Per the main hypotheses of Jared Diamonds “Guns Germs and Steel”. Are it’s hypotheses still considered the best explanation for European domination or have any powerful critiques put a hole in his conclusions? The wiki article outlines some of the critiques, but I was curious how valid his conclusions are currently considered among his academic & professional peers, and people with fairly extensive knowledge on these subjects.
WIki article
Just to add some meat on the bones of that wiki quote, Diamond postulates that Eurasia* had two advantages over the Americas:
-and-
*and we need to start thinking of Europe and Aisa as one continuous landmass instead of two artificially created continents
I haven’t read all of the book, I put it down and never picked it up again…but I recently read a Nat’l Geographic that had some of the same conclusions from G,G & S listed, i.e. vegetation growing east-west & migration routes of animals. So, some of the things he lists have become normalized.
-Tcat
It’s been attacked from a number of sides, partly because he started out as a physiologist and over the years has been encroaching on a number of other disciplines, whose experts don’t take kindly to the meddlings of someone they see as a dilettante. As a result, a few inconsistencies and factual errors have been identified, though none comes to mind immediately. He’s also lost a few defenders by advancing rather outré positions like this.
On the other hand, given the glaring spotlight thrown on Diamond’s GG&S hypothesis, I think it’s held up remarkably well in its broad strokes. And as Tomcat observes, some of Diamond’s conclusions, the shorthand version anyway, have become pretty well mainstreamed.
Not a bad legacy, I’d say.
The only problem I have with GG&S is that it’s so fatalistic. I don’t believe physical conditions alone can account for the reasons why some civilizations rise and others fail. GG&S isn’t the end all be all on the rise of civilization but intead it’s just one piece of the puzzle.
Marc
I don’t know, I think he’s just adopting a contrarian posture here to make a point – namely, that some of the assumptions we make (agriculture good, H&G bad) can be challenged on certain grounds. I don’ t know that he thinks we should all suddenly return to hunting and gathering. Manhattan would be a nightmare, I think.
Doesn’t Manhattan already have a lot of hunters and gatherers?
I’m not clear on what you mean by “fatalistic.” Certainly, the work is reductionist by very nature–Diamond, after all, is trying to find a set of root causes or principles that describe the development of civilization–but he doesn’t limit his thesis to one narrow area (as is typically done by an “expert in the field”) but rather looks at a fairly holistic picture of influences. It’s not that Europe was inevitably going to end up dominating world affairs; the nations of East Asia had nearly equal opportunity, and Diamond notes that internal political issues resulted in the abandonment of technological development. Had the Americas been populated earlier or had more domesticatible species of flora and fauna, they’d have been more competitive by Diamond’s assessment. However, “physical conditions”–geography, zoology, natural resources, et cetera–play a key role in how a civilization will develop, and there are strong parallel correlations one can make in the anthropological development of societies in widely seperated but similiar climates and conditions.
As Cervaise says, while a few claims by Diamond have been challenged and effectively debased, by and large his model (or rather, the model he presents, which is something of an amalgamation of previous hypotheses) has stood well. The most egregious claim that stood out in my reading was his attempt to assert the superior intellect of New Guinians based upon their perceptiveness of the local environment. He seemed, in that case, to have totally foregone his own argument of environment shaping the expectation and capability of a society in which it exists (i.e. hunters will be good at hunting, accountants are good at bookkeeping, and neither is very good at the other’s trade) and irrationally defended his friends in a biased argument.
I’ve found that a lot of the most virulent critics have seemingly not read the book, or have only read bits and pieces of it. Like biological evolution, Diamond’s theory of the evolution of societies is an broad, multivalued model in which a large number of factors influence the outcome. Attempting to overreduce to one bumper sticker statement undermines the whole point.
Stranger
Well I’ve read it, and I think we both agree that I’m not a virulent critic, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. What I enjoyed most about it was that it gave me a new way of thinking about how civilizations arose and why some dominant others. “Fatalistic” might have been a poor choice of words on my part. What I meant was that I feel he places to great an emphasis on location. While I recognize the importance of location I’m not sure it’s as important as he belives.
Marc
I think I know what you’re getting at. For myself, I believe that cultural factors play a significant role in the success and failure of competing civilizations, and that Diamond downplays this rather more than is warranted. I do think he’s doing this on purpose, though, to make a point, along the same lines as Sal Ammoniac’s reasonable response to my calling-out of Diamond’s anti-agriculture essay. The way I see it, “a culture” tends to be roughly synonymous with “a people” in the layman’s mind, which is fine — but then “a people” also maps rather neatly onto “a race,” creating a false congruence between cultural factors and racial factors. In other words, arguments about cultural superiority, which I think are legitimate, inevitably and unfortunately become entangled with beliefs about racial superiority, which are clearly not legitimate. Diamond undercuts this tendency, deliberately I think, by arguing for the equal or greater significance of geographical, climatological, and other localized factors that have nothing whatever to do with the populations occupying various areas. As I said above, that’s a pretty good legacy.
Do you have examples? I do not recall Diamond making any claims as to why the Greeks overran Meopotamia and Northeast Africa based on geographic considerations or why the Romans later conquered their empire.
The closest he seems to have come is in the contrast between China and Europe where civilizations at roughly equal levels of technology might have a geographic explanation for how hegemony is maintained or lost, with Europe getting a temporary (if crucial) advantage in it collection of mountain ranges and seas that made absolute hegemony impossible to maintain, (the Romans could not do it, the Church could not do it), whereas the greater ease of travel (especially for armies) made it easier for the entirety of China to be kept under one hegemonic culture, even when a military conquest changed the people in power. He made no claim, for example, that the Chinese could not have become the world explorers that the Europeans became, only that a single decision in Beijing could recall and dismantle the Great Fleet while no pope or emperor could control ther fractious Spaniards, Portuguese, English, and Dutch from doing what they wanted.
I think that the Japanese, with their surrounding seas, and the area of Southeast Asia (where mountains and, to a certain extent, jungles), made it more difficult for Beijing to maintain an empire all the way to the Indian Ocean, tend to support that aspect of his thought while allowing the “personalities” of cultures to determine whether any group would invest more energy in astronomy or weaponry or architecture or labor saving mechanincs.
No, sorry. I read the book a while ago, when it was a mainstream hardcover bestseller, so it’s been a number of years. I just recall having that thought in the back of my head while going through the text. It’s probably worth reading again.
Your 2. is slightly off. It is not that the climate is roughly the same, but that the length of daylight is roughly the same. Crops can be bred to do well in different climates much easier than breeding them to different day lengths would be. The mediteranean climate that was the cradle of agriculture was important because it selected for crops that could withstand dry storage, but the key factor in trasmission of agriculture is being able to take stored seeds and have them grow in a different places.