More (#2) from A Troubled Inheritance:

China, though for different reasons, developed the same antipathy to modern science as did the Islamic world. One problem in China was the absence of any institutions independent of the emperor. There were no universities. Such academies as existed were essentially crammers for the imperial examination system. Independent thinkers were not encouraged. When Hung-wu, the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, decided that scholars had let things get out of hand, he ordered the death penalty for 68 degree holders and 2 students, and penal servitude for 70 degree holders and 12 students. The problem with Chinese science, Huff writes, was not that it was technically flawed, “but that Chinese authorities neither created or tolerated independent institutions of higher learning within which disinterested scholars could pursue their insights.”

China, unlike the Islamic world, did not ban printing presses, but the books they produced were only for the elite. Another impediment to independent thought was the stultifying education system, which consisted of rote memorization of the more than 500,000 characters that comprised the Confucian classics, and the ability to write a stylized commentary on them. The imperial examination system, which began in 124 BC, took its final form in 1368 AD and remained unchanged until 1905, deterring intellectual innovation for a further five centuries.

More (#1) from A Troublesome Inheritance:

Contrary to widespread belief that the 20th century was more violent than any other, Pinker establishes [in The Better Angels of Our Nature] that both personal violence and deaths in warfare have been in steady decline for as long as records can tell.

...Pinker agrees with Elias that the principal drivers of the civilizing process were the increasing monopoly of force by the state, which reduced the need for interpersonal violence, and the greater levels of interaction with others that were brought about by urbanization and commerce.

The next question of interest is whether the long behavioral shift toward more restrained behavior had a genetic basis. The gracilization of human skulls prior to 15,000 years ago almost certainly did, and Clark makes a strong case that the molding of the English population from rough peasants into industrious citizenry between 1200 and 1800 AD was a continuation of this evolutionary process. On the basis of Pinker’s vast compilation of evidence, natural selection seems to have acted incessantly to soften the human temperament, from the earliest times until the most recent date for which there is meaningful data.

This is the conclusion that Pinker signals strongly to his readers. He notes that mice can be bred to be more aggressive in just five generations, evidence that the reverse process could occur just as speedily. He describes the human genes, such as the violence-promoting MAO-A mutation mentioned in chapter 3, that could easily be modulated so as to reduce aggressiveness. He mentions that violence is quite heritable, on the evidence from studies of twins, and so must have a genetic basis. He states that “nothing rules out the possibility that human populations have undergone some degree of biological evolution in recent millennia, or even centuries, long after races, ethnic groups, and nations diverged.”

But at the last moment, Pinker veers away from the conclusion, which he has so strongly pointed to, that human populations have become less violent in the past few thousand years because of the continuation of the long evolutionary trend toward less violence. He mentions that evolutionary psychologists, of whom he is one, have always held that the human mind is adapted to the conditions of 10,000 years ago and hasn’t changed since.

But since many other traits have evolved more recently than that, why should human behavior be any exception? Well, says Pinker, it would be terribly inconvenient politically if this were so. “It could have the incendiary implication that aboriginal and immigrant populations are less biologically adapted to the demands of modern life than populations that have lived in literate state societies for millennia.”

Whether or not a thesis might be politically incendiary should have no bearing on the estimate of its scientific validity. That Pinker would raise this issue in a last minute diversion of a sustained scientific argument is an explicit acknowledgment to the reader of the political dangers that researchers, even ones of his stature and independence, would face in pursuing the truth too far.

Turning on a dime, Pinker then contends that there is no evidence that the decline in violence over the past 10,000 years is an evolutionary change. To reach this official conclusion, he is obliged to challenge Clark’s evidence that there was indeed such a change. But he does so with an array of arguments that seem less than decisive...

And:

Outside of Europe, the most promising new users of the telescope were in China, whose government had a keen interest in astronomy. Moreover, there was an unusual but vigorous mechanism for pumping the new European astronomical discoveries into China in the form of the Jesuit mission there. The Jesuits figured they had a better chance of converting the Chinese to Christianity if they could show that European astronomy provided more accurate calculations of the celestial events in which the Chinese were interested. Through the Jesuits’ efforts, the Chinese certainly knew of the telescope by 1626, and the emperor probably received a telescope from Cardinal Borromeo of Milan as early as 1618.

The Jesuits invested significant talent in their mission, which was founded by Matteo Ricci, a trained mathematician who also spoke Chinese. Ricci, who died in 1610, and his successors imported the latest European books on math and astronomy and diligently trained Chinese astronomers, who set about reforming the calendar. One of the Jesuits, Adam Schall von Bell, even became head of the Chinese Bureau of Mathematics and Astronomy.

The Jesuits and their Chinese followers several times arranged prediction challenges between themselves and Chinese astronomers following traditional methods, which the Jesuits always won. The Chinese knew, for instance, that there would be a solar eclipse on June 21, 1629, and the emperor asked both sides to submit the day before their predictions of its exact time and duration. The traditional astronomers predicted the eclipse would start at 10:30 AM and last for two hours. Instead it began at 11:30 AM and lasted two minutes, exactly as the Jesuits had calculated.

But these computational victories did not solve the Jesuits’ problem. The Chinese had little curiosity about astronomy itself. Rather, they were interested in divination, in forecasting propitious days for certain events, and astronomy was merely a means to this end. Thus the astronomical bureau was a small unit within the Ministry of Rites. The Jesuits doubted how far they should get into the business of astrological prediction, but their program of converting the Chinese through astronomical excellence compelled them to take the plunge anyway. This led them into confrontation with Chinese officials and to being denounced as foreigners who were interfering in Chinese affairs. In 1661, Schall and the other Jesuits were bound with thick iron chains and thrown into jail. Schall was sentenced to be executed by dismemberment, and only an earthquake that occurred the next day prompted his release.

The puzzle is that throughout this period the Chinese made no improvements on the telescope. Nor did they show any sustained interest in the ferment of European ideas about the theoretical structure of the universe, despite being plied by the Jesuits with the latest European research. Chinese astronomers had behind them a centuries-old tradition of astronomical observation. But it was embedded in a Chinese cosmological system that they were reluctant to abandon. Their latent xenophobia also supported resistance to new ideas. “It is better to have no good astronomy than to have Westerners in China,” wrote the anti-Christian scholar Yang Guangxian.