Yes. So his theory doesn’t really explain why it was white people who took over the world. It explains why some group or other from Eurasia took over the world. Yet part of the point that people use him for, and use him in this thread, is that there is nothing special about Europeans. But in order to use Diamond for that, you need to explain why it actually was Europe, and if there is nothing special about Europeans, why it happened to be Europeans and not Asians, or Middle Easterners. You’ve admitted that Diamond doesn’t really explain why Europe; he explains, “Why Eurasia.” Yet it wasn’t Eurasia in the New World, it was a subset of Eurasia, it was Europe. I’m even willing to say Western Europe, which unfortunately doesn’t help much, because that unfortunately excites the anti-Slav, anti-Asiatic, noble white-man crowd even more.
(continuing my post)
On the other hand, I just listened to a This American Life from 1996 in which an athropolgist laughs (that part was from 1986) at Scott Carrier’s brother’s theory that humans could run down large game. “But people are so SLOW!” the anthro dude crowed. What makes the guy an obvious moron is that people can and do run down large game because we have higher endurance (the same way dogs can run down rabbits) and this has been common (but not common enough) knowledge among anthropologists for many years. My own wife ran down a horse once. The Carrier brothers’ problem was that they started out on pronghorn antelope, the fastest land animal over long distances. Deer are easier because they aren’t built for endurance.
Hernstein and Murray are marginalized for being obvious morons? Do tell. Sure, mainstream psychologists and anthropologists don’t have much use for them, but they’re all part of the ivory tower liberal elite, and they’re obviously just rejecting Hernstein and Murray’s scholarship because their conclusions aren’t politically correct. Note: this is not my view, but you don’t have to look very far to find it. I don’t think it’s a particularly marginal view at all. I wish it were.
I can’t agree. Diamond provides an explanation for the technological status of non-Eurasians, one which is all the more convincing because his theory accurately predicts the relative conditions of Australians, Americans, etc. This provides strong support for the view that the pre-contact technological state of non-Eurasians had nothing to do with perceived racial inferiority. Once you’ve got that, and you note that most of the major advances in civilization in Eurasia (agriculture, writing, wheel, political organization, metallurgy, etc) originate in the Middle East and China, how is there room for any racialist view of white superiority?
Because the question was, “Why do they have more? Why did they (the Europeans, since the Asians and Middle Easterners did not conquer the New World (again, I don’t want to hear about isolated and minor counter-examples)) and not the other way around.”
That’s the basis for the original question about the “pop” in the last 500 years. Yes, many of the major advances originated in the Middle East and China, but those major advances did not lead to the conquest of the New World by those areas. Perhaps when you are discussing the above question, it means to you, “Why was the New World so technologically backward over the last 11,000 years?” It is my opinion that for more people, the question is, “Why did Europe conquer when it did?” And if your response is, “Because they are part of the Eurasian landmass, which had geographic advantages,” the natural follow up question for me is, “So are China and the Middle East; why didn’t they do it?”
Now I respect a lot of your reasons; I agree that there were political, cultural, and societal. But I do not believe that all, or even most, of those aspects were foretold by the direction that crop development naturally travels. I respect, although I do not agree with, another possible answer, that it was merely a crapshoot as to who did the conquering first (maybe if military development had been delayed by 300 years, it would have been China, for example). So I believe that Diamond’s book is lacking in its explanation to the question as most people would interpret it.
Well, the average “man on the street” is smart enough to make the following observations:
- White men dominated everywhere and everything.
- There must be a reason for the white man dominating.
Before Diamond, there only seemed two obvious reasons, the white man was somehow superiour, not neccesarily genetically. Or sheer dumb luck.
Since it was now socially inappropriate to say the first, most people uncomfortably defaulted to the second. But there are quite a number of glaring holes in the dumb luck theory. As Diamond pointed out, how could it be that Aboriginals had been in Australia for over 10,000 years and didn’t manage to do nearly as well as white settlers did in a mere 200? Sure, white man had technology and livestock, but the black man must of been on a different plane of stupid to not be able to invent bows and arrows or agriculture. I mean, how hard could it be to figure out if you dropped some seeds in the ground, you could have a reliable food source? Maybe white man isn’t genetically superior to the black man, but something must be different between the two. Maybe it was the spirit of scientific enquiry? or maybe it was democracy or something else unique to europe.
Diamond was really the first person to burst into the public conciousness and propose a theory that accounted for such radical differences in progress without requiring that the people be different for it to work. It’s not at all obvious that farming isn’t as easy nor desirable as it looks and that it’s possible to know about bows and arrows and then subsequently lose such knowledge.
GAH!!! For the last freaking time, for approximately the same sorts of reasons that the Germans and Italians didn’t! Sweet Jesus in a Ruby Loincloth, what freaking part of that answer don’t you get?!?
Huh. I haven’t seen a book this hard to interpret since Finnegan’s Wake.
Well of course when you started this line of criticism I had made it clear that these were implicit positions of Diamond’s, not explicit. So it’s highly disingenuous of you to now claim that I have asserted that Diamond actually said those things.
The alternative is to construct an argument that conceded that the points that can’t be explained biogeographically (eg reindeer and bison never being domesticated) may be the result of a culture that made it impossible. Instead Diamond insisted that bison couldn’t be domesticated simply because they never had been.
It’s grossly different for the purposes of this discussion. On the one hand Diamond asks to accept that Japanese culture was militarily inferior because geography permitted military inferiority, or conversely that European cultures were superior because they were forced to be superior by environment. OTOH we have a situation where the culture is simply inferior because it is culturally inferior and would have been inferior no matter where it was located.
:rolleyes:
Yes, and I think if you asked most historians, they would tell you that Europe did not dominate during the Hellenistic and Imperial Roman periods, and was pretty much on par with Asia in terms of colonization, technological development, expansion of culture, and other items.
You are right, Rome and Greece’s domination never happened
Yet while making this argument you simultaneously hold that for some 400 odd years during the Hellenistic and Imperial Romana years, European states in general have had no more success in colonizing, developing technology, and effectively submitting their will onto others than Asians did
There is a clear double standard at play here.
I’d just like to repeat this. It sums up my frustration with you so well slyfrog. You keep moving the goalposts by utilising special case pleading. You appear to be the only person here who doesn’t see it, and that’s because you are the perpetrator. We are not all ganging up on you. You really are moving the goalposts constantly.
Diamond does not purport to explain detailed differences. He explains broad historical trends and broad geographic trends. Hence he can explain why, broadly, the Mediterranean developed agriculture and civilisation first. He can explain why that then broadly shifted to Europe. He never attempts to explain the occasional incursion or backstep within that grand pattern. That is way to complex for a thesis with such massive scope.
Similarly he can explain why western Europe dominated, but not specifically why Spain and not Italy, or why England and not Belgium. The question of why Eurasia dominated the other ocntinents has been answered for you several times. Diamond also addresses why East Asia (which includes China and Japan) fell behind during a specific narrow window in the colonial era (lack of internal conflict due to geographic uniformity very broadly). However he never attempts to address specifically why not China or why not the Levant. Those geographic areas are just way to narrow and no more within his scope than asking why not Italy or Belgium.
Well, I’ve never been uncomfortable claiming the latter, but I have been the beneficiary of enough dumb luck to recognize it when others get it.
As Diamond also pointed out in his 1987 Discover article (which I did read way back when, but which it sounds like Diamond has forgotten), successful hunter-gatherers don’t exactly have a lot of inspiration to change career paths. The living is far too easy to give it up and start farming. Anyway, it’s terribly unfair to make a comparison that starts with native Australians of 1800 and Europeans of 1800 and say, “Look how much more Whitey has done in 200 years!” and say that the Brits were 10,000 years ahead because it wasn’t Brits who were inventing cuneiform and irrigation. No, 10,000 years ago (and eight or four) they were stone-age (or barely past it) hunter gatherers, too. The Aborigines would be more fairly compared with Brits of back then and if the prehistoric Britons were at all ahead technologically it was because they were exposed to better technology from the mainland. Despite the Channel they were not developing in a vacuum but, because of the distance between New Guinea and Australia, for all intents and purposes the native Australians were.
Does Diamond get into what a force for change a northern climate is? It not only forces residents to plan for winter but, especially if the people are farmers, it gives them an awful lot of downtime during which equipment can be maintained and even improved. Instead of weeding the third crop of wheat Angus can be tinkering with a better moldboard.
I’d say “DUH!” and point out that at least one guy sorta in the field thought it was BS but in 1976 did I consider going on for my doctorate? No, I had to read in American Anthropologist that by 1980 80% of people with Anthro PhDs would be working in factories so I figured I’d beat the rush and do it right away. :smack: Damn! I coulda had a show on PBS! 
If Diamond actually said that then the man is a pillock. The HG lifestyle is anything but easy, which is precisely why HGs have such low densities compared to agriculturalists and why they lose out to them whenever they come into conflict. The HG lifestyle is easy for much of the time because it is so terribly hard the rest of the time that the vast majority of them die. The only exception to that is HGs that practice infanticide in order to restrict the population below carrying capacity. Niether option is by any stretch an easy life.
There are two major problems with that.
The first is that, Tasmanians excepted, Australians have never been isolated for more than a few hundred years at most. While it’s true that the average resident of South Australia probably never saw too many foreigners for most of that time the same is also true for the average resident of Minsk or Belfast. Northern Australians on the other hand have always maintained contact and trade links with the rest of the world.
The second problem is that even 10, 00 years ago the people of Britain were technologically far superior to Australians in most fields (maritime crafts being one possible exception). Even being generous it wasn’t until around 5000 years ago that the Australians reached a level equivalent to Britons of 20, 000 years ago. IOW Australia has always been 15, 000 years behind technologically. A very strong argument could be made that Australians never developed the full Neolithic technology of Briton 20, 00 years ago.
Two problems with this as well.
The first is that it suggests that only northern climates are seasonal, when we know that isn’t the truth. Mediterranean and southern climates are equally seasonal with just as much downtime. Very few areas of the world outside the wet tropics can sustain three crops a year without irrigation, rainfall is too restrictive and the winters are too cool
The second problem is that Australians never developed indigenous agriculture, so the seasonality of agriculture really can’t be invoked to explain a lack of technological advance. We might just as well say they never advanced to space flight because there are no suitable launch areas available. That may have been an issue had they ever developed a technology anywhere near that level, but being stuck in the Neolithic it simply was never an issue.
So you’re saying I wouldn’t have a PBS series whatever career path I took in 1976? 
You seen some of those SBS docos? You shouldn’t let the facts get in the way of letting you make one.
Actually, this post and the OP share the same error: on this topic, Diamond is a self-confessed popularizer and has never claimed to be the brilliant chap to discover any of this.
The professionals in the Anthrpology racket were not surprised by Diamond’s efforts because they had read the same stuff in the original sources long before Diamond published. While there are professionals who disagreed with Diamond on particular points, his work was never controversial in the Anthro community. The controversies were all on the outside among people who had never studied the source material and were affronted by his assertion that white folks conquered the world by sheer dumb luck.
His theses probably do not seem startling to anyone with a firm foundation in the original sources upon which he relied for his material. So what? If you have that background, you were not his audience. And if the authors(s) of his source works wish to take umbrage. let it be noted that they did not bother trying to let the great unwashed masses see what they had learned.
Which are what? Political, cultural, and societal reasons that are not explained by, and have nothing to do with what Diamond is writing about? So effectively, Diamond does not explain the reason?
I fully “get” it. My point is that Diamond does not explain what people say he explains. You cannot say, “Well, Diamond shows that there was nothing innately special about the conquerors,” and at the same time say, “Well, Diamond’s theory doesn’t really cover why it was those guys in particular.” It just doesn’t work.
There’s nothing wrong with Diamond just because his theory doesn’t cover them, but there is something wrong with people who say that Diamond explains why it was nothing special about the conquerors, when he doesn’t actually explain why it was those conquerors versus the others on the Eurasian landmass who shared the same advantages that Diamond does discuss.
And what I’m saying is that if he specifically pointed out examples of microscale human arbitrariness in the evolution of culture and societal development, then I fail to see how he implicitly said culture and society is only shaped by environment. I would have had a major problem with the book myself if I had walked away with that impression. But the message I took home is that societal development (including the culture it contains) is mostly shaped by environmental pressures.
I think you have a valid critique about the buffalo situation. Perhaps he should have not glossed over the fact that buffalos can be domesticated, and delved more into the possible reasons why they were not. He could have explored into cultural reasons why buffalos were hunted instead of farmed. Or he could have emphasized more the point (that he did make) which was simply because Native Americans hadn’t domesticated buffalo doesn’t mean they would have never domesticated them.
Right, because all those racialist theories about how spiffy white people are focus on how white people are only superior to Chinese and East Indians, and are careful to emphasize the equality between Eurasian groups and non-Eurasian groups. :rolleyes:
Frankly, I just don’t fathom this nit you’re picking.
Here’s the problem with an argument that it was culture that prevented the domestication of bison:
The range bison covered was huge. At any given time, there would have been dozens of different cultures amongst the people living in that range. And cultures change quite rapidly when you’re talking about small groups with only oral traditions, so over the 11000 years people coexisted with bison, we’d be talking about hundreds and hundreds of different cultures, none of which domesticated the bison. It would be very odd for all of those hundreds of cultures to contain an arbitrary taboo against animal domestication. If they all contained such a taboo, one would expect there to be a good reason for it. So what sort of reason might that be?
Cultural explanations do nicely if you’re wondering why the Chinese abandoned naval exploration in the mid-15th Century. They don’t do so well explaining why the myriad of different tribes living off the bison didn’t domesticate them. Now you know that I disagree with Diamond’s arguments about domestication, but I do think that some non-cultural explanation is needed.
And as I have said several times, when he does admit that, yes, arbitrary cultural differences come into play in the next breath says that those cultural differences are themselves an inevitable result of geography and couldn’t and wouldn’t have occurred elsewhere. IOW he does imply that human societies are shaped only by environment. If arbitrary cultural decisions play any role at all, at any stage, he then says that the cultural decision is itself either an unavoidable result of geography or else so strongly selected by it that it couldn’t have arisen elsewhere. No matter what happens Diamond implies that it was dictated by geography.
The example of the guns in Japan is one example. Yes the decision was arbitrarily cultural, but Diamond then spends some time explaining why the decision could only have arisen in Japan, why it couldn’t have arisen in Europe and why, by extension, European culture isn’t superior but simply a product of a lucky environmental lottery.
The way he deals with the Aboriginal refusal to adopt bows, agriculture and numerous other technologies it is another example. Yes he admits that Aborigines had continuous contact with agricultural people with bows, and could have adopted the technology any time they liked. But he then goes on to say that geography dictated that they couldn’t because contact was only possible by a few small groups, soils were infertile etc.
This is the point I think you are missing. Diamond assiduously tries to avoid saying that some cultures simply can’t use some technology because he finds it ‘unsatisfying’. On those rare occasions when he does have to explain something that is clearly cultural such as Japanese refusal to adopt guns or Aboriginal refusal to adopt bows Diamond says that the cultural decision is itself either an unavoidable result of geography or else so strongly selected by it that it couldn’t have arisen elsewhere This is, IMO, one of the biggest flaws in Diamond’s argument. It is totally logically invalid and unscientific.
Illogical because it utilises ad hoc reasoning to force everything to fit a geographic explanation. There is no unifying objective standard applied here as there is when he discusses the distribution of Mediterranean climates, or the abundance of large seeded annual grasses or the availability of potential domesticates. Instead he deals with areas that apparently are exceptions to environmental explanations on a case-by-case basis. forcing an environmental explanation to fit, not matter how tortured. Bows spread across the Indonesian archipeligo and into Ireland despite having to island hop. Yet the same technology didn’t spread into Australia because it had to island hop. Microliths and domestic dogs spread into Australia despite having to island hop, but bows and agriculture didn’t because they had to island hop.
And that in turn makes it unscientific because the hypothesis predicts everything, and thus predicts nothing. Diamond looks at what is environmentally unique about Australia and then claims, absent any evidence or reasoned argument, that those unique environmental features explain the cultural decision to reject bows. Diamond look sat what is environmentally unique about Japan and then claims, absent any evidence or reasoned argument, that those unique environmental features explain the cultural decision to reject guns. This sort of ad hoc reasoning explains anything, no matter what it is. If we discovered tribe living in the foothills of the Swiss Alps tomorrow with stone-age technology Diamond would only need to look at what is geographically unique about that area and declare that it explains the state. Because all areas are geographically unique in some way it is impossible to even conceive of a situation that can’t be explained by this forced-fit type of geographic explanation. As a result the theory has no predictive power and can never be falsified. It’s not scientific.
I agree with that wholeheartedly (and it’s rather well put BTW). I would extend the same suggestion to several other examples in the book. Instead of saying that England couldn’t have made the same cultural decision as Japan to ban firearms he could have explained the inherent cultural reasons why Japan made the ‘wrong’ choice. Instead of saying that Aborigines couldn’t have decided to adopt bows from Asia at the same time and via the same routes as they adopted microlith technology form Asia he could have spent some time emphasizing the point hat it took over 4000 years between microliths arising in SE Asia and their adoption into Australia, and that just because they hadn’t adopted them didn’t mean they wouldn’t sometime in the next 10, 000 years.
Instead we get these tortured geographic explanations which predict nothing and ignore evidence. Diamond’s hypothesis can’t predict that Australians will fail to adopt weapons technology from Asia because we know that at least two different waves of weapons technologies were adopted from Asia in the past 10, 00 years. Instead he tries to explain away failure to adopt one specific type of weapon, the bow, as a special case rather than simply conceding that it is simply in the same basket as modern Australia failing to adopt nuclear power. It’s a cultural decision shaped entirely by culture and has nothing whatsoever to do with geography.
Diamond’s hypothesis can’t predict that small densely populated islands will succeed in banning technology, because Britain and Java are small densely populated islands and have never successfully banned a technology yet. Instead he deals with one specific case of banning on one specific island (or archipeligo) and goes looking around for some geographic quirk to explain it away without ever actually explaining it.
This argument doesn’t really establish anything because we know that bison can be domesticated, and we know that they were not. So ultimately we know that there was some reason why over the 11000 years and hundreds and hundreds of different cultures no one did domesticate them. There is no commonality of geography across the range of the bison even in historic times, given that the species ranged from mountains to to forests to prairies, from rainforest margins to semi-desert, from Mexico to Canada, from Pennsylvania to California. So for the same reasons that cultural explanations don’t work biogeographic reasons don’t work: there is no commonality.
Note that I never argued that the reason was cultural, simply that Diamond should have conceded that it was as possible as a geographic explanation, or his contradictory position that bison have been domesticated yet are undomesticable. Whatever problems cultural explanations have equally plague any biogeographic explanations.
I agree. What I disagree with is Diamond dismissing cultural differences out of hand and implying that it can never be cultural, that it has to be biogeographic. The explanation itself is almost certainly incredibly complex and a combination of cultural factors that have no relationship to geography, cultural factors are linked to geography, the biology of the animal, the biogeography of the continent and the geography itself. Diamond OTOH seems willing to construct the most tortured explanations to avoid admitting that some cultures simply made better choices. Not were simply forced to make them by geography, but simply made them when myriad alternatives existed.
Indeed, without any consistent cultural or geographical conditions over the range of the bison, it would seem that the only “biogeographic” explanation that could possibly succeed is that something about the bison themselves prevented domestication. As it happens, this is exactly the type of theory that Diamond adopts. What a coincidence!