, population and tech encouraging each other has been constant all along, so this can't explain sudden spurts.
Tim, some hunter gatherers lived in large dense communities. Printing showed up long before the industrial revolution.
Lord, if the energy was always there, that doesn't explain why particular things happened at particular times.
gwern, yes the growth groove game is hard.
Juilian, unless you think brain plasticity showed up about 10KBC, I don't see how it explains the timing.
bysl, black swans are not mystical causes beyond science; once you see them you can usually understand them - the hard part is to foresee them.
snuff, I don't see the prey to predator transition explaining the timing, unless you think it happened over a million years ago.
Brian, are you saying we are not influential and powerful?
nick, do you have specific delay effects in mind, or are you just guessing there might be some, since the effects you focus on appeared centuries before the industrial revolution?
Steve, are you postulating specific genetic innovations at the key 10KBC and 1800 dates?
It seems likely to me that recent genetic evolution is a--perhaps the--key factor in the growth of human influence and power. (Nick is quite right to point to Cochran and Harpending, if only glancingly.) But it's a factor that we don't yet know enough about to draw firm conclusions from.
We can say with a great deal of confidence that the emergence and spread of lactose tolerance was a strong contributor to the rise of humans. But the temperamental and behavioral changes are much harder to tease out.
Did Hamlet's (decidedly Elizabethan/early modern) character vary so greatly from his father's (decidedly 10th-century, Viking-like) character for genetic reasons? Is that genetic change on display there?
gwern is on the money in saying that (a) explaining the IR is hard, and (b)the explanation has to include something that China didn't have much sooner.
Indeed, the most important thing in this area is to be aware of enough of those kinds of facts and common sense that you can eliminate theories that should obviously be wrong. For example, be aware that hunter-gatherers were experts on botany and animal behavior. It's not plausible that the simple ideas that seeds can grow into plants that you can eat later, or that you can keep an animal tied or penned up and eat it later, were not discovered and known countless times during the c. 100,000 years between when our brains became modern-sized and agriculture developed. There has to have been some major barrier to benefitting from such obvious ideas to have kept agriculture from developing far sooner. I also don't find genetics plausible as a cause of agriculture, since agriculture ended up spreading to a very large number of human groups that had become genetically isolated long before the dawn of agriculture. (Genetic evolution cause _by_ agriculture is another story -- Cochran and Harpending have some ideas very much worth thinking about). Also not plausible are climate explanations -- there were many local climates hospitable to agriculture throughout those 100,000 years -- just not necessarily at Mediterranean or higher lattitudes.
That said, going back to the IR there a number of likely-to-firm differences between China and Western Europe (or Great Britain in particular):
(1) Differences in political and legal culture. What differences, specifically, it's hard to say, because there is very little about, for example, Sung or Ming dynasty commercial law that has been translated into English: far too little to compare to English law in the 18th century, for example. We know some very general things, such as that Western Europe was (and still is) a far more legalistic culture than China. Also, we know that Western Europe (contrary to Clark's claim) radically changed its property law between the 16th and 19th centuries, from a fuedal model of of hierarchy of tenures and bundled political property rights to a model based on old Roman law with flattened and purely economic ownership. There ensued movements such as the enclosure movement in England and an accompanying large increase in capital investments in land. But we don't know when or to what extent similar incentives to capital investment might have been present or missing in China.
(2) China never controlled the world's oceans and merchant marine, but the British just prior and during its IR did. If this explains the IR, then to explain our explanation (i.e. why did Brtain come to control the world's ocean-going trade) we have to step back and solve the even more puzzling question of how a tiny country of fishing-folk, Portugal, and not an advanced superpower like China, was the first country to take over most of the world's oceanic trade routes (later to be beaten back by other Western European countries and eventually Great Britain).
(3) China had the printing press, but in contrast to Western Europe it did not lead to a rapid growth in literacy sustained over several centuries -- perhaps because of bureaucratic central control rather than the free-enterprise printing businesses that sprung up all over Western Europe, perhaps because the much greater number of symbols did not as efficiently lend itself to printing, or a combination of these two factors.
Other interesting related phenomenon to explain, (and it would be nice per Occam's Razor if it was the same general explanation, but social life is rarely that simple) is why Japan industrialized well in advance of China and Britain was a fuew decades ahead of the rest of Western Europe during most of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century.
Robin: "If you wanted to attribute the industrial revolution to writing, you'd have to explain why there was a strong threshold effect, so that pre-1800 writing levels had weak growth rate effects, while post-1800 writing levels had strong effects."
Besides strong threshold effects, there could be delay effects: for example, the the rapid growth of books and literacy after the mid-15th century in Western Europe gave rise to a slow but accelerating series of innovations (most obviously scientific and technological advances, but perhaps also innovations in business or law), which in turn gave rise to the IR (and happened in England rather than other parts of Western Europe for orthogonal reasons).
For Peter Drucker's view: See Introduction: The Transformation and chapter 1 (From Capitalism to Knowledge Society) of Post-Capitalist Society (http://is.gd/B1Bt). Please be sure to view the entire page.
You start with, "How did humanity become so influential and powerful?" Then proceed with an interesting example of confirmation bias. What even prompts the question?
"You're forgetting something -- our planet has ready-made sources of chemical energy. It's hard to imagine how a civilization could get off the ground without wood, coal, natural gas, petroleum, &c. It wouldn't be possible to invent other forms of energy production without using them first. We got lucky."Actually, since we're based on oxygen combustion the fact that there was readily accessible chemical energy would fall more under the anthropic principle.Even further, though, it's very hard to imagine a complex system replicative like DNA developing under the conditions of any system of really high energy (fusion, for example). This may mean that all life probably has its origins in environments of relatively abundant chemical energy. Which shouldn't be controversial - not stars, and not ice worlds.
Go read 'Man the Hunted' by Sussman and Hart, a primatologist and paleontologist. They discuss early human adaptation as the byproduct of a past where we were hunted without mercy during the night by apex-predators (to which we eventually adapted through use of weapons, language, and team work), while during the day we were scavengers. The evidence provided in the book makes it out that humanity was a prey species for far, far longer than it was a hunter-gatherer and eventual apex-predator species (in fact the authors argue primarily against the "humans as hunter-gatherer" as only a very small aspect for humanity's lineage, and thus not as influential). The authors don't extrapolate too far onto the psychological effects of this, but they do point out some areas where it could have influenced our psychology given the long term effects of being hunted day-in, day-out.
Good point gwern. I'm wondering whether the competition between the nation states of europe was an important ingredient about why the IR happened there.
How many competitors did china have? I'm thinking that the push from the rulers for better military and naval technology could have kick started the IR by creating specialists and improving ships and metal working techniques on a large scale.
Presuming that there is a single attribute with sufficient explanatory power to justify and characterize the (ostensibly) three transitions (and four growth phases) implies that it was, in fact, a deterministic system. Could it be that the transitions are the result of (the new trendy term, and its explanatory power is still being explored, I suppose) "black swan" effects? This was perhaps unintentionally touched on by hegimonicon and nazgulnarsil--i.e. that black swan events which provide massive shifts in the effective cost of a particular resource are what drove each transition.
I suggest for behavioral modernity: brain plasticity and neophilia as a neotenic trait, resulting in copying behavior in adults. That's what sets apart on the one hand lower and middle paleolithic Hom Sap and close cousins such as Neanderthals, who pass on a barely changed culture for millennia, and on the other, upper paleolithic Hom Sap who quickly innovate in culture and tools. I think language is oversold. Do you tell someone how to bang out a flint ax? No, you show them. But can you show an adult, or only a child?
It's the mechanisms for coordinating dispersed activities to new spatial and temporal scales that put limits on exponential growth. Occasionally, new ones get introduced and new scales become feasible.
Yes, Robin, I am saying that we are not influential and powerful. We can observe that there are many more of us than several thousand years ago and that we have made a lot of things. Past that we are confined by our own point of view. Influence and power are normative and your question presumes human norms for a world that is much more than that.
Will Pearson wrote:"How many competitors did china have? I'm thinking that the push from the rulers for better military and naval technology could have kick started the IR by creating specialists and improving ships and metal working techniques on a large scale."
nick szabo wrote:"(2) China never controlled the world's oceans and merchant marine, but the British just prior and during its IR did. If this explains the IR, then to explain our explanation (i.e. why did Brtain come to control the world's ocean-going trade) we have to step back and solve the even more puzzling question of how a tiny country of fishing-folk, Portugal, and not an advanced superpower like China, was the first country to take over most of the world's oceanic trade routes (later to be beaten back by other Western European countries and eventually Great Britain)."
One of the most important episodes for people interested in the Industrial Revolution & China are the famous voyages of Zheng He they demonstrate that China had seafaring ability on the order of Portugal or Britain, and long before them. The executive summary for those not already familiar with Zheng He: he lead expeditions of dozens/hundreds of truly enormous junks all over East Asia and the Indian Ocean, trading and fighting, in the early 1400s; the expeditions were ended by imperial fiat.
In particular, it's worth noting that the Chinese had already developed the compass and techniques like water-tight compartments. This was in the earlier Song dynasty; the Songs were fighting the incursing Mongols, and their navy was one of their key advantages, so they sponsored and generally supported naval innovation.
Given this, 'lack of competition' is a viable explanation for why naval expeditions & technology stagnated or were abandoned in the later Ming.
Robin, like everybody else I'm just making hopefully informed guesses, but Clark gives a good graph of the rise in literacy in England in the 16th-19th centuries. It's a fairly steady rise. During this period manufacturing productivity was increasing at about the same rate as it was during the IR. The exponential growth in manufacturing productivity in Western Europe dates to at least 16th century and probably earlier, starting from the very low level of the depths of the Dark Ages in the 9th century. The increase in literacy had been steady since the introduction of paper in Europe and got new energy and reached much higher levels because of the spread of printed books.
So part of my explanation (based on Clarks' data) is that the IR was much less of a "spurt" than commonly believed -- it was mainly just a long-standing exponential trend becoming the largest percentage of the economy. The rate of growth in that productivity, and in agricultural productivity that allowed manufacturing to come to dominate the economy, was higher than China due to a faster growth of literacy and growth of that literacy to a much higher percent of the population -- of which literacy the rise of science, the engineering profession, some of the legal and political changes, etc. were effects.
It's as if electronics became the dominant sector of our economy such that economic growth was dominated by Moore's Law, because we became satiated with our service sector (analogous to the fact that we only need so much food, so the agricultural sector was able to drop as a percent of the economy as Great Britain started to violate Malthusian limits). I don't expect that to happen for a variety of reasons, but if it did, and if it were fully monetized (i.e. inernalized into the measurable economy), we'd see our GDP doubling every two years. At some point it would look like an economic revolution is happening as Moore's law came to dominate the economy, but the actual reason would be just a long-standing trend not a revolution in the specific decade when electronics came to dominate the economy. (I've just been reading your 1998 paper on exponential trends. Ah, the Internet Bubble, those were heady days. :-)
Robin: "Steve, are you postulating specific genetic innovations at the key 10KBC and 1800 dates?"
More accurately: the rapid spread of specific genetic innovations.
With that caveat: In the centuries leading up to those lift-off dates, yes--with a concurrent/resultant exponential leap.
As an example: Cochran and Harpending posit strong selection for intelligence among a particular genetically and professionally isolated European group during the late middle ages/early renaissance. Since I am one-half Ashkenazi Jew and hence am likely to be biased, I hesitate to give any endorsement for this view.
bill, population and tech encouraging each other has been constant all along, so this can't explain sudden spurts.
Tim, some hunter gatherers lived in large dense communities. Printing showed up long before the industrial revolution.
Lord, if the energy was always there, that doesn't explain why particular things happened at particular times.
gwern, yes the growth groove game is hard.
Juilian, unless you think brain plasticity showed up about 10KBC, I don't see how it explains the timing.
bysl, black swans are not mystical causes beyond science; once you see them you can usually understand them - the hard part is to foresee them.
snuff, I don't see the prey to predator transition explaining the timing, unless you think it happened over a million years ago.
Brian, are you saying we are not influential and powerful?
nick, do you have specific delay effects in mind, or are you just guessing there might be some, since the effects you focus on appeared centuries before the industrial revolution?
Steve, are you postulating specific genetic innovations at the key 10KBC and 1800 dates?
It seems likely to me that recent genetic evolution is a--perhaps the--key factor in the growth of human influence and power. (Nick is quite right to point to Cochran and Harpending, if only glancingly.) But it's a factor that we don't yet know enough about to draw firm conclusions from.
We can say with a great deal of confidence that the emergence and spread of lactose tolerance was a strong contributor to the rise of humans. But the temperamental and behavioral changes are much harder to tease out.
Did Hamlet's (decidedly Elizabethan/early modern) character vary so greatly from his father's (decidedly 10th-century, Viking-like) character for genetic reasons? Is that genetic change on display there?
gwern is on the money in saying that (a) explaining the IR is hard, and (b)the explanation has to include something that China didn't have much sooner.
Indeed, the most important thing in this area is to be aware of enough of those kinds of facts and common sense that you can eliminate theories that should obviously be wrong. For example, be aware that hunter-gatherers were experts on botany and animal behavior. It's not plausible that the simple ideas that seeds can grow into plants that you can eat later, or that you can keep an animal tied or penned up and eat it later, were not discovered and known countless times during the c. 100,000 years between when our brains became modern-sized and agriculture developed. There has to have been some major barrier to benefitting from such obvious ideas to have kept agriculture from developing far sooner. I also don't find genetics plausible as a cause of agriculture, since agriculture ended up spreading to a very large number of human groups that had become genetically isolated long before the dawn of agriculture. (Genetic evolution cause _by_ agriculture is another story -- Cochran and Harpending have some ideas very much worth thinking about). Also not plausible are climate explanations -- there were many local climates hospitable to agriculture throughout those 100,000 years -- just not necessarily at Mediterranean or higher lattitudes.
That said, going back to the IR there a number of likely-to-firm differences between China and Western Europe (or Great Britain in particular):
(1) Differences in political and legal culture. What differences, specifically, it's hard to say, because there is very little about, for example, Sung or Ming dynasty commercial law that has been translated into English: far too little to compare to English law in the 18th century, for example. We know some very general things, such as that Western Europe was (and still is) a far more legalistic culture than China. Also, we know that Western Europe (contrary to Clark's claim) radically changed its property law between the 16th and 19th centuries, from a fuedal model of of hierarchy of tenures and bundled political property rights to a model based on old Roman law with flattened and purely economic ownership. There ensued movements such as the enclosure movement in England and an accompanying large increase in capital investments in land. But we don't know when or to what extent similar incentives to capital investment might have been present or missing in China.
(2) China never controlled the world's oceans and merchant marine, but the British just prior and during its IR did. If this explains the IR, then to explain our explanation (i.e. why did Brtain come to control the world's ocean-going trade) we have to step back and solve the even more puzzling question of how a tiny country of fishing-folk, Portugal, and not an advanced superpower like China, was the first country to take over most of the world's oceanic trade routes (later to be beaten back by other Western European countries and eventually Great Britain).
(3) China had the printing press, but in contrast to Western Europe it did not lead to a rapid growth in literacy sustained over several centuries -- perhaps because of bureaucratic central control rather than the free-enterprise printing businesses that sprung up all over Western Europe, perhaps because the much greater number of symbols did not as efficiently lend itself to printing, or a combination of these two factors.
Other interesting related phenomenon to explain, (and it would be nice per Occam's Razor if it was the same general explanation, but social life is rarely that simple) is why Japan industrialized well in advance of China and Britain was a fuew decades ahead of the rest of Western Europe during most of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century.
Robin: "If you wanted to attribute the industrial revolution to writing, you'd have to explain why there was a strong threshold effect, so that pre-1800 writing levels had weak growth rate effects, while post-1800 writing levels had strong effects."
Besides strong threshold effects, there could be delay effects: for example, the the rapid growth of books and literacy after the mid-15th century in Western Europe gave rise to a slow but accelerating series of innovations (most obviously scientific and technological advances, but perhaps also innovations in business or law), which in turn gave rise to the IR (and happened in England rather than other parts of Western Europe for orthogonal reasons).
For Peter Drucker's view: See Introduction: The Transformation and chapter 1 (From Capitalism to Knowledge Society) of Post-Capitalist Society (http://is.gd/B1Bt). Please be sure to view the entire page.
You start with, "How did humanity become so influential and powerful?" Then proceed with an interesting example of confirmation bias. What even prompts the question?
Chemical energy and the origin of life? See: http://originoflife.net/cai...
That hypothesis uses energy from super-saturated solutions - not really "chemical energy" as the term is usually understood.
"You're forgetting something -- our planet has ready-made sources of chemical energy. It's hard to imagine how a civilization could get off the ground without wood, coal, natural gas, petroleum, &c. It wouldn't be possible to invent other forms of energy production without using them first. We got lucky."Actually, since we're based on oxygen combustion the fact that there was readily accessible chemical energy would fall more under the anthropic principle.Even further, though, it's very hard to imagine a complex system replicative like DNA developing under the conditions of any system of really high energy (fusion, for example). This may mean that all life probably has its origins in environments of relatively abundant chemical energy. Which shouldn't be controversial - not stars, and not ice worlds.
Go read 'Man the Hunted' by Sussman and Hart, a primatologist and paleontologist. They discuss early human adaptation as the byproduct of a past where we were hunted without mercy during the night by apex-predators (to which we eventually adapted through use of weapons, language, and team work), while during the day we were scavengers. The evidence provided in the book makes it out that humanity was a prey species for far, far longer than it was a hunter-gatherer and eventual apex-predator species (in fact the authors argue primarily against the "humans as hunter-gatherer" as only a very small aspect for humanity's lineage, and thus not as influential). The authors don't extrapolate too far onto the psychological effects of this, but they do point out some areas where it could have influenced our psychology given the long term effects of being hunted day-in, day-out.
Good point gwern. I'm wondering whether the competition between the nation states of europe was an important ingredient about why the IR happened there.
How many competitors did china have? I'm thinking that the push from the rulers for better military and naval technology could have kick started the IR by creating specialists and improving ships and metal working techniques on a large scale.
So that might be the catalyst...
Presuming that there is a single attribute with sufficient explanatory power to justify and characterize the (ostensibly) three transitions (and four growth phases) implies that it was, in fact, a deterministic system. Could it be that the transitions are the result of (the new trendy term, and its explanatory power is still being explored, I suppose) "black swan" effects? This was perhaps unintentionally touched on by hegimonicon and nazgulnarsil--i.e. that black swan events which provide massive shifts in the effective cost of a particular resource are what drove each transition.
I suggest for behavioral modernity: brain plasticity and neophilia as a neotenic trait, resulting in copying behavior in adults. That's what sets apart on the one hand lower and middle paleolithic Hom Sap and close cousins such as Neanderthals, who pass on a barely changed culture for millennia, and on the other, upper paleolithic Hom Sap who quickly innovate in culture and tools. I think language is oversold. Do you tell someone how to bang out a flint ax? No, you show them. But can you show an adult, or only a child?