A Better Class of Critics of Jared Diamond, Please...

C. Northcote Parkinson was the first to identify the phenomenon of "injelitance"--the jealousy that the less-than-competent feel for the capable.

Here we have a classic case from the anthropologists at Savage Mind, who are both positively green with envy at Jared Diamond's ability to make interesting arguments in a striking and comprehensible way, and also remarkably incompetent at critique.

---

BIZARRE UPDATE:

Kerim of Savage Minds writes:

http://savageminds.org/2005/07/26/guns-germs-and-steel-links/: Addendum: Yes, if [Jared Diamond's] book [Guns, Germs, and Steel] had been framed in terms of “why, prior to 1600, did the west have more cargo” ... fine. But that is not how the book is framed. Nor do I think it would have been as popular if it had been framed in those terms (for the reasons Ozma alludes to).

But the book was explicitly framed in terms of "why, prior to 1600, did the west have more cargo?" You cannot read the first five pages of the prologue and fail to recognize that:

We all know that history has proceeded very differently from peoples from different parts of the globe. In the 13000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, some parts of the world developed literate industrial societies with metal toolsk other parts developed only nonliterate farming societies, and still others remained societies of hunter-gatherers with stone tools. Those historical inequalities hae cast long shadows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies.... [T]hese differences constitute the most basic fact of world history....

In July 1972 I was walking along a beach.... I had already heard about a remarkable local politician named Yali.... [H]e asked me, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"...

I didn't have an answer then.... This book, written twenty-five years later, attempts to answer Yali....

People of Eurasian origin... dominate the modern world in wealth and power. Other peoples, including most Africans, have thrown off European colonial domination but remain far behind in wealth and power. Still other peoples... are no longer even masters of their own lands but have been decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated by European colonialists.... Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way?...

We can easily push this question back one step. As of the year A.D. 1500... [m]uch of Europe, Asia, and North Africa was the site of metal-equipped states or empires, some of them on the threshold of industrialization. Two Native American peoples, the Aztecs and the Incas, ruled over empires with stone tools. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa... iron tools... Australia and New Guinea, many Pacific islands, much of the Americas, and small parts of sub-Saharan Africa... farming tribes... hunter-gatherer bands using stone tools....

[T]hose technological and political differences of A.D. 1500 were the immediate cause of the modern world's inequalities. Empires with steel weapons were able to conquer or exterminate tribes with weapons of stone and wood. How, though, did the world get to be the way it was in 1500?... Until the end of the last Ice Age, around 11000 B.C., all peoples on all continents were still hunter-gatherers. Different rates of development on different continents, from 11000 BC to AD 1500, were what led to the technological and political inequlities of AD 1500....

Thus we can finally rephrase the question about the modern world's inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history's broadest pattern and my book's subject....

The history of interaction among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries.... [M]uch of Africa is still struggling with its legacies from colonialism. In other regions... civil unrest or guerrilla warfare pits still-numerous indigenous populations against governments dominated by descendants of invading conquerers. Many other indigenous populations... so reduced in numbers by genocide and disease that they are now greatly outnumbered by the descendants of invaders... they are nevertheless increasingly asserting their rights...

Seems to me that these Savage Minds owe it to themselves to at least read the "Prologue" to Guns, Germs, and Steel.

---

We resume our original post: Assertions that Nigeria was one of the richest countries in the world after World War II and that California's Amerindians had as ample a portfolio of plants and animals to draw on as did the people of the Fertile Crescent are just plain embarrassing:

Savage Minds: I finally watched episode one of the Guns, Germs, and Steel TV show... painfully made.... So many shots of Jared Diamond looking scholarly.... Ugh!.... The show is framed by the motif of "Yali’s Question."... "Why you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?"... [T]he show is forced to portray New Guniea as a land of poor people, and the US as a land of wealth.... [O]ne would hardly know that there is internet access in the country.... [I]t overlooks a fundamental issue: the inequality within countries as well as between them. I assure you that logging industry executives in New Guinea live better than you or I do!... Nigeria (environmentally blessed with some of the largest oil reserves outside of the Middle East) used to be one of the richest countries in the world. Corruption, aided by Western banks who provided the means of funneling the majority of the nation’s GDP into private bank accounts, and deep cultural divisions between North and South, destroyed that wealth. Yet there are still many, many, millionaires and billionaires in Nigeria....

As best we can estimate, Nigerian real GDP per capita peaked at $942 per head at the start of the 1980s. Nigeria had oil. But Nigeria was never, not by anyone's wildest dreams, not by any stretch of the imagination, "one of the richest countries in the world." An extraordinary degree of detachment from the reality of Lagos or from the technology and land availability of Nigerian agriculture is required for anyone to imagine that this was so. (See http://pwt.econ.upenn.edu/php_site/pwt_index.php.)

The gap in median living standards between the United States and Papua New Guinea today is about ten-to-one. And out of every hundred households in New Guinea, only two have the real purchasing power of the median American household.

Savage Minds: Kerim suggested Savage Minds mount a response to... self-described polylingual polymath Jared Diamond.... [W]e all conceded it was a worthy idea.... To explain why you don’t like the book would take more time than most people making friendly small talk want to spend, and –- worse yet –- your explanation will necessarily impugn the motives of people who do like it, a group that you now know includes the person with whom you are speaking. My own usual reaction in such encounters is to say that unfortunately I have not read the book but that boy, it sure does sound interesting. Alas, I did read most of the book.... Part the first is: white people are immeasurably superior to everyone else on the planet, in terms of technology, wealth, store of knowledge, and actual power, and have been so for a long time. Part the second is: this is not because non-white people are lazy and stupid. Part the third is: it’s because of the determining force that geographical and ecological constraints have exerted on human history....

I can’t exactly remember the Eurasian landmass part of the argument.... I don’t have any grounds for critiquing this part.... It sounds like a plausible hypothesis to me, but (given the caliber of the rest of Diamond’s case) might be ridiculous....

Diamond... argues that the inhabitants of... Eurasia... started off with a better array of potentially domesticable plants.... [M]y problem with this argument was that it is utterly post-hoc: he insists that there just plain are (and thus, by inference, were) more such plants in Eurasia than elsewhere, but I wondered about ongoing hybridization between wild ancestor plants, land races, and domesticated plants across thousands of years of domestication and whether that may have transformed what he takes to be the “wild” baseline.... Diamond likewise argues that the Eurasian landmass offered a uniquely amenable population of potentially-domesticable proto-livestock.... Now, again, this argument runs into the a posteriori problem... hand-waving.

Furthermore, in the lowland South American context at least, there is considerable evidence that human-animal relationships are in important respects conceptualized and experienced as relations between social equals, such that a pastoral, dominating, domesticating relationship is rendered “no good to think” (apologies to Stanley Tambiah).... The point, though, is that given the presence of potentially useful animals, it is not a foregone conclusion that humans will set about domesticating them....

I will admit I never finished reading GG&S....

Diamond's argument is that in a really big continental landmass stretching east-west--like Eurasia--somebody, eventually, will start domesticating animals. And if it seems to work as a lifestyle, their neighbors will copy them. And their neighbors will copy them. And so on. Somebody in South America did domesticate the llama--even though it was "no good to think" in such terms. It is indeed not a foregone conclusion that any one group of humans will start domesticating animals--indeed, almost none of the groups will. But it is a foregone conclusion that some group, somewhere, will try, and that what they learn will spread to those in ecologically-similar regions with whom they are in direct and indirect contact.

Diamond's argument is that in a really big continental landmass there will be lots of variation in animal and plant life, some of which will turn out to be useful for agriculture. Hence wheat, rice, barley, rye, oats--an impressive portfolio compared to corn (and a lot of people must have worked really hard over a long time to turn teosinte into corn) and... acorns. California Amerindians were doing the best they can at making bread and porridge, and yet they could only get as far as gathering and grinding acorns.

It does indeed take a very special cast of mind--or injelitance--to critique a book you didn't finish, and don't remember.

Comments

[PaulC]

> Diamond's argument is that in a really big continental landmass stretching east-west--like Eurasia--somebody, eventually, will start domesticating animals. And if it seems to work as a lifestyle, their neighbors will copy them. And their neighbors will copy them.

I would add (and I think it's in Diamond's argument anyway): If their neighbors don't copy them, they'll get pushed out of the most productive pastoral land by their better nourished and more populous neighbors. (Or get wiped out from some disease of their neighbors' livestock.)

There's nothing inconsistent in saying that some cultures just refuse to think in a certain way, and there are plenty of examples. But unless they really have an ability to enforce cultural constraints universally, the mere existence of a more successful way of life in reach is equivalent to its inevitable discovery, and when it is discovered it will crowd out competitors.

Actually, Diamond's chapter on China seemed to suggest a counterexample in the form of a centralized culture that succeeded in suppressing innovation at historically significant times.

I don't accept Guns, Germs, and Steel as a precise explanation of what happened, but its hypotheses strike me, a layperson, as plausible, and do not fall prey to the most obvious attacks.

[AllenM]

GGM is a great book in that it attempts to synthesize into a coherent tale how the sciences have started answering the question of how did we get here?

I found the savage mind review to be boring, stupid, and pendantic. The premise behind his criticism was so "marxist-leninist" as to be post modern in it's flight from reality. I found it to be a signifier that almost anything further to be had from that intellectual heritage is so debased to be as worthless.

So indo europeans oppressed themselves out of the state of nature and it's accompanying anarchosyndicallist collective and fell into the fascist agriculture religious apparatus through bad luck? He didn't explain the Aztec pattern that follows this story line...

Brad- that savage mind review was not even an example of injellitence, but of Trotskyite thinking.

[anne]

An excellent review:

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?050103crbo_books

January 3, 2005

The Vanishing
By MALCOLM GLADWELL

In "Collapse," Jared Diamond shows how societies destroy themselves.

A thousand years ago, a group of Vikings led by Erik the Red set sail from Norway for the vast Arctic landmass west of Scandinavia which came to be known as Greenland. It was largely uninhabitable—a forbidding expanse of snow and ice. But along the southwestern coast there were two deep fjords protected from the harsh winds and saltwater spray of the North Atlantic Ocean, and as the Norse sailed upriver they saw grassy slopes flowering with buttercups, dandelions, and bluebells, and thick forests of willow and birch and alder. Two colonies were formed, three hundred miles apart, known as the Eastern and Western Settlements. The Norse raised sheep, goats, and cattle. They turned the grassy slopes into pastureland. They hunted seal and caribou. They built a string of parish churches and a magnificent cathedral, the remains of which are still standing. They traded actively with mainland Europe, and tithed regularly to the Roman Catholic Church. The Norse colonies in Greenland were law-abiding, economically viable, fully integrated communities, numbering at their peak five thousand people. They lasted for four hundred and fifty years—and then they vanished.

The story of the Eastern and Western Settlements of Greenland is told in Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." Diamond teaches geography at U.C.L.A. and is well known for his best-seller "Guns, Germs, and Steel," which won a Pulitzer Prize. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Diamond looked at environmental and structural factors to explain why Western societies came to dominate the world. In "Collapse," he continues that approach, only this time he looks at history's losers—like the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the Mayans, and the modern-day Rwandans. We live in an era preoccupied with the way that ideology and culture and politics and economics help shape the course of history. But Diamond isn't particularly interested in any of those things—or, at least, he's interested in them only insofar as they bear on what to him is the far more important question, which is a society's relationship to its climate and geography and resources and neighbors. "Collapse" is a book about the most prosaic elements of the earth's ecosystem—soil, trees, and water—because societies fail, in Diamond's view, when they mismanage those environmental factors....

[A-ro]

I think the important feature of the Eurasian landmass (in Diamond's argument) was actually it's east-west axis rather than its sheer population. Domesticated plants travel well on the east-west axis because the seasons behave similarly; in contrast, as you take a seed toward a planetary pole, a seed will sprout too early in the spring and get dilled by frost.

In addition, I think Diamond really DID argue that the Eurasian continent just happened to have more domesticable plants and animals; he basically said that ALL plants and animals have had people try to domesticate them at some point, so ALL potentially-domesticable plants and animals have been exploited at this point.

[Kuas]

Paul Krugman and Jared Diamond are both guilty of creating epidemic proportions of injelitance in the nation's punditocracy. Mickey Kaus has a particularly acute form of the disease.

In the case of Donald Luskin, it can't even really be called "injelitance", but rather "stupealousy".

[Larry Grisham]

From the germs' point of view, humans are doing a gungho job of raising a lot of future germ plasm:
http://www.atsnn.com/story/156752.html

[Aaron Swartz]

I'm not objecting, but it is a little amusing that you cite VDARE.com, the notorious racist website whose current front page also attacks Jared Diamond...for not recognizing the obvious importance of white genetic supremacy.

[J Thomas]

I don't want to be too critical either. I think Diamond comes up with very good ideas that the available data doesn't particularly support or oppose.

Amerinds came up with lots of foods they could turn to flour -- osage, pumpkin, etc. They did pretty well at it, for their ecosystem. If you want wheat, rice, barley, rye, oats then you want cheap iron axes to chop down the forests and iron plows to sow your seed. Notice that the big european forest wasn't known for its wheat until europeans got those. In the old days a lot of grain got shipped from egypt, or from the fertile crescent. Special land for special crops.

Was eurasia really more diverse? Was it bigger biomes, or more different biomes? Bigger biomes need not be more diverse, a bigger steppe might not have much more variety than a medium-size steppe. With more biomes you do get more diversity but you have to be careful about mixing them or you can get, well, a lot less diversity.

The nile and the fertile crescent both gave a lot of food that could go by water to a sea. So once the technology was there to amke cargo vessels those two places could feed people all around a big body of water. And the empires each controlled one of those places. You weren't really an empire unless you could embargo food. Note Joseph's interpretation of Pharoah's dream. Once a place has more people than they can feed and you're the only one who has food for them, you hardly need your army to invade them. It's almost enough to prove their army can't invade you. But if their army *can* invade you and stay, then they're the empire.

The way I heard it, the amerinds weren't at all deficient in domesticated plants. They were deficient in meat animals. Dogs. They didn't domesticate deer or bison. I'd consider domesticating aurochs more impressive than horses, and I'm guessing that people chose to build megaliths partly because they had oxen do do the heavy lifting. Did north americans or africans etc have pets? Yes. And the difference between that and domestication is ... herd animals stay with the herd whether they consider you part of the family or not. What herd animals did amerinds have available to domesticate? Bison, mourning doves, sparrows, passenger pigeons, martins, geese, antelope? prairie dogs? I'm sure I've forgotten some.

So OK, suppose erasia had a lot more biomes to pick plants from. It might be inevitable that they'd wind up with more domesticated plants. So they culd have 700 varieties of beans compared to the western hemisphere 300, and 500 kinds of squash instead of 200, and how much difference would that make?

On the other hand, with a lot of biomes they might inevitably find a few that are good a producing surplus food for humans. They did find a couple of those, that produced food which traveled well. (Amerinds found mussel shoals that supported a whole lot of people, but you can't carry tons of mussel food inland to trade.)

I got the impression from the quotes that these particular critics disliked the idea that it was supposed to be inevitable. I don't see it's inevitable anywhere that people would find a biome that supports a whole lot of calories and almost-adequate protein with easy access to water transport.

How much was it inevitable and how much was random accident? I don't know and neither does Diamond, or his critics. But he tells his story well, and that counts for a whole lot.

[JRoth]

Did Brad just link to noted racist website VDare?

Yes he did. I suppose that's not Parkinson's fault, and perhaps he's not available anywhere else online, but good lord, could we at least get a "warning: cooties" on the link?

One link of many on VDare:
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004_01_04_dneiwert_archive.html

[JRoth]

Gack, superceded while looking for supporting evidence, while the culprit was offering such evidence up-front!

[Larry Grisham]

Earth to Brad, Earth to Brad:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4559309.stm

"Instead, in northern Vietnam, researchers say they have discovered a higher number of infection clusters, the period of infection is longer and the age range of those infected is much wider.

The scientists have also found that the virus in northern Vietnam is genetically more different to a bird virus than other strains.

However, the WHO stresses that the pattern of infection could also be explained by a more infectious form of bird to human infection."

http://www.alphapatriot.com/home/archives/2005/03/27/avian_flu_spreads_and_why_you_should_worry.php

"Further, the most recent victims were aged 26 and 17, providing stark similarities to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic"Pandemics are different from seasonal outbreaks or "epidemics" of influenza. Seasonal outbreaks are caused by subtypes of influenza viruses that are already in existence among people, whereas pandemic outbreaks are caused by new subtypes or by subtypes that have never circulated among people or that have not circulated among people for a long time. Past influenza pandemics have led to high levels of illness, death, social disruption, and economic loss." which targeted young healthy adults over those with weakened immune systems, as in the very young, the very old, and the infirm. Given our propensity to give vacinnes first to the very young, very old and infirm, what would be the effect if we ran out of vacinne before everyone else was protected?"

Time to start preparing.

[David C]

The Savage Mind review of Diamond expresses in very neat form exactly why I dropped out of grad school in anthropology and switched to economics! No respect for simple facts that make it possible to definitively and objectively reject a particular idea or viewpoint in favor of another. Contrary to what anthropologists may believe, the proposition that "Nigeria was one of the richest countries in the world" is not simply an opinion that can never ultimately be shown to be worse or better than any other. It is not one interpretation among many. Its just wrong.

[JRoth]

OK, and on-topic:

J Thomas, the argument isn't 100% "veil-of-ignorance"-based. Diamond didn't simply argue that Eurasia would, on the basis of biome count, inevitably have better-domesticable crops (although he does argue that, given the east-west axis, they would inevitably spread); he argued that, in fact, Eurasia ended up with better-domesticable crops & animals. I'm not sure what you're getting at with your lists of native American fauna, but it's simply been borne out by the passage of time: Euarasia had the cows, pigs, & horses, and America had the llamas and buffalo. With the most advanced technology imaginable, these animals are novelties, not civilization-fodder. Americans don't eat more wheat than corn because we're Europeans; it's because wheat flour is more versatile.

It's weird to me how Diamond-doubters hop back and forth between questioning his arguments and questioning his facts. If you really think you can win on the facts, use those, and his arguments stand on nothing. But if his facts are (basically) sound (and to me there's little question they are), then knocking them down doesn't absolve you from credibly addressing his arguments.

[Wh]

I'm not sure if he counts as a better class of critic, but neoconservative guru Victor Davis Hanson launched a pretty serious attack on Jared Diamond in his book "Carnage and Culture". Hanson's point is that the reason the conquistadors won had nothing to do with germs, but it did have to do with guns and steel, and to the uniquely Western ability to wage war. Hanson of course ignores the fact that iron, gunpowder and the like were all originally products of non-Western civilizations (although improved by the West) and he has to really stretch to deny the role of smallpox in the Spainish victory. [Of course, Hanson is able to simultaneously praise European powers for their willingness to absorb non-Western technology and claim that Turkey's trying to use Western technology shows the superiority of Western technology]

On the other hand, Diamond's geographical explanation for China's not overtaking the West is lame. This is one case where a culture based explanation does make sense. The chinese culture had become stale and ingrown, while Western culture post-Renaissance was dyanmic and outward looking. That was why European powers prevailed in the 19th century over China.

[Jonathan Goldberg]

Tainted though the source may be (I'd never heard of DVare before reading this post) it still brings back warm memories of reading and enjoying Parkinson's books. I read "Parkinson's Law," "Parkinson's Second Law," and "The Law and the Profits" back in Junior High (what we called middle schools back during the administration of President Grant). My local branch library had them. And a fine choice they were.

Let's not blame CNP for the sins of his readers (this is premptive; I don't think anyone has done so on this thread yer).

[gcochran]

All the factors Diamond mentions influenced the development of human civilization - but so did regional variation in human genes influencing cognitive and personality traits. In fact, the sort of biogeographical variation he talks about drove the evolution of a lot of those genetic differences.

[Michael Carroll]

Good Post! I disagree but good post.

Jumping right in here, the teleological aspect to Brad's comments is a bit much. The idea that the Native Americans "only got as far as" grinding nuts implies that there is in nature some kind of race going on and that we who use cell phones are somehow winning it. Taking nature for what it is, be confident that rats, cockroaches and fungii will ultimately inherit the earth and "win the race" all without walking "getting as far as" walking upright.

Meanwhile there is a good chance that we who use cell phones will be choking on our poisonous air or otherwise fighting, flooding, or starving ourselves out of the natural history of the planet.

Not, that I am a post-structuralist or anything but if you ain't used the internet there's a good chance your not missing it. Yes, I know there are unforseen/unforseeable benefits but there are also unforseen costs to technological progress the magnitude of which may still outweigh the cost.

[Brad DeLong]

Most women of my acquaintance would rather not spend two hours a day grinding acorns into flour, thank you...

[anne]

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?050103crbo_books

'Diamond's distinction between social and biological survival is a critical one, because too often we blur the two, or assume that biological survival is contingent on the strength of our civilizational values. That was the lesson taken from the two world wars and the nuclear age that followed: we would survive as a species only if we learned to get along and resolve our disputes peacefully. The fact is, though, that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave in ways that are biologically suicidal. The two kinds of survival are separate.'

[sm]

Many readers of this thread might benefit from reading Alfred Crosby's *Ecological Imperialism,* especially the detailed discussion of the situation in New Zealand.

From what I gather of this discussion, Diamond is somewhat derivative of Crosby's work (*The Columbian Exchange*). I've known Crosby's work for years, but the detailed analysis of genetic inheritances in conflict in NZ in *Ecological Imperialism* really hit hard.

[Redleg]

Brad,
What the heck are you doing linking to the VDare site? You have me worried.

[PaulC]

> On the other hand, Diamond's geographical explanation for China's not overtaking the West is lame. This is one case where a culture based explanation does make sense.

I'm pretty certain that Diamond did make a cultural argument in this instance. He was explicit in contrasting centralized Chinese society, which could effectively outlaw innovations in weaponry, with warring European nations in which societies that outlawed such advances would be at a clear disadvantage.

I don't remember if he claimed that this effect was primary or secondary to geography, but he did not ignore it.

I do tend to think that Diamond errs on the side of determinism, even given his insistence that he is not a determinist. There's not really much to explain when comparing Asia and Europe. Both had periods of innovation and stagnation. Europe just got the edge most recently, and when it counted most in terms of global discovery and conquest. But starting out with everything even, one of them was still going to reach certain technological milestones first due to chance alone.

There is more to explain when it comes to indigenous Australians. In that case, lack of domesticates might be very significant. But even there I'm a little skeptical. Genetically modern humans have spent (I'm guessing) about 90% of our history in the stone age, so all of the differences we note between cultures are extremely recent developments that can be explained by chance as much as anything else.

[natasha]

"Americans don't eat more wheat than corn because we're Europeans; it's because wheat flour is more versatile."

Don't overlook the crucial point that wheat contains more protein than corn. People can be remarkably inventive when it comes to finding a good dietary source of starch, and unless you're living in a very dry climate there's usually one to hand, but it's the protein that's hard to get. Because even early herders and farmers couldn't always afford to eat meat every day, that protein had to come from somewhere.

The interesting thing I got from watching the first part of the television special that didn't seem like such a strong standalone point when reading the book was the free time gap between societies that had better access to animal muscle and protein-rich diets. There's a lot of sitting around and doing (apparently) jack-all before you get to figuring out how to make plaster, or glass, or how to forge metal.

For more modern examples, the first steam engine, clockworks, fireworks and even computing machines were little more than amusing toys when first invented. You don't have time for that sort of thing when you're laboring from dawn to dusk trying not to starve. It isn't a coincidence that most early science came from the upper classes of the society in question.

[anne]

Natasha

"Don't overlook the crucial point that wheat contains more protein than corn. People can be remarkably inventive when it comes to finding a good dietary source of starch, and unless you're living in a very dry climate there's usually one to hand, but it's the protein that's hard to get. Because even early herders and farmers couldn't always afford to eat meat every day, that protein had to come from somewhere."

Nicely summarized. From a ready protein source comes time to look to understanding and modifying our surrounds. Of course, there is more but the chain of logic is salient.

[sm]

"Laboring dawn to dusk."

That's at a late stage of human development, the agricultural stage.

Earlier scavenging societies don't work that hard. A real run of bad luck can kill them in large numbers, but they don't labor from dawn to dusk.

Agricultural societies are in some sense a step down, nutritionally speaking, for most people. Ag can support more people, create storable surpluses, and support a parasitic ruling class. But they mean more work for more people, too.

[david]

Diamond is derivative in many places of Crosby, and in GGandS is a pop synthesis; I expect he gets credit for being a genius from that work because, like much of evolutionary psychology or many economists' games, he confirms a lot of prejudices. But my main beef is with his silly account of the conquest, which draws on, of all people, Hugh Thomas, busy spinning out rewrites of Prescott, for a bunch of evidence. The whole bit on kleptocracy was a joke, too -- William McNeill in the NYRB was on point but too kind, its a review worth going back to if I remember correctly.

Anyway, nothing new about economists getting all huffy about anthropologists. Yes I've read the book cover to cover. A while back. I've taught some of the first chapters, which are very good sythesis on spread of species, disease, etc.

[PQuincy]

My response to GGS, if I recall, (the book, not the TV series) was considerable admiration that Diamond had managed to make a largely empirical and materialist argument that quite carefully _avoided_ the flaws that Brad claims the "Savage Mind" folks attributed to him. He was explicit and careful not to propose a racial/racist argument. He was careful and explicit not to rely on broad cultural characteristics like "dynamism"...and so forth. And he didn't for a moment take it for granted that energy-dense high-consumption industrial societies are "better" in some metaphyical sense.

In fact, his book--in some ways like Ken Pomeranz's _The Great Divide_, which answers in similar terms the question of "why not China" (a question which Pomeranz et al. show to be rather misconceived until about 1800)--relies considerably on accident to explain variation. Some geographical locations are simply better for cultivation, domestication, larger population densities, positive-feedback technology cycles, etc.

That people-of-poststructuralism attribute "arguments from accident" to nefarious hidden agendas is not surprising, in the end. It's a direct consequence of seeing _everything_ as language, text, meaning, rather than seeing meaning-systems and material systems as complemenatary or dialectical or what-have-you.

Thus, note that Diamond did NOT, as the Savage Minders (per Brad...I gotta go read the original!) say, that "white people are immeasurably superior to everyone else on the planet, in terms of technology, wealth, store of knowledge, and actual power, and have been so for a long time." He was careful to avoid the word "superior," in my recollection, very very careful. That's the heuristic value of "Yali's question": it's not, "why are you _better_ than us?", but rather "why do you guys have more stuff?" That's a very different question, and one that is, indeed, approachable by the kind of evidence and metrics Diamond uses.

I guess this shows that one of the flaws of developing hypersensitive detectors for the kind of hidden racism that plagues a lot of macro-historical-economic writing (like the first chapter of David Landes's effort to rewrite Adam Smith, if you ask me), is that having such a hypersensitive detector, you start detecting the signal even when (I'm pretty sure!) it's not there. It's a shame, on account of all that sensitive and often quite useful instrumentarium, developed over years of graduate study.

Oh, by the way: good call on mentioning Albert Crosby. GGS already drew on Crosby's approach in important ways (though avoiding some of its pitfalls, carefully), and I suspect Collapse is even more directly drawn from Ecological Imperialism.

[Jennifer]

The PBS series on Jared Diamond's work has been fascinating and added to my understanding of the book by helping me focus more clearly on Diamond's theses. This is wonderfully sensitive analysis for such a bold scope.

[Laertes]

Diamond indeed got nowhere near arguing that white northern europeans are somehow naturally superior. This seems to form the basis of VDare's hostility.

It speaks poorly of the savage mind folks that their powers of perception and reason are weaker than those of even the loathsome VDare crowd.

[Jennifer]

The beginning thesis for Jared Diamond is that indeed there is no inherent racial superiority or inferiority. All of his training as a biologist suggested this to him, and he consistently demolishes the idea.

Anne has several times pointed out that Diamond is most influenced in biology by Ernst Mayr, and Mayr had early on shown that race explains nothing in the way of social development.

[natasha]

sm - "Laboring dawn to dusk."

That's at a late stage of human development, the agricultural stage. Earlier scavenging societies don't work that hard.

Yes, that's true, but very few societies have lasted to the present day that remained pure scavengers. When numbers increase (yours or your neighbors'), or when it just becomes more inviting to stay in one place, you need to have a food source that doesn't become depleted by the mere fact of your presence for more than a week or so.

Diamond did point this out in his book I think, but when you're talking about a group like the New Guinea highland residents (and images of them from the broadcast were foremost in my mind when I wrote that), they live in an area which constrained their movement very early on and developed agriculture quite some time ago.

Which is to say that scavenging tends not to be very much work if you're in an environment that's hospitable to it, but when it becomes hard, people start growing their own pretty darn quick.

[J Thomas]

Brad, aren't acorns a seasonal product? You grind enough acorns in the fall to last you through the winter?

Is that really harder than using sickles and flails and matates to get wheat flour to last you through the winter?

You get the time savings by using an animal-power or water-power mill to grind your flour. Is there that much time saving by growing wheat instead of oak tres? I mean, if the oak trees are already there....

Natasha makes the point about protein. That's valid as far as it goes, but you have to look at the whole picture. It's *simpler* to get everything you need from wheat so you can live on bread and water, while people who try to live on just cornmeal and water get pellagra. But unless you have a bunch of slaves who need the simplest possible diet, what's wrong with one crop that provides all the calories you could possibly need, and others to provide protein? You can get protein by putting the corn out as bait and killing birds and squirrels that come for it, or by growing bugs on cornmeal. (Incidentally mealworms are a good addition to wheat, provided you throw away the wheat they excreted in as they grew.)

It doesn't take a long time to get food provided the population is low enough. When the population gets too high all the easy good stuff is taken and you have to work harder for worse. The almost universal way to keep the population low enough to keep life easy is to kill some distant neighbors. If they agree to let you push them into marginal land where their population shrinks through attrition, that's fine. Or you can kill them. In winter if you raid their homes and burn them down, some of them will die of exposure etc. It doesn't take a whole lot of open warfare to keep the population down.

And it appears that was done more effectively in the western hemisphere and in africa than in eurasia. I don't know why.

Anyway, I'm kind of unclear what the bad critics disliked about Diamond. He came up with some ideas that are hard to test. They talked like he believed in some sort of statistical determinism but apparently he didn't exactly. Clearly, chaotic things were important. Occasionally asia produced nomads with military technology that let them slaughter a whole lot of people. And they tended to do so, because they preferred to have lots of horse pasture rather than wheatfields to support cities. Perhaps part of the reason there was less of that in the west was that they didn't have horses. But if the mogols, or timirlame or whoever had swept through all of europe and asia, would we be here to talk about the superiority of our civilisation? It may have been a close thing.

[Auros]

SM: Despite being a "step down" in terms of the labor:leisure ratio for most members, ag societies' ability to support more members -- and in particular, to support members whose sole job is to train for combat (and then suppress the serfs during peacetime, and fight during war) -- ensures that they will have the ability to take over the land any neighboring hunter/gatherers might occupy.

[William]

If I was ignorant as the writer is on PNG, or disregarded facts as a rule, I could write that the "show is forced to portray Albania as a land of poor people, and Switzerland as a land of wealth".

PNG is not only very poor, the cities are violently savage places, the kind where security guards carry baseball bats, or wooden posts with protruding nails.

[piotr]

One can provide quite a few examples of advantages of East-West axis over North-South. Americas have quite capatious tropical zone and the tropical food plants are OK. However, the cold weather foods developed in Andes were bottled up in that ecological zones, and North American Indians needed at least 1000 years to adapt corn to a colder climate -- the process that was still unfinished when Europeans came. Imagine millions of potato growing Indians in Canada, using llamas for meat, wool and transportation.

Eventually, tropical Americas developed a very impressive set of plants, maise, tomatoes, chili peppers, various beans, various nuts, grapefruits, apricots etc. However, it took Amerindians more time to do it so Eurasia had 2-3 thousand years of a head start.

By the way, Andes provide quite extensive zone with similar growing conditions, and we more technologically advanced than the rest of Americas --- bronze tool etc.

[Unstable Isotope]

I'll give my father's book review for GG&S (he's a biologist). He said, "It's a great book to read if you're a little bit racist." Meaning, that it demolishes the argument that race plays a role in who succeeds and who doesn't.

My brother, a rabid wingnut, ranted that Jared Diamond was a raving Communist. I asked him, "How do you explain why certain societies succeed when others don't?" He had no answer (he's a biologist also). That seems to be a lot of critics' weakness. They don't like Diamond's conclusion, but don't really have an explanation themselves (except, of course, race & religion).

I'm now in the middle of Collapse, which is a great book and I highly recommend it.

[Grumpy]

One critique of the TV show I agree with:

"So many shots of Jared Diamond looking scholarly.... Ugh!...."

But the rest is basically off-base.

"[T]he show is forced to portray New Guniea as a land of poor people, and the US as a land of wealth.... [O]ne would hardly know that there is internet access in the country..."

The first episode does briefly mention that PNG has urban areas. But that's beside the point: would the indigenous Papuans have built such cities, absent European contact? Obviously, the Europeans brought it with them (and, pointedly, not the other way around).

[Dan Nexon]

1) Jeremy Black, War and the World has a few brief comments on Diamond that are worth looking at. One involves the limitations of disease explanations for European ascendency (brief argument, works well in North America, rather poorly elsewhere). Another involves suggesting that European political and social institutions might have been better at mobilizing resources for warfare, and that the reasons for this have little to do with geography or technology. Black's main point of comparison, IIRC, is with Asia.

2) Jack Goldstone has written a fair amount on European expansion. The crux of the argument is that the Europeans fit a typical pattern of liminal expansion, got lucky quite a few times (such as hitting the Aztec and Incan Empires during periods of weakness), and might not have gone much further if it hadn't been for the industrial revolution, which owes more to developments unique to England. Not a full - or even direct - critique of Diamond, but worth considering.

3) Along Black's lines, Robert Bartlett (in The Making of Europe) argues that the Europeans evolved a system of conquest and colonization (through "cellular reproduction" of fortified urban areas with surrounding settlements, among other things) for a variety of fairly contingent reason (Christianity plus primogenitor plus local superiority in siege technology and heavy cavalry) that turned out to be rather effective for expansion in North America and elsewhere once it was bootstrapped with later developments.

My general view is that Diamond's interesting (if discursive), but doesn't satisfactorily solve a very difficult puzzle.

[Dan Nexon]

For "England," substitute "Britain."

[Michael Carroll]

"Most women of my acquaintance would rather not spend two hours a day grinding acorns into flour, thank you..."

Wheras the men would? Actually come to think of it we DON'T ask for directions...

Brad, I believe there is a pretty strong body of evidence that stated happiness is more closely correlated with social and economic stability than with either material accumulation or technological progress.

[steven]

Too often, people discussing native culture on the West Coast of North America forget about seafood. When you eat fresh oysters, seal, whale, salmon, halibut, herring eggs, kelp, gull, crab, and egret every day, you don't need as much protein from your grains. The west coast of N. America had some of the world's most stable and famine-proof cultures. Arts and culture were relatively advanced, and still are in Alaska and BC where they've been less destroyed.

This is not to complain about Jared Diamond, but rather to remind the anti-acornists among us that there is more to life than wheat.

Also, out on Mt Diablo, which Dr DeLong knows well, there are buckeye trees at high elevations. These are trees with starchy, edible seeds the size of baseballs that normally cluster around creeks, where their seeds roll to. The high-elevation clusters are evidence of very bored and ambitious birds or of wildcrafting humans in the immediate pre-Spanish period. It doesn't take that much work to collect and grind seeds that size, and in fact the Ohlone Indians were masters of making huge baskets for leaching massive quantities of acorns' tannins at one time.

[Movie Guy]

I just want to know why native Americans and the subsequent invaders didn't tame the buffalo.

Should have made a great tractor for the plow.

[Brad DeLong]

We have three California Buckeyes in our creekbed, with chestnut-like seeds maybe a quarter the size of baseballs. Haven't tried eating 'em yet, but we will some year...

[Ralph]

I agree with Piotr, the Amerindians went far beyond acorn grinding and other hunter-gatherer activities. Various groups in NA were primarily farmers. In addition to many varieties of corn, the Aztecs developed amaranth as a high protein grain and also domesticated turkeys.

In SA, the Andean civilization developed a wide variety of tubers, roots, grains and possibly fruits. They domesticated the llamas and also raised guinea pigs for meat (still very common). What was perhaps most impressive about the Andes Indians was the level of effort devoted to the development of new varieties which could be transferred to different climate zones. At Moray you can still see the concentric circular agricultural terraces which were used to represent different ecological zones and climates. The shape creates a major temperature differential from upper to lower terraces. Some of the micro-terraces at Machu Pichu and lower on the mountain may also have been used as experimental stations. The National Academies has an interesting publication "Lost Crops of the Incas: Little-Known Plants of the Andes with Promise for Worldwide Cultivation" (1989). The variety, of potatoes alone, is astounding.

The Incas were defeated by an unfortunate combination Spanish luck (they arrived during a civil war) and, of course, disease. Perhaps the Andeans were not that far behind the euroasians.

[Brad DeLong]

But amaranth--the power grain of the Aztecs!--and domesticated turkeys did not spread north to California or the Mississippi valley, or south far into central America, did they? North-South spread is hard, East-West spread is easy--that's one of Diamond's principal points.

Similarly, Inca civilization did not spread far beyond its high-country ecological home. It's much easier for the Fertile Crescent to colonize and makeover the Mediterranean and Iran than for an Amerindian culture to expand across ecozone boundaries.

[Ralph]

Well - turkeys spread as far as Arizona - the Hopis had them. How long would it have taken turkeys, amaranth, etc. to spread over the rest of NA? Perhaps not that long in terms of human development. Now, putting a harness on a buffalo – that might have taken awhile.

The Inca and pre-Inca civilizations probably flourished specifically because they integrated both highland, coastal, and jungle lowland food production. The basic social unit was the ayllu, rooted in kinship, which typically included disconnected parcels of land in different ecological zones. It’s a fascinating approach to social organization that converts an apparent obstacle into a benefit. Basically each ayllu had an internal trading system.

The Incas developed the wheel as a toy and perhaps would have eventually bred llamas into more substantial beasts of burden. Their metallurgy included gold, silver, copper, and both arsenic bronze and tin bronze. Their stonework is unequalled (not counting Chartres, of course!) I think they weren’t that far behind. And if human progress is measured in human happiness, perhaps they weren’t behind at all.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Brad - Thank you for your heroic efforts to empty the vast ocean of stupidity in which we seem immersed. Now if only you had a bigger spoon!

PaulC - "Diamond's argument is that in a really big continental landmass stretching east-west--like Eurasia--somebody, eventually, will start domesticating animals. And if it seems to work as a lifestyle, their neighbors will copy them. And their neighbors will copy them."

You miss one important point. There is on Earth just one such landmass that had domesticable animals and plants. Domesticable large animals are rare.

[PQuincy]

(Following up after seeing part of another GGS episode and reading the Savage Mind posts):

Well, I now conclude that the TV series, while perhaps useful in illuminating some points, is consistently flawed by gross oversimplification. Last night's episode had to do with agriculture and languange and colonialism in Africa. Alas, the framing of it was "Africans vs. Europeans", and the Africans were consistently described in terms of "tribes", even right around where some constructs, like inland states trading with the Indian Ocean, were being discussed. The tone was consistently patronizing, I fear: "Look, those clever Africans [a generic designation, n.b.], overcame tropical challenges to build great states and cities!" (while the camera panned over scrubland with a few tumbled piles of rock that I guess were supposed to be ruins). The subtext for a lot of readers will be: "yeah, some Africans may have done some stuff, but look what happened to it". What I'm saying, to be clear: the filmmaking, by consistently appealing to National-Geographic-type stereotypes, seriously undermined Diamond's message, which was itself so stripped of detail (dates, places, etc.) as to be reduced to a near parody.

Making scientific film is hard, and specialists (I'm an academic, if not a specialist in African history and archaeology) will find even the best examples to be oversimplifying. Visual narration tends to work best with strong narrative lines and a minimum of detail, after all. But it doesn't HAVE to be this way, as any number of truly useful NOVA specials have shown. Too bad that Diamond went with the commercial producers at National Geographic.

So: the Savage Mind critics with their concentration on issues of colonialism, etc., might not be totally off the mark about at least this episode as a film -- though their projection of that concern onto Diamond's book may not be justified.

[anne]

Another excellent review:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B03E6DC103DF936A25755C0A961958260&n=Top%2fFeatures%2fBooks%2fBook%20Reviews

Dominance and Submission
By JAMES SHREEVE

GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
The Fates of Human Societies.
By Jared Diamond.

On the morning of Nov. 16, 1532, the Incan Emperor Atahualpa greeted the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca. Atahualpa was surrounded by some 80,000 Indian warriors; Pizarro came accompanied only by a ragged group of 168 horsemen and foot soldiers. The meeting was ostensibly friendly, but when Atahualpa scorned an offered Bible, the Spaniards attacked. By nightfall, 7,000 Indians had been slaughtered, without the loss of a single Spanish soldier. (Atahualpa was captured alive and held for an enormous ransom of gold. When the ransom was delivered, Pizarro executed him anyway.) Within a few decades the Incan, Aztec and Mayan civilizations had crumbled, and within a few centuries 95 percent of the native population of two entire continents had disappeared as well.

In ''Guns, Germs, and Steel,'' an ambitious, highly important book, Jared Diamond asks: How did Pizarro come to be at Cajamarca capturing Atahualpa, instead of Atahualpa in Madrid capturing King Charles I? Why, indeed, did Europeans (and especially western Europeans) and Asians always triumph in their historical conquests of other populations? Why weren't Native Americans, Africans and aboriginal Australians instead the ones who enslaved or exterminated the Europeans?

Mr. Diamond, the author of ''The Third Chimpanzee'' and a professor of physiology at the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine, should be applauded just for asking this powerfully original question. Perhaps it had never been posed in quite the same terms before because the answer was assumed to be obvious: the Europeans triumphed because they were technologically and politically superior to the indigenous populations they encountered. Left to ferment unexamined, this assumption has led to the corollary belief, most often unconsciously held, that European hegemony had something to do with the Europeans' innate superiority as a people. We may no longer speak of ''the white man's burden'' or proclaim our ''manifest destiny,'' but books are still written and sold (''The Bell Curve,'' to cite a particularly insidious recent example) that seek to reinforce the notion that Europeans got where they are today because they deserved to.

Before analyzing the deeper (and ultimately accidental) causes behind European domination, Mr. Diamond cleverly finesses the biological determinists with another tale of annihilation of one society at the hands of another. In the last two months of 1835, the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands, off the coast of New Zealand, were slaughtered and enslaved by a small group of invaders who, like Pizarro's men, used sophisticated weapons and unmitigated brutality to defeat a politically and technologically more primitive native population. In this case, however, the conquerors were some 900 Maori warriors from the New Zealand mainland, 500 miles away....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/26/science/earth/26afri.html

South Africa Puts the Unemployed to Work, Restoring Land and Water
By AMANDA HAWN

CAPE TOWN - On a red-dirt road in the Baviaanskloof Nature Reserve in South Africa, Mike Powell suddenly hit the brakes and jabbed a finger in the direction of an innocuous-looking clump of pink flowers. "That is an alien," he said. "All these aliens are going ballistic."

Baviaanskloof means Valley of the Baboons in Afrikaans, but Mr. Powell, program manager for a government project called Working for Woodlands, was not reaching for a pun on "Planet of the Apes." "It is called mother of millions," he said of the flower. "It's an invasive succulent from Madagascar."

Alien invasive plants are a serious concern in South Africa, displacing native vegetation and sucking up water needed by humans. They are one of many environmental problems that have prompted programs like Mr. Powell's to pioneer a new ecological approach in Africa: conservation farming.

In 1995, the South African government started a program called Working for Water, in which unemployed people were hired to clear thirsty alien trees from important watersheds around Cape Town. A single eucalyptus consumes up to 100 gallons of water in a day, so removing the trees is like putting water back in the system. "Rivers that hadn't run in 30, 40 years began to run again," said Guy Preston, the founder of Working for Water....

[anne]

Ecology is a startlingly new field of consciousness, considering that our future depends on the continual study and acceptance. Darwin introduced the study of ecology in "Origin of Species," and though Ernst Mayr furthered the field 70 years later, it is not until Rachel Carson that the field captures broad attention. Of course, even dear Rachel Carson was just recently set down as one of the most dangerously subversive of writers in the last 2 centuries. The point is that we so often have not been conscious of how dangerous our activities can be to our own well-being and even when we are so conscious there are often cultural limits to our ability to change collective behavior.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/26/science/earth/26afri.html

In 1995, the South African government started a program called Working for Water, in which unemployed people were hired to clear thirsty alien trees from important watersheds around Cape Town. A single eucalyptus consumes up to 100 gallons of water in a day, so removing the trees is like putting water back in the system. "Rivers that hadn't run in 30, 40 years began to run again," said Guy Preston, the founder of Working for Water.

That program now operates in every South African province, has an annual budget of $60 million and has inspired a group of sister programs that may change the face of conservation across the continent. Their aim is not just to restore ecosystems but to put them to use for human benefit.

Healthy marshlands, for example, serve to purify the water that runs through them. So Working for Wetlands was spun off from Working for Water five years ago and is now employing teams throughout the country to restore marshes. Working on Fire has been dispatching crews since 2003 to prevent and control wildfires. And in Baviaanskloof, Mr. Powell is overseeing Working for Woodlands, a pilot project to reforest subtropical thickets to capture carbon from the atmosphere and support biodiversity on the land.

Japie Buckle, a technical adviser at a wetlands restoration site in Agulhas National Park, says some of these benefits are both quick and tangible. "The nice thing about wetlands is that you start helping the system and it will start helping itself," he said. "Within two years you won't believe it is the same area."

Another goal is to provide people with skills to help them get jobs in the private sector. All of the programs require that workers be recruited from "the poorest of the poor," and in an effort to raise participation by single parents, 6 of every 10 must be women.

Arnold Viegeland, a tall man with a reflective gaze and an easy smile, said he was unemployed when he joined the Working for Water program seven years ago. Today, he oversees 109 workers in two programs and has a bright office at the new Agulhas National Park headquarters. Maps adorn the wall and a new computer hums in the corner. The conservation farming programs' goal of helping people help themselves "is not just a nice story," he said.

Still, in South Africa, there is no quick fix when it comes to curing poverty.

A Working for Woodlands team leader, Colette Zealand, said she was sick of managing people and would just as soon work on a citrus farm - though her grin made it hard to tell if she was serious or just fed up after five of her workers had failed to show up because they had been drinking in the local pub, known here as a shebeen.

The growth of the conservation farming programs poses a different challenge: stable financing. "When it comes to operating costs, the financing of a program like this is similar, in some ways, to funding a war," said Mr. Powell of Working for Woodlands. "The cars are going out, the crews are going out, and if you don't come up with some way of financing all that in a sustainable way, your funding sources are going to experience battle fatigue at some point." ...

[J Thomas]

"You miss one important point. There is on Earth just one such landmass that had domesticable animals and plants. Domesticable large animals are rare."

We don't know what it takes to get a "domesticable" animal. Maybe the animals that look particularly domesticable look that way because they've already been bred to be more domesticable. It might take some particular confluence of events, something that persuades people to take some sort of predomestication step they don't usually take.

And if you do it with one animal, that might predispose you to doing it with another.

I think the evidence is weak. Diamond makes a plausible JustSo story, and I doubt I could do it much better, but it isn't clearly right in detail.

Arguing that X has happened once in place Y, therefore we can conclude .... is a version of the Anthropic Principle. We can make guesses about what conditions are necessary for life since we have life here and conditions here were adequate for life, and we don't know of anyplace else that has life. Arguing from one sample isn't wrong in itself, when you only have one sample you either do that or you say you don't know. But -- we don't know.

Domestication is sort of a fuzzy concept. Are cats domesticated? If a family of amerinds had a fox living under their house, they weren't afraid of the fox and the fox wasn't afraid of them, the fox ate the mice from their crops and sometimes they fed it table scraps, was the fox domesticated?

If they knew precisely where a turkey was nesting 500 feet away, and they weren't scared of the turkey and the turkey wasn't afraid of them, they ignored the turkey and its chicks who ignored them, they sometimes helped protect the chicks from predators, until sometime in the fall they killed a couple of of the young turkeys, were those turkeys domesticated? Not exactly. But if they kept the turkeys in cages and gathered food for them rather than let them find their own food, then the turkeys were clearly domesticated.

Did north americans have amaranth? They had pigweed. If they didn't plant big fields of pigweed was it that they didn't know how to cultivate it or that they had enough?

When the europeans came to north america they didn't find big cities. They found some very large towns, and here are stories that the population may have been 10 times larger before the plagues; I haven't tracked the evidence about that. But when you're living in a land of plenty, without a lot of other people around, you don't need real sophisticated methods. You don't need to work hard as a turkey farmer when you can let your turkeys run around loose and harvest them when you need them. It's easy to figure that whatever they didn't do, they didn't know how to do. But that's unproven too.

With the north american population kept low, they didn't need all the innovations that would let them support a high population. But when the europeans came the natives needed iron, and they didn't know how to get that except from the europeans.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/01/opinion/01diamond.html?ex=1262322000&en=0bca4693e985942b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

The Ends of the World as We Know Them
By JARED DIAMOND

There are many reasons why past societies made bad decisions, and thereby failed to solve or even to perceive the problems that would eventually destroy them. One reason involves conflicts of interest, whereby one group within a society (for instance, the pig farmers who caused the worst erosion in medieval Greenland and Iceland) can profit by engaging in practices that damage the rest of society. Another is the pursuit of short-term gains at the expense of long-term survival, as when fishermen overfish the stocks on which their livelihoods ultimately depend.

History also teaches us two deeper lessons about what separates successful societies from those heading toward failure. A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions. That's why Maya kings, Norse Greenlanders and Easter Island chiefs made choices that eventually undermined their societies. They themselves did not begin to feel deprived until they had irreversibly destroyed their landscape.

Could this happen in the United States? It's a thought that often occurs to me here in Los Angeles, when I drive by gated communities, guarded by private security patrols, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools. By doing these things, they lose the motivation to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security and public schools. If conditions deteriorate too much for poorer people, gates will not keep the rioters out. Rioters eventually burned the palaces of Maya kings and tore down the statues of Easter Island chiefs; they have also already threatened wealthy districts in Los Angeles twice in recent decades.

In contrast, the elite in 17th-century Japan, as in modern Scandinavia and the Netherlands, could not ignore or insulate themselves from broad societal problems. For instance, the Dutch upper class for hundreds of years has been unable to insulate itself from the Netherlands' water management problems for a simple reason: the rich live in the same drained lands below sea level as the poor. If the dikes and pumps keeping out the sea fail, the well-off Dutch know that they will drown along with everybody else, which is precisely what happened during the floods of 1953....

[anne]

There is a review in the New York Times of a book that strikes me as important. The book is a history of Eritrea, a country about which I scarcely know of. What Jared Diamond's work does is give me a set of models or a way of thinking about such a history from a geographic or environmental perspective that is quite powerful for analysis.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/26/books/26grim.html

The Never-Ending Struggle of a Forgotten Bit of Africa
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Eritrea has not been in the news lately. That statement has pretty much been true for as long as newspapers have existed, even after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, when the European powers first noticed that the little kingdom to the north of present-day Ethiopia had a coastline that made it worth seizing. Italy seized it and set up colonial rule, and Eritrea has been a plaything of Western politics ever since, as Michela Wrong argues, angrily and persuasively, in 'I Didn't Do It for You,' her splendid account of modern Eritrean history.

The book's title refers to an apocryphal incident after the battle of Keren in 1941, when a British captain, marching at the head of his victorious men, was met by an old Eritrean woman who trilled a celebratory greeting. The officer took one look at her and said, 'I didn't do it for you,' tacking on a crass racial epithet at the end. The Italians were out, but Eritrean aspirations had nothing to do with it, and that, in a nutshell, has been Eritrea's fate for most of the modern era.

Ms. Wrong, an Africa correspondent and the author of 'In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo,' does her utmost to put Eritrea back on the map. The task is daunting. A Pakistani businessman in the Cairo airport, asking her about her work, furrows his brow when he hears the subject. Did she mean Algeria? Nigeria? Or perhaps Al-Jazeera? Finally he throws up his hands. 'I'm sorry,' he says. 'But I've simply never heard of the place.'

The place, as Ms. Wrong depicts it, is fascinating, a strange Shangri-La whose cities high above the clouds look over sizzling coastal plains, and whose people seem rather Swiss in manner and outlook. The national style, Ms. Wrong writes, is diffident, self-reliant and resolute, with a premium placed on self-control. These qualities served the Eritreans well throughout the 30-year guerrilla war they waged against Ethiopia before gaining independence in 1991. When it came time to erect a victory monument, the rebels, rather than putting up a statue of their charismatic leader, Isaias Afwerki, opted for an oversize metal version of the plastic sandal worn by rebel forces.

'Ridiculously cheap, washable, long-lasting, the Kongo sandal - as it was known - was the poor man's boot, perfect symbol for an egalitarian movement,' Ms. Wrong writes....

[Ozma]

Hi -- I wrote one of the two reviews of GG&S to which you so strongly object. I find it a bit puzzling that you didn't state your objections on our site but instead launched a tirade over here. As everyone over at SM is a young scholar, none of us is motivated by professional jealousy in questioning Diamond's work. We're all at a career stage that is both decades and worlds away from aspiring to the kind of spectacular fame he has achieved. Instead, we genuinely do question the validity of his evidence (and we are hardly the only scholars in anthropology and geography to do so -- as you are either not aware or choose not to acknowledge). We also question the motivation and orientation of the book. In an over the top way, this relates to something one of the more dyspeptic commentators here rather befuddedly accused us of -- being "postmodernist Trotskyites" . We haven't quite managed to pull off that astonishing hybridization, but yes, we do have a political axe to grind with Diamond's approach. If anyone wants to know more, I stand the post and comments on our site.

[radek]

"I just want to know why native Americans and the subsequent invaders didn't tame the buffalo.

Should have made a great tractor for the plow."

Probably for the same reasons why the Europeans never tamed the Bison.

[Carl Manaster]

> C. Northcote Parkinson was the first to identify
> the phenomenon of "injelitance"--the jealousy
> that the less-than-competent feel for the capable.

I wish I'd thought of that! ;-)

[Marc]

One of the persistently annoying things in these comments is that some of the critics (including the anthropologists that Brad critiqued) clearly didn't read the book. I see a lot of breeezy commentary here about what animals could or could not be domesticated. One of the best chapters in GGS ***goes through*** the number of large animals on all of the continents and ***in detail*** discusses why the supply that can be domesticated is so small. He goes through the nutritional content of various food crops. The logical error in the critiques on this thread is actually quite simple. If you think there are 500 potential domestic animals, then the land mass difference between Australia and Eurasia won't matter. If it is the difference between 20 and 3, on the other hand, it does. And the latter is much closer to the truth. It is precisely matters such as this that make GGS such a substantial achievement.

[Kimmitt]

Re: China vs. the West.

My theory is that the West conquered China and not the other way around because, well, one of the two was bound to happen, so one did.

[anne]

Marc has done us a favor in emphasizing how methodical and intricate is the building to theory of Jared Diamond. This is the way Darwin and Mayr worked; the way of a bird watcher who carefully records anecdote on anecdote and builds on them. By all means critique diamond in just this way, by paying attention to the detail and finding it point elsewhere than Diamond realizes. Diamonds work leaves question after question for us, but the compiling of anecdotes must be looked to for criticism. The zebra is not turned to our use, the horse is. There really our far more zebra than horse species....

[tom f]

Re: China and Europe. Paul Kennedy's book _The Rise and Fall..._ makes an interesting point explicitly linking the two civilizations' divergent mid-millenial fates to...Geography! Because China contained a broad massive plain it was susceptible to a degree of centralization that Europe did not realize. On the other hand, Europe developed into several states bisected by water and mountains that were close enought to allow the trade of diverse materials and ideas, close enough for competition and warfare, but too geographically seperated for the formation of a stable, conservative, unpioneering elite.

[J Thomas]

Marc, would you like to explain how we prove that an animal is domesticable, without actually domesticating it?

And then explain how you prove that an animal is not domsticable?

Diamond does not cover these topics adequately. That isn't a criticism of him; it can't be done this year. He has put together a large collection of hazy abstractions that look kind of clear if you squint your eyes. He makes sense of a lot of things. His sensible answers may not be correct though they provide a great intuitive vision of how things may have been and how they may have changed.

[natasha]

"One of the best chapters in GGS ***goes through*** the number of large animals on all of the continents and ***in detail*** discusses why the supply that can be domesticated is so small. He goes through the nutritional content of various food crops."

Exactly. The people up-thread bringing up bison and cats clearly haven't read it.

Further, even if easy hunting is available, it's more time consuming and doesn't yield the same variety of products that herding can. A goat or sheep provides milk and wool as well as meat. A cow can provide milk or muscle all its life. They are ongoing sources of protein, fiber, or cheap labor and all you have to do to get them is walk out to the pasture. Hunting is a comparatively thought and labor intensive activity, and it's far more vulnerable to fickle weather. Five minutes spent thinking about the different sort of hard winter a hunter has compared to a farmer with a cow and a few sheep in the shed is all it should take to illustrate the point. One lifestyle automatically supports more people than the other.

Someone already went into the importance of the East-West axis vs. a North-South axis, and in illustration of this, JD did talk about the Inca wheel toys and the llamas. The Incas lived in a mountainous ecosystem in which wheeled conveyances were useless, therefore the wheel never got beyond the toy stage. They also had the only domesticable animals on the continent capable of pulling a wheeled device to any great effect.

Elaborating on what makes a good crop plant, oak trees are right out. The lifespan of an oak makes it very difficult to patiently cultivate, as pointed out in GGS, for some trait like larger, meatier acorns. Most trees are like that, and most of the particularly good fruit trees that have more rapid growth rates don't come from the Americas. Even if you wanted to look at the Brazil nut tree, it's completely dependent on a complex rainforest ecosystem where certain species of wasps and orchids are present for pollination, and doesn't lend itself to easy cultivation.

Again, we go back to the issue of yields. It took (as mentioned above) a very long time to turn teosinte into corn. Quinoa and amaranth are good grains nutritionally, but the seeds are very small, collection is labor intensive, and I don't know how long it took to turn them into crop plants. The fact that they remain specialty grains with limited production even today should say something. Even squash and beans are good crop plants, but without the animal muscle to break more land, you're constrained by the amount of farming that can be carried on the backs of the human population or the amount of food available for gathering naturally.

There needs to be a confluence of favorable factors. You need domesticable food animals (rapid reproductive rates, decent meat yield, docile and controllable) and domesticable muscle animals (which category may or may not overlap with the other.) You need a steady source of starchy plant food with high yields that's relatively protein-rich to compensate for any shortage of other sources of protein, particularly as population expands. If Eurasia hadn't had even one of these factors, the world might look very different. But they had all of them, to the loss to the societies that inherited only part of this powerful foundation for expansion.

[Marc]

J Thomas: I think it is more accurate to state that there is no argument that would convince you, not that there is no argument that he could make. You can demonstrate that there is no evidence that a given animal has ever been domesticated. You can use the experiences of modern people cataloging reasons why some species simply don't breed in captivity, e.g. highly territorial males with large ranges, or highly aggressive critters that can't be kept in enclosures. You can also compile a listing of how many large animals there are. In what sense isn't this a reasonable approach?

[anne]

Think carefully for instance of a zebra in its territory, and of the attributes that keep the zebra part of a herd and alive, then think of a wild horse and imagine how you might domesticate a zebra.

[Retief]

Yes Jared diamond makes a big deal out of the east-west axis of the old world and how that let food crops spread more easily. Unfortunately that is a load of old codswallop. Empirically speaking we don't see such east-west bands of similar foodplants. We don't see a rice band streching from Hanoi to Senegal or a wheat band stretching from Bejing to Lisbon or a oat band stretching from Pyongyan to Paris. Instead we see north-south clusters of similar foods. There is no historical grape and olive culture that stretchs across Eurasia. The domestic animals themselves are vastly different in different parts of the land mass. If his east-west theory were true it would predict a very different world than the one we have before our eyes.

[J Thomas]

"You can demonstrate that there is no evidence that a given animal has ever been domesticated."

This is the argument from ignorance. "This never happened. If it had ever happened I'd have heard of it and I haven't." It isn't exactly a fallacy, negative evidence is a weak sort of evidence.

I'm not saying that Diamond is wrong, I'm saying the evidence is weak on detail. Many of the arguments are inevitably circular. Like, there's the argument that domesticable animals are genetically predisposed to be domesticable, and as a result humans were able to control their breeding. And the evidence is that after nobody-knows-how-many-generations of controlled breeding they're more domesticable than others. But we don't know what they were starting from.

It *makes sense* that the animals that were successfully domesticated should have been predisposed to it, more than animals that have not been successfully domesticated. It's only logical. It's a plausible JustSo story. I don't object to Diamond, I like JustSo stories. There's a lot of value in bold extrapolations that integrate the weak data into a coherent pattern.

[AllenM]

Ozma,
I went to your site and read your thread regarding this topic and I believe my comments are valid. The regard with which your responses are treated here is greater than that which was shown to outsiders making comments on your thread. Maybe I sounded a little harsh, but then I have had the pleasure of trashing enough people who continually bring race into everything in existance. I was told in all seriousness that slaves had built the subways of Philadelphia when I attended Temple University. I asked the commenter to provide a reference for that claim- he responded I must be a racist. After that I no longer gave some claims of racism much credence. Many of your arguments seem to be that shallow. BTW I did quite a bit of research into economic development in grad school and if you can follow some of the North/Temin/Williamson discussion you might sound more intelligent here.

[natasha]

"Yes Jared diamond makes a big deal out of the east-west axis of the old world and how that let food crops spread more easily. Unfortunately that is a load of old codswallop. ..."

Plants are sensitive to multiple environmental factors, and day length is one of them. There's far more difference between the days and seasons in Peru and Texas than between Jordan and France, for example, though obviously there's some tolerance for variation. Just look at a globe and compare the number of major parallels separating Europe and the Mideast to the number separating the Mideast from the tip of Africa. Another thing is that by the time people in China and people in the Middle East got introduced to each other, they already had their own, entrenched local foodstuffs to which they were accustomed and that had suited themselves to the local climate.

Also, he didn't say that because a plant can spread east to west easier that it would, just that it could. You have to look at something like local biomes and microclimates for certain foods, like the grapes you brought up, for example. They thrive and produce their best where there's a long, hot summer, doing great in the Meditteranean chaparral biome, which is reasonably close to conditions in parts of California where transplanted grapes thrive today. Rice, in contrast, is happiest when it's soaking wet and does well in monsoon country. Some things are easier to transfer than others.

Plants that are suited to dryer climates select for slow growth and water conservation, and they can be easily outcompeted and overshaded when they move to a wetter area and are surrounded by plants that have no pre-programmed inclinations to conserve their resources. Conversely, wet climate plants get beaten out by more cautious neighbors when trying to move into dryer areas.

Diamond's explanation seems to fit the facts reasonably well though, even when his argument doesn't hold for a given species. Any increase or constriction in ease of movement is likely to produce a greater cumulative effect than might be obvious.

[AllenM]

You have your biases, I have mine.
Different professions yield different answer.

[Auros]

Piotr said: "Eventually, tropical Americas developed a very impressive set of plants, maise, tomatoes, chili peppers, various beans, various nuts, grapefruits, apricots etc. However, it took Amerindians more time to do it so Eurasia had 2-3 thousand years of a head start."

Come to think of it, I wonder if another advantage the Eurasians had is simply the fact that, if you buy the "out-of-Africa" theory, we GOT THERE sooner. In order for humans to cross the land bridge to the Americas, they had to have crossed through the ancient Middle East (and hence the Fertile Crescent) way, way earlier, right?

[Auros]

Steven: The problem with a culture based on an abundance of seafood is that it's rather difficult for it to propagate in the manner of the ag societies.

Retief said: "There is no historical grape and olive culture that stretchs across Eurasia." Er, actually? There's quite a distinct viniculture band that runs from Georgia in the east across to France in the west. Sure, it's not STRICTLY east/west, meandering north-south a bit as altitude, local bodies of water, and prevailing winds change local conditions. Similarly, you'll find plenty of olives and olive oil in the cuisines of Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Persia.

[J Thomas]

And there's a date-palm belt. And a coconut palm belt.

And a whole lot of plants have turned out to transport well, in the last few hundred years. Okra grows lots of places, and tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, lots and lots of things. Why didn't the various indian plants get to europe and china earlier? Well, maybe some of them did, history is hazy about when some things got where.

Still, the point for building empires is to find a grain that can be grown in great quantity somewhere it's easy to transport from, and then you have your breadbasket you can ship cheap food from to wherever you choose to ship it. How many of those have there been in eurasia before the last couple thousand years? Egypt, fertile crescent, the rice of south asia, the four grains of north asia, the fields of india. In places where 9 farmers can support 10 people, you don't have a lot to work with.

And the early abandoned cities of south america each represent an agricultural attempt that worked for awhile.

[James Wimberley]

Jared Diamond's linguistic argument in GGS for the Taiwanese origin of Polynesians has just been confirmed by genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA:
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0030281

[anne]

Watching Jared Diamond again last night on PBS, I could not have been more impressed. The work he has done is a monument in economic-geography.

[anne]

Diamond's books set out a theory of development around which we can test specific development hypotheses. What should be striking is the humane and optimistic possibilities offered us in approaching development from a geographic perspective. I am more impressed in the wake of newly considering the work than ever.

[J Thomas]

I feel like somehow I must be missing the point. Diamond's book is science popularization, like _The Aquatic Ape_ or _The Territorial imperative_ but better researched.

It covers a lot of traditional material and puts it together in ways that are plausible but mostly can't be tested to get a clear (but maybe wrong) big picture. There's a very strong emphasis on geography which is natural since Diamond is a geographer.

The last time I noticed this sort of reaction was with SJ Gould's ideas about punctuated equilibrium. There was no new theory there, he was only correcting a mistake that no serious evolutionist would make. His scientific papers on the topic were unexceptional though he presented them as breakthroughs. But he got a lot of attention from scientists because he had so much attention from the public. And yet there were young biologists who swore by him, who thought he'd done something fantastic. But it was mostly marketing.

[Kerim Friedman]

Brad. I quote the prolog in my initial post. Did you do me the favor of reading that? No. You just scanned it looking for cheap shots. The question isn't whether he says 1600, but whether ending in 1600 is a legitimate way to answer Yali's question. I argue it is not.

[Diamond thinks that after 1600 the story is clear: conquest, genocide, enslavement, extermination--the strong do what they want, and the weak suffer what they must. You have a problem with that?]

[Kerim Friedman]

Brad. I've clarified my position in the post you link to. This is the last time I will attempt to clarify my position for you, until I feel that you are acutally trying to understand my position and not just humilate me.

[Colin Danby]

Brad could you please, please, cultivate a mode of engagement (particularly outside your discipline) between "I agree with you" and "you're beneath contempt"?

Yes, there are problems with the blanket, large-scale, pre-moralized invocations of economy and capitalism that occasionally appear on Savage Minds. And I think there are ways, if we identify and pick apart issues carefully, that people can learn from each other. But Kerim is right here -- if you *begin* in cudgel-swinging mode we get nowhere and damage the cause of interdisciplinary engagement.

Two observations about substance:

-- both sides, it seems, depend in one way or another on "nation" or "society" as a unit, one to point to differences between them, the other within them. Why exactly is this the relevant unit, analytically or ethically? There *is* a problem in JD's work with a too-easy invocation of "society" as a coherent, internally-even, discrete unit, somewhat in the manner of the old German historicists or slightly-less-old structural functionalists. And I'm not saying states don't matter, but there are implicit arguments here that need to be pulled out.

-- both sides sometimes reach for oversimple arguments about what capitalism did, good or ill. Is it possible that there are contemporary large-scale social results, including income and wealth differences, that are not caused by "capitalism"?

[luke weiger]

"Is it possible that there are contemporary large-scale social results, including income and wealth differences, that are not caused by 'capitalism'?"

That's the problem with talking to historical materialists--they'll never admit that anything isn't "ultimately" a result of class relations. I suppose the folks at Savage Minds would say the same sort of thing about sociobilogists.

[RETARDO]

I have never cared for JD because GGS -- I admit I have not read all of it but I have read a good deal; also, Ive read his interviews and speeches over at Edge -- takes a thesis implicit in the cultural materialist classics, explicit in Alfred W. Crosby's masterpiece, and the "ecology is destiny" line of Julian Steward, and people fawn over it as if it were new.

I'm just a dabbler in anth, but there's nothing new I saw in GGS, except the underlying moral leitmotiv of, "see, the way to avoid this fate is techological intensification and trade": an ideological thesis that is music to the ears of people like Dr DeLong. JD, iirc, gets explicit about this wrt pacific cultures (while saying some stupid things specifically about lapita culture degradation as well as tasmanian isolation) in a speech to redmond techies posted at Edge (im too lazy to look it up).

look, Diamond's thesis, so far as i can tell, in crash seems spot on and welcome, though it must burn a bit to anth people that ecological degradation parables arent exactly rare in the anth canon, and JD seems to be getting credit for innovation here that he's not due. but hey, it's true and useful.

you want to know the differences in biological inventory between old world and new, read crosby.

[Steve LaBonne]

"[Diamond thinks that after 1600 the story is clear: conquest, genocide, enslavement, extermination--the strong do what they want, and the weak suffer what they must. You have a problem with that?]"

That's generally what has happened in human history. (You do know something about the bloody succession of mesoamerican empires, right? It's not just those nasty capitalist Europeans who have behaved badly.) So the question Diamond asks- _why_ were the strong so (relatively) strong?- needs to be answered, whatever you think of Diamond's own answer to it. That indeed leaves us with another highly important question- why are the strong so often beastly to the weak? But that's not the question Diamond set out to answer, and to chide him for not writing a completely different book is simply to be an incompetent reader.

[anne]

Again, Jared Diamond has presented a profound theoretical framework for looking at ways in which we have been favored or not by geography and ways in which we have come to understand and take advantage of and respect geography. Our patterns of social interaction in various geographical settings provides a profound understanding of technological advance and is reflective of our vaarious cultures. I find Diamond's work as exciting in a sociological context as Darwin's work in biology and ecology.

[RETARDO]

"Jared Diamond has presented a profound theoretical framework for looking at ways in which we have been favored or not by geography and ways in which we have come to understand and take advantage of and respect geography."

IMO, he has not. The geographical aspect was always implicit in the old cultural materialist & ecological determinist explanations of cultural evolution.

[Michael Balter]

For my critical review of the PBS program in July 8 Science, please go to my site www.michaelbalter.com then News then Neolithic news.

Michael Balter, Science

[anne]

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond_rich/rich_p2.html

HOW TO GET RICH
A Talk by Jared Diamond

In Guns, Germs, and Steel I asked why history has unfolded differently over the last 13,000 years in Eurasia, in the Americas, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in Aboriginal Australia, with the result that within the last 500 years Europeans were the ones who conquered Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians and sub-Saharan Africans, rather than vice versa.

Most of that book, was concerned with comparing the peoples of different continents, but I knew that I couldn't publish a book comparing the histories of different continents and considering Eurasia as a unit without saying something about the fascinating problem of the differences of history within Eurasia. Why, within Eurasia, was it Europeans who conquered the world and colonized other people, rather than the Chinese or the people of India or the Middle East? I devoted seven pages to that subject at the end of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I think I arrived at the correct solution. Nevertheless, since the publication of Guns, Germs, and Steel, I've received a lot of feedback, and the most interesting feedback has been about the implications of that comparative analysis of the histories of China, Europe, India, and the Middle East.

In particular, in addition to the review of my book by Bill Gates, I've received a lot of correspondence from economists and business people, who pointed out to me possible parallels between the histories of entire human societies and histories of smaller groups. This correspondence from economists and business people has to do with the following big question: what is the best way to organize human groups and human organizations and businesses so as to maximize productivity, creativity, innovation, and wealth? Should your human group have a centralized direction, in the extreme having a dictator, or should there be diffuse or even anarchical organization? Should your collection of people be organized into a single group, or broken off into a number of groups, or broken off into a lot of groups? Should you maintain open communication between your groups, or erect walls between them, with groups working more secretly? Should you erect protectionist tariff walls against the outside, or should you expose your business or government to free competition?

These questions about group organization arise at many different levels and for many types of groups. They arise, of course, about the organization of entire governments or countries: what is the best way to govern a country? Remember the classic arguments about whether the best government is a benign dictatorship, or a federal system, or an anarchical free-for-all. The same questions also rise about the organization of different companies within the same industry. How can you account for the fact that Microsoft has been so successful recently, and that IBM, which was formerly successful, fell behind but then drastically changed its organization over the last four years and improved its success? How can we explain the different successes of what we call different industrial belts? When I was a boy growing up in Boston, Route 128, the industrial belt around Boston, led the industrial world in scientific creativity and imagination. But Route 128 has fallen behind, and now Silicon Valley is the center of innovation. And the relations of businesses to each other in Silicon Valley and Route 128 are very different, possibly resulting in those different outcomes....

[anne]

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond/diamond_p2.html

Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years?
A Talk by Jared Diamond

I've set myself the modest task of trying to explain the broad pattern of human history, on all the continents, for the last 13,000 years. Why did history take such different evolutionary courses for peoples of different continents? This problem has fascinated me for a long time, but it's now ripe for a new synthesis because of recent advances in many fields seemingly remote from history, including molecular biology, plant and animal genetics and biogeography, archaeology, and linguistics.

As we all know, Eurasians, especially peoples of Europe and eastern Asia, have spread around the globe, to dominate the modern world in wealth and power. Other peoples, including most Africans, survived, and have thrown off European domination but remain behind in wealth and power. Still other peoples, including the original inhabitants of Australia, the Americas, and southern Africa, are no longer even masters of their own lands but have been decimated, subjugated, or exterminated by European colonialists. Why did history turn out that way, instead of the opposite way? Why weren't Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who conquered or exterminated Europeans and Asians?

This big question can easily be pushed back one step further. By the year A.D. 1500, the approximate year when Europe's overseas expansion was just beginning, peoples of the different continents already differed greatly in technology and political organization. Much of Eurasia and North Africa was occupied then by Iron Age states and empires, some of them on the verge of industrialization. Two Native American peoples, the Incas and Aztecs, ruled over empires with stone tools and were just starting to experiment with bronze. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa were divided among small indigenous Iron Age states or chiefdoms. But all peoples of Australia, New Guinea, and the Pacific islands, and many peoples of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, were still living as farmers or even still as hunter/ gatherers with stone tools.

Obviously, those differences as of A.D. 1500 were the immediate cause of the modern world's inequalities. Empires with iron tools conquered or exterminated tribes with stone tools. But how did the world evolve to be the way that it was in the year A.D. 1500?

This question, too can be easily pushed back a further step, with the help of written histories and archaeological discoveries. Until the end of the last Ice Age around 11,000 B.C., all humans on all continents were still living as Stone Age hunter/gatherers. Different rates of development on different continents, from 11,000 B.C. to A.D. 1500, were what produced the inequalities of A.D. 1500. While Aboriginal Australians and many Native American peoples remained Stone Age hunter/gatherers, most Eurasian peoples, and many peoples of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, gradually developed agriculture, herding, metallurgy, and complex political organization. Parts of Eurasia, and one small area of the Americas, developed indigenous writing as well. But each of these new developments appeared earlier in Eurasia than elsewhere.

So, we can finally rephrase our question about the evolution of the modern world's inequalities as follows. Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years? Those differing rates constitute the broadest pattern of history, the biggest unsolved problem of history, and my subject today.

Historians tend to avoid this subject like the plague, because of its apparently racist overtones. Many people, or even most people, assume that the answer involves biological differences in average IQ among the world's populations, despite the fact that there is no evidence for the existence of such IQ differences. Even to ask the question why different peoples had different histories strikes some of us as evil, because it appears to be justifying what happened in history. In fact, we study the injustices of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds of murderers and rapists: not in order to justify history, genocide, murder, and rape, but instead to understand how those evil things came about, and then to use that understanding so as to prevent their happening again. In case the stink of racism still makes you feel uncomfortable about exploring this subject, just reflect on the underlying reason why so many people accept racist explanations of history's broad pattern: we don't have a convincing alternative explanation. Until we do, people will continue to gravitate by default to racist theories. That leaves us with a huge moral gap, which constitutes the strongest reason for tackling this uncomfortable subject....

[sm]

"IMO, he has not. The geographical aspect was always implicit in the old cultural materialist & ecological determinist explanations of cultural evolution."

For instance, Montesquieu? (Who probably didn't invent this stuff either.)

[Retief]

Natasha, I think we agree. When you suggest that "by the time people in China and people in the Middle East got introduced to each other, they already had their own, entrenched local foodstuffs to which they were accustomed and that had suited themselves to the local climate" you are reiterating my point that the Eurasian land mass isn't one big biome but a cluster of smaller ones. If that is the case, a lot of the force of his argument disapears.

Auros, I think we're agreeing as well. There is certainly a mediteranean cluster of grape and olive culture. But the east-west orientation of Eurasia did not allow it to spread to India or China or the stepes or northern Europe. It is one thing to argue that corn was harder to domesticate than some of the grains that people in Europe and the mediteranean started with but that has nothing to do with the east-west vs. north-south business.

The example of rice is, I think even more revealing. Rice is the staple from the frozen tundra of North Korea in the North to the equatorial heat of Jakarta in the South. Sure people in the region could borrow from each other's fields, but while the band includes india in the west, it stretches from the Amur River to the Java Sea. It doesn't travel acros the landmass. It represents another smaller than continental biome.

This brings us to the next real problem. Diamond devotes most of his effort to explain the pre-eminence of Eurasians when it isn't Eurasians but Europeans who conquered the world and colonized other people, rather than the Chinese or the people of India or the Middle East. If his continent spanning geographic explanations have little if any bearing on this question, what good are they?

[Steve LaBonne]

Since the Europeans and their agricultural way of life both came originally from the Middle East, it's a bit more complicated than "not Eurasians but merely Europeans" if you're thinking on the timescale Diamond is examining.

[Matt Austern]

The last chapter of the book deals with the differences between eastern Eurasia and western Eurasia, and I think it's the weakest chapter of the book by far.

Diamond did convince me that there were real differences, persisting for many thousands of years, between the way cultures developed in Eurasia versus the way they developed in the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and Australia. That sort of difference calls out for a non-contingent explanation. His book was the best sort of popular science writing, in that it showed me a new way of looking at facts many of which I had already known.

The fact that western Eurasia was richer than eastern Eurasia from around the early 18th century through the late 20th century, though, looks to me an awful lot like historical contingency. You could easily find three-century periods where the reverse was true. Perhaps we're entering one now. I don't see that a geographic explanation is called for, and I don't find Diamond's suggested explanation very convincing.

[Brad DeLong]

I wouldn't say historical contingency, but I would say that Diamond's tools give you little purchase to answer the question "Why Europe?" rather than other parts of Eurasia.

The last chapter-Epilogue is definitely the weakest thing in the book.

[Steve LaBonne]

I agree it's both weak and deals with a question not very susceptible to Diamond's tools. But to be fair, Diamond himself admits as much and (perhaps unwisely) hazards an explanation for China's weakness in the modern period that hinges precisely on historical contingency (the xenophobia and preference for autarky of the Ming government.)

[John Emerson]

Before the recent DeLong threads, I regarded nyself as a Diamond enthusiast (though I always grouped him with McNeill as a broad-scope historian).

Without changing my opinion, I have become classifiable as a Diamond-skeptic. There's far too much surplus enthusiasm for his extremely ambitious books. He and McNeill are pioneers, and people will be working out their details for decades (I hope), but the conclusions of a book as short and bold as either of Diamonds (or most of McNeill's) cannot possibly be taken at face value.

Suppose someone spent forty years researching and writing a bold, revolutionary book, approximately the length of Diamond's, about Rome from its beginnings to the fall of the Western Empire. Rome has been studied for centuries, and it would be possible to look at the new book, check its bibliography, compare the new conclusions with what was already known, and ultimately give the book an unequivocal thumbs-up because it was completely solid and well-done.

You can't do that with Diamond. His pioneering methods are only a decade or two old, his scope is much broader than the book on Rome I'm using for comparison (which was already a very ambitious book), and he has not spent forty years mastering all of the existing scholarship -- no one could.

I am glad that historians are writing on the large scale again (McNeill, a Toynbeeist at one time, was the last of the breed for awhile). But works at that scale need to be read critically, and they're more fruitful than definitive.

I'm not sure that either McNaill or Diamond would disagree with me.

[AllenM]

As one of the commenters who helped to inflame this subject with a snarky comment I feel it might help to talk about some of the background issues in academia that seem to pin everybody to their chairs. Brad exists an able mainstream proponent of the current version of economics that owes something to the Keynsian school. I myself tend to be a bit austrian and a bit whatever that works best to explain what I am looking at. Even though we don't see eye to eye on some issues in the profession, there can at times seem to be a united front when confronted by statements arising from theories that have for the most part been totally discredited in the current thinking of the economics profession. While anthropology is a related field and it does delve into areas that most of economics is not much concerned with, but the economic development of societies and the subsequent expression of the economic power evident from the 14th century to the present of the European expansion is a topic of study that has been under scrutiny for the last 60 years. Witness some of the chapter's of Avner Greif's book that Brad posted a link to yesterday and you see the deep thought using an economic framework to explain development.

Now, I did follow the subsequent discussions on savageminds and crooked timber as a lurker. I felt that making any further comment was going to be inflammatory their and nonproductive. However, I feel a few short asides are warranted.

Ozma, your work on the structures of society in your PhD thesis sounds interesting, but how vulnerable ultimately is the resulting society to an exogenous shock- see the Hohokam precolumbian disappearance in the Salt River Valley of Arizona and the abandonment of the Mesa Verde complex and the Four Corners region. This question might reinforce some of the elements in Collapse that have absolutely nothing to do exogenous conquest and more to do with a societal response to changing climatic conditions. It is interesting that some of the same responses from Easter Island including cannibalism are present in the Mesa Verde collapse.

Michael Balter, why did the Inca conquer the other Andean peoples before the arrival of Pizarro? The ability to decide to fight wars seems to have originated in the very makeup of humanity, since some of the earliest written records outside of accounting seem to deal with justice, wars, and conflicts. Asking such a question in a criticism seems a little silly. Why do chimpanzee troops combat other troops and invaders?

[RETARDO]

"For instance, Montesquieu? (Who probably didn't invent this stuff either.)"

Hmmm, I've never thought of that, actually, and am too weak on him to comment further.

I should say, wrt Crosby and Diamond, that within this frame I can see why the professional anth ppl are uncomfy with JD.

The anti-racist viewpoint is of course welcome, if standard issue in anth. That JD popularizes this is a good thing.

But sometimes determinism does let people off the historical hook in analyses of when cultures clash. You cant read Crosby's "The Columbian Exchange" and come away thinking that the "pre-determined" aspects of Euro exploration and technological ability were a good thing. Yes, I know that sounds banal so let me put it like this. If 1492 was globalisation 1.0, anyone who reads Crosby will think globalisation sucks, and rightly so. The cultural *and* biological inventories of the New World were impoverished by contact.

With that fact in mind, when I read Diamond on, say, the tasmanians, I can tell he deplores its isolationist, autonomous culture and technological poverty. I get from his pronouncements on them nothing but a "it got what it deserved" attitude, though of course he's telling this to techies at microsoft, so he may be gilding the lily a bit for them. He even ,if memory serves, throws them a luddist bone to gnaw on: why, the lapitas moved into the pacific from asia, and the silly goofballs stopped making pottery! of course they were conquered, *they commited the cardinal sin of becoming techologically more primitive*! But, of course, when you move to a place that has naturally-growing storage containers, like cocoanuts and gourds, etc, you dont need pottery but diamond does't care about that. (also, cough cough, pottery-making is work, even specialised work, see where this is going?)

I know I write terribly, but do you see what I mean? IMO, you can only think after reading JD that trade and cultural exchange are proper defences to predatory cultures, nevermind that predatory culturals are morally abominable regardless of the morality of the prey culture. IOW, to beat the euros or to stand up to them, the NW and Pacific peoples were doomed because they never had the geography-ecology and therefore the material wealth and technological ability to compete, or to be more like, the euros. so it's all just too bad and let's just dust off our hands and make sure no one is allowed to be culturally autonomous again.

Look, it's been a while since I read the Edge and GGS stuff so if I've misrepresented JD, I'll shut up. Maybe I've embarrassed myself. But IMO, aside the admirable anti-racist stuff, and the afore-mentioned environmental responsibility stuff in crash, JD's work is morally degenerate.

[RETARDO]

Does no one read Marvin Harris anymore? Just a general question but I cant see how ppl think JD is innovative and ambitious in comparison. Too bad Harris died a few years ago.