Nowadays most people scoff at the notion of Columbus Day. The media has recast Columbus’s discovery as primarily a venal event. So why is it still a holiday? The answer seems simply to be: “Because it’s always been done that way.” We humans have a strong propensity to do the same thing over and over again. We’re engineered that way. So Columbus Day is to the calendar what the appendix is to the human body.
But let’s take the opportunity to look at the event from a different angle. The accidental “discovery” of the new world was a major moment on the road to globalization and modernity. It is in the nature of history to yield winners and losers. Even more reason to stop and understand its consequences. Read Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” to get an unbiased analysis of why European culture became a hegemon. Unfortunately, our tendency to believe that things are either “good” or “bad,” “black” or “white” goes wide of the mark. The accelerated pace of discovery that is marked by Columbus’s voyage can be linked to human kind’s escape from all kinds of tyranny. For example, it led to the rise of such things as democracy, capitalism and medical science.
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June 12, 2010 at 2:44 am
chen019
Diamond’s book is a little out of date on genetics. Recent studies have shown that there was an increase in genetic change with the development of agriculture and population expansion in eurasia. Some of these changes appear to relate to neurological function (see papers by Benjamin Voight, Bruce Lahn or Scott Williams).
New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade’s book ‘Before the Dawn’ covers some of this, as does the more recent ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution’.