urederra said:
Europe, with its 400 (?) million people has achieve more in science, arts, philosophy, politics, culture, economics and military in the last millenium than China and India together, with their 2200 million inhabitants.
And that is thanks to the culture variety that Europe has, in that tiny piece of land.
I agree, and I think some others have missed your point.
Claiming any achievement to be exclusive is not a difficult principle to substantiate. Granted, it is hard to claim that some achievements are exclusive. Take, for example, monotheism. You can't say definitively that the Jews came up with that, or the Zoroastrians, or whoever. But something like Calculus? I think it's pretty clear that Newton and Leibniz exclusively invented that. And while it is obviously true that some Eastern achievements (like the concept of zero, for one) facilitated their invention, that does not contradict the fact that Calculus is a scientific achievement developed by European scientists in the last thousand years.
I agree that Eastern culture has achieved many great things over the course of human history. And it is almost impossible to quantify the historical significance of their innovations...how can you say that something like paper is more or less important than something like television? But I think it is pretty self-evident that if you confine the innovations to the last thousand years, Europe has far out-stripped any Eastern culture. Here's an abbreviated list of achievements of uniquely European/American origin over the last thousand years (derived in part from the CivIII tech tree):
steam power, modern medicine (sanitation, anti-biotics, transplantation, psychotherapy, genetics, cloning, etc.), the scientific method, modern astronomy, modern physics, modern atomic theory, interchangeable parts, industrialization, combustion, flight, television, radio, photography, analog storage media, mass production, motorized transport, electromagnetic theory, electronics, calculus, relativity, rocketry, space flight, fission, computers, nuclear power, satellites, the laser, miniaturization, and communism
I could go on and on. There are some European achievements which just aren't fair to quantify (like art and music for instance, even though it is apparent that the Eastern culture highly regards Western music, since all of Asia's most talented musicians focus their efforts on classical music, a Western innovation). But there are some achievements which have undeniable significance in modern society. I mean, seriously, how can you look at that list above and say that those innovations don't have staggering significance? And how can you say that they aren't exclusively Western? Of course none the things on that list would've been developed without the influence of some elements of Eastern culture...but using that reasoning to deny their exclusivity forces you to admit that ANY idea that ANY person EVER thinks up is NEVER exclusive, since it is the byproduct of the cultural influences of EVERY civilization that has EVER existed. And some of you might genuinely believe that's true. But I think there is something by which an achievement or innovation is made unique or exclusive, and even if I can't exactly articulate what that something is, I'm pretty sure that it applies to at least a few of the things listed above, and therefore confirms urederra's point.
EDIT: oops, I was wrong...cloning was an Eastern innovation (Tong Dizhou in 1963:
http://www.pbs.org/bloodlines/timeline/text_timeline.html); even though a European scientist was the first to theorize genetic cloning, that Tony guy was the first to actually do it
