I just finished Jared Diamond’s aforementioned book, and, as a non-scientist/academic, found it fascinating (to attempt to summarize, it has two main theses: 1) Different races of humans are essentially equal genetically, but different races have accrued power due to clear environmental advantages put in motion 13,000 years ago (e.g., access to domesticable plants and animals); 2) Once these ultimate causations of dominance are teased apart and understood, the broad patterns of history can be layed out and potentially even used predictively (shades of Hari Seldon of Asimov’s “Foundation”?).
My two questions to scientist/academics: 1) How generally accepted are Diamond’s conclusions? He seems to have a pretty strong fact base to support him; and 2) How powerful are the conclusions drawn? Do they state the scientifically obvious for the lay person? Are they interesting but move the ball forward incrementally at best? Or are they revolutionary? The books comes across as well-documented, hard-to-refute common sense that sneaks up on you with very powerful conclusions about who we are - almost like Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”. I know time is required, but what do you think?
I share your appreciation. Damn fine piece of work.
Where he’s going to come into criticism is from the specialists. Diamond is bringing together a whole bunch of scientific disciplines and perceives a pattern that is invisible to scientists who are specificly archeologists, botanists, etc., which is sure to infuriate some academicians, who all tend to believe that there particular discipline is the most important, the most relevant.
Worse than that, the book is a hit. Once Carl Sagan got on TV, astronomers and astrophysicists were standing on line to dump on him.
I think he has the general outline right, which is a brilliant piece of work. Revolutionary? No, not really, none of his evidence was unknown before, he just put the pattern together. Merely brilliant.
I agree with Elucidator - It’s an excellent synthesis, but not revolutionary. Just as an example an earlier book that covered similar ( or at least overlapping ) ground, is Ecological Imperialism, The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900 - 1900 by Alfred Crosby ( Cambridge University Press, 1986 ). And the disease coverage echoes William McNeil’s old classic Plagues and Peoples among others. And I could probably come up with some more ( especially if I started going through journal articles ).
And I do recall having a minor quibble or two with parts of it. For the life of me I can’t remember what, though shrug.
That said it really is a fine piece of work, based on very solid scholarship .
So the book’s power is in its synthesis of a broad array of disciplines into cogent theses and its ability to lay the thinking out in an accessible manner. What about the epilogue which posits that the patterns that Diamond has described could be used in a predictive way?
I think the easy to see pattern is that people/corporations/countries with access to advanced resources will continue to pull farther ahead of the people behind them. It’s the basic ‘rich get richer, poor get poorer’ story.
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I think the easy to see pattern is that people/corporations/countries with access to advanced resources will continue to pull farther ahead of the people behind them.[//quote]
That is one interpretation of the historical pattern, but I would think that the greater mobility and communications the world has today are revolutionary to the extent that the old rules no longer apply. Although Diamond insisted that he was NOT saying that “geography is destiny”, as the old proverb goes, that did seem to be the most significant thrust of his book (and I’ll chime in with my admiration of it, of course). However, his explanation for the differences in the origins of the differences in cultures and technologies does not seem to me to apply to a world in which people can go anywhere at any time, and be as informed as they want to be about anything they want.
There was an author on C-Span lately, who had written a book that unexpectedly became a best seller. He said that the goal was “to get published and not sell over 300 books” otherwise you would not be taken seriously. Of course, he wasn’t complaining.
I recently bought the book and I am definitely looking forward to getting into it!
Really? Any examples? I’m surprised because I had not heard this before and at least one current astronomer says that he was very highly regarded among astronomers.
Minor quibble: if, as seems likely, the AmerIndian population was decimated by diseases of the White Man, how come this didn’t happen before Columbus, when the Vikings contacted the “skraelings” about 1200(?).
I would guess that it was because it wasn’t a major contact, either in terms of numbers or location.
The Vikings had a settlement in Newfoundland, for example, right on the northern tip. Very isolated, and not very big.
Not every European would be a carrier of diseases like smallpox - you would need a certain size of European population before all the European diseases would be carried.
As well, even if the Vikings at L’Anse-aux-Meadows brought the diseases, the fact that Newfoundland is a very isolated island would reduce the chance of it spreading broadly through the Aboriginal population.
(I am aware that other Aboriginal groups, such as the MicMac, travelled to Newfoundland for fishing and likely some trading - I’m just suggesting that the amount of contacts between the Beothuk and other Aboriginal peoples would be considerably lesser than between different Aborginal groups along the Eastern seaborad, for example.)
Great book. I have to agree with geography is not destiny. There are other factors in the progression of civilization that aren’t based on science. The difference in resources gave some people an advantage, but the ability to use it to its full potential may or may not have been there. Diamond even points out regression in some areas in regards to technology. The biggest non-scientific factor that Diamond smartly avoided was the progression of religion. But, thats another thread.
Diamond also made clear, in a way I had not realized, how little contact there was among the Indians in various parts of North America, due to geographic restraints that are no longer apparent. It’s entirely possible that the “skraelings” really did die off upon contact with any of the Viking crews who were diseased but still alive upon contact, without passing the diseases on to other tribes. How many Indians are there on Newfoundland even today?
I also hadn’t realized how extensive the die-off of Indians from smallpox really was. The vast, open spaces, open for settling, that are such a part of American mythology were there to a large extent because the hundreds of thousands of Indians who occupied them had only recently died off.
An unfortunate side effect of Diamond’s success is that many assume he was the first to tackle this question.
He wasn’t, of course. Bear in mind that Diamond is a phsiologist dipping his toe into a deep well of history, geography, economics, etc. There are many historians, economic historians, geographers, anthropologists, etc. who have long studied why certain regions of the world developed before others. These other authors just didn’t happen to make the best-seller list.
The other authors’ influence on Diamond is not instantly apparent because of the way Diamond wrote his book – as a book for the lay public, without the usual scholarly apparatus of footnotes. Many of the examples in the book–e.g. the section on QWERTY keyboards–are lifted straight out of the scholarly literature; however, the reader is given no indication whether this idea is Diamond’s or someone else’s. (In this case, Paul David’s.)
Fortunately, there are some accessable (but better annotated!) books that predate Diamond and give you a better idea of what he was building on. On the economic history side, I would recommend Eric Jones’s THE EUROPEAN MIRACLE and Joel Mokyr’s THE LEVER OF RICHES. THE EUROPEAN MIRACLE is especially good on the “geography is destiny” issue. On the history side, I heartily recommend McNeil’s PLAGUES AND PEOPLES.
I haven’t read Plagues and People in some time, but IIRC McNeil had a different explanation than Diamond for why the Amerinds were largely desease free.
According to McNeil, the main reasons were that humans had evolved in the old world and their diseases along with them. But the New World was disease-free and because of the way the Amerinds got there, they didn’t bring any diseases with them.
Diamond (with 30 more years of research to draw on) put the whole thing on the lack of domestic animals in the New World.
I think that many people would agree that geography accounts, to a greater or lesser extent, for the “dominance” of Europeans (whatever that means).
What is highly controversial is whether you should take the final step in the argument, and speculate as to whether geography and/or living for generations in agricultural societies, surrounded by domesticated plants and animals, has had effects on the cognitive abilities or behaviour of Europeans (or other groups).
Ah yes, our resident baseless speculator once more tries to repackage racialism in another package.
Let’s see, I read your statement as hypothesizing that Europeans (let’s be frank and say white people, that’s what you really mean after all) “cognitive abilities” (again let’s be frank, intelligence) was effected by “geography” or “living for generations in agricultural socieities, surrounded by domesticated plants and animals.”
More or less, we can restate this as “Are white people smarter because they live in Europe.” My does this not seem like a familiar proposition? Indeed, our own Diamond addresses this.
The answer of course has been dealt with ad nauseum in the race threads, and indeed in Diamond himself.
Briefly:
(a) in re agriculture/domesticates – they come late to most of Europe, after their arrival in other areas. A mere handful of thousands of years in any case is not enough to shift anyone’s genome. Too little time and of course as the genetic evidence clearly indicates, too much exchanges. Fails.
(b) in re the good old Rushton-the-racist formulation, which you have attempted to dress up in other clothes, that somehow Euro climate was more challenging and produced different cognitive results – more crudely cold makes people smarter or some such nonesense – is crude, unsupported nonesense. (i) Once more ‘white folks’ are too recent in Europe, (ii) maintained linkages/gene flow with other populations as amply demonstrated in past race threads (iii) there is not compelling evidence to suggest that Euro environment is any more cognitively challenging than any other place, crude stereotypes aside (iv) no historical basis for such assertions.
I don’t think race has much to do with it, the Chinese “yellow race” could have conquered the world until the 16th. century or so if they had the mind to do so. The reason China did not dominate Europe was more or less political, when you are the center of the world you don’t much care what is beyond your borders. China had the population, technology and for a brief time the fleet of ships necessary to rule the world but closed the door on it’s own ambition.
Started this book, then got distracted. You’ve convinced me to get back to it.
I do agree that it is unfortunate that when an academic such as Sagan tries to bring his subject to the masses, he/she is frowned upon by colleagues. Ivory towers are apparently not to be accessible to the rest of us.
Whoa, there, Collounsbury. Personal attacks are not allowed in this forum. You’re allowed to address the ideas or views of another person, but things like calling another poster “our resident baseless speculator” is over the line. I understand that you and Ms. Wind Chick have had prior contact elsewhere on the Internet, but that does not justify carrying feuds over here to the SDMB. If another poster says something with which you disagree, then address that specific post, not that person’s entire posting history.
Indeed he does. In fact, in the prologue, Diamond states: “Sound evidence for the existence of human differences in intelligence that parallel human differences in technology are lacking. In fact…modern ‘Stone Age’ peoples are on the average probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples.”
Diamond goes on to explain this in terms of natural selection:
“…natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry [such as resistance to smallpox] was instead more potent.”
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