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By Root 478 0

opening a capsule in 2000. That would have been a no-brainer: the Chinese, of course!” Based on who and what mattered in 1000, today’s world should be dominated by the Chinese. But as Diamond shows, predicting history’s future lists is even harder than constructing lists about what already happened.

Such lists, while of no import to the work of professional historians, do contain some value if, for no other reason, they stimulate us to think about who and what really matters. Besides, it is fun to wrangle with the list maker’s choices. For example, what are we to make of the following list from Ashley Montagu, anthropologist, author, and social commentator, of his “ten worst well-known human beings in history”?

1. Attila the Hun

2. Hitler

3. Kaiser Wilhelm II

4. Ivan the Terrible

5. Idi Amin

6. Heinrich Himmler

7. Stalin

8. Caligula

9. Nixon

10. Comte J. A. de Gobineau (theory of the superior Aryan race)

In a different twist on the list game, the Herald Tribune picked the top ten news stories of the twentieth century.

1. Kennedy’s assassination

2. Bolshevik revolution

3. Moon landing

4. Hiroshima atomic explosion

5. Hitler’s launching of WW II

6. Wall Street crash

7. Birth control pill

8. Pearl Harbor

9. Independence of India

10. Lindbergh’s flight

Jumping the gun in 1984 (inspired by Mr. Orwell?), the popular science magazine Science 84 offered the most important “discoveries that shaped our lives” in the twentieth century. Their criterion was that the discovery (actually most are inventions) had to be within the fields of science and technology, and had to have a “significant impact on the way we live or the way we think about ourselves and our world.” They were:

1. Plastics and nylon

2. IQtest

3. Einstein’s relativity theory

4. Blood typing and transfusion

5. Pearson’s chisquare statistics

6. Vacuum tube

7. Controlled breeding of crops

8. Powered flight

9. Penicillin

10. Discovery of ancient man in Africa

11. Atomic fission/bomb

12. The big bang theory

13. DDT

14. Television

15. The Pill

16. Computer

17. Psychoactive drugs

18. Transistor

19. DNA

20. Laser

Enumerateology: The Science of Making Lists

It turns out that such listing tendencies—let’s call it enumerateology, or the science of making lists—are not new nor are they constrained to our century. History’s lists themselves have a history (see figures 12.1 12.4). In the sixteenth century, for example, the Flemish artist Johannes Stradanus considered these nine discoveries the most outstanding of that age:

1. The New World

2. The magnetic compass

3. Gunpowder

4. Printing press

5. Mechanical clocks

6. Guaiac wood (mistakenly thought to cure syphilis)

7. Distillation

8. Silk cultivation

9. Stirrups

Stradanus began a tradition that would have a long lineage extending to our time (although we seem to prefer round numbers). Lists broad in scope and deep in time include rankings of the most influential people in all of history, not just within a particular age or century. Michael Hart’s The 100, for instance, dares to present an “importance ranking” of all time from top ten:

Figure 12.1. The printing press descends from heaven. The tool that gave rise to the other tools of learning—the printing press—is shown symbolically descending from heaven. The press is carried by Minerva and Mercury who will present it first to Gutenberg, master printer in Germany, who will then pass it along to master printers in Holland, Italy, England, and France.

Figure 12.2. Nine discoveries that changed the world, in the sixteenth century. Nine discoveries and inventions considered the most significant of his time, by the Flemish artist Johannes Stradanus (1523-1605): 1. the New World; 2. the magnetic compass; 3. gunpowder; 4. the printing press; 5. mechanical clocks; 6. Guaiac wood (mistakenly thought to cure syphilis); 7. distillation; 8. silk cultivation 9. stirrups.

Figure 12.3. Académie Royale