The Strong Do What They Want, and the Weak Suffer What They Must

Ah. Fred and Deborah at Savage Minds finally write something interesting--something that does not pretend that Jared Diamond is blind to western colonial domination of Papua New Guinea or that Diamond's argument is an ideologically-driven "perverse justification of colonial forms of inequality." We seem to be back in speech-situation territory:

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology -- A Group Blog: Diamond's conflation between the necessary and the sufficient grows out of the link between his interest in "history's broadest pattern" (1997: 420) and his determination to develop "human history as a science, on a par with acknowledged historical sciences such as astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology" (1997: 408).... Crucial to this search for law like explanations that will generate long chains of causation back to first causes (chains of causation that even link mountain range formation to Yali's quandary) is Diamond's distinction between ultimate and proximate causes. Ultimate causes are those broadly applicable and pervasive forces, such as guns, germs, and steel. Diamond is interested in these causes because he thinks they are the ones which really drive history -- both past and present. These ultimate causes shape derivative and more immediate occurrences, such as particular battles, conquests, economic systems. The effects of these more immediate occurrences, in turn, become proximate causes of yet other events.

Diamond's view of an inevitable and inexorable course of human history, one driven by the operation of ultimate causes over the span of its 13,000-year course, rests (as some of you suggested in earlier postings) on what seems to us to be an implicit view of human nature.... This is a view of human beings as necessarily leading lives so as to extract maximum advantage over others: give a guy--any guy--half a chance and he will conquer the world; give a guy a piece of appropriate metal and he will inevitably fashion a sword to cut you down; give a guy a piece of appropriate metal and he will inevitably fashion a chain to enslave you within the hold of a ship bound for a New World sugar plantation. In a way that many in the contemporary West find seemingly self-evident--in a way that does not problematize the way the world works--Diamond suggests that people everywhere and at all times, if they had sufficient power, would necessarily use it in seeking to maximize their own advantage through the domination of others. This implicit view of a trans-historical and trans-cultural human nature is consistent with Diamond's explicit rendering of both historical context and cultural perspective as irrelevant. In fact, Diamond works hard to exclude such perspective and context from his scientific history.

Correspondingly, Diamond describes the rise of mercantilism and capitalism as only "proximate forces" in the course of world history (1997: 10).... From our perspective, however, mercantilism and capitalism provide particular historical contexts in which (and in different though related ways) expansionist conquest appears an especially desirable activity--and one made especially feasible by the availability of guns, germs, and steel. This is to say, rather than merely proximate causes of lives more fundamentally and inexorably determined, mercantilism and capitalism impel the use of guns, germs, and steel in particular manners for particular ends.... [L]ives and historical outcomes as made possible by (for instance) guns, germs, and steel but as importantly propelled and shaped by cultural visions of what was worth pursuing and at what cost: of winning favor from God and King, acquiring gold and silver, attaining certain lifestyles, or achieving national strength.... [W]here we see the likes of guns, germs, and steel as necessary but not sufficient causes of such lives, Diamond sees such lives--apparently all lives--as inevitably seeking as much conquest and domination as possible....

Raymond Kelly's recent comprehensive analysis of the origins of human warfare provides a relevant and contrasting view of human nature and of inevitability. In this critique of the Hobbesian notion that there is a "trinity of interrelationship between human nature, war and the constitution of society" (Kelly, 2000: 121), he writes:

Warfare is an episodic feature of human history and prehistory observed at certain times and places but not others. Moreover, the vast majority of societies in which warfare does occur are characterized by the alteration of war and peace; there are relatively few societies--only about 6 percent--in which warfare is continual and peace almost unknown. It is only in this relatively small percentage of cases that something approaching a Hobbesian social condition of pervasive and unending warfare can be found.... The human propensity to peacemaking, so strikingly evident from the characteristic alteration between war and peace, is central to the nexus of interrelationships between human nature, war and society--and this bodes well for the future (2000: 161).

It is the case that Yali was poor and that the people of the New World were brutally conquered by representatives of the Old. It is also the case that those who beat up on other people have the capacity to do so. But are these facts inevitable by virtue either of the nature of history or the nature of humans?... They might make war, but they also might make peace. Whether they choose one or the other is powerfully affected by particular historically and culturally located ideas about the desirable and the feasible....

The existence of such alternatives means that human beings may, realistically, be held accountable for the choices they make. We find this stipulation important both in combating Diamond's general world history and in constructing an aspect of Papua New Guinea's more particular one. Pizarro (for example) had the capacity and resources to behave with remarkable brutality in the New World--he had both the technology and will to conquer. But the mere capacity to behave brutally does not absolve him from having done so. Likewise, Europeans had the resources to treat Yali and other Papua New Guineans with contempt. But that position should not absolve them from having done so...

I have three responses:

First, Fred and Deborah are correct in identifying one important piece of Jared Diamond's visualization of the Cosmic All: Jared Diamond has a Melian Dialogue view of how human societies interact with each other--the strong do what they want, and the weak suffer what they must.

Second, for reasons I don't understand, Fred and Deborah take the fact that Jared Diamond has a Melian Dialogue view of how human societies interact to entail that Jared Diamond approves, justifies, or excuses conquest, genocide, and slavery. Diamond does not. If you were to read the first few pages of Guns, Germs, and Steel, you would find that Diamond writes:

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...

Third, Fred and Deborah believe that Diamond's Melian Dialogue view of how human societies interact must be rooted in some kind of social-darwinist cartoon view of human nature. They claim that Diamond sees "human beings as necessarily leading lives so as to extract maximum advantage over others: give a guy--any guy--half a chance and he will conquer the world; give a guy a piece of appropriate metal and he will inevitably fashion a sword to cut you down; give a guy a piece of appropriate metal and he will inevitably fashion a chain to enslave you within the hold of a ship bound for a New World sugar plantation. In a way that many in the contemporary West find seemingly self-evident--in a way that does not problematize the way the world works--Diamond suggests that people everywhere and at all times, if they had sufficient power, would necessarily use it in seeking to maximize their own advantage through the domination of others."

I see Diamond's Melian Dialogue view of human nature as coming out of what some have called the tragedy of power politics, an argument that goes roughly like this:

• Human societies vary.
• Some human societies value, practice, and train for war, others do not.
• When they meet the societies that value, practice, and train for war will conquer, enslave, and absorb the others whenever they have the technological capability to do so.
• In the long run we will all be ruled by thugs-with-spears: the only societies we will see surviving as independent entities will be those that:
  • practice and prepare for war--if only in self-defense
  • have good enough military technology to resist whatever aggressive societies that do value, practice, and train for war that they come in contact with.

I hope this "tragedy of power politics" argument is wrong. The existence of the United Nations and the fact that Papua New Guinea is now an independent nation allows us to hope that it is wrong. But the "tragedy of power politics" argument has force, and does not rest upon a social-darwinist cartoon view of human nature. I would be happy to be taught that the "tragedy of power politics" argument has less force than I think it does: examples of hunter-gatherer cultures adjoining agricultural ones for considerable periods of time without bloody war and conquest, anyone?

Comments

[Matthew Yglesias]

I believe pre-colonial Rwanda featured pastoralists (Tutsis) and agriculturalists (Hutu) living side-by-side peacefully, which isn't quite the same, but at least somewhat similar. Eventually, of course, that came to a bad end, but Europeans interposed themselves first and imposed an ethnic consciousness onto a group differentiation that was understood previously in a different way.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Over a long time-scale -- which is what Diamond is talking about -- it doesn't matter how many human societies are expansionist and how many aren't. If there are a minority that are expansionist, and if some of them have better technology than other societies, they will expand, because they can. Later on, you will only see either expansionsit societies or societies with the technology and force to resist them; the rest will be gone. It has nothing to do with "human nature", only with human variability. Nor will periodic peace-making stop the process over a long time-scale.

The Savage Minds people really don't seem to understand much.

[david]

Plenty of northerners are hunter-gatherers incorporated without much violence (for the last while at least) into industrial states. Canada has its problems, but ongoing open warfare with First Nations isn't one of them. Property rights conflicts (indeed, the imposition of the controlling idea of property rights) are a real problem, and have caused some serious suffering, but not open warfare.

Anyway, the only person who left Habermas territory in this debate was you. A minimally charitable reading of Fred and Deborah would have allowed you to make your points, and even call them sloppy, without accusing them of being Karl Rove. For someone who regularly blasts those who oppose "free-trade" agreements for ignorantly oppressing the poor people of India and China, you get really sensitive when somebody suggests Diamond may not provide the best answer to racism.

[nate]

Some countries with great technology coupled with aggressive militaries inevitably over-extend themselves due to greed, hubris, overconfidence, or something else. They fight wars on too many fronts.

Mean reversion is a powerful idea. Great military things deteriorate and "the weak" surprise people with strength.

Overly violent societies tend to repel or expel smart people. The history of war is one of innovation. The smart people move some place weak and make it strong.

[Julian Elson]

Brad, I'd say that the "tragedy of power politics" scenario that you outline is EXACTLY social Darwinism. It isn't social Hobbesianism (we're all mean and selfish and brutal). It is, however, social Darwinism (some of us are mean and selfish and brutal. Some of us are not. The thugs end up on top and propogate their social model.). I think what you mean by "social Darwinism" is something like "social Hobbesianism as a result of biological Darwinism" or something.

Or maybe I just am confusing social Darwinism with techno-institutional Darwinism. Or something.

[Auros]

Can anyone cite an example of a society predating the Enlightenment that did NOT follow the pattern of treating those who refused to assimilate like dirt? The vast majority didn't even offer you the chance to assimilate.

[donna]

Perhaps some of us are just letting the thugs be thugs while we quietly educate our own children to be a different sort of human being, hmm?

The qwuestion is, what is it that you actually value, and how much is that reflected in how you behave in a society? Most of us are more than happy to simply live our own lives without conflict with others.

[s9]

"...Fred and Deborah take the fact that Jared Diamond has a Melian Dialogue view of how human societies interact to entail that Jared Diamond approves, justifies, or excuses conquest, genocide, and slavery. Diamond does not."

Explanation vs. Justification. We're back to that snarlyball, are we?

[João Carlos]

"Overly violent societies tend to repel or expel smart people. The history of war is one of innovation. The smart people move some place weak and make it strong."

Let's me see...USA grew upon the native americans that where 11 million people and lived where now is more than half United States of America...so, where are the native americans now?

I have the impression that the smart people from USA simply helped to kill the indians. You know: kill all buffalo, give to the native americans cloth with smallpox, send the army with rifle to kill the "saveges", elected presidents saying that "a good indian is a dead one". But USA aparently had a good reason: to built DEMOCRACY!

So, overly violent societies not repel smart people, USA is an overly violent society (just see your Western Movies...and you continue to have a "gun fetishism" culture) and you not repel smart people, to be true you import brains today.

Sorry, but the facts not comprove your hypothesis. USA is an overly violent society that exterminated the native americans, however it attracht the smarter brains around the world.

João Carlos

sorry the bad english, my native language is portuguese.

[Auros]

Also, it seems like they imagine that some small corner of Europe might've developed a society that was relatively peaceful, with a stable population (hence no need to expand) -- and then continued to exist that way, in a vacuum, indefinitely. It fails to occur to them that as soon as ONE tribe develops the expansionist Guns/Germs/Steel mode of life -- high fertility leading to overburdening your local resources, mixed with the skill at war to take your neighbors' resources -- they wipe out, enslave, or (at best) assimilate the "nice" tribes. This is the same kind of argument as: Agriculture was bad for most individuals, but more competitive at the societal level, because the ag societies could drive hunter-gatherers off the land -- a hundred malnourished farmers beat one tough healthy hunter, any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

It seems like they're unable to imagine "cultural evolution" without inferring the ugly kind of "Social Darwinism" preached by right-wing loons in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

[Auros]

Re: violent societies repel smart people.

Look at all the scientists employed by the DoD -- they're not morons. Heck, Alexander the Great was a pretty smart guy. In addition to being a tactical and strategic genius, he envisioned whole new classes of engineering feat, and found the people who could execute his ideas -- almost all of which involved killing large numbers of people.

[Roger Albin]

Julian, you are confusing Social Darwinism with something else. Social Darwinism, properly defined, has a large genetic component a la Nazi ideology or a considerably amount of 19th and 20th century racism. The term is sometimes and sloppily used metaphorically. DeLong's argument has no explicit or implicit genetic component and isn't Social Darwinist.

Another major problem with the Savage Mind account is that it contains serious factual errors. "It is the case...that the people of the New World were brutally conquered by representatives of the Old." Absolutely correct. But how did this conquest occur? It would not have happened without the epidemiological advantages possessed by conquerors from the Eastern Hemisphere. Pizarro didn't have the "technology...to conquer." He had a force of less than 200 lightly armed men and was thousands of miles from Spain. He succeeded because he was a ruthless and skilled leader fishing in very troubled waters. The Inkan empire was in a state of civil war when he entered Peru. This civil war was precipitated by what was probably a major smallpox epidemice that may have killed 20% of the population of the Inka empire. The Spanish could not have conquered the Mexica empire without the assistance of epidemic disease. These initial epidemics were followed by subsequent epidemics over the course of the ensuing decades that killed a huge percentage of the native peoples of the Americans. Without this depopulation, there is no way that Europeans could have attained the degree of control over the Western Hemisphere that they eventually achieved. In his recent history of the conquest of Mexico, Hugh Thomas makes the astute comment that without recurrent epidemics, colonial Mexico would probably have resembled 19th century British India, a western veneer over a primarily traditional society. The effect of epidemic disease on non-Eurasian populations is precisely the kind of pervasive, higher level cause that Diamond features prominently in his book.

[nate]

I am a little bit beyond my expertise here and was speaking from some anecdotal observations and opinions. The criticism and input has been good and appreciated.

One does not hear much about Greece today as a world power. How did Greece eventually slide?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great

[Dan Nexon]

"Can anyone cite an example of a society predating the Enlightenment that did NOT follow the pattern of treating those who refused to assimilate like dirt? The vast majority didn't even offer you the chance to assimilate."

Many, many premodern empires did not demand much in the way of assimilation from their subjects. They wanted things like tribute and military concessions, but if you gave that to them, they'd pretty much leave you alone. Forced cultural assimilation - particularly in the form of eliminating language, ethnicity, and so forth - crops up now and again but doesn't seem to be any more the norm than various alternatives modes of domination. One could even make a claim that forced cultural assimilation/the subordination of those who do not assimilate gets worse for a time after the Enlightenment, because nationalism, racism, and other ideologies raise the stakes significantly while eliminating "exit options" for people.

That being said, Fred's and Deborah's reading of history seems highly selective here. Take this statement: " mercantilism and capitalism provide particular historical contexts in which (and in different though related ways) expansionist conquest appears an especially desirable activity--and one made especially feasible by the availability of guns, germs, and steel." Either it is banal - modalities of domination and extraction have an important influence on patterns of conquest - or it is misleading. Expansionist conquest, over vast areas, was alive and kicking long before mercantilism and capitalism, and I doubt either explains the "rise of the west" very well.

[Maynard Handley]

"
Diamond's view of an inevitable and inexorable course of human history, one driven by the operation of ultimate causes over the span of its 13,000-year course
"

What is the point of language like this ("inevitable and inexorable")? To show that anthropologists are twits with no understanding of mathematics and probability? To show that they live in a manichean black-and-white world?
An evolutionary biologist, one of those hard sciences to which Diamond is supposedly aspiring, would never make so stupid a statement, neither, I imagine, would Diamond. The whole *point* of evolution is that random things happen and that, while mutations that lead to improved fitness will persist, no-one can predict what those mutations will be. Oxygen released to the atmosophere made it likely (but not inevitable) that multi-cellular organims would arise. Was it even likely, as opposed to just possible, that specifically vertebrates, or even more specifically cows would have arisen? Certainly contingencies not even part of the randomness of mutation played a role (eg meteor strikes earth, wipes out dinosaurs, reshuffles the dice).

[nate]

"Look at all the scientists employed by the DoD -- they're not morons"

true they are not morons. but the DoD probably does not monopolize the brightest-

look at the last 30 years: Microsoft, Amazon, eBay and others-

[nate]

maybe it is something like relatively more violent societies tend to expel and repel smart people more than relatively less violent societies.

not sure-

[João Carlos]

"Many, many premodern empires did not demand much in the way of assimilation from their subjects."

Strange...History say something about the Assirian empire and the Neobabylonian empire...something about conquered populations being destroyed or forced to move to live at other place where they can be "assimilated". And the egyptians where aparently happy with Alexander because the persians not liked the polytheistic egyptian religion - see, the Persian empire had as official religion zoroastrism.

So, FORCED cultural assimilation happened at the Ancient Empires? Evidently we need burn that history books before someone find the truth...

João Carlos

Sorry the bad english, my native language is portuguese.

[ralph]

Those savage minds people are interesting. It seems to me that Jared is the straw man for them, taken, as others have pointed out, as the static representation of The West and of Capitalism even though the oppressed, non-Western people had will and agency and consciousness which could not be statically viewed through the "Yali Device."

Bah. Non of this is really about Diamond. JD just says, "look, environments seem to matter; here's how." And the evidence he adduces is extremely convincing. It's really about the fact of his persuasiveness in our culture. Savages think that his effect is pernicious, because they don't like the effect of "capitalism" or of "Westernism" -- whatever that is. Brad, more rightly and reasonably, however tetchy he can be, is in favor of the essential insights of the capitalist mindset. I might be weaker on support for Brad's capitalism, but I am firmly with him in the belief that Diamond is saying that history demonstrates that dominant violence occurs. And that is all he is saying. No more, no less.

To the extent that Diamond wants a "real" science, such as astronomy/physics/whatever, he's a nutcase. History is argument by evidence that can never be tested against a control, and so by definition it can never, EVER be a science. But it can pursue the highest standards of the scientific approach absent the idea of controlled experiment, and it always benefits from such an approach.

Savages should just say, "We hate this capitalism crap because it supports the idea of the quest for domination." And Brad (and I) will say, "Because people do this historically, we can inveigh against it but properly harnessed, it turns out to be darned reasonable and productive of both personal and communal freedom and prosperity."

Well, actually, Brad would probably put it another way. :-)

[ryan]

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it." -- Jack Handy

Seriously, though, Fred and Deborah's assertion that Diamond doesn't understand that some societies don't develop the desire to conquer is ludicrous. Just look at Diamond's discussion of Ming China's exploration. He suggests it was exactly those first causes like mountation formation that made it possible that a single Chinese emperor could scuttle China's expansion, whereas the competition between the dramatically weaker and less advanced European states would make such a move impossible in the long run. Savage Minds may disagree, but they should at least respond to his argument.

[wml]

"...Diamond's distinction between ultimate and proximate causes. Ultimate causes are those broadly applicable and pervasive forces, such as guns, germs, and steel."

This phrasing is NOT diamond's phrasing, which makes me wonder about the article. Diamond describes guns, germs, steel as merely proximate causes. Ultimate causes are what caused some societies to develop guns, germs, and steel (large areas with few barriers to travel, domesticable animals, wild plants well suited to agriculture, etc.)

[bb]

Auros says ...

"Can anyone cite an example of a society predating the Enlightenment that did NOT follow the pattern of treating those who refused to assimilate like dirt? The vast majority didn't even offer you the chance to assimilate."

I would say that the people of India did not care (and do not care) much about assimilation. Persecuted groups such as the Parsis (from Iran), the Jews (from Spain and the middle east) have lived with their traditions intact in India for around a 1000 years. The requirement of assimilation, IMHO, is an outcome of the culture of Christianity and Islam and not a normative rule among all societies.

[liberal]

ralph wrote, "To the extent that Diamond wants a "real" science, such as astronomy/physics/whatever, he's a nutcase. History is argument by evidence that can never be tested against a control, and so by definition it can never, EVER be a science."

But most of astronomy, as well as evolutionary biology, is observation science, where there are few or no controlled experiments possible.

[liberal]

ralph wrote, "To the extent that Diamond wants a "real" science, such as astronomy/physics/whatever, he's a nutcase. History is argument by evidence that can never be tested against a control, and so by definition it can never, EVER be a science."

But most of astronomy, as well as evolutionary biology, is observation science, where there are few or no controlled experiments possible.

[Gareth]

Diamond has a great discussion of the biological roots of genocide in The Third Chimpanzee. It is true that he doesn't think genocide was an invention of capitalism or mercantalism. But there is some evidence that he is right.

[Matt Austern]

I think Brad is explaining Diamond's view correctly. (Although I suppose Diamond would probably emphasize two other levels of explanation as well: the three levels are variation among individuals within a society, variation among societies within a continent, and variation among continents. Diamond's book is about the last of those levels of explanation, and you need to understand the existence of the other two levels for the book to make sense.)

I'm not sure he is responding correctly to the Savage-Minders' critique, though, because I don't think he has asked: why do they think that what they're making an argument against anything Diamond says?

That's a serious question. After all, we really do live in a world where militarily powerful Eurasians conquered less powerful American, Africans, and Australians. It seems strange to attack Diamond for saying that we live in a world where stronger societies conquer weaker. It seems strange to think that this means any of Diamond's arguments about the development of societies on different continents is incorrect.

This is related, I think, to a different question: why so many articles, why so much focus, on Diamond's preface about "Yali's question"? After all, the preface isn't much more than Diamond explaining his motivation for writing the book. Diamond's interpretation of what Yali meant is at least as plausible as the Savage Minders', but, ultimately, the fact that their arguments about Yali are strained isn't even what's most striking. What's striking is that all Diamond is doing in that preface is explaining why he became interested in the subject of the book: the impact of geography at a continental scale on societal evolution. One would think that even if Diamond had been completely wrong about what Yali meant, even if he had only read Yali's words in a newspaper, that wouldn't have mattered to an evaluation of Diamond's thesis. Why would anyone think that an attack on a preface that motivates the investigation of a question would have anything to do with the authors' proposed answers?

What's striking about both of these attacks is what isn't said: that Diamond's arguments about the effect of continent-scale geography on societal evolution are incorrect. And that's odd. There are criticisms to be made. I think Diamond's analysis of the difference between eastern and western Eurasia is weak. I've heard people say that the differences in availability of domesticable crops were less clear-cut than what Diamond said. (I don't know enough to evaluate those arguments.) And I'm sure there are other serious criticisms of Diamond's arguments to be made. But that doesn't seem to be what concerns the Savage Minders. Instead of finding places where Diamond's conclusions are wrong or his arguments aer insufficiently supported, they're focusing their rhetoric on things that are at best peripheral to Diamond's thesis and at worst perfectly irrelevant.

Unlike Brad, I don't think this odd behavior indicates dishonesty on the Savage Minders' part. It just means that what they're saying is something they're not being explicit about. Their rhetoric has nothing to do with the validity of Diamond's thesis about continental geography and societal evolution because they aren't arguing that his thesis is incorrect. Instead they're attacking the very idea of asking such a question, irrespective of what the answer might be. From that perspective, their attacks make sense. If asking a question is wrong, then it's relevant to attack the passage where the author discusses his motivation for asking it. If asking a question is immoral, then it's relevant to say that the question has something to do with reprehensible views.

That's ultimately the difference between the Savage Minders and me. I don't think asking about geographic influences on societal evolution is wrong.

[wilbert]

Intriguing aside: The "The PNG Government responded [to the Bougainvillians defense of their island from mining corps.] by sending its Defence force [sic]to Bougainville, thereby declaring an all out war with the people of the island. The mine was closed in March 1989 and what has ensued since is a protracted eight year war between the PNG Defence Forces and the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA). The people of Bougainville are known right throughout the world as the only Indigenous People that have shut a mine owned by one of the mining giants of the world."

[ralph]

To liberal:

Good point; you're quite correct -- I've overreached. However, I would respond by saying that both of those fields use uncontrolled observation in cahoots with scientific theories of biology and physics and controlled experiments about said theories. History has no such "validation" mechanism. We look, examine as best we can, and write a story about what we think.

Am I getting closer? :-)

[JRossi]

Suppose the vast majority of a large country desires peace and prosperity. Suppose further that a dedicated and ruthless cabal of true believers decides to use any means to take over, does so, and then leads the country to war. Then the wishes of the majority in the country becomes irrelevant, as do the wishes of people in other countries. Aggressive people can take over countries and start wars. The aggressive can drive out the docile, both within and among countries, even if almost all people are peace-loving. They can control the course of history.

[Joe O]

I was trying to look up that quote up yesterday but my google-fu failed me.

[radek]

"From our perspective, however, mercantilism and capitalism provide particular historical contexts in which (and in different though related ways) expansionist conquest appears an especially desirable activity"

This is a particularly strange paragraph as it seems to suggest that without mercantilism or capitalism you don't get expansion and conquest, or even just plain ol' brutal warfare. I know that's not exactly what they mean - they can't possibly mean that, can they? - since the counterexamples are too numerous, but it is a sort of sleight-of-hand rhetorical trick which leads the reader to subconciously associate 'expansion and conquest' with 'capitalism and mercantilism' and link the two as unseperable. After all, they need that sort of a link to argue their main thesis which is that 'we' of the modern 'capitalism and mercantilist' world, only think the world is a Hobessian one where the strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must because we can't see outside the mentality that this 'capitalist and mercantilist' world has been busy for the past 200+ year imposing on our minds. Which is just bunk.

[Dan Nexon]

José: please look up the difference between "many" and "all," then see "Khazars," "Mongols," "Romans," "Athenians," "Hsiang-Nu," many pre-British Indian empires, etc. etc.

[ralph]

radek:

I'm pretty sure that this is exactly what they mean. I'll concede that they mean it for the best of reasons: It is true that the "capitalist mentality" -- I am intentionally vague here -- does encourage exercising your personal desires because it says that the people will ultimately decide whether it's a good thing or not. (Radically simplified and shorn of any explicitly economic content.)

And I think what they don't like is that this encourages a society that says, if it works, do it, which leads to all sorts of mayhem (because, of course, violence often works for those who use it). Now, this is a caricature of the capitalist mentality (as I am slicing and dicing their point of view, too), but it has a sense of truth about it that is very powerful both to those who are on the further U.S. left and those who are on the traditionally conservative right (people who do really value social stability and moral conservatism in their non-overtly-ideological senses).

But I suspect, however, that they really just want to militate against all social forms that tend to justify economic and moral inequivalence. Yet that's not what they say. They abuse poor old JD. (Well, he's neither, but there it is.)

Capitalism, too, is in this sense not really the problem, because as you and everyone else with a whiff of history about them point out, good old fashioned male-led violence is a human specialty. Is it a "law" of "social darwinism"? Nah. But arguing that there's good evidence against it's enduring existence is like thinking that perhaps gravity won't work tomorrow. Might be true....

... but not too persuasive. Most people would like to figure out how to moderate and modify what will most likely occur.

[James Wimberley]

Brad asked originally for evidence of peaceful coexistence of agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers. I can' t provide this, but would like to bring in a beautiful data set: Luigi Cavalli-Sforza's maps of human genetic diversity in Europe number-crunched by factor analysis. The first principal factor shows concentric "isobars" spreading out from the Fertile Crescent, and coinciding almost completely with archaeological maps of the spread of agriculture. So:
- agricultural populations displaced hunter-gatherer ones; the effect dominates all later or earlier invasions and conquests;
- the displacement was combined with mixing, though the maps are silent as to whether the process was peaceful infiltration and cohabitation as in the Ituri forests, or Old Testament anthrocidal warfare (kill the men, enslave the women and children).

[sm]

"History should be a real science, like physics" is one of the longest-lived of straw man arguments.

Even physics isn't a "real science" any more. Michelson and Morley blew that physics away a century ago.

[ralph]

oooooo -- "anthrocidal". I like that word. Not run across it before. Quite good.

[J Thomas]

Matt, I can't be sure I understand what the SavageMinds people are thinking, but I've found a way to look at it that so far consistently makes sense to me.

First, pretty much all these people have studied other cultures, and pretty much all the other cultures they've studied suffered badly under colonialism. Not just any colonialism, european colonialism and whatever-you-call what americans have done.

They don't like what's happened to their friends and they don't want to accept that it's inevitable.

I want to put in a few words about imperialism. I want to claim that maybe the old colonial empires were not actually worth what they cost. I can't give a detailed justification and I might be wrong, but consider it. i've read that at some times half the british men who went to india died there. And half the french men who went to africa died there. And since most of them didn't marry and bring their wives, a fair number of the survivors found women in the colonies and didn't come home to marry. It was enough to bias sex ratios, a lot of english and french women didn't marry because there just weren't enough english and french men for them. If you had asked the women what benefits to empire they thought would justify that, I expect a lot of them would agree with me that it wasn't worth it.

Britain got trade goods. Lots of cotton cloth. Stuff. Elephant ivory to make billiard balls from. Teak. Tea. I contend that these amounted more than anything else to trophies, and were things they could have done without. Not worth it for themselves any more than bowling trophies are worth the effort it takes to get them. (I could be wrong, but just try it out.)

The other thing they got was strategic advantage. Nations with colonies got strategic materials. When warships were sailboats, they got tall trees they could use for masts etc. When warships were steamboats they got iron ore and coal and coaling stations. When warships were oilers they got oil and bases. Even when warships were carriers colonies provided resupply stations and strategic metals -- aluminum, titanium, uranium, etc. Without strategic advantage you'd lose a war and not be an empire any more. Except ... after awhile it wasn't the stronger nation that won the war, it was the stronger coalition. Your empire might wither away even if your side won the war. And then as lethal weapons got cheaper and more plentiful, the cost of keeping colonies got far more than colonialists could support. Finally they had a couple of world wars that cost more than the whole thing could possibly be worth, even to the winners. Except, except if you didn't have an empire you'd wind up part of somebody else's empire and they'd draft your boys to fight in their army, and they tax your land to support the war, and the armies fight their way across, and it's just about as bad either way.

I didn't make this stuff up. I read it in pop-economics books written in the 1960's and 1970's. These books explained to a lay audience why the USA was the most successful nation in the world. They explained that colonialism basicly didn't work, and the USA mostly didn't do colonialism. Instead we invested in technology. And technology paid off where colonialism didn't. Technology was entirely responsible for our wealth. We were the best because we were the best at science and technology, the best at research and development.

Any physical limitation we ran into, we would overcome with technology. Crowded phone lines? We invented fiber optics which someday would give us unlimited transmission. Crowded airwaves? We invented masers and lasers -- monochromatic light -- which let us tune frequencies far more tightly. Vacuum tubes take too much power and burn out too fast? Transistors solved that.

We bought raw materials from underdeveloped countries at a fair price, but it was more as a favor to them than anything else. Any raw material we lacked, we could do R&D and come up with a better substitute. Synthetic rubber. Aluminum in place of tin. Aluminum in place of steel -- Aluminum has a tenth the strength of steel for a tenth the weight. Steel in place of wood. Steel has thirty times the strength of wood in tension, for ten times the weight. Plastic in place of....

It sounded plausible when I read it. Does it sound plausible now? Actually, kind of. But moving right along,

If somebody had told me as a junior in high school that america was in any way responsible for the poverty of underdeveloped nations I would have set them straight. The USA had nothing to do with that except to give them aid and buy their products at a fair price. What made us successful was technology, and any nation that wanted to be successful could follow our example and invest in technology too. I felt good about that. We were the best and the richest nation in the world and it wasn't our fault. We hadn't done anything wrong at all.

It turned out that this rosy picture wasn't exactly so. In those times our increasing GDP wsa directly proportional to our increasing use of oil. Directly proportional. Our military wasn't willing to accept substitutes for titanium and tungsten and cobalt etc, and our consumers didn't want substitutes for coffee or bananas. Instead of administering a colony we picked the weakest bunch of thugs that could still maintain order with our help, and let them run the place. They could have as much wealth as they wanted to extract from their people provided they sold to us at our price. Where the colonialists may have believed they were bringing civilization to the savages and the noble cause justified the small profit they took, we didn't make any such attempt. They could do whatever they wanted provided we got their stuff at our price. And the american people ignored it as long as we got our oil and coffee and bananas and titanium and airbases.

Would we have done anything different if we actually noticed what our diplomats and CIA and military and corporations were doing in the third world? Maybe we'd have just come up with a better rationalization. But there was no chance we'd do something better while we didn't notice we were doing it.

Back to Diamond and the anthropologists after I get some work done.

[aiontay]

My Kiowa band is “Arikara”. The Kiowas, who were hunter/gatherers had a close trading relation with the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara agriculturalists of the Northern Plains. My particular band was especially close to the Arikaras, hence the name.

When the Kiowas moved south in the 1700s we became allies with the Wichitas, the main agricultural tribe of the Southern Plains. There was sporadic conflict with the Wichitas in the 19th Century, but that was a byproduct of White expansion onto the Southern Plains (those Texans were always causing trouble) rather than a conflict between hunters and farmers. We also had, and still have, a close relationship with the people of Taos Pueblo, and my cousin, who lives in New Mexico, says she’s met people from Jemez Pueblo that have Kiowa blood via intermarriage from the days when we used to trade there. I don't think we had a problem with farmers back when we were hunters.

[Roger Albin]

J Thomas, I think you may be remembering things incorrectly. Some colonies didn't pay. This was true of many African colonies conquered in the second half of the 19th century but Europeans held these colonies for relatively short periods. But India paid very well for the British, the Caribbean paid very well for the British and the French, and the Spanish did very well out of their colonies. Southeast Asia paid well for the French and the Dutch. There is an influential argument that one of the causes of subsequent European domination of the globe was the "ecological windfall" provided by the largely fortuitous European conquest of the Americas. Colonies paid well.

[Dominika Kretek]

I think what they're trying to say is that if your line of inquiry is to explain broad features of contemporary society in terms that make little reference to culture, ideology, and individual choice, then you are implicitly foreclosing or at least minimizing the possibility of escaping the Melian Dialogue view, and all you're left with are these environmental initial conditions that necessarily lead to the economic inequality and such that we see today.

In other words, they think that Jared's depressing conclusion is contained before the fact in his model and his approach. Even the depressingness is contained in them, since they imply a world where individual and group choices are ineffectual.

A perhaps more hopeful approach would be to try to figure out what leads cultures to choose war, domination, and annihilation over peace, coexistence, and tolerance, regardless of whatever pre-existing technological discrepancies there may be. Then at least we'd have a strategy for structuring our own choices in the here and now, besides the "in the long run, we're all dead," fatalism that a purely environmental theory would suggest.

[Ralph]

Although Jared Diamond's work appears to be an academic thesis adapted for the popular mind, it is also the case that sweeping views of history and philosophy sometimes succeed in having excessive obssessive sway over the popular imagination. Sadly the most popular thesis represent a Hobbesian view of human affairs and Diamond's does not appear any different. We live in an era where people of good will face a situation where optimism of the spirit exists with pessimism of the mind.

[piotr]

Roger Albin: But how did this conquest occur? It would not have happened without the epidemiological advantages possessed by conquerors from the Eastern Hemisphere. Pizarro didn't have the "technology...to conquer."

A good test case can be found in Philippines. Magellan tried to dabble as a conquistador and was promptly killed. Even so, after sending more ships the Spanish did conquer the islands --- although they could extend their conquest into Indonesia, not easily at least. Given that silver of Mexico and Bolivia justified expending large resources for the sake of conquest, I think that Spanish would do it even without having epidemics in their advantage. (I think that pre-colonial Philppines were somewhat backward and conquering the leading states of Java and Sumatra by Europeans was perhaps impossible in 16 century.)

[Russil Wvong]

"Fred and Deborah believe that Diamond's Melian Dialogue view of how human societies interact must be rooted in some kind of social-darwinist cartoon view of human nature."

I don't think their characterization of Diamond's view of human nature is unfair. It's a view in which the drive for power tends to dominate. I can immediately think of three examples from Diamond's writings: genocide among chimpanzees (in "The Third Chimpanzee"); Diamond's suggestion that trying to contact alien civilizations is insane (again from "The Third Chimpanzee"); and an instance of two Pacific Islander societies meeting and one destroying the other ("Guns, Germs, and Steel").

Personally, I subscribe to this view myself; not just from reading Diamond, but from reading a lot of Morgenthau and Kennan.

It's important to note that *power* (being able to override the will of another) and *war* are not synonymous: one society or people can have power over another without having to resort to actual warfare. (For example, threats may suffice.) So Raymond Kelly's findings aren't conclusive.

Andrew Schmookler gives a good presentation of the argument in "The Parable of the Tribes":
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC07/Schmoklr.htm

"Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another. If all choose the way of peace, then all may live in peace. But what if all but one choose peace, and that one is ambitious for expansion and conquest? What can happen to the others when confronted by an ambitious and potent neighbor? Perhaps one tribe is attacked and defeated, its people destroyed and its lands seized for the use of the victors. Another is defeated, but this one is not exterminated; rather, it is subjugated and transformed to serve the conqueror. A third seeking to avoid such disaster flees from the area into some inaccessible (and undesirable) place, and its former homeland becomes part of the growing empire of the power-seeking tribe. Let us suppose that others observing these developments decide to defend themselves in order to preserve themselves and their autonomy. But the irony is that successful defense against a power-maximizing aggressor requires a society to become more like the society that threatens it. Power can be stopped only by power, and if the threatening society has discovered ways to magnify its power through innovations in organization or technology (or whatever), the defensive society will have to transform itself into something more like its foe in order to resist the external force.

"I have just outlined four possible outcomes for the threatened tribes: destruction, absorption and transformation, withdrawal, and imitation. *In every one of these outcomes the ways of power are spread throughout the system.* This is the parable of the tribes."

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

I think I know what Fred and Deb's problem with Diamond is: they don't want to admit that humans and human societies have been shaped and produced by Darwinian evolution. Instead of confronting that point squarely though, they create a strawman Diamond, and whack away at that, and not even that very effectively.

Of course Brad is correct about the "Melian Dialogue" view of power politics, but hoping it isn't so is like wishing there really was a Santa Claus.

B&D's defenders seem to be under the impression that Capitalism and Mercantilism are somehow responsible for aggression in human affairs. I can't imagine how anyone who has actually read Diamond, or studied any anthropology, could hold such a view. Diamond gives plentiful examples of pre-literate (not to mention pre-mercantilist) societies exterminating each other.

aiontay is unfortunately quite wrong about the relations between tribal societies in the Americas. There is superabundant evidence of widespread war, conquest, and genocide in pre-Columbian times. It's true that the arrival of the horse with the Spanish made possible a new mode of life for peoples like the Kiowas, but neither their earlier or later societies were free of war and strife.

The "blank slaters" like B&D are peddling a psuedo-science as silly as that of the Creationists. Accepting Darwin does not imply accepting "social Darwinism" (the view that those holding lower places in society deserve their station for reason of genetic inferiority), and it doesn't mean accepting a Hobbesian view of existence. It does mean realizing that our faults lie not in our economics, but in ourselves.

[J Thomas]

Roger, I would like you to grant me the claim that the european colonial empires were not worth it, just for the sake of the argument for the moment. I can't prove it and it may be wrong, and it also depends a lot on how you choose to do your accounting. For example, if you decide that england was overpopulated, then the men england lost in india were a liability and not an asset, and england gained by losing them. That might be enough to make england a winner. But if those human beings had a worth, then a scenario where a bunch of men go to india and after a few years half of them die and the other half go home relatively rich, is not so clear-cut.

So anyway, the british rationalised excuses for their empire. They were bringing peace and law to their colonies, they were bringing culture, etc. The french likewise. We had a rationalization that we weren't doing it at all, but we were doing it -- we just left out the peace, law, and culture. And now Diamond is providing a new rationalization. It's inevitable. There's nothing anybody can do about it. If we didn't do it somebody else would. And these anthropologists are seeing people just lap up that rationalization. A whole lot of people like it a whole lot. Ignoring how much truth there may be in the details of the academic argument, the important thing is that people use it as an excuse for neocolonialism etc.

Is it true? Do we have a choice? Do we have to use a quarter of the world's oil? Do we have to trap third world countries in debt and devaluation and ruinous exports?

That isn't obviously true. Do we need our "standard of living"? Obviously not, the rest of the world does OK without it. Could we substitute for the imports we take? We could if we developed the technology. If we could develop the technology, if we still have that capability. (If we ever did.) Do we have the labor to make our stuff ourselves? We have a whole lot of unused labor and underused labor, particularly if you include most of our military and military contractors and military R&D. We could make stuff that we could sell at a fair price -- whatever a free market would bear -- and pay for the minimal resources and the clever manufactured goods we needed to import.

And we could help the third world do the same thing. We could do that, if we had the political will. Would we be better off than we are now? We wouldn't be as rich -- assuming that what's limiting us is iron ore and oil. If it's human innovation that's limiting us, then the more human beings who get the chance to do cutting-edge innovation, the better. If there were a lot of moderately-rich hi-tech cultures one of them might cause trouble and we wouldn't have the military edge we do now. But we'd have a lot of friends, compared to....

Was it inevitable that eurasia would develop nations that mistreated everybody else? I say no, though it's the way to bet. All it took was for the nation that had the geographical edge to make a different choice, and they could have gone off in some other direction, maybe a direction we haven't thought of at all. Saying the way it happened was inevitable based on one example is, well, inductive reasoning from one example. It can sound plausible. But the important point is that it isn't inevitable for us, now. And people want to accept that it is inevitable, because that's easy. And they use Diamond to rationalize it.

Maybe today it is inevitable, maybe we have to step aside and watch china take over, because we made bad decisions over the past 50 years and particularly the past 5 years, and it's too late for our choices to matter. It would be possible to make up JustSo stories that explain why china's geography makes it inevitable that china takes over the hegemony instead of us. For example, they are a very old empire that traditionally left the provinces alone except for necessary things. The ideographic written language meant that the literate elite could more-or-less translate everything into their own local languages (apart from spoken grammar) and didn't have to learn Mandarin. For lots of reasons they got *good* at empire. Good at delegating. Good at easing out inadequate leaders. (We'd need explanations for three recent exceptions, the empress dowager, Chiang Kai Shek, and Mao TseTung.) Let's see, tie it to geography. China spans a lot of biomes, and there are lots of barriers to travel, and it's obviously hard to do centralised government because locality matters so much. So the central government probes each local government for weakness and replaces the ones that look weak, and avoids micromanagement. So the difference between china governing the USA by occasionally correcting us with a gentle reminder about debts, versus governing a mostly-self-governing chinese province, is only a matter of degree. The chinese government had to develop the characteristics of an effective world government, due to their geography. But the USA has a few great big biomes plus a bunch of little ones that don't matter so much, and we have a fairly homogeneous population, and a dominant religion, and so we have never had to learn how to manage alien peoples. And so we are very bad at it and we do it by main force and the threat of force, and we fail within a generation or three.

Anyway, these anthropologists see the cultural shift, the shift that we use to go from a covert neocolonial power where we pretended as hard as we could that we weren't doing it, to an overt neocolonial power where we justify it. And they don't like it. But their experience is all in observing cultures and not in shaping cultures, so the best response they've come up with is to say "Hey, this is a wrong thing to do. We don't have to do it, we really do have a choice, we don't have to believe the people who say there's no choice. It isn't even true that everybody in the world suffers the American Dream where they want to maximise how much stuff they own. It doesn't have to be a death match to see who can grab the most of the world's resources." But they are so bad at saying it that people who want to believe Diamond think they're arguing about the facts of the last 15,000 years.

[Matt Austern]

This, again, strikes me as saying Diamond is wrong (and I mean "wrong" in both senses) even to ask the question of how geography influences cultural evolution.

Again, look at what mindset you have to have to think that this is an argument against Diamond's work. The initial preface, about Yali's question, was just to motivate why it might be interesting to look at geography and culture. But what I think nobody in this thread has pointed out yet is that *so is the part about conquest*. Diamond's book is not about conquest. It is not about colonialism. There is one chapter about the subject, in which he pointed out that a small band of brutal Spaniards overthrew an American empire, while it never happened that a small band of brutal Americans (it should be obvious that there were some) overthrew a Eurasian empire.

That was one chapter. And that chapter was introduction to what all the rest of the book was about: the ways in which Eurasian cultures developed differently than cultures on all other continents. I didn't find all of Diamond's arguments convincing, but he did convince me that there was a real difference, that it was continental in scale, and that it was not recent. The differences can't be ascribed to recent phenomena like capitalism or Protestantism; they go back far too many millennia for that.

A book on colonial and post-colonial history since the 15th century could be interesting. Many books on that subject have been written, and many of them are very good. Diamond shouldn't be attacked for having written a bad book on that subject; it simply isn't the subject he was writing about.

[J Thomas]

"From our perspective, however, mercantilism and capitalism provide particular historical contexts in which (and in different though related ways) expansionist conquest appears an especially desirable activity"

"This is a particularly strange paragraph as it seems to suggest that without mercantilism or capitalism you don't get expansion and conquest, or even just plain ol' brutal warfare."

Maybe this is not the paragraph you intended to quote. I think this paragraph does not mean what you think it means. It looks to me like it says only that mercantilism and capitalism sometimes provide contexts where expansionist conquest looks like a desirable goal. It sure doesn't say that you can't get expansionist conquest without them.

[Les Brunswick]

People have got Fred and Deborah wrong. They seem to be making an anthropological argument, but it is really an ideological one. They are leftists who believe that socialism is both good and possible, and that we have had capitalism and imperialism simply because people had bad values and wrong ideas about the world.

Fred and Deborah don't like Diamond because he explains how there are causal forces at work in history that can lead it in directions beyond our choosing. Underneath it all they hold the metaphysical position that the free human soul is the ultimate cause, and we could have a utopia if everyone just decided to think right and be good.

[J Thomas]

Ah! Here's a way to describe the Savages' technical argument against Diamond, short and simple.

Diamond is a historical determinist. He says that the broad scope of the last 15,000 years had to happen pretty much the way it did, because it was dominated by what worked. If somebody else discovered what worked and they were in someplace it worked, then the small details would have gone somewhat differently. But the larger scope would have stayed the same. Particularly because particular parts of it trumped the rest, and so only changes in the trumps would have mattered.

But these anhtropologists make the pop-culture chaos theory response. The environment determines some things that don't work. If you try something that doesn't work where you are, then it won't work for you. But there's a big variety of things that work well enough, and the details matter. A small difference in detail might make such big differences down the road that you can't really predict the course of history. You can only look back at what you think happened, and make a story that sounds plausible about it.

Then they talk about choice because they want to believe that choices matter, that we have the chance to choose better. But their actual argument is that the environmental determinism doesn't really determine, beyond broad limits.

We can imagine that the technologies that trumped everything else were the best that could have existed at the time. But for all we know other technologies that would trump them might have been discovered, but weren't. We just don't know.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Having reread the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides, I'm not quite sure that I accept Brad's view that Diamond takes the Athenian side of the Melian Dialogue. Not that he would deny that it happens.

Diamond is explaining the past in "Guns, Germs, and Steel." He deals with the future in "Collapse." His point in GGS is that geography has been a major shaper of history. His point in C is that the choices a society makes play a major role in shaping its fate.

If we build our hopes for the future on a cold-eyed and realistic appraisal of the past like Jared Diamond's, we have more chance of shaping it to our liking than if we build it on the anti-capitalist fantasies of Fred and Deb.

[obscure]

There is observation. There is action. There is story-telling.

To date, the best human understanding (a combination of all three) suggests, via natural selection, a deeply grim and brutal fight for life.

Right-wingers, to their credit, intuitively understand this even if they can't articulate it very well.

Lefties have a tendency (well, maybe everyone does) to confuse their preferences with facts. (Desire vs observation)

[J Thomas]

Obscure, I believe you have missed the point about natural selection.

It is only grim and brutal when you are losing.

The fight for life is joyous, and fun, and full of religious awe and bursting with love, most of the time. Unless you are a chronic loser who hasn't died yet.

HTH

[Jon Kay]

"Male-led violence?" Ah, yes. We know how pacifistic Maggie Thatcher, Queens Elizabeth I and Victoria were. The women who helped bomb the Taliban and Iraq might find that idea to be downright sexist.

Violence looks equal opportunity to me, moderated more by access to power than by gender.

[Ralph]

FDR was no slouch when it came to war as we all know. But he (and Eleanor) were appalled by the destruction of THE WAR just concluded. So they created the UN an organization to prevent the sort of aggressive imperialistic wars that had become so brutal and destructive in their time. The US has now become the great enemy of the UN and the hopes that were spawned in the world by its creation. How did this happen? It is a question that needs an answer and pronto.

[Sean McCann]

Actually, I think you need to read only one sentence in F&D to see why they can't really be taken seriously:

in a way that does not problematize the way the world works

The point for them isn't to interpret the world. Or to change the world. But to change the world by interpreting it. Lame.

[anne]

Jared Diamond's framework is a powerful new tool for structuring our thinking of history. I find the framework thoroughly without bias, and only an organizing tool for the understanding of history. Attacking the framework as though it might limit anthropological or cultural studies makes not the slightest sense to me.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/international/africa/09wheat.html

September 9, 2005

New Strain of Wheat Rust Appears in Africa
By MARC LACEY

NAIROBI, Kenya - Biologists warned Thursday that a virulent new strain of a previously controlled plant disease had emerged in East Africa and could wipe out 10 percent of the world's wheat production if its spread is not halted.

The disease, wheat rust, caused huge grain losses and even famines in the first half of the 20th century. The new strain was discovered in Uganda in 1999 and has since spread to Kenya and Ethiopia, damaging wheat crops there.

The fungus that causes wheat rust, Puccinia graminis, produces a rusty color on the stem of wheat and slowly destroys the plant. It was controlled in the late 1950's and 1960's through the groundbreaking work of Norman Borlaug, an American who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for developing high-yield grains that led to the green revolution.

Dr. Borlaug, now 91, spoke at a news conference on Thursday in Nairobi and called to draw attention to the new threat.

'Nobody's seen an epidemic for 50 years, nobody in this room except myself,' he said. 'Maybe we got too complacent.'

After the new strain of fungus emerged - and was named Ug99, for Uganda 1999 - it seemed to disappear for a couple of years. It re-emerged in Kenya in 2001 and in Ethiopia two years later, said Ravi Singh, a plant pathologist with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a nonprofit research group that convened an expert panel to study the resurgent disease. The panel's report, to which Dr. Borlaug contributed, was released at the news conference....

[J Thomas]

Anne, I don;t see the owerful new tool here. I'm just missing that.

Here's the algorithm as I see it.

1. Come up with a set of interlinked JustSo stories. Try to aim high, make the, so broad that they can't help but be interdisciplinary, which severely reduces the number of experts who can discredit the whole thing.

There's nothing special about this step, anybody can make up JustSo stories. I can do it myself. It does take some effort to keep the various stories from contradicting each other too obviously. But if the contradictions aren't too obvious they're OK, people won't notice.

2. Review the literature in several fields looking for fragmentary inconplete evidence whic can be used to support your JustSo stories. Ignore any evidence against them, unless you want to use it to come up with an even better JustSo story.

This step is a lot of work, but anybody with enough stamina can eventually get it done. Better to do it with a topic that isn't moving too fast, so that spectacular new finds that you have to mention don't show up faster than you can revise and publish.

3. Present your fragmentary incomplete evidence in a way that encourages the reader to fit it all together the way you want him to, while implying that there's a lot more you didn't include.

Anybody who reads murder mysteries is familiar with the methods to do this, and anybody who's written one should have no trouble assembling his evidence in the correct form.

4. Publish and publicise.

For this step it helps to be fairly well-spoken and know how to present a good image. It helps to have some sort of credentials. And you need the right publisher and the right connections.

Is this really so different from Desmond Morris? What is new about the methodology? I'm not saying there's nothing new here, just I haven't seen it yet.

[David G]

Poor Jared Diamond. Here he goes and writes the most painfully, carefully politically correct anti-triumphalist story of the rise of the West, and the left hits him for racism. Can these people not read, or are they just never satisfied?

The problem with Diamond is that he is a super-materialist and super-determinist. Compared to him, the Marxists are airy metaphysicians. Everything is due to environment, climate, resources, plants. (Actually, this is an ancient Greek doctrine, going back to Hippocrates). The PNG'ans are really smarter than the Europeans, because they didn't have resources as cushions. Exploiting resources requires no intelligence, etc.

The left should love this stuff. Diamond is the absolute anti-Weberian. There was nothing whatever in Western culture, institutions, norms, jurisprudence, theology, or anything else that explains the rise of the West.

I go with old William McNeill. History is about cultural contact and competition. Tautologically, the more successful cultures win. The stuff of history is the ways in which they do, the people who act, the stories they (both winners and losers) tell, the literatures, poetry, religions, and art they produce in the process.

Thanks to ann for mentioning Norman Borlaug. That man probably saved more lives than anyone in history. To me, he is the real Westerner.

To reduce the rise of the West to a story of power and exploitation is an old, tired moralism, which is no truer for being widespread. Even Pizarro was more than his caricature.

And isn't it rather strange how all the sorts of behavior glorified in all other civilizations -- conquest, victories -- is instinctively vilified in Western culture? Homer was the first: he was Greek, but in his story the Trojans are not the enemy, but morally superior. Westerners have always magnified their own guilt and seen virtue in the Other. Montaigne is the great exemplar of this.

The same European civilization that conquered the New World gave us the Enlightenment, medicine, science, and liberty, making them available for everyone, including those who hate the West. So: History is not a unilinear moral tale. That's what makes it interesting.

Whether human beings are naturally aggressive and whether war is a constant is another one of those unanswerable and pointless questions. Answer: it depends. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. One of the big recognized changes in Western culture 1500-1700 is what social historians call "the civilizing process" whereby casual, everyday violence became stigmatized and eventually died out; masters stopped beating servants and parents their children -- only to revive in recent years as the sociomoral fabric crumbles; see English hooliganism, post-Katrina New Orleans, etc.

People far poorer did not riot 50 or 100 years ago.

But enough. The historian cannot cope with these levels of generalization. Tell me stories about real people and I can relate.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

J Thomas - The trouble with your "Just so" slander is that it is so empty of content. Any historical science must seeks patterns of causation and attempt to match them to the facts. This "just so story" accusation has become a trite ritual for leftists too lazy to actually mount a thoughtful critique of an idea that offends their prejudices.

My memory of Kipling is a bit dimmed by the years, but I do remember that a key feature of the original "Just So" stories was their arbitrary and ad hoc character. If you wish to make this critique of Diamond, you need to be prepared to cite examples and defend your analysis.

I predict that you will fail miserably if you try this, because Diamond's hypotheses are parsimonious, clear, and anything but ad hoc.

It's also amusing that you would contrast Diamond to McNeill, who is a leading proponent of the type of analysis Diamond publicises in GGS.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

J Thomas - Sorry, it wan't you who mentioned McNeill. I stand by the rest of my critique.

[Walt]

David G: You have understood nothing. The argument you are witnessing here is an intermural argument -- both sides are on the left. The argument is left-leaning cultural anthropologists versus left-leaning sociologists and economists. Here's how you can tell when you've understood nothing: whenever you reduce your analysis to broad categories like "the left". "The left thinks this", "the left thinks that," then you can be pretty sure that you are completely wrong.

J Thomas: The point is that it's _not_ a Just So story. You have yet to offer any evidence that it is. Jesus, don't you think we've heard of Just So stories before?

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

David G. - The Marxist left doesn't love Diamond because his scientific viewpoint is as antithetical to the Marxist-Hegelian religion as it is to any other. Your accusation that he is a super determinist is quite unreasonable - Is it super determinism to argue that a man suspended above the ground will fall when his support is cut? What was determined for our ancestors of 15000 years ago was the choices they had.

One might guess that the Native American population of 13,000 or so years ago might have chosen to, say, domesticate the American horse rather than exterminate it, but, given the social and technological state of the age, that was probably not a realistic choice.

[J Thomas]

"History is about cultural contact and competition. Tautologically, the more successful cultures win."

That is a tautology provided we equate the adjective "successful" with the verb "win". Then it's true whatever we mean by success.

But consider the original claim. "The strong do what they will." They don't have to do what's "successful", provided they don't do things that fail badly enough to make them weak.

Consider the story Herodotus told about the persians. Every now and then their priests told them they had to go conquer the world. They'd build an army and conquer their nearest neighbors, and then make them contribute men and supplies to the army that would conquer the next batch. So that's a bigger army going after the next bunch, who promptly surrender and contribute men and supplies to move the army along to the next one still. After awhile they have a giant army of mostly foreign conscripts, who fight and die and have to be fed, and the logistics get shakier and shakier, but they keep on conquering. And they keep on until they have some sort of reverse. Then the leader and his palace guard beat a quick retreat all the way home, and their giant army is left to flounder. A raucous good time is had by all, but who exactly wins by this? No matter, in a few generations the priests tell them they have to do it again. One of these expeditions conquered their way up the nile and presumably fell apart somewhere in nubia (which Herodotus called libya). Another failed on the greek peninsula. The persians were strong enough to dominate a whole lot of people, but I'm not clear it did them a lot of good. They were the strong because nobody could tell them to lay off, everybody had to just let them do it until they got so overstretched somebody could trip them and they fell over.

Consider the USA in vietnam. We were strong. All the people we bombed just had to suck it up. It cost us a whole lot of money, we're still paying interest on the debt. Were we successful? No, we were just strong enough to do what we wanted up to a point.

Consider the germans in WWII. They conquered europe, a lot of north africa, a lot of russia, etc. Nobody could stop them, everybody just had to suck it up. It didn't do the germans much good at all.

I want to claim that the various colonial empires mostly cost more than they were worth. This is debatable; I couldn't begin to prove it myself. But suppose it's true. The colonial empires oppress their colonies because they can. The natives have to suck it up because they have no choice. Nobody wins.

Powerful fools do what they want, everybody else suffers what they must. Nobody wins, not the powerful fools or anybody else.

If a man quit his job and spent all his time practicing his bowling, and then he went off and won a competition that resulted in him bringing home a trophy that cost $35 with an engraved plate that cost $15 to engrave, his neighbors would probably think he was a fool. But if they paid for him to practice his bowling and he won an internatinal competitin that brought glory to their nation, they wouldn't think he was a fool, they might think he was a patriot. Same way when it's war trophies. Did japan's fruits from the military co-prosperity sphere com close to paying for the war? Compare what they got from being the trade experts, while that lasted....

Maybe history is often about the powerful stumbling over the weak and twisting their ankles. Nobody wins, nobody breaks even, nobody comes out better than they would have without the accident. And maybe the people who think it's about winning are a big part of the problem, one of the major causes of the accident.

[J Thomas]

Walt, it's possible we are not on the same wavelength here.

You say you've heard of JustSo stories before. Would you tell us what a JustSo story means to you, and give some indication why Diamond's stories are not JustSo stories supported by cherry-picked evidence?

[obscure]

&&It is only grim and brutal when you are losing. The fight for life is joyous, and fun, and full of religious awe and bursting with love, most of the time. Unless you are a chronic loser who hasn't died yet.&&

J Thomas, I wasn't suggesting that all of life is grim & brutal. Sure, there is abundant beauty and love in this world. But the struggle for survival, which to the best of our knowledge is what produced the variegated splendor of life on Earth, is quite grim and brutal when we take a close look at it. And all of us, winners & losers, partake of the inherent suffering of existence. IMO. (Buddhist for the most part.)

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

J Thomas - The Mongol empire lasted only a couple of generations. Eight percent of the population of the former Mongol empire (a billion or two) traces its male descent to Genghis Khan and his close relatives.

That's what winning is about in biological terms. Very little of importance in human affairs can be understood till you understand Darwin.

If you are going to toss around the "just so story" accusation, you need to at least glance at the original, Kipling's "Just so Stories."

[ralph]

John Kay:

Would you like to stack the statistics of males and violence up against the counter examples through history? While is is of course true that women can be violent, there is no doubt that across cultures and time men seem to have the violent gene. It is to this fact that I refer.

[Roger Albin]

Piotr, your point about the Phillipines is appropriate but I didn't mean to imply that the epidemicologic advantage explains all European colonial conquests during the early modern period but it was a very important factor. Epidemiology was a major factor in European dominance of the Western Hemisphere, the Pacific, and Australia. The case of Africa is also interesting. Why didn't Europeans in the Early Modern period conquer western Africa as they did the Western Hemisphere? They had no epidemiologic advantages in western Africa, if anything the opposite. This probably wasn't the only factor but it was a major factor. The real conquest of Africa didn't start until the 19th century, when Europeans really did have major technological advantages.

[J Thomas]

Obscure, I want to suggest again that if you project grimness and brutality into the stuggle for survival, that is your projection and not an inherent reality.

When a cheetah is singling out a weak gazelle to run down and kill, the strong gazelles have the joy of running like the wind. The cheetah likely enjoys himself, the winning gazelles enjoy themselves, it's only the loser that has a grim brutal time of it.

In a small business, every sale feels like a victory. For a teenager, every date feels like a victory, at least up until it ends in confusion and blame. These things are part of the struggle for life but they only seem grim when you lose, when your business is failing or you can't get a date etc.

[anne]

David G, that was a clever comment indeed. For Jared Diamond geography is the framework but yes there is culture and within culture it is as though we are made of stories. Think of Tolstoy's theory of history, which Isaiah Berlin so well described. History becomes the countless stories that make us who we are and describe how we behave, but if anyone never forget the constraints of cultural history it was Tolstoy.

Remember Napoleon and the massed armies crossing into Russia and advancing to Moscow and occupying Moscow, but Napoleon had already lost simply by crossing into Russia, and lost not because of the Russians really but because of the constraints of geography. General Kutuzov understood, so giving Napoleon Moscow. But, what was Napoleon to do with an army in an evacuated city? Kutuzov did not burn Moscow, there was no reason. Moscow evacuated simply began to decay in the Russian winter.

[anne]

J Thomas, you are clever as well but you are really playing, which is fine, but still is play :)

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/29/specials/berlin-hedgehog.html

February 14, 1954

Sharp Eyes for the Multiple Things
By WILLIAM BARRETT

THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX
An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. By Isaiah Berlin.

Most of us, I imagine, reading "War and Peace" tend to skim over the long disquisitions on history as rather tedious breaks in a marvelously exciting story, and nearly all critics hitherto have given official sanction to this habit by attempting to prove that these historical essays are an unnecessary blemish upon a great work of art. However, Isaiah Berlin--lecturer in philosophy at Oxford and famous as a scholar, diplomatist and conversationalist in at least two continents--has chosen to subject these historical passages to careful attention. In this brilliant essay he not only succeeds in making very good sense out of Tolstoy's historical theory but also finds in it an indispensable key to the complex and divided personality of the great Russian novelist.

The fox, said the old Greek poet, knows many things, but the hedgehog only one big thing. On this ancient bit of wisdom Mr. Berlin bases his distinction between two fundamental human types: those who have sharp eyes, like the fox, for the multiple things of the world, and those, like the hedgehog, whose defense consists of a single centripetal impulse--that is, who seek an inner unified vision. Tolstoy, in Mr. Berlin's view, was a fox who all his life sought, unsuccessfully, to be a hedgehog.

The glory of Tolstoy's novels lies precisely in their almost superhuman sensitivity to the multiplicity of things, their ability to record the individual feel and tone of persons, places and situations in their concrete objectivity; but the other half of Tolstoy, particularly during his latter years, is the agonizing search for an inner unifying vision with which his foxlike appetite for multiplicity can lie down in peace. The theory of history in "War and Peace" comes out of this deep cleft in the man himself.

The theory maintains, very simply, that the human understanding can never comprehend history, since the historic process involves an infinity of causes that lie beyond our grasp. Mr. Berlin seems to me to be altogether right in rescuing his theory from the charge of "mysticism." It is, rather, an entirely lucid and intellectually cogent theory, and a deterministic one to boot, though rather discomforting to the facile determinism of some historians. The individual, from the point of view of history, is never free, since he is caught in a web of infinite circumstances and causes.

On the other hand, "War and Peace" as a novel swarms with an extraordinary number of vivid personal lives each of which throbs with its own sense of decision and choice. This conflict between the feeling of freedom and the rational truth of determinism Tolstoy never succeeded in resolving for himself during his whole life....

[anne]

What Jared Diamond has done is provide a framework which as hedgehogs we can adopt and be as foxes within :) Here is Dear Brad's hedgehog....

[Steve LaBonne]

"Can these people not read, or are they just never satisfied?"

Those possibilities are not mutually exclusive...

[anne]

Whatever is Dear Brad, if not a fox wishing oh so hard to be a hedgehog....

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

J Thomas - "You say you've heard of JustSo stories before. Would you tell us what a JustSo story means to you, and give some indication why Diamond's stories are not JustSo stories supported by cherry-picked evidence?"

Your comment wan't addressed to me, but I have done that above (in a comment preceeding your question). As the accuser, you bear the burden of evidence, and you have provided none.

[anne]

This reminds me of Emily Dickinson's fierce line "Split the lark and you ’ll find the music...." I understood when I heard Richard Niebuhr fairly growl the line.

[anne]

All stories are "just so." Whatever else could they be, for where are we to find a definitive history? this was a wonderful understanding of Tolstoy. Napoleon was not France, and even if his story could be tolld in full, which it cannot be, French history is the history of the full rich lives of the least of the French. There is no exhausting the telling of the French history of march to and from Moscow. Napoleon becomes in the telling as little or much as a remote gunner.

[obscure]

%% it's only the loser that has a grim brutal time of it.%%

J Thomas- Yes, there is a value judgement in my phrase "grim & brutal." But there is also an aspect of mere observation, for example, the word 'brutal' merely suggests, "lawless, remorseless, subject to brute force" or something similar. That is not a value judgement.

What I am trying to convey is the feeling I had when reading 'On the Origin of Species' which I confess I did not finish. Darwin takes us by the hand and escourts us on a tour of random genetic variation and survival. It is really quite extraordinary accompany Darwin and absorb the almost superhuman patience he brings to his observation of natural phenomena. And to begin to have a sense of the vastness of biological time. And to *see* from the evidence that life is shaped by random, brutal and remorseless forces and struggles. The larger world cares not about our suffering, or for that matter, our success.

Your suggestion that "only the losers" have a brutal time of it doesn't hold up. Have you ever watched a squirrel, or a songbird, and noticed the frequency of their nervous, twitching efforts to scan the perimeter for signs of a predator? Does that look like fun to you?

A fight between Bull moose for the right to mate produces, apparently, a winner and a loser. But they both may have suffered severe wounds. And the 'loser' now may later win. (Sounds like Dylan)

It's like saying that Ceasar must have lived heaven on earth. Sure, except for the moments he spent trying to discern who would betray him. Just so, some of the most successful humans today (think Bush, Cheney etc ad nauseum) are Republicans for precisely the reason that they're paranoid as hell about losing their lucre!

[J Thomas]

Anne, you say I'm playing. Of course I'm having fun and I'm also serious about the topic. I get the impression by "playing" you mean "not to be taken seriously". I do mean it seriously, though.

CapitalistImperialistPig, CIP, let's review the bidding. I gave a protocol that Diamond could have followed to get his results. You claim that he did not do so. Yo say that the first step is wrong, that Diamond did not start out with JustSo stories.

It seems to me that if we're going to throw claims back and forth that you have the obligation to show that Diamond couldn't have used my protocol as much as I do to show that he could have.

You want to say that the central quality of JustSo stories is that they're arbitrary. How would we determine whether Diamond's stories are arbitrary or not? You could point to the evidence he presents for them. After he makes the case for his ideas they seem like fundamental truths. But this is an illusion. His ideas seem true and inevitable because he's a good writer and because he presents his cherry-picked evidence well. If he'd sprung them on you cold they'd have seemed like so many JustSo stories.

This isn't the first time that's happened. Look at Marx. Lots of people who actually read Marx feel like his ideas are true and inevitable. If Marx had stuck to describing history a whole lot of people would still want to believe it. It's only because he predicted the future that they saw his predictions fail. Marx predicted class warfare was inevitable, and he was wrong -- we wound up with a country that had a strong middle class and strong labor unions and laws that protected workers, all things Marx didn't predict. Our proletariat firmly believe that if they work hard they can become rich themselves and if they don't get rich it's entirely their own fault. Marx was entirely wrong, but most people who actually read his JustSo stories with his cherry-picked evidence didn't see it.

What is so special about Diamond? What new method has he used that Marx didn't use?

[J Thomas]

Obvious, if by "brutal" you mean only inexorable and inevitable, then I have no quarrel with it.

Your observation that often people or animals who look like they're "winning" are actually on the edge of losing is of coruse true. Further, some lifestyles and some ecological niches make it easier to hedge your bets than others. If you make a living doing no-limits poker, then your prosperity may vanish with the next hand. But if you have your money in real estate you could go decades before the bubble burts. "The fox needs to know many tricks, the hedgehog only one big trick."

[Jon Kay]

ralph sez:
> Would you like to stack the statistics of males and violence up
> against the counter examples through history? While is is of course
> true that women can be violent, there is no doubt that across
> cultures and time men seem to have the violent gene. It is to this
> fact that I refer.

Well, if there's no doubt, then you should have no trouble finding statistics backing your claim up.

I will concede that women's violence more often comes within a lawful context, but not that fewer women are violent, nor that those women who've made it to, as Monty Python put it, "supreme executive authority," are less likely to go to war than men (since that was your most important point - "male-led violence").

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

J Thomas - I don't see any evidence that you have read either Kipling or Diamond, which could explain why you don't seem to be following the argument. I thought the "just so" epithet was silly when Gould used it, but it's really silly if used by someone who doesn't know what it means.

If "just so" means anything it means ad hoc - like the theory below that only explains "How the leopard got it's spots" (The title of one of Kipling's stories). The just so stories were fairy tales, and here's Kipling's version:

"Then the Ethiopian put his five fingers close together (there was plenty of black left on his new skin still) and pressed them all over the Leopard, and wherever the five fingers touched they left five little black marks, all close together. You can see them on any Leopard's skin you like, Best Beloved. Sometimes the fingers slipped and the marks got a little blurred; but if you look closely at any Leopard now you will see that there are always five spots -- off five black finger-tips.
"

Jared Diamond starts with a very few fundamental and easily understandable ideas: that easily domesticable plants and animals are fairly rare and unevenly distributed, that the spread of crop cultivation is much easier if no major geographic obstacles intrude, and that the orientations of the continents makes a difference in the spread of continents.

He presents plenty of evidence, including maps and tables to demonstrate these ideas. He further shows that early development of agriculture and subsequently technology occurred in precisely those places where those ideas predict.

If you have read his book, and have a specific critique to make, make it. If you haven't, and are simply trying to be annoying, congratulations - you've succeeded.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

J Thomas - "What is so special about Diamond? What new method has he used that Marx didn't use?"

If you want to know about Diamond, RTFB.

Not being a student of Marx, I can't compare him, though pretty clearly he and Diamond studied different subjects and came to different conclusions.

[anne]

J Thomas

When I mentioned "playing," I meant that I take your comments as exploratory and playfully argumentative :)

[anne]

Play, but do not underestimate how meticulous a researcher Jared Diamond is. The work Ernst Mayr and Jared Diamond completed on birds of New Guinea gives a sense of how thorough an evolutionary biologist can be. The thoroughness has continued.

[derek lane]

sm: I agree that much bad analysis is inspired by emulation of the methods found fruitful in "real sciences" like physics and chemistry. I do not understand your comment that the michelson/morley experiments changed physics from a "real science". For example, the idea of a distinguished 'fixed frame of reference' while perhaps philosophically interesting was not important to Newtonian physics, and was only an accomodation to the observed properties of electricity and magnetism. More radical re-imaginings of fundamental physical reality (in particular quantum mechanics) are *really weird* in a different sense, but that issue seems orthogonal to the question of 'real' vs 'unreal' science.

j thomas on historical determinism: One can play modelling on various levels. In physics the determinist game is 'what description of reality now can be used to describe the world at least as well one second into the future'. So for small particles we describe the world as probabilities of various measurable outcomes and simple models (for simple arrangements) yield probabilities of the same types of outcomes one second later. (The suprise in this arena is that you either get to describe positions in this way or speeds, but not both at the same time.) JD appears to be trying for a simple model that explains a common outcome (overwhelming European impact on comparitively sparse populations). This is a different game than physics', for example. My recollection of his book includes many examples of the common outcome, but does not probe the model by, for example, looking for smaller variations in the underlying causes (say areas in a generally N-S continent with long E-W valleys; looking for differences between areas with no endemic diseases and ones with a few; controlling for such classic military issues as long supply lines and the advantage that defenders have of local knowledge). Perhaps the data is not there, or not accessible to him, or systematically smudged by underlying causes (as disease propogation might well do).

[J Thomas]

CIP, we have a minor disagreement about the meaning of a JustSo story. Here's how I believe Gould etc intended JustSo stories to mean: When you make a hypothesis and use it to predict testable things that you didn't already know, that isn't a JustSo story. (Though it might be pedestrian and uninteresting.) When you make a hypothesis and either simply present it on its plausibility, or you collect data to support it, that's a JustSo story.

Diamond's hypotheses are simple and compelling and need no data. I came up with some of them when I was in high school. For example, I reasoned from first principles that other things equal, a larger population will outcompete a smaller population and people on a larger landmass will outcompete people on a smaller one. I looked at the USA and the USSR, and on a globe the difference s very striking, the USSR was this giant entity sprawled over a big part of the world, a tremendous east-west country. And then throw in china with their giant population....

But I didn't see any way to pitch that idea that would be palatable. In the cold war I could not have sold the idea that the iron curtain had a giant advantage. So i dropped it. I looked at the idea that species from eurasia might be more invasive when introduced into alien ecosystems. The thought was that they'd have faced more competition berore and more opportunities to invade. But that one didn't particularly work out. From the data I could get, invasiveness didn't seem to correlate with anything in particular. A species that lived one way at home would find a new way to live somewhere else, and it wasn't particularly predictable which systems it could invade. The big exception was species that had adapted to humans, and that were good at colonising systems that humans disrupted.

OK, so then Diamond came up with a lot of data to support his ideas. He did not particularly look for data that would contradict his ideas, but for data that would support them. He may have put a whole lot of work into that, but still it's JustSo work. Various specialists say that specific points that Diamond claims are suspect. They have data that tends to contradict that point. But of course it's only a bunch of minor points, not the whole sweeping generalization. Just a lot of his supporting things, the body of detail he uses to make his JustSo stories seem plausible.

I claim that other simple hypotheses can be set up that are just as plausible, and with a lot of work just as much supporting evidence can be found for them. The first is not very hard, the second would take so much work that it isn't worth doing except for someone who hopes to share Diamond's ecological niche. Since I lack credentials in that field, I won't do it.

I have presented various alternative hypotheses here at various times, that I thought were inherently plausible. It's so easy to do that I have mostly forgotten them, one of us could look them up if it's worth arguing. Or I suppose I could make new ones, but I'd have to spend some time on it. The problem is to find things that people here would instinctively believe, as opposed to ideas just as good that people would instinctively disbelieved. A good JustSo story should be tailored to its audience.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

J Thomas - I don't think you have understood Gould, you clearly don't understand Diamond, and probably haven't read it, so let's not waste any more of your time or mine discussing it.

[J Thomas]

CIP, you have brought nothing to the discussion except brief unsubstantiated claims and allegations, so I don't feel I lose much by ending discussion with you.

[Jon Kay]

Ralph: maybe the violent gene only in men thesis is harder to find evidence for than you thought, huh?