Did men invent civilization?
I will assume that you mean did males invent civilisation. Most likely people invented civilisation - men and women working together. It does not seem likely that only one or the other of the two primary genders could have invented civilisation. You may also want to consider that civilisation was not really "invented" like one invents a light bulb or computer chip. It is the result of a long process of changes, small inventions and innovation: the building of permanent houses; the realisation that one can plant seeds rather than rely on nature to do the planting for you; the domestication of the dog, then sheep and pigs; making pottery; and the slow development of political complexity. In all this, men and women would have been working together. However, I would like to correct some of the misinformation in some of the other posts. First, Çatalhöyük in Turkey is not necessarily the world's oldest city. What appears to be the oldest city in the world, now sunken off the coast of Gujarat, was discovered in 2001 and dates back to 7,500 BC, a hundred or so years earlier than the earliest dates for Çatalhöyük. "City" is somewhat problematic, and depending on your definition there may be others that are older still. More importantly, the female figurines recovered at Çatalhöyük do not mean that the Neolithic population there was governed by women. Consider this - the Greek city-state of Athens was as male-dominated as a place can be, yet the city's patron deity was the goddess Athena and "female figurines" (i.e. statues of Athena) were everywhere. Also, it is important to remember that along with female figurines there are also some male figurines at Çatal, and many houses also had bull skulls, complete with horns, affixed to the walls. Bull's skulls are typically associated with maleness. As for the idea that early farming societies were peaceful maternal collectives until angry, hurtful male pastoralists overran them, that is complete fiction. Finally, the claim that in hunter-gatherer societies the women do all the foraging is not true. In societies such as the !Kung, the Yanamamo and those in Melanesia, men and women both forage, often helped by children and the elderly of both sexes. Gathering firewood and collecting shell-fish, eggs, insects and other small game for food are typically not gender-specific activities. Even the idea that only men hunt can be challenged; it is certainly not the case that only women forage.
What are some breakthroughs/inventions that women have come up with?
The field of data analysis and statistics. The overthrow of the idea that civilation was begun because of war and protection from war. (Just saw this in an really interesting documentary the other night.) Those are just two that spring to mind. One problem with questions like this is that most of the people who've made breakthroughs and invented things are unknown to most people. Look around you. For how many things do YOU know the inventor's name? Of every "breakthrough" -- how many do you know WHOSE breakthrough it was?
What inventions did women invent that we still use today?
1843 Ada Augusta Lovelace, laid some of the early conceptual and technical groundwork for high technology by helping develop an early computer. 1903 Marie Curie was the first female recipient of a Nobel Prize, for the discovery of radioactive elements. Mary Anderson was awarded a patent in 1903 for a window cleaning device, a foreruuner to the windshield wiper. 1904 Lizzie Magie invents a game called The Landlords Game a forerunner of the Monopoly game. 1946 Marion Donovan sold her disposable diaper invention for about $1 million "in order to devote more time to developing other inventions". 1952 Grace Hopper was credited with devising the first compiler, a program that translates instructions for a computer from English to machine language. 1959 Ruth Handler invented an anatomically improbable molded plastic statuette named Barbie. Since its debut in 1959, the Barbie doll has become an American icon that functions as both a steady outlet for girls' dreams and an ever changing reflection of American society. 1971 Stephanie Kwolek invented one of the modern world's most readily recognized and widely used materials: Kevlar. Her name appears on 16 patents; she is sole patent holder on seven. 1991 Naomi Nakao, is a practicing gastroenterologist, founder of Granit Medical Innovations in 1989 and inventor of the Nakao Snare in 1991. She has 54 patents or patent pending in her name. 2002 Under Helen Greiner's leadership, iRobot Corporation is delivering robots into the industrial, consumer, academic, and military markets. In 2002, the ROOMBA robot vacuum was introduced to the consumer products marketplace. 2006 Jennifer Tuttler submitted a short essay to the Live Your Dream contest. Tuttle created a game, Multiplication Madness. In February, 2006 she was selected as the winner and won over $250,000 in cash, products and training for her effort.
Does the fact that men invented more things than women make them more important than women?
Yeah. Let’s count! Lets make sure we only look at few couple hundred years, when it just so happened women were not allowed to get any education and those who tried to invent things had things stolen from them by men. (This is a bit like trying to prove the superiority of white people over black by counting inventions and discoveries)Let’s not figure in the equation who more likely invented things that really did change human history like such as agriculture, weaving (you know like textiles, clothing, thanks to which men could go places where it was freezing), food preservation (so people could live through winter in those places) possibly even writing. No, no it was probably men, men who sat in camp wondering how they can use those piles of animal hair or figured the thing with seeds while they were digging for roots while women were out there running and hunting deer.To determine who really makes more inventions we would need to make it a fair comparison. Let’s give all equal opportunity to be educated and to contribute (i.e women are not the only ones penalized with loss of profession for making babies, men spend equal time on taking care of their children). Let’s make sure achievements and inventions are judged on merit not on what’s between inventor’s legs. Then let’s wait couple of centuries and count.Oh, and also lets declare a contents under the following rules:whoever wins makes the people who share their genital configuration more important that the people who do not share their genital configuration whether they invent things or not, andwe discard the inventions and importance of the ‘losers’ and all loses have to heretofore bow down to the people of the winners genital kind even if they actually invented nifty shit prior to the contest being concluded(Of course to make such rules and believe they make sense we would have to somehow devolved our so much, it’s doubtful anyone would be actually inventing anything. Never mind details, though, right?)To put it in simpler terms, if you think that because Einstein had a dick it makes you, who also have a dick, as important as Einstein,sorry to break it to you, but such thinking only makes you a dick.You want to feel important? Go DO something to benefit humanity, invent some kick ass math like Emma Noether or a computer language that powered the world and is still used like Grace Hopper.
How would you compare the invention of the printing press to the computer. ?
It probably hurt it in some ways and helped in others. As you said, computers are creating a great demand for information, but I don't think they'll replace books anytime soon, at least until computers become extremely reliable and allow you to easily do things that you could normally only do on paper. Paper allows you much more freedom to put things exactly the way you want, even though you can't work as fast as a computer. For example, when I take notes, I usually express part of what I hear by drawing a quick picture or graph or arranging the words so that I can see the relationship between them. I have yet to see a program that allows you to do this and is as intuitive and cheap as paper. The same applies if I write notes on the pages of a textbook. Also, since it is so easy to copy material from the internet, anyone who wants to make money writing books will most likely still publish on paper. It might even be too early to say how the internet has affected or will affect the pursuit of knowledge. The internet might eventually be replaced by another method of accessing infromation or it might become so integrated into our lives that we don't even realize it's there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing.
What do you think is the most significant invention ever made?
Very few inventions have truly transformed every aspect of human existence. 1. Agriculture:Before the invention of agriculture humans were nomadic, we didn't settle down, therefore there was no possibility of developing because almost all advancements had to be left behind. With the introduction of farming humans could build settlements and develop new technologies, otherwise known as civilization.2. Steam Engine:Before the Steam Engine all work that had to be done could only be done by humans, or maybe horses, this meant that the productivity of society was limited to the productivity of man or animal. With the invention of the Steam Engine we were able to increase output without increasing man hours, which allowed for factories, trains, and the modern world.3. ElectricityBefore Electricity we were limited by machines the could be powered by steam. This meant that small tasks (e.g. cleaning the house) had to be completed by humans. With electricity we had the power to banish the darkness, to clean away the dust, and "modernize" everything else in our daily lives. 4. SemiconductorsBefore Semiconductors all calculations had to be done by hand, by humans. There were people that were called calculators that would sit and complete computations by hand. Vacuum tubes, which were the predecessors to semiconductors were slightly better, but a room of computers was far less powerful than a Ti-83.
What is the most interesting invention/technology that most people have never heard about?
You have all probably seen these while surfing the web, but do you know the purpose of it and how exactly it verifies whether or not you’re a robot?This is called a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). They were invented in 2003 by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in order to be used as a security check on websites to ensure only human users can pass through.Only humans can read this text, computers can’t!So now millions of captchas are being solved every single day, isn’t there a way that all this brain power can be put to good use? YES, there is. The creators of ReCaptcha started scanning books and converting them into PDFs using software, any words that were too hard for the computer to convert they would put into a captcha and let a human convert them.At this point 100 million ReCaptchas were being solved every day, the equivalent of 2.5 million books a year. So Google says “let’s buy ReCaptcha” and they did in 2009. Google digitized all of google books and all of the New York times archives. When they ran out of books to digitize Google started giving people street numbers from Google street view to help Google maps.Everything was going great, until… computer technology started getting advanced enough to solve captchas on its own. They started making captchas harder to solve, but eventually the technology caught on and Google needed a new strategy.So Google engineers came up with the captcha that we all know and love!When you click the checkbox, it sends over an HTTP request to Google with information like your IP address, your location and time, the way you move your cursor before you click, how you were scrolling the page, time intervals, and more. Most of the time the machine learning bots over at Google can tell whether or not you are a robot, but if they’re still unsure you get something like this-And that’s how Google can tell who’s a human and who isn’t. pretty cool, huh?credit goes to this guy for the idea and the info, thanks!I'm not a robot^^I highly recommend this videoEdit: A lot of people were asking how Google knows the answer to the captcha, since the whole point is that robots can't solve them. The answer is that ReCaptcha uses two words in their captchas, one of which they know, and one of which they don't know(a street sign or word from a book that needs converting).
What are useful inventions black people have created?
@ Rodney white......you just rambled off a bunch of our most important inventions that were invented by white people, Charles Babbage was the inventor of the computer (white), Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone (white) , thomas edison invented the lightbulb (white) and all of you people that liked his comment just shows how ignorant you are and to that other person that asks what I have invented...nothing yet but at least I am striving to invent something unlike black people that think stealing is the better option and my great grandfather was the inventor of the drinking fountain I wish we were all still segregated so you blacks wouldn't get to use my grandfathers invention.
Invention: "WHEEL" is considered as the top-most invention of mankind, everything else followed. How can this be explained/justified?
Invention of wheel is considered as a revolutionary invention as it was about to change whole transportation history. This gave birth to ghoragadi, bellgadi, later known carts or baghis. Mobility grew faster. And as we know humans started settling in Neolethic age, they even started trade and invention of these means encouraged long road journeys. Trade and commerce flourished, exchange of cultures started and gave birth to knew cultures. Not only wheel but boat was equally important. ** Well, if there would have no wheels then how Arjuna would have killed Karna! Thank you