Popularity: -3
Vote:   | African cavalry mounted on rhinos or hippos would have made mincemeat of European cavalry mounted on horses. But it couldn't happen. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | All of Africa's mammalian domesticates - cattle, sheep, goats, horses, even dogs - entered sub-Saharan Africa from the north, from Eurasia or North Africa. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | As a biologist practicing laboratory experimental science, I'm aware that some scientists may be inclined to dismiss these historical interpretations as unprovable speculation, because they're not founded on replicated laboratory experiments. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Australia is the most isolated continent. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Australia is the smallest continent, and most of it can support only small human populations because of low rainfall and productivity. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Differences between the Old and New Worlds in domesticated plants,especially in large-seeded cereals, are qualitatively similar to the differences in domesticated mammals, though the difference is not so extreme. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Domestic animals revolutionized land transport. They also revolutionized agriculture, by letting one farmer plough and manure much more land than the farmer could till or manure by the farmer's own efforts. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Domesticated plants and animals yield far more calories per acre than do wild habitats, in which most species are inedible to humans. |
Popularity: -6
Vote: | Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Eurasia's main axis is east/west, whereas the main axis of the Americas is north/south. Eurasia's east/west axis meant that species domesticated in one part of Eurasia could easily spread thousands of miles at the same latitude, encountering the same day-length and climate to which they were already adapted. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Even to this day, no native Australian animal species and only one plant species - the macadamia nut - have proved suitable for domestication. There still are no domestic kangaroos. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Federal elections happen every two years in this country. Presidential elections every four years. And four years just isn't long enough to dismantle all the environmental laws we've got in this country. |
Popularity: -6
Vote: | How is it that Pizarro and Cortes reached the New World at all, before Aztec and Inca conquistadors could reach Europe? That outcome depended partly on technology in the form of oceangoing ships. Europeans had such ships, while the Aztecs and Incas did not. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Humans have been evolving for millions of years longer in Africa than in Europe, and even anatomically modern Homo sapiens may have reached Europe from Africa only within the last 50,000 years. If time were a critical factor in the development of human societies, Africa should have enjoyed an enormous head start and advantage over Europe. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book... and I began putting more work into environmental history. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I personally am not conscious of my accent. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I read that a false alarm of a tsunami in Hawaii would cost about $68 million. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I'd rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I've always been interested in a lot of things, and a lot of things at the same time, and I always tried to explain them to myself. I ask a lot of questions. |
Popularity: -5
Vote: | I've worked very hard in this book to keep the lines of communication open. I don't want to turn someone away from this information for partisan political reasons. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | If you gave me 10 million dollars, I wouldn't live any differently. Although nowadays I guess you'd have to raise that to 20 million to mean anything. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | In modern times, Australia was the sole continent still inhabited only by hunter-gatherers... Native Australia had no farmers or herders, no writing, no metal tools, and no political organization beyond the level of the tribe or band. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World's Indian population. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks... of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economic interdependence. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Livestock adopted in Africa were Eurasian species that came in from the north. Africa's long axis, like that of the Americas, is north/south rather than east/west. Those Eurasian domestic mammals spread southward very slowly in Africa, because they had to adapt to different climate zones and different animal diseases. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Most people are explicitly racists. In parts of the world - so called educated, so-called western society - we've learned that it is not polite to be racist, and so often we don't express racist views, but... Racism is one of the big issues in the world today. Racism is the big social problem in the United States. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | No government is here forever. And there are other forces - the most potent force in our society, in fact, big business - doing good for the environment. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | One could say that Patagonia is radically environmentalist, a company that's founded on those principles. But there are other examples, too. I spoke at a World Wildlife Fund dinner fundraiser last October hosted and funded by Starbucks. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | People are not helpless in the face of big business. It's up to the public to say what it wants. Only when the public bans single-hulled oil tankers from American waters, only when the public says no more selling wood logged from old-growth forests, will companies... come up with other solutions. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | People are responding so well to the book - it's really an upper. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Population densities of farmers and herders are typically 10 to 100 times greater than those of hunter/gatherers. That fact alone explains why farmers and herders everywhere in the world have been able to push hunter/gatherers out of land suitable for farming and herding. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Some people have much more pull than other people. But when I say that the public has ultimate responsibility, I'm not saying it in a moral sense. I'm just saying it in the sense of what is it that's really going to bring change. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Starbucks goes to a great effort, and pays twice as much for its coffee as its competitors do, and is very careful to help coffee producers in developing countries grow coffee without pesticides and in ways that preserve forest structure. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Take air quality in the United States today: It's about 30 percent better than it was 25 years ago, even though there are now more people driving more cars. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Tasmania lies 130 miles southeast of Australia. When it was first visited by Europeans in 1642, Tasmania was occupied by 4,000 hunter-gatherers related to mainland Australians, but with the simplest technology of any recent people on Earth. Unlike mainland Aboriginal Australians, Tasmanians couldn't start a fire. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Tasmanians actually abandoned some technologies that they brought with them from Australia and that persisted on the Australian mainland. For example, bone tools and the practice of fishing were both present in Tasmania at the time that the land bridge was severed, and both disappeared from Tasmania by around 1500 B.C. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Technology has to be invented or adopted. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The broadest pattern of history - namely, the differences between human societies on different continents - seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to biological differences among peoples themselves. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The Indian civilizations of Central and North America remained entirely without pack animals; and it took thousands of years for the corn that evolved in Mexico's climate to become modified into a corn adapted to the short growing season and seasonally changing day-length of North America. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | The Norse held values that would not allow them to deal with... pagans and certainly would not let them eat fish and hunt ringed seals the way these pagans did. So here is a case where the values that sustained them for 450 years ultimately killed them. The United States faces similar agonizing reappraisals today. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn't grow - with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The United States has long thought of itself as the land of infinite plenty, and historically we did have abundant resources. But now we are gradually exhausting our fisheries, our topsoil, our water. On top of that, we're coming to the end of world resources. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The World Wildlife Fund has been involved with Chevron for 10 years now. It's been involved with Unilever and Home Depot, too. Conservation International is involved with Starbucks. And a few weeks ago, I had dinner with the president and CEO of Patagonia, who told me his company has made a policy decision not to pollute. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Twenty years ago, you might have been pessimistic and said there's no hope. But these days, some of our very biggest companies are acting remarkably cleanly. And in some cases, although not all cases, the CEOs are the driving forces behind that. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Until the end of the last Ice Age around 11,000 B.C., all humans on all continents were still living as Stone Age hunter/gatherers. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | We can't manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can't start and stop ice ages, and we can't experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | We study the injustices of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds of murderers and rapists... to understand how those evil things came about. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didn't have anthropologists. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | When I visited Nike and asked whether they were using organic and sustainable cotton, they told me they were careful not to use too much organic cotton, because they knew that Patagonia needs to use organic cotton, and they didn't want to drive Patagonia out of the market. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years? |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Why were there far more species of domesticated animals in Eurasia than in the Americas? The Americas harbor over a thousand native wild mammal species, so you might initially suppose that the Americas offered plenty of starting material for domestication. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | With the MacArthur grant, I realized that people have high expectations of me, that they were placing me in this group of achievers. I compared what I'd actually achieved in my life with what I would like to achieve and what other people have achieved, and I found that comparison depressing. |