Post by Hairynosedwombat on Dec 23, 2019 6:44:27 GMT
It is possible that the simple ability to digest milk gave Europeans such a big advantage in nutrition that they got a head start in several cultural areas.
Most anthropologists also don't denigrate the advances made outside Europe before the Renaissance in Arabia and China, and recognise that climate and climate changes had a massive effect on cultural change.
Your electricity and radio inventions were the innovations of a very few people from different countries with specific reasons for different innovations.
For example the combination of a large amount of venture capital available for investment due partly to gold rushes and a patent law and legal system protecting corporate investment gave the United States a huge advantage in turning inventions into cash cows. Edison might have been a talented inventor but he was an equally talented entrepreneur and patent thief.
And when you claim these were innovations by few people, you're ignoring that every great technological advance came in the West. I mean we could list them all day - electricity, radio, television, telephone, automobiles, airplanes, photography, film, atomic power ... There is an underlying reason this all happened in the West and not in China. Go to a large city in China today and you see Western architecture and they even order their society on a Western economic concept - Marxism.
Could this be because we digest milk? I'm not sure the ancient Greeks and Romans who started it all drank much milk. I would say it goes back to the Greek concept of the individual and the idea of democracy.
I still don't see any attributes that the "west" has that explains specific advances, unless as you say, democracy.