One might even make a case that the invention of calculus set off a chain of events that made it likely someone, somewhere, would eventually create nuclear weapons. But to assert that Al-Tusi’s work on polynomials in the 1100s caused Hiroshima and Nagasaki is clearly absurd. Similarly, with agriculture. Roughly 6,000 years stand between the appearance of the first farmers in the Middle East and the rise of what we are used to calling the first states; and in many parts of the world, farming never led to the emergence of anything remotely like those states.
