Whereas, for you, I guess “genetic culpability” is the only “viable excuse” for disparate outcomes.
Is it your position that Diamond’s work is unpersuasive, or that genetic variance is an additional factor that he doesn’t examine?
In other words, is genetics part of the puzzle, or the whole story?
According to Paul Johnson in Modern Times, the main motive for Japanese imperialism was a growing and painful awareness that their country’s population had outgrown its capacity to grow sufficient food for it. They needed to conquer foreign land as land, i.e., as farmland. (Today, Japan still does not feed itself, but it doesn’t matter – they export high-end manufactures and import food, and they eat better and grow taller than Japanese in the 1940s; they don’t need any colonies.)
Which, as an aside, is evidence for the idea that economic interdependence has the power to prevent large-scale wars, and that free trade contributes to peace.
Yes. Despite heated rhetoric, the U.S. will never go to war with China, it would disrupt the business of too many American businesses. (With one possible reservation: If China attacks Taiwan, all bets are off. But if SK and NK go to war . . . well, China will probably do the sensible thing and stay out of it, NK is just an embarrassment to them anyway.)
While it is true that Diamond does not believe that genetic based intelligence played any role in the differences in timing of various societies, the claim that he would accept “any excuse” is a pretty blatant distortion of his actual thesis.
Actually, his specific point–that he does support with better models than any of his critics–is that the origin of large, complex societies can be correlated directly to the advantages of crops and animals that can be domesticated along with the advantages of latitudinal trade. Beyond that, he does not make any effort to pretend to know how already large and complex societies will succeed when they come into conflict with each other.
The closest he comes is in his last chapter (or so) where he floats a single plausible hypothesis regarding Europe in contrast to China. And he makes no claim to having proven his point.
He noted that Europe had a number of internal natural barriers that promoted the development of smaller states over which no single empire could retain hegemony. In contrast, China, (particularly populated China), had no such internal barriers, providing easy army access to a hegemony-devoted central government. Thus, China, which developed paper, printing, gunpowder, and large fleets of exploration prior to Europe was subject to the suppression of those and similar inventions at the whims of various rulers while any such invention, in Europe, if suppressed in one country, would be seized upon and exploited by its neighbors, forcing all the smaller nations to stay in a competitive race of inventions.
Noted. And I should not have taken such liberty with hyperbole.
I think Dr Diamond is sincere, and has some good points.
All of us are a combination of nature and nurture; of genes and environment.
My main complaint with GGaS is its out of hand dismissal of the genetic contribution to population disparities.
My other criticism is that it is very easy after the fact to identify why something happened. You can present any hypothesis you want, and since you know the outcome, you can color the narrative so it looks like your hypothesis is obviously correct. In my opinion much of GGaS makes it seem like advances in technology just fell out of the sky, or were found under a bush, for the lucky populations who came to be in possession of them.
Given that even a wild fox can be domesticated with the proper breeding, I find, for example, the assertion that domestication of wild animals was unavailable to africans suspect. Also suspect for me is the lack of knowledge transfer among populations. Some populations seem to be able to swipe stuff developed elsewhere (gunpowder) and expand upon it. Other populations seem to be permanently dependent on imported technology which remains essentially unimproved within that population..but perhaps a specific thread on GGaS belongs elsewhere.
Why? Isn’t it very reasonable that some species may have a greater tendency (horses, bovids, and canines, for example) towards domestication? It’s likely that dogs were domesticated from wolves not just once, but multiple times, in different places. Are you really saying “blacks are too dumb to domesticate animals by themselves”? Considering that the current understanding, IIRC, is that wolves may have at least partially domesticated themselves on the outskirts of human populated areas, that just seems patently ridiculous (and seems to be another example of your knee-jerk bias that leads you to dismiss any possible achievements by black people).
I would love to know what populations you claim are unable to “develop technology.”
I think I can guess at least one aspect that these supposed technology-development-free populations will have in common.
You are aware that genetically we all are African in origin? There are differences in societies very little in genetics.
Capt
Is this true of societies as well as individuals? Meaning, can an ability or disability for developing technology be demonstrated to exist within a distinct genotype?
The case is even clearer with plants. Domesticatable plants have distinct characteristics, such as undesirable traits being linked to a single gene (like bitterness in almonds) rather than many (like bitterness in acorns), or the ability to control which seeds which take hold in the soil, as opposed to plants that broadcast seeds.
They did domesticate cattle and goats. Dogs too, I believe. But the malarial West African region with which Europeans were at first most familiar is not healthy for horses.
First I’ve heard of this…
Do go on.
As measured, say, by patent applications?
What you’re talking about would long predate patent-systems, of course.
Whatever metrestick you want.
Weaponry? Civil engineering? Transportation? Industrial technology? Scientific advances? Agricultural advances? Medicine?
Fury, are you saying that it’s incompatible to be white and Mexican? Because I have quite a few Mexican acquaintances who are as white as you or me. Mexican is a nationality, white is about ancestry, and many Mexicans who wouldn’t be “white enough” for the racists don’t have Native American ancestry, but ancestry from Africa or from Asia. Then again, the kind of people for whom those Mexicans aren’t white enough wouldn’t consider either of us white enough…
Christ, whatever you want. Your “proof” (scare quote included) stands/falls on it’s own after that.