The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [182]
Employing the comparative method, Diamond compared Australia and Europe and noted that Australian Aborigines could not strap a plow to or mount the back of a kangaroo, as Europeans did the ox and horse. As well, indigenous wild grains that could be domesticated were few in number and located only in certain regions of the globe—those regions that saw the rise of the first civilizations. The east-west-oriented axis of the Euro-Asian continent lent itself to diffusion of domesticated grains and animals as well as knowledge and ideas, so Europe was able to benefit much earlier from the domestication process. By comparison, the north-south-oriented axis of the Americas, Africa, and the Asia-Malaysia-Australia corridor did not lend itself to such fluid transportation, and thus those areas already not well suited biogeographically for farming could not even benefit from diffusion. In addition, through constant interactions with domesticated animals and other peoples, Euro-Asians developed immunities to numerous diseases that, when brought by them in the form of germs to Australia and the Americas, along with their guns and steel, produced a genocide on a hitherto unseen scale. Furthermore, in less than one generation modern Australian Aborigines learned to fly planes, operate computers, and do anything that any European inhabitant of Australia can do. Comparatively, when European farmers were transplanted to Greenland they went extinct when their environment changed, not because their genes devolved.
Such comparative methods are the result of natural experiments of history, numerous examples of which Diamond presented in his 2010 book of that title, including a timely study comparing Haiti to the Dominican Republic. Both countries inhabit the same island but because of geopolitical differences one ended up dirt poor while the other flourishes.5 What happened? This is a natural experiment of borders, similar to the one on the Korean peninsula. Adding a border between North and South Korea in 1945 resulted in dictatorship and poverty for North Korea, which in 2008 had an annual GDP of $13.34 billion and $555 per capita income, compared to South Korea’s annual GDP of $929.1 billion and $19,295 per capita income. Think about how different your life would be if you made $555 a year compared to $19,295 a year, and you can feel the power of the comparative method. The border that divides the island of Hispaniola is striking: on one side the land is green and forested while on the other side the land is brown and treeless. Rain-laden weather fronts come from the east and dump their watery load on the eastern Dominican Republic side of the island, leaving the western side drier and with less fertile soils for agricultural productivity. Deforestation of the fewer trees on the Haitian side led to soil erosion, decreased soil fertility, loss of timber for the building industry and wood for charcoal fuel, heavier sediment loads in rivers, and decreased watershed protection, leading to lower hydroelectric power. This set up a negative feedback cycle of environmental degradation for Haiti.
Comparing the political history of the two sides of the island reveals a second set of factors at work. Christopher Columbus’s brother Bartholomeo colonized Hispaniola in 1496 for Spain, establishing the capital at Santo Domingo on the egress of the Ozama River on the eastern side of the island. Two centuries later, during tensions between France and Spain, the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 granted France dominion over the western half of the island, and the border was permanently established by the Treaty of Aranjuez in 1777. Because France was richer than Spain and slavery was an integral part of its economy, it turned western Hispaniola into a center of the slave trade with a population consisting of 85 percent slaves, compared to the eastern half under Spain with only 10–15 percent slaves. The raw numbers are staggering: about 500,000 slaves in the western side of the island compared to only 15,000 to 30,000 slaves in the