Intellectual Garbage Pickup on Guns, Germs, and Steel

Sigh.

Time for some unpleasant but necessary intellectual garbage pickup on the critics of Guns, Germs, and Steel over at savageminds.org...

An ordinary human being, on reading:

Ozma: Diamond... argues that the inhabitants of this Eurasian landmass started off with a better array of potentially domesticable plants than did prehistoric humans living elsewhere on the planet. There are pages and pages of discussion of wild plants with a large, oily seed yield -- the kinds of plants that would be good candidates for domestication. At first reading, my 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.

But my fuzzy doubts [about Diamond] are mere amateur ankle-biting as compared to the expertly rear-end-kicking article lead-authored by John Terrell of the Field Museum (full reference below). It demolishes the bright line demarcating agricultural domestication in human prehistory that sustains this entire portion of Diamond's argument. It also offers a thoroughgoing critique of Diamond's thesis and evidence. Highly recommended reading...

would think that the article cited challenges Jared Diamond's belief that the inhabitants of Eurasia 12000 years ago had a larger and more promising array of potentially domesticable plants than did people living elsewhere, and presents evidence that Diamond's claims about Eurasian agriculture's ability to draw on a broader portfolio of plants is false.

The ordinary human being would be naive.

The article doesn't.

What the article does do is to point out that lots of people spent some time farming, some time hunting, and some time gathering (blackberries, anyone? there are still a few left); and to point out that people who are not-farmers alter the landscape (planted any Baobab trees lately? Set any forest fires to enlarge clearings so that there will be more deer about?). It goes on to claim that we simply should not talk of the "domestication" of particular kinds of plants or animals--or at least the article claims that "any knowledgeable fly-rod fisherman... has domesticated his or her surroundings... at least as skillfully as a farmer domesticates the Indiana landscape by turning the sod and planting corn and soy beans..."

Here we see the fly fisherman:

Here we see the cornfield:

Notice how the fly fisherman has "domesticated" his or her surroundings at least as skillfully as the corn farmer has?

Never draw to an inside straight, never get involved in a land war in Asia, and never trust a reference to an article in a journal of "Method and Theory."

In case anyone has any doubt, there really is a meaningful difference between "hunter-gatherers" and "farmers."

There really was a "Neolithic Revolution"--a surprisingly short period of time nearly ten thousand years ago when technologies of farming and herding spread throughout large parts of the world, and that the resulting greater availability of food pushed global human populations through a powerful upward inflection point. My friend Michael Kremer tells me that we do indeed believe that it was the case that global human populations were nearly stable at 4 million or so for the 10,000 years before 10,000 BC, and then grew forty-fold to perhaps 170 million or so by the year 1.

---

Here are three selections from the article--John Edward Terrell, John P. Hart, Sibel Barut, Nicoletta Cellinese, Antonio Curet, Tim Denham, Chapurukha M. Kusimba, Kyle Latinis, Rahul Oka, Joel Palka, Mary E. D. Pohl, Kevin O. Pope, Patrick Ryan Williams, Helen Haines, and John E. Staller (2003), "Domesticated Landscapes: The Subsistence Ecology of Plant and Animal Domestication," Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 10:4 (December)--that will give you a good idea of what it is actually about:

White's claim that agriculture was a new kind of relationship that arose in prehistory as a response to growing food shortages might be called a "Lost Eden" hypothesis that overlooks what Charles Darwin taught us.... What White saw as the old [pre-Neolithic Revolution] equilibrium of hunting-and-gathering is difficult to reconcile with Darwin's observation that all species--even those "in the wild"--compete with one another for their survival.... Consequently, as John Odling-Smee and his colleagues have observed, it is hardly surprising that--contrary to simple dictionary definitions of adaptation--"organisms not only adapt to environments, but in part also construct them.... [I]f it is true that hunter gatherers have and have always had abundant and accurate knowledge of the flora and fauna of the places they inhabit... then knowing how to hunt and gather is not so different from knowing how to plant and cultivate. Knowledge of what works... is power... a way of "controlling," or "harnessing" that many conventionally associate with the idea of domestication.... [T]he intrinsic commonalities of foraging and farming would be easier to see.... Then it might be more obvious than it evidently now may be that any knowledgeable fly-rod fisherman or Inuit seal hunter has domesticated his or her surroundings--here, trout streams or Arctic shorelines--at least as skillfully as a farmer domesticates the Indiana landscape by turning the sod and planting corn and soy beans...

It is not surprising, therefore, that few people know about traditional African ways of managing this continent's many species of useful plants... the seeds of over 60 species of uncultivated grasses are commonly harvested in Africa, and there is a long history of intimate relationships between people and certain trees and tubers. The baobab (Adansonia sp.), the oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), and the karate, or shea (the butter tree, Butyrospermum sp.) are a few examples. Karate grows in many parts of the Sahel in West Africa. The edible oil extracted from the fruit of this tree is important to the diet of savanna peoples, where this species enjoys a nearly sacred status.... Abyssinian oats (Avena abyssinica), Guinea millet (Brachiaria deflexa), African rice (Oryza glaberrima), and safu plums (Pachylobus edulis) (Harlan, 1989) are not intentionally grown, but when they do come up in fields or gardens, people are careful to protect them so that they can eventually be harvested, nonetheless.... Since A. abyssinica is less dependent on human intervention, it serves as a food to fall back on when other species fail (Harlan, 1989). Many archaeologists have noted a relationship between old village sites and the baobab, a tree whose wide distribution on the continent is thought to be largely the result of human propagation (Wickens, 1982).... Young baobab rely on humans for survival, humans turn to mature Adansonia for sustenance. The bark is used for fiber, while its leaves and roots are used as medicinal herbs. Its fruit is eaten and used as shampoo. While young, Adansonia are sometimes hollowed out, so that as they mature the opening deepens, becoming a cistern, trapping rainwater for dry season use. These few examples show how we cannot fully understand and appreciate the long history of intimate relationships between people and selected trees and seeds in Africa using current ways of thinking about and modeling domestication...

Just as the set of relations... shown on a provisions spreadsheet summarizes a community's actions at a given time, so too, a chronologically ordered sequence of such spreadsheets would be a database for exploring human-landscape interactions over time and space. The history of these interactions might be expressed, for instance, as a subtraction matrix showing patterned local change over time; or as a topology for exploring points of continuity or discontinuity between people living at different times and places.... [T]he major difference between the tables of species conventionally published in archaeological site reports and a provisions spreadsheet is the added stipulation that one must try to gauge the likely harvesting skills... used in the past at the site in question to harvest the species evidenced.... Whether it makes sense to identify at least some of the species arrayed on a provisions spreadsheet in themselves as "domesticated" is a moot question... plants, animals, and people may evolve together.... To the degree that these interactions have influenced human behavior enough to make people the dominant force behind the continued survival of local plant or animal populations, it might make equal sense to say that any species found on a provisions spreadsheet time after time attests to the success with which that species has "domesticated" (shaped) the behavior of the people.... Consider the case of Zea mays. Starting in the early Holocene as a geographically restricted species in Mexico, maize has successfully spread worldwide through its interactions with people, and it has been able to do so because people take pains to create living conditions for this crop that are favorable to its survival. People do virtually anything they possibly can to help Zea mays triumph over pests and competitors; they have expanded this plant's geographic range by helping it boost its genetic fitness in marginal environments; they have developed processing techniques that boost its nutritional value as a staple food; and where and when people fail at such tasks, famine and death may be the price they have to pay. Our species' success and that of Zea mays are often so intertwined that deciding exactly who domesticated whom might be beside the point.... From this perspective, therefore, all of the species on a provisions spreadsheet may be called "domesticated species."... The story of agriculture has been about how human beings have learned to control Mother Nature's wild, impulsive ways by replacing them with our own orderly, efficient, and thus more trustworthy ways... learned to replace the lean and allusive varieties favored by nature with more fruitful and abundant creations of our own design.... However appealing this standard account may be (e.g., Diamond, 2002)... the notion that to be controlled, Mother Nature must first be changed or transformed is not only debatable, but has often been debated.... What the oft-designated "hunter-gatherers" of Australia or the Amazon have been doing to domesticate their landscapes is different from what sharecroppers have done in Arkansas, or wheat farmers do in Kansas. Yet the goal of putting food on the table in each case is not so different.... [C]oncluding that the final answer to the "origin of domestication and agriculture" question is that no single model will work leads us to regard this persistent question as a nonquestion. Therefore, as an alternative, we have turned to the twin concepts of the domesticated landscape and the provisions spreadsheet. With these notional tools in mind, we think the focus of research on the evolution of human subsistence behavior changes. What becomes challenging is not deciding how people should be classified--as foragers or as farmers--but instead, how successfully archaeologists can use what they have found to discover what people in the past were doing to put a family together, food on the table, and a roof over their head.

Comments

[John Emerson]

My objection to Diamond lies in the fact that along with a lot of valuable, interesting stuff, he offers neat and tidy, morally satisfying explanations of very complex hostorical phenomenon, without a very thorough knowledge of the phenomenon.

GG&S has an anti-racist tract folded into a very broad, geographically-determinist explanation of all of human history. The more recent book (still haven't read it) apparently includes an environmentalist moral folded into a simple generalized explanation of the rise and fall of civilizations.

In particular, including the Greenland and Easter Island outliers in the second book was cheating. The Norse and the Malayo-Polynesians have flourished, even though certain minor colonies of theirs perished or dwindled. (If Diamond had been in geographical-reduction mode, he could have skipped those two entirely: "ultimately inhospitable landscape" would have covered those two quite adequately.)

I love the guy, really, but people are going apeshit.

[pinson]

I read GG&S a few years ago so I may be forgetting things, but his contention that Asia had more usable/promising grains on hand than Americans seemed solid and non-controversial. That the Europeans arrived in America carrying (or at least knowing of) wheat, oats, rice and barley and met with natives who had corn and corn only would seem to put that argument to rest. Could all of the asian grains have derived from the same source plant in the period of time from 10,000 b.c. to 1492? Seems highly unlikely. Just as important was Diamond's argument that Amerindians who relied on acorns were hamstrung because oak genetics makes cultivation and hybridization extremely difficult. So the corn-growing Mayans were able to build cities. The acorn-eating Miwoks in California lived in redwood-bark huts until the 1800s.

So is there any serious criticism of Diamond out there? The Savage Minds guys are't doing so well.

[Matt]

The experssion "determinism" keeps getting used a lot in this discussion, both by those who seem quite hostile to Diamond and those who seem at least much less so. I have not read GGS, just a series of articles Diamond wrote in various places (like the now sadly dead magazine/journal of the New York Academy of Science and the like) discribing his view and his theories, so maybe I'm missing some points here. But, it seems to me that this is a funny sort of determinism if it's determinism in an interesting way at all. yes, he says that geographic factors and environmental factors (including what sorts of plants and animals are in what place) play an important and interesting role in history. I suppose you'd have to be a fool to disagree with that, though the details can be fought about. But, he doesn't say, I think, that history had to play out how it did in a way that can really be called "determinism" in a very interesting sense- there's no very good reason why things happend when they did rather than a thousand years earlier or a thousand years later, and they could have happend more east or more west or whatever. The Mongols could have pushed beyond Russia. The Chinese could have kept exploring. Plus, it's accidental that the right plants and crops end up where they do- that is, there's a causal story to tell, but there's one to tell about everything, and it could have easily been different. So I don't see how the term "determinism" here helps the issue at all. Rather, it seems to just cloud things. I'd recommend dropping it and being more precise about what one is interested in or on to. Diamond doesn't use it, does he? (not in what I've read, but as I said, I've only read articles, not the book.) If not, maybe it's becuase he doesn't think that's what's going on, and maybe we should not, too.

[SamChevre]

These arguments are tiresomely familiar; it seems that anthropology/sociology tend to argue that indeterminate boundaries aren't boundaries. Thus, races are cultural constructs because some individuals are not clearly part of a single race; hunter-gatherer and farmer are not useful descriptions becasue some people do both, and some activities could be described as either; and so forth. It's the "problem of heaps"--two grains of sand isn't a heap, but if you keep adding grains you have a heap eventually, but it doesn't go from some sand to a heap at any particular point; a heap of sand is still a useful description.

[The artist formerly known as M.]

I thought the problem with GG&S was the fact that it's really just a long just-so story. He floats all these ideas past the reader and performs the occasional thought experiment on them, but he isn't able to test them (or suggest tests for them) with any degree of rigor.

For instance, the model he uses for the spread of disease seems pretty simplistic. The spread of some diseases probably owes more to factors other than population size, density and domesticated animals. Influenza apparently uses domesticated animals as vectors, but wild animals and insects can also spread disease.

Then there's the issue of timing. Suppose the Black Death had come to Europe in the 15th century. Would Spain have been able to hold onto its colonies? Would the Europeans have been able to colonize the New World? There's nothing in his book which can predict issues of timing.

Although I gotta say I loved the book and I do think a lot of the ideas are compelling.

[John Emerson]

"Yes, he says that geographic factors and environmental factors (including what sorts of plants and animals are in what place) play an important and interesting role in history."

I'd say he goes beyond that, which is why I used the word determinism. He does not present his point of view very modestly, though he does insert qualifiers here and there. If he had written up his factors more soberly and reservedly, I'd like him better. But we wouldn't be talking about him now, either.

[sm]

Actually, I don't think being sober and reserved is his job. That was the job of other people, whose research Diamond has used.

This is not a snark. Diamond's role is an honorable one, not unlike that of a lecturer in an undergraduate class. If you stop with the lectures or Diamond's books, you have a pretty superficial and (usually) derivative synthesis. Those who want more must go farther.

[Jeff]

I don't see how anything in this post refutes the selections from _...Method and Theory_. I don't question the expertise of your friend, but experts disagree. While you bemoan Diamond's lack of critics, it seems like you are defending Diamond against any and all criticisms without any patience for what their substance might be.

And everything in the article must be wrong because of the...name of the journal?

I suppose that "intellectual garbage pickup" might be appropriate if someone has given a really uninformed criticism motivated by jealousy, but its its very poor taste of you to talk like this when its the peer-reviewed work of other scholars that's under discussion. Its sophomoric. If you're going to call someone else's work intellectual garbage, you need to offer something more substantive than a jibe at the name of the journal and a definition of the neolithic era that reads like it came from an encyclopedia.

Though I suppose I have no business reading this blog if snarky comments fail to impress me as arguments.

[John Emerson]

Given his scope and his ambition, Diamond could have written more carefully and flattered his readers less.

[Marc]

I think it's more appropriate to say that the quoted articles is not germane to the point that it was intended to make. The absence of bright lines between categories does not imply that the categories are not, in fact, useful. There are people who are hermaphrodites, but man and woman are still useful categories. If you try to define "farmer" or "hunter/gatherer" you can find exceptions, but organized farming had a real impact on human development. To the extent that the authors of the paper being discussed claim that their exceptions prove that it did not, they are missing the boat. That is an entirely fair point.

[Marc]

John, I think this has generated so many posts for reasons that are only tangentially related to Diamond. The more I read it the more it looks like a reprise of Gross&Levitts book "Higher Superstition". Namely, it's the reaction of hard scientists to a style of argument among humanities-types that they find annoying.

[piotr]

I am not sure if "determinism" is a right term, but it is nice to see someone trying to make some sense of history. An explanation has to be simpler than the phenomenon itself, thus the criticism that it is "too simple" is missing that point.

Now, the extend of "Diamond determinism" is that a Eurasian civiliation would reach Americas and it would found inhabitants hopelessly outmatched. And indeed, it could be a Holy Roman Empire of Mongol Nation, China, whatever. My bet would be on the temperate zone folks.

About Black Death in 16 century: Black death reduced the population by 30%, perhaps 50% in some places, and in one-two generations population was back. Amerindians suffered epidemics for generations with the population reduced to 10% of the original one. Ravaged Spain and Portugal would still have enough Conquistadors to perform voyages and conquests.

Tinfoil hat theory: By the way, syphilis allegedly was brought to Europe by Columbus on the return trip which lead to the end of many royal dynasties (kings being on top of the sexual food chain). Suppose that this tipped the balance and foster the victory of Reformation in Northern Europe... Protestant work ethic winning because of an epidemic that targetted traditionalist aristocracy...

[John Emerson]

Piotr, I really like many of Diamond's individual points. But when he swoops it all together and makes historical genetic geography (or whatever he calls it) into an explanation of everything, I don't think that we should accept it instantly.

And he does that as much of that as he dares.

[natasha]

From the article: "These few examples show how we cannot fully understand and appreciate the long history of intimate relationships between people and selected trees and seeds in Africa using current ways of thinking about and modeling domestication..."

I think what those few examples really show is that people in Africa tried as hard as people anywhere else to mold their environment to better suit their needs. But the starting material they had to work with was simply never as productive as that in Eurasia.

The thing that really makes the argument fall down hard is that by the author's exceptionally loose definition of domestication, we would have to accept the premise that elephants have domesticated the African savannah. Elephants like grass, and they prefer it to acacia trees, which overshade the grass. It's a regularly observed behavior of African elephants to periodically destroy entire acacia groves, not just to eat the pods but to demolish or uproot the tree trunks, which behavior clears more land for grass. It would probably irritate the elephants to know that acacia seeds passing through their digestive tracts are those most likely to grow up big and strong, but they're spared this frustration by virtue of being elephants.

That's just one example, though. (Heinous anthropomorphizing to follow.) The entire reason we have life on land is because of relationships between plants and the animals that eat them. It's a long story of plants starting off by trying to avoid getting eaten at all costs, early land plants provided little nutrition even when they weren't trying to kill off would-be diners, but then some of them developed parts that were explicitly designed to be eaten, which also made use of the animals involved as reproductive go-betweens. First, animals were just in the loop for pollen distribution, and then there was fruit (yay, fruit) which gets animals into the act of distributing the young of an immobile species far and wide. It's been argued that plants are the ones doing the taming in this scenario, but either way such relationships predate our species.

TAFKM - "The spread of some diseases probably owes more to factors other than population size, density and domesticated animals."

Some diseases yes, but scale is important. The greatest increases in lifespan we've seen over the last century have come from public health measures, including those that prevent dense populations from contaminating the drinking water supply or human and animal waste from clogging the streets.

There are diseases that people can get from coming into contact with wild animals, but I think that only makes the point that animals are prime disease vectors and that the more time that's spent with them, the more disease gets passed along. Malaria and other insect-borne diseases have quite the jump on strictly mammal based germs, but that doesn't take away the importance of diseases that are dependent on those three factors for their impact.

It didn't seem to me that JD was arguing that those are the only disease vectors by a longshot, just that they're very important ones. Put those three things together and take public sanitation out of the mix, you've got a regular germ warfare lab on your hands. Particularly so in temperate zones where the winters are inhospitable to many insects, keeping their populations down and moderating their ability to spread disease.

On a related note, I was reading not too long ago that around a tenth of people of European descent are naturally immune to HIV. Explanation here:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=20999&nfid=rssfeeds

"Scientists have known for some time that these individuals carry a genetic mutation (known as CCR5-Ä32) that prevents the virus from entering the cells of the immune system but have been unable to account for the high levels of the gene in Scandinavia and relatively low levels in areas bordering the Mediterranean.

They have also been puzzled by the fact that HIV emerged only recently and could not have played a role in raising the frequency of the mutation to the high levels found in some Europeans today.

... Around 1900, historians spread the idea that the plagues of Europe were not a directly infectious disease but were outbreaks of bubonic plague, overturning an accepted belief that had stood for 550 years. Professor Duncan and Dr Scott illustrated in their book, Return of the Black Death (2004, Wiley), that this idea was incorrect and the plagues of Europe (1347-1660) were in fact a continuing series of epidemics of a lethal, viral, haemorrhagic fever that used the CCR5 as an entry port into the immune system.

Using computer modeling, they demonstrated how this disease provided the selection pressure that forced up the frequency of the mutation from 1 in 20,000 at the time of the Black Death to values today of 1 in 10. ..."

[J Thomas]

What I don't understand about this, is that Diamond is doing science populariztion, and a bunch of economists are acting like they think he's doing science.

There's nothing wrong with science popularization, and he does it very well. But why are they taking him so seriously?

[anne]

The decades of observations recorded by Jared Diamond may seem as though too commonplace to be profound, but as in "Origin of Species" when the observations are set down one after another there begin to emerge patterns that can change the way in which history is to be ever understood. Watching birds in New Guinea leads to a flow of lovely data, no single observation been revealing in itself, but linked there is Darwin and evolution. Diamond is as Darwin.

[anne]

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond_pulitzer/diamond_index.html

Laying A Foundation For Human History
Bill Gates on Jared Diamond

When Columbus, Cortes, Pizarro and other European colonists arrived in the New World five centuries ago, why weren't they driven into the sea by thousands of native warriors on horseback brandishing guns and carrying epidemic diseases?

Why didn't rhino-mounted Bantu warriors swarm north to decimate horse-mounted Romans and create an empire that spanned Africa and Europe?

These and many other questions are answered persuasively in Jared Diamond's fascinating new book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (W.W. Norton, 1997). It's the first explanation of history I've seen that gets at the key question of why Europeans and Asians, came to control most of the world, rather than Africans, Native Americans or other people.

Diamond's primary thesis is that there's no inherent superiority among any racial or ethnic groups, and that the often-tragic failure of other races to resist expansion by other peoples was largely a matter of bad luck.

He marshals mountains of evidence to suggest that Europeans and Asians achieved dominance because they had an abundance of plants and animals suitable for domestication, and because the east-west orientation of the Eurasian landmass eased the transfer of animals, crops, and technology.

Eurasia had 32 of the 56 prize wild grasses that were candidates for cultivation; no other region had more than six. It was home to 13 of the 14 animals most important to humans.

The Fertile Crescent, an area of Southwest Asia occupying portions of what are now Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Turkey, had six of the eight "founder crops" and four of the five most important domesticated mammals—the cow, goat, pig and sheep.

It's no surprise that the Fertile Crescent produced prodigious amounts of food and that the earliest known examples of many kinds of human development began there about 11,000 B.C. People outside Eurasia, and especially outside the Fertile Crescent, were at a big disadvantage because there wasn't much for them to work with. Few of the world's 200,000 wild plant species have food value to humans. More than 80 percent of the modern world's crop tonnage comes from just 12 species: banana, barley, corn, manioc, potato, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugar beet , sugarcane, sweet potato and wheat.

"Our failure to domesticate even a single major new food plant in modern times suggests that ancient peoples really may have explored virtually all useful wild plants and domesticated all the ones worth domesticating," Diamond writes.

Domesticated animals furnished fertilizer, meat and milk. They pulled plows. They helped win wars. Whereas the Fertile Crescent had many, California had no important mammals to domesticate, despite sharing a similar climate.

In fact, North America had no large mammals suitable for domestication other than the llama, and it wasn't widespread. When human hunters arrived in the Americas via the Bering Strait about 13,000 years ago, they apparently killed most of the unwary mammals that would have been suited to domestication.

"About 15,000 years ago, the American West looked much as Africa's Serengeti Plains do today, with herds of elephants and horses pursued by lions and cheetahs, and joined by members of such exotic species as camels and giant sloths," Diamond writes. Soon these species were extinct.

In Europe and Asia, food surpluses allowed some people to specialize in science or art and others to focus their energies on being soldiers. Civilizations grew in the Fertile Crescent and spread to the east and west.

One reason a native cavalry didn't drive Columbus and other European colonialists back into the Atlantic was that there were no native horsemen. The Americas didn't have horses again until Europeans brought them, and the natives didn't get them until they escaped from Spanish explorers.

Rhino-mounted warriors didn't swarm into Europe from Africa because rhinos can't be domesticated. Nor can elephants, hippos, zebras or any of the other African animals that would otherwise make great allies in war. These animals can sometimes be tamed into submission, but their breeding—and hence their genetic characteristics—can't be controlled the way horses can.

Diamond illustrates the enormous competitive advantage enjoyed by societies with horses and guns by recounting how Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro used 62 horsemen and 106 foot soldiers to destroy thousands of Inca soldiers on Nov. 16, 1532. In a matter of hours, Pizarro's small band captured the Inca emperor Atahuallpa, leader of America's most advanced state, by panicking the emperor's 80,000 guards.

Disease was even more important than horses or guns in the European subjugation of the Americas and the rest of the world. Diamond estimates that European disease wiped out 95 percent of America's pre-Columbian population. Epidemics spread from tribe to tribe, often well in advance of the Europeans themselves.

Why, instead, didn't Indian epidemic diseases wipe out Europeans?

Epidemic diseases originated in domesticated animals. Measles, smallpox and tuberculosis came to humans from cattle, flu came from pigs and ducks, and pertussis (whooping cough) came from pigs and dogs.

Indians didn't have epidemic diseases or immunities because they didn't have the domesticated animals that gave rise to the diseases.

Besides having good grains, good animals and diseases on their side, Eurasians were blessed with a huge landmass that was oriented east-west rather than north-south like Africa and America.

People could take their crops and livestock long distances to the east or west, because climate tended not to change much along a given latitude. Trade routes eventually opened from Asia to Europe.

North-south migration tended to be vastly more difficult. Abrupt climate changes would render a crop useless, and mean the wrong forage and weather for livestock. African and American civilizations were isolated by mountains, deserts or rainforests and often unable to share in the advances of other cultures that might be as little as 1,000 miles to the north or south.

Natives of Australia, New Guinea and much of the rest of the Pacific suffered because of their isolation, too. Diamond makes a compelling case that traditional lifestyles in New Guinea and Australia, rather than showing a lack of "advancement," as defined by Europeans, were in fact intelligent adaptations to areas with difficult soils and climates and a lack of domesticable animals. A thousand years ago Asia was equal or ahead of Europe in many technologies.

Diamond argues that Europeans later pulled ahead of Asians because Japan and China became inward-looking and stopped trading ideas with other countries. The result, almost by default, was European domination of much of the world until after World War II.

Japan and now China have roared back as economic powers, and for Japan technological innovation has been a key to its enormous strides in recent decades. "Guns, Germs, and Steel" lays a foundation for understanding human history, which makes it fascinating in its own right. Because it brilliantly describes how chance advantages can lead to early success in a highly competitive environment, it also offers useful lessons for the business world and for people interested in why technologies succeed.

The book reminds me that innovation sustains success while complacency leads to stagnation and decline—a lesson I try to keep in mind every day.

In early human history, technological advantages were built on the availability of certain plants, animals and geographies.

In today's emerging information society, the critical natural resources are human intelligence, skill and leadership. Every region of the world has these in abundance, which promises to make the next chapter of human history particularly interesting.

[anne]

Yes, Diamond is doing science as surely as Darwin and Ernst Mayr. Follow how Ernst Mayr worked over an 80 year career as an evolutionary biologist and you will know why Mayr was a giant on the order of Darwin and you will know how Diamond has worked. The elegant simplicity of Darwin's conclusions follow the most painstaking recording as a scientist. Diamond is such a scientist.

[anne]

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mayr/mayr_index.html

What Evolution Is: Introduction
By Jared Diamond:

From New Guinea, Ernst [Mayr] went on to the Solomon Islands in the Southwest Pacific, where as a member of the Whitney South Sea Expedition he participated in bird surveys of several islands, including the notorious Malaita (even more dangerous in those days than was New Guinea). A telegram then invited him to come in 1930 to the American Museum of Natural History in New York to identify the tens of thousands of bird specimens collected by the Whitney Expedition on dozens of Pacific Islands. Just as Darwin's "explorations," sitting at home, of collections of barnacles were as important to Darwin in forming his insights as was his visit to the Galapagos Islands, so too Ernst Mayr's "explorations" of bird specimens in museums were as important as his fieldwork in New Guinea and the Solomons in forming his own insights into geographic variation and evolution. In 1953 Ernst moved from New York to Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, where even today he continues to work at the age of 97, still writing a new book every year or two. For scholars studying evolution and the history and philosophy of biology, Ernst's hundreds of technical articles and dozens of technical books have been for a long time the standard reference works.

But in addition to gaining insights from his own fieldwork in the Pacific and from his own studies of museum bird specimens, Ernst has collaborated with many other scientists to extract insights from other species, ranging from flies and flowering plants to snails and people. One of those collaborations transformed my own life, just as the meeting with Erwin Stresemann transformed Ernst's life. While I was a teenaged schoolboy, my father, a physician studying human blood groups, collaborated with Ernst in the first study proving that human blood groups evolve subject to natural selection. I thereby met Ernst at dinner at my parents' house, was later instructed by him in the identification of Pacific island birds, began in 1964 the first of 19 ornithological expeditions of my own to New Guinea and the Solomons, and in 1971 began to collaborate with Ernst on a massive book about Solomon and Bismarck birds that we completed only this year, after 30 years of work....

[anne]

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mayr/mayr_index.html

ERNST MAYR: WHAT EVOLUTION IS

EDGE: To what extent has the study of evolutionary biology been the study of ideas about evolutionary biology? Is evolution the evolution of ideas, or is it a fact?

ERNST MAYR: That's a very good question. Because of the historically entrenched resistance to the thought of evolution, documented by modern-day creationism, evolutionists have been forced into defending evolution and trying to prove that it is a fact and not a theory. Certainly the explanation of evolution and the search for its underlying ideas has been somewhat neglected, and my new book, the title of which is What Evolution Is, is precisely attempting to rectify that situation. It attempts to explain evolution. As I say in the first section of the book, I don't need to prove it again, evolution is so clearly a fact that you need to be committed to something like a belief in the supernatural if you are at all in disagreement with evolution. It is a fact and we don't need to prove it anymore. Nonetheless we must explain why it happened and how it happens.

One of the surprising things that I discovered in my work on the philosophy of biology is that when it comes to the physical sciences, any new theory is based on a law, on a natural law. Yet as several leading philosophers have stated, and I agree with them, there are no laws in biology like those of physics. Biologists often use the word law, but for something to be a law, it has to have no exceptions. A law must be beyond space and time, and therefore it cannot be specific. Every general truth in biology though is specific. Biological "laws" are restricted to certain parts of the living world, or certain localized situations, and they are restricted in time. So we can say that their are no laws in biology, except in functional biology which, as I claim, is much closer to the physical sciences, than the historical science of evolution....

[GW]

Request for information

Following up on Brad's comment about the change in population during the Neolithic, I was hoping somebody could point me towards good sources that discuss the link between Neolithic agricultural methods/technologies, regional climate issues, and population densities? Sources that summarize the available literature would be particularly valued, as I'm just starting out.

Muito obrigado

[anne]

To spend 30 years at work to record the geography and birds and bird life of a region of New Guinea to set a history of such birds in an evolutionary context is the essence of what evolutionary biology is about. This is science, and as surely Jared Diamond is a scientist for all ages. Here is evolutionary biology as geographical-human historical relationship. This is science.

[anne]

Other influences on Jared Diamond were Leo Tolstoy and Isaiah Berlin, as described in the monumental essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox."

[J Thomas]

Natasha, from your elephant example why would you say elephants aren't molding their environment? And why would you think they'd object to planting acacia groves? They can tear them down when the groves get too big or too many. Elephants don't mind doing that sort of thing. I guess if they had a different mindset they might want to arrange things so they could sit in one place and not move and have their grass delivered to them, but....

You say the only reason we have life on land is the relationship between plants and animals. But plants did just fine on land before there were animals on land. They don't need us. They just need to outcompete each other, and balancing growth versus offense/defense against other plants versus offense/defense against animals versus against bacteria|fungi|etc is part of the competition.

It makes sense to think about strategies for plants, but we generally think they do most of their strategising in their genetics since they don't appear to have anything analogous to nervous systems. What we've seen about their learning looks like it's genetically-modulated. They can learn specific things and to learn different things they need different genes. For awhile we had a fad that involved looking at how successful the various strategies would be and arguing that any method they use to implement successful strategies would be selected, and so they're likely to use successful strategies. This general approach eventually got labeled "sociobiology" and it seems to be largely discredited now. I think the reason is that it's hard to test just how adaptive the different strategies are unless you have populations that demonstrate all the strategies in question. It's very easy to make up stories in a sociobiology framework, and it's very very hard to design experiments to test them. And after awhile people looked at how much easy bullshit was getting done versus hard experiments, and decided it was bullshit. Which is where we're likely heading with Diamond.

I try to imagine a disease where population size and density wouldn't be important, and I can't do it. Some genetic diseases, I guess. Maybe an endemic disease where pretty much everybody has it and babies get it from their parents. For anything where contagion is a limiting factor, host population size and density will be vital. Malaria depends on population size and density both for the insect vectors and for the mammalian hosts.

Ah! There's an example. When humans get the dieasee as an accident, when something else is the primary host and it doesn't matter how many humans get it, then human population size and density doesn't matter much. Various insect-born viruses fit that; they mostly live in wild birds and the rare infected mosquitoes who bite humands don't matter, few infected humans will be bitten by uninfected mosquitoes to pass it on.

Surely some of the european epidemics were bubonic plague. It had a pneumonic form which spread directly. I'll put the book on my to-read list, there's surely something interesting there.

[anne]

GW

'Following up on Brad's comment about the change in population during the Neolithic, I was hoping somebody could point me towards good sources that discuss the link between Neolithic agricultural methods/technologies, regional climate issues, and population densities?'

An excellent question that I will also ask a research librarian about in the afternoon.

[J Thomas]

Anne, there is a place for descriptive anatomical studies, that's fine. And there's a place for science popularizztion that is unrelated to those studies. I have no objection to calling Diamond a scientist for his fieldwork, and calling him a science popularizer for his popularising books.

What Darwin did writing about evolution would not be considered science today, any more than the guy who writes about how chaos theory creates self-organising intelligent systems. A garbage-scow of data supporting a simple idea that doesn't quite make sense but that probably has some relation to truth.

Your Mayr quote looks peculiar. Evolution does provide laws that are beyond time and space. The trouble is, the relation of those laws to specific situations requires a whole lot of quantitative observation which is usually very hard to do and which is hardly ever done.

[anne]

J Thomas

Your arguments are interesting, but we need go beyond. Darwin and Mayr are among the giants in all the history of science, but you need consider a bit more closely what evolutionary science, what biology, is and how these science differ from physics or chemistry.

[anne]

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mayr/mayr_index.html

EDGE: Is biology a narrative based of our times and how we look at the world?

MAYR: It depends entirely on when in the given age of the intellectual world you ask these questions. For instance when Darwin published The Origin of Species, the leading Cambridge University geologist was Sedgwick, and Sedgwick wrote a critique of Darwin's Origin that asked how Darwin could be so unscientific as to use chance in some of his arguments, when everyone knew that God controlled the world? Now who was more scientific, Darwin or Sedgwick? This was in 1860 and now, 140 years later, we recognize how much this critique was colored by the beliefs of that time. The choice of historical narratives is also very time-bound. Once you recognize this, you cease to question their usefulness. There are a number of such narratives that are as ordinary as proverbs and yet still work.

EDGE: Darwin is bigger than ever. Why?

MAYR: One of my themes is that Darwin changed the foundations of Western thought. He challenged certain ideas that had been accepted by everyone, and we now agree that he was right and his contemporaries were wrong. Let me just illuminate some of them. One such idea goes back to Plato who claimed that there were a limited number of classes of objects and each class of objects had a fixed definition. Any variation between entities in the same class was only accidental and the reality was an underlying realm of absolutes.

EDGE: How does that pertain to Darwin?

MAYR: Well Darwin showed that such essentialist typology was absolutely wrong. Darwin, though he didn't realize it at the time, invented the concept of biopopulation, which is the idea that the living organisms in any assemblage are populations in which every individual is uniquely different, which is the exact opposite of such a typological concept as racism. Darwin applied this populational idea quite consistently in the discovery of new adaptations though not when explaining the origin of new species....

[J Thomas]

Here's another reason why eurasia would have an advantage for domestication.

If we suppose that humans evolved in africa, the plants and animals would have evolved with them. Each new adaptation that people did would call forth adaptations in everything that was affected. The african system would be wise to us.

On the other hand, the western hemisphere didn't have any people until 20,000 years ago. By some estimates, 12,000 years. It was a system that wasn't at *all* preadapted to humans except by accident. All the years that humans had spent adapting eurasia to their needs before that time were simply not there.

Sophisticated rice cultivation is thought to go back a good 10,000 years, and the longer it's researched the earlier that date will get pushed. Say just for argument that it gets pushed back to 15,000 years, and that people did a certain amount of selective planting and weeding for 15,000 years before that. North americans would be way behind from the start. (On the other hand the date that humans reached north america keeps getting pushed back too.)

It isn't so much that there were a lot of plants that were predisposed to agriculture. It's that humans spent a very long time fumbling around breeding them. We bred lots and lots of things before we settled on a few of the most promising. Meanwhile the western himisphere was empty. Australia would need yet a third explanation compared to africa and the west, since people were there for 20,000 to 40,000 years. I'm trying to remember how early most of it got so dry....

This idea is not new, but it didn't get a great big popular push. There's enough research that can be interpreted to support it. It's a very good JustSo story though it doesn't explain as much as Diamond's.

[theorajones]

Sure, one can argue that Diamond's piece is little more than anti-racist revisionism. But it's really not. It's a slightly different way of looking at human history, one that focuses primarily on fitness and feedback loops, and which is heavily influenced by the proper application of evolutionary theory (i.e., adaptation as iterative and open-ended as opposed to goal-oriented. Birds did not grow wings in order to fly, and humans didn't develop agriculture in 10,000 BC in order to build the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria).

Diamond has made a compelling argument that winning "doesn't make you better. It makes you luckier."

And because at the end of the day, most racists support their arguments by pointing out that "we won--people who look like me run the world. Obviously we're better," they obviously find the idea that it could have just as easily been someone else running the world line very threatening.

However, this line of thought is far better supported by evidence than are the many theories of inherent genetic superiority of certain human phenotypes, which tend to fall apart miserably when they're actually tested.

Racism, while very culturally popular, isn't terribly scientific. It should be unsurprising that a popular adaptation of scientific thought to human hisotry should challenge the "white people are just better! Look at New York!" story that we all got as children.

But that doesn't mean you should dismiss it as an anti-racist polemic. There's a lot of other very good thinking in there, and if it shifts the way we think about current problems and historical trends, all the better.

[John Emerson]

Diamond's study of historical genetic geography is highly impressive. His application to 10,000 years of global history is of necessity less well done, but it gives a starting point.

There's a 100-year-old theory still floating around that Eurasian history (specifically the steppe invasions) was controlled by climate change. However, it's proved extremely difficult to actually match specific invasions to specific climate changes.

A recent revision was that a long-term wet phase allowed the building up of the mongol herds, and then a drought triggered the invasions. This is plausible, but not yet proven. There are also many other factors that seem more important -- the unity and military readiness of the Mongols being the chief one.

Some of Diamond's explanations look good to me, but others don't.

[J Thomas]

Anne, no biology course has the students read Darwin, but "creation scientists" regularly read him. Darwin was wrong about genetics, which left him with a story that fundamentally did not make sense. He recognised that and did handwaving for that part.

Given mendelian genetics it was pretty easy to develop part of the math, and mathematical population genetics makes perfect sense -- except that there's always the question how it relates to the real world. Once you assume genes with traits that are selected, you can predict changes in gene frequency. But how do you tell about the selection? You can estimate how much selection is going on by measuring changes in gene frequency....

So we have a problem similar to that of some economists. A nice theory that makes perfect sense, but its relation to reality is uncertain. In the abstract it *has* to fit, because whatever happens can be described in terms of the theory. But....

But evolution can be done in the lab. You can continuously grow populations of bacteria or yeast and freeze-dry samples to track what the population was doing over time. You can follow selectively neutral markers to watch for population changeovers that show a big selection event has happened. You can make guesses about what physiological changes would be selected and test whether those have happened. You can see how reproducible the results are. When the population size is in the billions of individuals and the genome size is millions of base-pairs, and the environment is rigidly controlled, results are moderately reproducible. The time for changeovers can be predicted within 50% or less, though you can't be sure which mutations will take over during a particular run.

There is a science that does evolution today. Darwin's contribution was mostly to propose that it would be a good idea to study evolution, and to make a big popular fuss about it.

[anne]

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mayr/mayr_index.html

EDGE: I understand that there is a facsimile of the first (1899) edition of Darwin's Origin of the Species.

MAYR: Yes and this is an interesting story. Darwin's importance has only been gradually acknowledged. Even 50 years ago, Darwin was just one of those people's names you learned was kind of important. That was it. Nobody read him. Well I published a very successful book for Harvard University Press in 1963 and this gave me the courage to go to the director of Harvard Press, Tom Wilson, and say to him, Tom, I have a great wish, a heart's desire, and that is to see a facsimile edition of the first edition of the Origin of Species. We have facsimile editions of all the great classics, but we haven't got one for Darwin. So he said all right, all right, we'll do it for you, even though we'll probably lose money since who's going to buy it? In 1964 they published this facsimile edition. That was almost 40 years ago. and at that time, the first few years I guess they sold about a couple hundred a year but much to everybody's surprise, sales did not drop off after all the libraries had their facsimile edition, but rather they picked up. After a while, they sold over a thousand a year, and then about 6­7 years ago I was informed by Harvard Press that for that particular year they had for the first time sold 2,500 copies. The last two years I have a report that they sold 3,000 copies a year! Now this shows you how an interest in Darwin has been steadily growing in spite of the great majority of ignorant people. People are beginning to want to know what Darwin really said, which for me is an absolutely marvelous development. You know there's an interesting side note that as a publisher you might be interested in. In the first edition of the Origin of the Species there's not a single misprint. What a document of the workmanship in 1859.

EDGE: Where do you think Darwinism is going to go in the next 50 years?

MAYR: Well, Darwinism will not have to do any going, because it's already here. In the last 50 years, ever since the "Evolutionary Synthesis" of the 1940s, the basic theory of Darwinism has not changed, with perhaps one exception, that is the question of the target of selection. What's the object of a selective act? For Darwin, who didn't know any better, it was the individual — and it turns out he was right.

An individual either survives or doesn't, an individual either reproduces or doesn't, an individual either reproduces very successfully or it doesn't. The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable. In fact, Dobzhanksy, for instance, worked quite a bit on so-called lethal chromosomes which are highly successful in one combination, and lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong. In the 30's and 40's, it was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the individual, not the gene. Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in the last 50 years....

[anne]

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mayr/mayr_index.html

EDGE: What important questions have I not asked you?

MAYR: One question that is very difficult one to answer is whether the Darwinian framework is robust enough to remain the same for many years, which I think it is, yes. The real question is what the burning issues in evolutionary biology are today. To answer that you've got to get back into functional biology. Take, for instance, a particular gene. Say this gene makes amino acids that determine which side of the egg is to become the anterior end of the larva and which will become the rear. We know that's what it does but how it can do that is something about which we don't have the slightest clue. That's one of the big problems, but it's in the realm of proteins and functional biology rather than of DNA and evolutionary biology.

In evolutionary biology we have species like horseshoe crabs. The horseshoe crab goes back in the fossil record over two hundred million years without any major changes. So obviously they have a very invariant genome type, right? . Wrong, they don't. Study the genotype of a series of horseshoe crabs and you'll find there's a great deal of genetic variation. How come, in spite of all this genetic variation, they haven't changed at all in over two hundred million years while other members of their ecosystem in which they were living two hundred million years ago are either extinct or have developed into something totally different? Why did the horseshoe crabs not change? That's the kind of question that completely stumps us at the present time.

Then there are issues that no one besides a few biologists can fully fathom. Like how and why do prokaryotes, bacteria that have no nucleus, differ in their evolution from eukaryotes, organisms that do have an nucleus. Eukaryotes have sexual reproduction, genetic recombination and well-formed chromosomes, whereas prokaryotes have none of the above. So how do they get genetic variation, which they must have in order to survive according to the principle of natural selection? The answer is that prokaryotes exchange genes with each other unilaterally; one bacterium injects a set of DNA into another bacterium, which is an amazing process. Genes of course also go from one chromosome to another via this old-fashioned process that all bacteria use to reproduce. Beyond that, we don't really know how much such gene transfer occurs in higher organisms....

[lise]

Please be polite, as Anne has been overwhelmingly polite. Charles Darwin could not be more relevant to every research biologist to this day. There is only the wondrous scientist about Darwin.

[Paul G. Brown]

For those who object to Diamond's 'environmental determinism', _Collapse_ provides an antidote. In that book he uses case histories--lots of 'em--to make the point that the environment in which a population finds itself has a huge impact on the way that population develops soci-economically. But it is the way that the society governs itself that is critical.

For every Greenland, there is an environmentally similar Iceland, and for every Easter Island, there is a Tikopia. In each situation the succesful population made different choices about how it would organize itself than the unsuccessful population.

In _Collapse_ Diamond explicitly disavows determinism. I read the book's ideological subtext as being very optimistic.

[James Wimberley]

Going back to the Neolithic population explosion. Could baby food have been a factor? No, seriously. Hunter-gatherers today limit their populations not only by by infanticide but by late weaning; their varied diet must be too chewy for infants. But once you start cultivating grains or roots, you have a plentiful supply of soft pap suitable for babies. It becomes possible for women to wean earlier, and become fertile again. The population expands, locking the culture into its new inferior diet, the aggressive search for new land, and the military superiority to enforce it over hunter-gathererers. The long, 10,000-year night of peasant farming and warfare descends.

The theory is partly testable, by comparing weaning ages in contemporarty hunter-gatherer and subsistence farming cultures. Not that the strange tribe over at Savage Minds would sully themselves with such reductionism, leaving it to Diamond and his friend Yali.

[anne]

Paul G. Brown

'For every Greenland, there is an environmentally similar Iceland, and for every Easter Island, there is a Tikopia. In each situation the succesful population made different choices about how it would organize itself than the unsuccessful population.

'In _Collapse_ Diamond explicitly disavows determinism. I read the book's ideological subtext as being very optimistic.'

Excellent, I could not agree more. Jared Diamond is thoroughly hopeful, thoroughly optimistic.

[J Thomas]

Lise, if you're talking to me, I didn't notice being impolite.

Note the context here. They republished Darwin's *first edition*, the one that lacked his further insights, instead of the last edition. The importance here is for historical awe, not for learning science. You don't see physicists reading the first edition of Maxwell.

And these Mayr quotes are embarrassing for him. He's done some good work, why hang him with this? Here he is going on about the unit-of-selection chestnut, which has no place in serious evolutionary discussion. Punctuated equilibrium likewise. Nobody knows how much lateral transfer there is but it isn't a big issue either, the math transfers in a straightforward way from the bacterial case. It would make a good popular gee-whiz if there was an estimate since whatever the estimate was we could get a big "This is something we didn't know and it has giant fascinating implications for humanity" but it wouldn't actually make much quantitative difference.

[Vish Subramanian]

"J Thomas" - actually I heard Diamond mention the "baby food" hypothesis in a talk about Japan - but he didnt include it in GG&S because he felt there want enough evidence.

[PaulC]

There's insufficient detail to be certain, but I'm guessing that Brad's hunter gatherer has domesticated and industrialized his environment enough to produce materials like nylon, gore-tex, and stainless steel. This is far more impressive than the other picture, which is just some even rows of corn and (I think) a bunch of concrete silos.

What was the point again?

[J Thomas]

James, here's the traditional sociobiology argument.

Populations tend on average to be at carrying capacity. If a population is at less than carrying capacity, and some people have more children than others, the ones have more will be overrepresented in the next generation. Then if for any reason (genetic, upbringing, whatever) people have some tendency to have the number of children their parents did, then the growth rate of the population will increase. But as the larger population degrades the environment, then some factor in that environmental degradation will result in the population stabilising.

It's possible but unlikely that the limiting factor for population size is the minimum spacing for children. Other possibilities include the difficulty of protecting multiple small children from predators, malnutrition leading to shorter lifespans and reduced viability of children, occasional famine culling the population, social factors (low-status individuals might get pushed into situations where they have higher child mortality, higher accident rates, suffer higher predation and illness, get sacrificed in religious rituals, etc, similar to today), etc.

When families space out their children more it's usually an adaptation -- their strategy is to have fewer children so that more of them will survive. This need not be a conscious strategy, all that is needed is some mechanism that gets people to tend to do what their parents did or to copy others who are (rather than just appear to be) successful.

Our estimates for old population sizes are extremely unreliable. They mostly get done by extrapolations from recent populations and logical deductions from things like estimated crop yields. But modern hunter-gatherers have mostly been pushed onto marginal land by agriculturalists etc. What population size would they have if they had the good land? Nobody knows. You can also make estimates from the age distribution of the collected remains. There usually aren't enough remains found to do that well, and there are also collection bias issues. At which ages were people most likely to die and not have the remains collected with the others?

These estimates are the best we have. But they come very largely from theory, and basing further theory on them doesn't provide a lot of support for the theory.

[Peter]

Why the sudden interest in GG&S (published in 1997) now, instead of years ago? I think it is two-fold. First to paint Diamond as some sort of crypto-racist, second is to draw attention away from Collapse, since that is what is *really* drawing the ire of the neo-cons, so that when attention gets drawn back to Collapse, the neo-cons can always claim "why are you reading that racist drivel?"

Other than that, I am enjoying the information brought up, and have tons of reading to catch up on. I haven't seen this much attention brought to the history of science/technology since the *original* Connections series on TV over 25 years ago.

[piotr]

J Emerson: it seems that we actually agree.

I treat it as a given that people present their theories as explaining everything and I am happy if they explain something. Then we have half-full half-empty glass problem.

A remark: there are many local food sources that allowed pre-agricultural societies to achieve relatively high concentrations of people. Quite possibly acorns in certain regions of California was one. More widespread were shell-fish and fish -- a possible explanation why Europe after invasion of agriculturalists from Mediterranean had a large surviving population of quite non-Mediterranean blonde folks who in turn learn agriculture. However, because they are local, they do not allow the resulting civilization to expand. Thus no acorn empire that could rival Maya or Aztec.

A general idea: about 3000 years ago, the technology in Europe was probably superior to East Asia, and about 1000 years ago the situation was reverse, only to reverse itself again. My theory is that statist organization of China offered a considerable advantage -- up to a point. After that point, development was basically arrested.

[anne]

J Thomas

Thank you so much for explaining. Though I do not agree with you, you have indeed been most polite in argument. I do not know enough about the topic however to do more than follow carefully. I did not understand your original comment about "Origin of Species." Thank you for the quality of your argument.

[anne]

Please remember however that though I do not know enough about genetic research to decide whether Darwin may have become in some way dated, I am skeptical at least and will look to ask the question of several biologists. I ask you to consider that evolutionary biology is not similar in methology to thermodynamics. Also, "Origin of Species" was published by Harvard. Mayr chose the first edition purposely, thinking it most accurate and contemporary before the influence of Herbert Spencer and others altered conclusions to an extent.

Thank you for being so kind.

[natasha]

J Thomas - "Natasha, from your elephant example why would you say elephants aren't molding their environment? And why would you think they'd object to planting acacia groves?

... You say the only reason we have life on land is the relationship between plants and animals. But plants did just fine on land before there were animals on land. They don't need us. ..."

I didn't say the elephants weren't molding their environment, they obviously are. My point is that there's a big gap between molding your environment and domesticating it that the article Brad quotes in the entry really brushes over. I was just pointing out that if you define farming as any degree of shaping the environment, then the elephants have to be included, even though they haven't domesticated either grass or acacias in the same way that some ant species have domesticated aphids. As to why they might find it frustrating, I was only suggesting as a joke that if they were more like us they might be irritated by the knowledge that they were continually planting a tree that they would then have to knock over later.

Regarding life on land, you're right of course, and I would have added 'as we know it' or 'animal life' to my comment if I'd been more careful. Still, the importance of cooperative relationships in determining which plants managed to survive and spread. Flowering plants that entered into a cooperative relationship with animals outcompeted their predecessors in many niches, with much constant back and forth between species shaping each other to their own liking. And again, I don't think any of it really qualifies as full-blown domestication, even though it's a consistent pattern.

Heck, one could say from the parameters of the article that fungi domesticated plant life, because the plants probably wouldn't have made it on land without them, but I wouldn't. That was my point, my apologies if it was murky.

[J Thomas]

Anne, the central idea from Darwin/Wallace -- that species have a perennial surplus of individuals, that these individuals vary and the variants may be selected by the environment, that offspring tend to be somewhat similar to their parents but not entirely, and that these put together over many generations can result in wonderful adaptations though the specifics are not very predictable -- that idea is in no danger at all and will not become obsolete any time soon. Note that it's vague enough that by changing the word "species" it could fit brain function, economies, ecosystems, and many kinds of artificial intelligence as easily as genetic systems.

Darwin did not understand mendelian genetics, so he assumed "blending inheritance" which said that offspring would tend to be about halfway between their parents in any particular trait. This assumption would make everything become more and more average very quickly. Since selection depends on differences, to keep getting difference to be selected Darwin assumed a large unknown source of random mutation. If evolution really worked that way it would not work very well. Even after a trait was optimised it would still have that large source of random variation dragging on it.

With Mendelism you get pairs of genes that interact with the rest of the genome in strange ways. You can keep a large store of hidden variation that doesn't have to be created fresh every generation. However, when a particular variant gene is too successful and spreads very fast, the variability in all the neighboring genes is reduced a lot. They'll be mostly the versions that happened to be linked to the successful variant, and they'll evolve slowly until one way or another their variability is restored in the population.

Experimental evolution is somewhat similar to thermodynamics. When you can have a hundred million individuals in a milliliter of culture medium, it's easy to experiment with a billion individuals. Possible but harder to experiment with ten trillion. That's 10^14, still a long way from 10^24 but getting there. That's enough that every single base-pair change will be represented in the population. But that isn't enough to get fully reproducible results because a lot of important adaptations don't come from single base-pair changes, and you can't be sure when the others will happen.

Most of evolutionary biology isn't done that way. There's the mathematical approach, where you make assumptions about how a system might operate and then you solve the math or run simulations to see what should result from those assumptions. This has the disadvantage that it's disconnected from reality. Then there's the approach of looking at something that appears succesful, and look at the particular adaptations that appear to be important to make it successful, and come up with JustSo stories that explain how they could have occurred in steps. These are the people that the creation science guys want to debate. Find something where it isn't obvious how it would evolve, and the JustSo guys come up with clever ways it could happen while the CS guys argue that by common sense there's no way. And there's the approach of just describing a lot of things that have adaptations. And there's the approach of doing DNA studies and guessing how closely related various things are and publishing when you have enough comparisons to get the publication. And so on.

I was tempted to ask whether economics students are encouraged to read Adam Smith or Ricardo to learn economics theory. But then I realised they might actually teach economics that way.

[J Thomas]

Natasha, I don't know anything about elephants and acacia tress except what you wrote.

But suppose that an elephant with its great memory noticed which acacia trees seemed to it better for elephants. It eats seeds from the ones it thinks are particularly good. It destroys the ones that seem not-so-good, without eating them. Provided the various elephants weren't working at cross-purposes, they would be domesticating the species.

I don't know how much they do that. It's plausible they might be doing it a significant amount. And when they clear out a whole acacia grove they might not be simply showing their distaste for acacias, they might be doing their version of crop rotation.

[J Thomas]

Oops, I said ten trillion was 10^14. It's 10^13 of course. Ten billion bacteria in 10 mils of medium. Ten trillion bacteria in 10 liters of medium. Ten liters is possible to do on a lab bench, but awkward. For a hundred liters you need special equipment and the costs mount. You can do a bunch of experiments in parallel at 10^10 individuals each, for 10^12 it starts getting expensive, 10^13 more expensive, 10^14 and you're heading toward pilot-plant stuff.

[anne]

J Tmomas

I understand the approach and examples and have copied them to think carefully about your argument. Thank you :)

Natasha

Interesting examples.

[natasha]

J Thomas - Erm, it's possible I guess, however I haven't heard it presented that way. As I mentioned, the above examples are anthropomorphized for ease of communication, which is the exact sort of thing that irritates scientists. I expect it's because having explained the situation in that framework, the temptation as the discussion progresses is to take that beyond the parameters of what the evidence suggests.

There really isn't anything that points to elephants deliberately selecting for particular traits in acacia trees, though. When they have grass, they eat the grass. When there are too many trees, they either eat and tear them down if they have edible parts, or they just tear them down if its a species that's inedible. An explanation by David Attenborough is posted at the following site:

http://www.primitivism.com/elephant-acacia.htm

[J Thomas]

Natasha, the idea that elephants might selectively prone the less-useful plants excited me partly because it's the sort of thing that researchers would tend not to see unless they were looking for it. (There's the opposite problem that if they look for it they might tend to see it whether it's there or not.)

Elephants have the sort of brains that might track the value of a tree over its whole lifespan.

And then if they happen to have the habit of eating seeds from the plants that are most useful to them, while they destroy the plants that are less useful without eating the seeds, they are doing de facto selective breeding. They don't have to understand what they're doing, they just have to eat the seeds of the best and destroy the others without eating the seeds. They select first for seeds that can survive passage through an elephant, and then for whatever traits they approve of.

I don't know whether they do it. It wouldn't be hard for them to do it, and if they do it wouldn't be hard for us to miss it and not notice. So I found the idea exciting.

[Jerome Dragonfly]

This is a vigorous group. The one clear note I receive is that there are oversimplifications in Diamond's work. It has though, brought us together to approach the issues related.

The use of global resources now or in the past for a temporary advantage does create a temporal human race.

The concept of civilization and industrialization as being enhancements to the souls of men cannot be measured.

[anne]

Threads of such helpful argument. Thank you :)

[Roger Sweeny]

Peter,

You ask, "Why the sudden interest in GG&S (published in 1997) now, instead of years ago?"

Because PBS just broadcast a series of well-promoted programs hosted by Diamond, based on GG&S, and entitled "Guns, Germs, and Steel."

It has nothing to do with neo-conservatives, racism, or Area 51.

[Roger Sweeny]

J Thomas,

Economics students are not encouraged to read Smith and Ricardo. They are encouraged to learn constrained maximization and any other mathematics they can.