Maybe we can get by, shifting from one agricultural breadbasket to another. Maybe a “fallow” of US farms forced by the emergence of Brazillian agriculture would allow US topsoil to recover.
On the other hand, maybe we’ll deplete one breadbasket after another until there are none left.
I don’t know enough about the problem to know which is true. But I do know it is dangerous to assume (as did the Easter Islanders) that we’ll always have plenty of resources.
Somehow, I don’t think that’s the problem, right now.
Rune and others: IMHO, Diamond’s introductory contention (in GGS) that his New Guinea friends seemed more “intelligent” than your average Westerner was meant just as a sort of (naively-written) devil’s-advocate eye-opener, and is hardly the main point of the rest of the book (which I generally enjoyed, BTW).
In any case, I think that both you and Mr. Diamond should stop focusing so much on “intelligence” anyway – the concept can be defined in so many ways, and historically (and today) has contributed to much harm without illuminating a whole lot. I recommend to both of you my favorite Stephen Jay Gould book, The Mismeasure of Man, as an antidote to your fixations with “intelligence”.
I agree. And it’s not that Diamond was fixated on “intelligence.” He was setting out his premise that there’s some reason that societies develop at different rates and it’s not because the people of a particular society are lacking in or benefitting from some inherent virtue, such as intelligence, or rectitude, or industriousness.
I too , find a lot that is unscientific (and just plain stupid) in Diamond’s book. First: there is NO evidence that the greenlanders “died out”. Bodies buried in the cemetray at Gardar, greenland, were found dressed in the latest fashions of the time. The most likely explanation for the disappearence of the Greenland colony was their abduction by english pirates. There were only a few hundred people anyway, and it is true, life for them was getting increasingly hard. The worsening climate was making dairy farming almost impossible.
Second, if the new Guineans are so "intelligent’, then how come they never evolved any writing method? or even this; there is no evidence that any of the mountain tribes ever even BOTHERED to trade with the coastal tribes. Their odd customs (like eating human brains) also doesn’t bespeak of much “intelligence”-particularly when people started dying after the funeral feast!
So Diamond is a lot like freud-a mountain of reasonable speculation, but no real proff of most of it.
What does any of this have to do with intelligence? Diamond’s point is that technological developments like writing are not the result of intelligence, but, rather a concatenation of circumstances, most of them being environmental.
If there never was a “tipping” point that made writing more useful than not to New Guinean society, then their failure to evolve it is not evidence of a lack of intelligence, but just that they never “evolved” a need for writing.
What evidence do you have that New Guineans started dropping like flies after a funeral feast? Maybe the number of deaths or illnesses never became common enough to effect a change in the culture?
So what if mountain tribes never even BOTHERED to trade with coastal tribes? That signifies a lack of intelligence? What were the circumstances? Did they need to trade with coastal tribes? Were there reasons not to?
Then they did die, or were they fashionably buried alive?
Cite? And why would pirates abduct hundreds of people?
…ultimately causing the settlement to “die out”, perhaps?
If you’re so intelligent, Jared would ask, how come you’d be dead within days or weeks if left in the jungle? A jungle is a difficult environment to scratch an existence from, leaving little time for the pursuits whose specialists can be fed by agricultural surpluses.
Why do you say this? The anthropologists and sociologists whom Jared cites all give first hand accounts of meetings between these different tribes and groups, in which items were exchanged.
What is inherently unintelligent about eating human flesh and offal? I’ve often wanted to try a bit myself.
Beware that you sound very much like a Creationist demanding instant, single item “proff” of evolution. Anthropology is just as scientific an endeavour, but requires an overview of a great deal of evidence from various directions.
This is just a nitpick, but it seems to me that the reason the New Guineans can survive in the jungle and we can’t doesn’t have anything to do with inherent intelligence, but rather training and experience. If the jungle is where you grew up, the jungle is what you learn to cope with. It would be as silly to expect a New Guinea islander to pass the California Bar Exam or negotiate alease with a landlord as it would be to expect an urban westerner to outperform said islander in his habitat. The ability to outperform a new-comer in an environment you’re used to is not a sign of your inherent intelligence. The NG’s might indeed be super-minds, but their jungle skills are not evidence of this.
New Guinea and post-funeral deaths: the custom of eating dead relative’s brains has been the cause of considerable death among the new Guinea highlanders. In fact, the mad-cow like symptoms were well known in new Guinea. I would conclude (though I am just an “ignorant” westerner, that something BAD , indeed happens to people who eat human brains. The incubation period of this disease is pretty short.
Greenland and the "mysterious’ disappearance of the norse colonists. the best evidence of this is the following:
-the last recorded wedding in greenland took place in the year 1470. Greenland then had a small population, but one that still had contact with europe. the burgundian-style men’s hats (seen on the corpses in the graveyard) is proof that there was contact untill 1500 AD, at the least. The norse farms were abandoned (quite suddenly) in the early 1500’s. Helge Ingestad gives several cites of traders landing at towns in greenland-and finding feral cattle and sheep-no people.
So, yes, there is considerable proof that greenland was abandoned quirte suddenly. the abduction by english pirates is the most lilkely fate of the colonists.
No, they did NOT die off peacefully.
Agreed, Larry - that was my point. Writing is something that we have learned just as ingenious methods of staying alive (like, say, following the monkey you fed with salt to a water source) are what NGers learn from an early age. This thread is (or became, after something of a diversion) about Jared’s suggestion that the knife-edge in the jungle, in which you have to be ingenious or die, might be a stronger evolutionary pressure than current Western civilisation in which stupidity and laziness do not have so dramatic a consequence to the individual. He could have said “NGers are differently intelligent to us”, but that perhaps doesn’t inspire as much debate as suggesting that they might even be more intelligent than us.
Eeeeexactly Diamond’s point. Differences in technological advances are not the result of differences in “intelligence” or other virtues.
3-6 months is not “pretty short” in terms of a foraging people identifying a causative agent. Any number of things could have caused kuru - it even required extensive research by Western doctors to correlate it to the brain consumption.
Ah, now you specify “peacefully”. Harsher environmental conditions make violent death more likely as resources become more scarce. None of this impugns Jared’s description of the Grennland settlement as “dying out”.
I’m with you, Acsenray. I just think that Diamond perhaps shouldn’t have momentarily violated (in order to make a quick, eye-opening point, and so spur the reader on to better things) his own general argument against “intelligence” as a particularly useful concept.
For a debate on how temporarily contradicting one’s general principles in order to prove a larger point may or may not be a wise tactic, check out:
Returning to the OP, I disagree. I have read Collapse. In my opinion, Diamond’s thesis is that environmental factors have been significant in the sudden demise of multiple societies in the past. And that societies that solve these environmental problems have survived.
Diamond then extrapolates that such environmental factors could (not will) cause a collapse of our present societies. He also highlights how pro-environment policies, instituted by either a centralized government or by grassroots actions, can counteract environmental degradations. He then states that both the forces worsening and sustaining the environment are increasing in strength. He explicitly states that the final outcome is unknowable at this point.
My mistake. Carry on. 
To add to your point, the Fore had been eating brains for a long time but the Kuru disease only emerged in recent times. It was not a traditional risk associated with brain eating. Whether it was a cross-species migration of some type, or whether from contact with white men, individuals with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease had been introduced into the gene (and eating) pool, something had changed. And it wasnt obvious what that change was.
“If they’re so smart, why don’t they have rocketships?” Is this seriously your argument? Fine, here’s one possible explanation – I suspect Jared Diamond would make a similar environmentally-based argument:
First, writing was likely invented as a consequence of agriculture. Rulers needed to keep track of the tribute their subjects gave them, tribute that could only exist because of the surplus food provided by agriculture, surplus that was impossible to get with hunting and gathering (whose products could not be stored and stockpiled). The need to keep track of tribute led to the tribute lists familiar to students of early Mesopotamian history and archaeology, as well as students of early writing.
Consider that New Guinea is mostly composed of difficult terrain – mountains, hills, and rainforests. It is not very fertile, and intensive agriculture would not be possible as a long-term survival strategy. Also consider that the most-intensive food production techniques that New Guineans practiced was horticulture (i.e., they grew food in gardens, not farms). That was the most that their land could support. Not much surplus could be produced, so unproductive members of society, like scholars, scribes, and a separate ruling class to employ them, would quickly drain resources. With no rulers demanding taxes, then there is no tribute to keep track of, and no need of methods to keep track of tribute.
The bands>tribes>chiefdoms>states continuum is considered simplistic and intellectually sloppy in modern anthropology, but it serves as an easy explanatory framework. The greatest cultural complexity possible in New Guinea, using local resources, was at the level of the chiefdom. Chiefdoms can operate well enough without writing because they don’t get too large, relative to states.
So, there you go, an environmental explanation to why New Guineans didn’t have writing. They didn’t have writing because they didn’t need it, and they didn’t need it because their environment didn’t allow them to achieve more political and cultural complexity.
Also notice that nothing in my argument requires any assumption of intelligence levels in New Guineans or anyone in particular.
I know I’m posting again for a 3rd time, but I forgot to ask this of ralph124c: if you would, please indicate where you got the information about the collapse of the Greenland colony being caused by English pirates.
Having read only two chapters of Diamond’s books (time to download it to my ipod I think) I am not in a position to comment. Reading all the above posts, however, it strikes me that Diamond is basically putting European sucess down to location, location and location. Seems a little simplistic to me.