[中文]作者乔伊思·埃普尔比在《无情的革命》一书中对“现代奇迹”,即当今多股世界经济力量的崛起,进行了典范的纪实性历史叙述。要合理顺畅地解释这个奇迹出于何种原因,以何种方式在十八到十九世纪间开始于英国及英属殖民地仍然是件极具挑战性的工作。富有争议的是,埃普尔比对她所称为“资本主义文化”的复杂的多因素分析只是对该问题的重述,而非一个令人满意的答案。《远离死亡和人道宇宙的诞生》一书则提出了一个基于人类进化新理论的、简易而有力的历史理论。它提出人类近两百万年以来的重大演变,包括“现代奇迹”在内,都源于对古老人类适应技巧(对社会利益冲突的强制管理)的重新运用。人类的经济力量,即适应能力每一次得到提升,其动力都来自一项强制科技的区域性应用。比如推动当代科学在世界范围大发展的技术动力,就来自火器的广泛使用所带来的国家制度民主化。这个简单得出奇的理论简练地说明了所有人类进化、考古和历史记载上的所有重大变迁。[/中文] [外文]Joyce Appleby’s description of the ’modern miracle’ (the rise of powerful contemporary economies) in "The Relentless Revolution" (2000, Norton) is a richly illuminating piece of empirical historical reportage. The challenge remains to develop a cogent, coherent theory explaining how and why this miracle began when (ca. 18th-19th Centuries) and where (mostly England and its colonies initially) it did. Appleby’s complex, poly-causal model of the emergence of a ’culture of capitalism’ is arguably a restatement of the question rather than an answer. In our book "Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe" (2000, BookSurge) a simple, powerful theory of history founded on a new theory of human evolution is described. On this theory each of the major transitions in the 2 million year human record, including the modern miracle, results from employing the ancient evolved human adaptive strategy (coercive management of social conflicts of interest) on a new scale. Each new scale of human economic (adaptive) power is driven by the local introduction of a new coercive technology - broad distribution of individual gunpowder weapons democratizing the state in the case of the modern miracle and the co-local, contemporaneous Scientific Revolution. This strikingly simple theory apparently explains all the major transitions in the human evolutionary, archaeological and historical records with compelling economy.[/外文]
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