Who needs to go to Iraq to see a war unfold?

For centuries battles have been fought. Over time the casualty tolls have risen to the billions. Ideas rose, spread and fell, one by one. Huge armies have been raised by both fanatics and the passionate alike. Ideologies have been carved and forged out of gigantic blocks of land. It is the epic struggle of humanity of all time.

It is now time for the latest report of the Intellectual War *da-da-da-dum*

(Ok, I didn't want to wind up starting from scratch so I decided to borrow the Earth. This map does not represent actual geographic locations, besides fundamentalist Christianity and Islam, which I specially catered for. You'll get a larger size with clearer details if you click it)

Now, I'm sure most of you will agree with me that there exist a huge conflict along the lines as shown by the map above. This question will then come to mind: What in the world do you call those two large factions?! Well, personally I had tried giving them different names such as coherence vs. non-coherence, as shown in the upper left portion in the map, but if I do that, it will only divide the world into two super blocks, only red and blue with nothing in between. I have also tried practical/non-practical with the same result. Therefore I ended up with naming them evidence before reason(blue)/reason before evidence(red), if you have any better suggestions, you can always tell me, though I'm not too keen on changing the map. If you're wondering why maths is being partially divided between the two, it's because evidence and reason are more or less the same thing for maths. No doubt most people should easily identify those yellow spheres of influence (fundamentalism). In addition the white coloured/uncoloured portions represent a wide variety of independents that doesn't fall into either side.

So how did the world get to be this way? Let us journey far back into history to the birth of civilisation. As we all know the earliest civilisation began in Mesopotamia (Babylon/Iraq) and spread to Egypt, but that's about where the similarities end. Soul psychology arise as a yellow blob in Mesopotamia, while Mathematics started off in Egypt as a blue blob because people needed to count stuff. (Remember, regions do not represent actually geographic locations, only pure coincidence.) As civilisation grow, Mathematics spread westward across the coast of the Mediterranean, unable to pass through the denser part within the Sahara, turning redder as it goes along as people just do mathematics for fun. Meanwhile, souls and religion spread upwards to Europe.

Now onwards to the classical ages. The ancient Greeks were one of the greatest explorers of their time who really turned the world red. From their islands in the Mediterranean they proposed a whole set of ideas about the mind, then they establish colonies in Africa, with Euclid compiling the largest book on mathematics in history at that time. Next they discovered Brazil by setting sail from Africa, and thus becoming one of the largest empire the world have ever seen, although getting almost all of it wrong. As we all know, Aristotle proposed an extremely poor four element system (Earth, Fire, Wood, Air), bad kinetics (Force is required to keep object in motion), and some other crazy stuff. Moving down South America, the Greeks discovered some natives who have already been using astronomy to do astrology. The Greeks assimilated them and began constructing an entire universe of circles. Although credit must be given to them for discovering the Earth was a sphere. Travelling further south, the Greeks discovered Antarctica and colonised it too, giving rise to a great many philosophers from that settlement, from Thales to Socrates, Plato to Epicurus. The Greeks also expanded towards governance within sociology in Asia, being the first to try out democracy and city states.

The Greeks however also made a few blue discoveries, one of them due to a dissident group of doctors not contented with the current path of medicine. They left on a voyage up north towards North America to settle in anatomy and medicine, and displacing the witchdoctor and clergy population found there, their results of their medical studies extended the lives of the average Greek, just look at all the old people they managed to bring about way down in the south. Another blue region carved out by the Greeks was in a section Physics (mechanics), made famous by Archimedes running down naked in the street during a bath. In addition, Archimedes constructed levers and pulleys, and various mechanisms to defeat the enemies of Greece, such as a Roman naval invasion. He burned down all the ships just by reflecting and concentrating sunlight.

The Romans were the inheritors to the Greek Empire, they used the Greeks exploration of Physics to develop a whole new system of Engineering, from complex architecture to ingenious war machine, turning the ancient world blue with envy. Unfortunately much was undone when Christianity was adopted as the religion in the once diverse Roman Empire, taking over literature (Bible) and art. The Greeks population within the Empire were persecuted. Christians burned down entire Greek schools of thought, philosophers died and were never replaced. The world entered a really yellow Dark Ages as the Christians could not hold onto the ancient knowledge, and the Empire collapsed upon itself, leaving yellow blobs all over.

The Arabs however took over some of the Roman-Greek holdings where the Romans retreated, such as the library of Alexandria. As well as preserving the Greek works, the develop astronomy from where the Greeks left of, naming over two-thirds of the stars known today, but still doing nothing to improve on the 'Earth is centre of universe' idea. In the 10th century, European scholars travelling to the Arab world managed to reacquire much of the knowledge lost in the Dark Ages, red as it is. Free trade spread, leading to exploration towards South Africa in business and capitalism. No long after, the Arabs turned from being an open society into fundamentalist and executing dissident scholars, spreading yellow blobs on all Arab knowledge, fortunately, Europe already owned a copy of them.

The renaissance finally saw a rise in blue discoveries again. Galileo is most remembered for the way he does his daring experiment, like the story that he drop cannon balls from the tower of Pisa (though it probably didn't happen) and of course his telescope. Word that the Earth revolve round the Sun started to spread all across Europe, leading to Galileo's house arrest. Bolder ideas that have been put forth even met the death penalty by the church. Towards the end, Physics turned from yellow (flat Earth, revolving Sun) to blue. The Enlightenment saw a rise in science literacy as well as exploration into the new world of chemistry, thanks to Antoine who discovered a few of the gases, and Humphrey Davy, who got laughing gas and some others. To the south, Newton revolutionised Physics and Astronomy into entirely blue domains, and kicked astrology out completely. Religion seeing itself lose so much ground so fast still kept a stronghold in the Americas in creation myths.

People seeing the Natural Science giving so much practical uses seek to do the same for other fields, and so born the social sciences, discovering the rest of Asia. Unfortunately it took less than a decade to have it all turn red. Social Sciences turned out to be entirely useless but for writing long manuscripts of theories that can't be tested like that Communist Manifesto by Marx. However, at that same time, an expedition was launched to chart the rest of Northwest America. Geography became the study of the Earth, and how natural features form. Then, within the rocks unexpected discoveries were made, fossils were found. With the help of radioactivity from Physics and anatomy in Biology, the fossils could be dated and ancestors traced. In a separate but closely related story, Englishman Darwin set sail for the Galapagos and wrote the theory of evolution. The yellow blob last stronghold in America was under assault.

With the invention of the microscope, the very small can now be explored, clearing new lands for physics, chemistry and biology. What they found astounded them, result in more modern fields such as Bacteriology, Virology and Neuroscience, computers only sped things up and pretty soon both evolution and neuroscience were entering the field of psychology, and philosophers armed with the new knowledge also travelled south to invade Antarctica. The red blob, having been pretty much preoccupied by internal dissent was shocked at the expansion of the blue region, try as they might all they could do was to play defensive, forming an alliance with fundamentalist by saying that the soul cannot be analysed. Except for some pathetic sting from the philosophy section that was largely destroyed before it had a chance to land on the Americas, the army of the blue, consisting of scientists to teachers, psychologists to doctors, marches on. As of today, land is still being ceded to the blue regions due to being practical and representative of reality. A scientific literate population within the humanities have also revolted to form a more coherent field of study.

As we look towards the future, only time can tell how long this war will last.