Environmental determinism

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Right wing people hate because it's not racial White supremacy and the leftist hate because it's not antiWhite.
And there's probably some who think competent political leadership is enough to somehow warp the laws of physics and biology and magically transform countries.

>there is most likely some truth to environmental factors influencing human evolution.

Understatement of the day.

Is there any madam or maybe a guy who tries to do history using complexity science?

>Aboriginals are more intelligent than the westerners. It was by muh environment and sheer luck that the white got more developed than them.

Just trying to be careful here, don't want to get lynched right away. I wonder what roughly the proportions of influence are in dictating human- and societal evolution.

It's probably a feedback loop.

Good environmental conditions lead to the initial development of civilization, which in turns retroactively gives an evolutionary advantage to being intelligent, which makes smarter people, which means that the civilization becomes more complex, which favors even smarter people, ad infinitum.

That's not actually jared diamond in that pic

Right?

I think that's a bit too simple, I found the book Why The West Rules - For Now to be very interesting.

Of course not you dipshit.

Well of course it's an oversimplification. Some civilizations are dysgenic and actually lead to a lowering of the intelligence.

Environmental Determinism undoubtedly plays a role in the development and evolution of humanity, but it's only a piece of the puzzle, an important piece sure, but it's not the entire picture.

Cultural values and the choices made by those values play influence as well to a people as a whole. The best example I can find is Japan's Sakoku era and the Charter Oath during the Meiji Restoration.

Japan closed itself off to all but minimal foreign contact and suffered as a result from it, the rest of the world at large developed around it due to trade and the exchange of ideas while Japan lagged behind. But when the Shogun was overthrown and Japan adopted a new constitution that committed to industrial development, they as a people were able to advance so quickly that they went from a hopeless island nation to defeating the Russians in 40 years.

Sakoku presents a lot of the remaining pieces. trade and the exchange of ideas from people group to people group is essential to advancing as new ideas can be spread to different people, and also that cultures and what they value can affect development as well, such as a culture that valued isolation from the world suffered in developing because of the Tokugawa's choice influenced by that cultural value to preserve identity through isolation.

tl;dr they're a myriad of factors, both small and large in their influence. the Environment is a big piece of the picture, but not the sole factor.

Environmentalism doesn't explain why the printing press caused a minor revolution in Europe while it didn't in China. Or why 500 Spanish freebooters managed to get 50.000 native allies to fight against the Aztecs.

It can explain some things but it can never be an all explanatory device for history unless you go down so far the causal chain of events that you reduce everything into being determined by the environment.

>trade and the exchange of ideas from people group to people group is essential

I think that's (part of) Diamond's explanation for why the sub-saharans were lagging behind; they were too far away from the big trade routes and civilizations to get going.

desu. Japan was actually advancing during the isolationist period. At least that I was I read in recent literature. Everything points to Japan having a more advanced economy around 1800 then 200 years earlier.

Environmental Determinism is always better as the plebeian idea that single individuals shape history. As much as I am an individualist people do not exist in isolation.

I wasn't saying there was no development, it just wasn't as fast as they would have with foreign trade and contact.

The example is that under isolation, Japan advanced but lagged behind, but after contact was reinstated with Emperor Meiji, they became an industrial powerhouse in less than 2 generations, and who know how long that would have taken under Sakoku, if at all.

But individuals do shape history. Do you think the Arab expansion would've happened had it not been for Mohammed and Islam?

Kill yourself pleb

I do not meant to say that they have no influence at all. But they cannot operate solely alone and are not the sole "shaper".

Individuals are not born from vacuums, and do not act in vacuums.

Nobody denies that.

Nobody denies that either.

But individuals, in the end, have free choice. History is not this deterministic, scientific thing which you can predict based on environmental influences.

It is emergent my man.

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Look how different environment at the Mexican side of the border! If only poor guys just lived 5 meters to the north. :^)

>But individuals, in the end, have free choice.

;)

middle ground, environment+culture+genetics shape things, you gotta have a good combination of those, I don't think a simpler model works

He probably doesn't know the meaning of apologist.