Jared Diamond
Author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
About the Author
Jared Mason Diamond is a physiologist, ecologist, and the author of several popular science books. Born in Boston in 1937, Diamond earned his B.A. at Harvard and his Ph.D. from Cambridge. A distinguished teacher and researcher, Diamond is well-known for the columns he contributes to the widely read show more magazines Natural History and Discover. Diamond's book The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal was heralded for its accessibility and for its blending of science and social science. The interdisciplinary Guns, Germs and Steel--Diamond's examination of the relationship between scientific technology and economic disparity--won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. Diamond has won a McArthur Foundation Fellowship in addition to several smaller awards for his science and writing. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Jared Diamond
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012) — Author — 2,365 copies, 51 reviews
The Third Chimpanzee for Young People: On the Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (For Young People Series) (2014) 49 copies, 2 reviews
Norse Greenland: A Controlled Experiment in Collapse--A Selection from Collapse (Penguin Tracks) (2012) 8 copies
Third Chimpanzee The 2 copies
The medicine inside the body is analytical (Chinese edidion) Pinyin: ti nei yao wu fen xi (2006) 2 copies
Sex and the Female Agenda 2 copies
Speaking with a Single Tongue 2 copies
Father's Milk 1 copy
The Arrow of Disease 1 copy
The Evolution of Dragons 1 copy
Building to Code 1 copy
How Africa Became Black 1 copy
Dining With Snakes 1 copy
The Return of Cholera 1 copy
Writing Right 1 copy
How to Tame a Wild Plant 1 copy
Race Without Color 1 copy
Empire of Uniformity 1 copy
Playing God at the Zoo 1 copy
Easter's End 1 copy
Question of Size 1 copy
Why Women Change 1 copy
The Best Way to Sell Sex 1 copy
The Curse of Qwerty 1 copy
Momente decisive 1 copy
Ружья, микробы и сталь. История человеческих сообществ (Эксклюзивная классика) (Russian Edition) 1 copy
Turning A Man 1 copy
Reversal of Fortune 1 copy
Silent Partner (CD) 1 copy
Alone in a Crowded Universe 1 copy
Continental Divides" 1 copy
[Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies] [By: Diamond Ph.D., Jared] [July, 2005] (2005) 1 copy
Пушки, вируси и стомана 1 copy
Összeomlás 1 copy
"Easter Islands End" 1 copy
The Red Flag of Optimality 1 copy
Guns 1 copy
Catherine the Great 1 copy
Associated Works
What Is Your Dangerous Idea? Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable (2007) — Contributor — 668 copies, 8 reviews
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History — Spring 2014 (2014) — Author ""Behind the Lines: When Empires Collapse" — 3 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Diamond, Jared Mason
- Other names
- Diamond, Jared M.
- Birthdate
- 1937-09-10
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Roxbury Latin School
Harvard University (BA | 1958)
University of Cambridge (PhD | Physiology and Biophysics | 1961) - Occupations
- evolutionary biologist
physiologist
biogeographer
Professor of Physiology
environmentalist
anthropologist (show all 9)
ornithologist
linguist
science writer - Organizations
- University of California, Los Angeles
World Wildlife Fund
The Skeptics Society - Awards and honors
- American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1973)
National Academy of Sciences (1979)
American Philosophical Society (1988)
MacArthur Fellowship (1985)
Elliott Coues Award (1998)
Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Prize (1997) (show all 22)
Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science (2002)
Randi Award (1994)
Zoological Society of San Diego Conservation Medal (1993)
Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize (1992)
Tanner Lecturer (1992)
Archie Carr Medal (1989)
California Book Awards (1998)
Franklin L. Burr Award (1979)
Nathaniel Bowditch Prize (1976)
Kaiser Permanente/Golden Apple Teaching Award (1976)
National Medal of Science (1999)
Kew International Medal (2012)
Lannan Literary Award (1999)
Distinguished Achievement Award (1975)
Distinguished Teaching Award (1972, 1973)
Prize Fellowship (1961) - Relationships
- Cohen, Marie Nabel (wife)
Diamond, Josh (son)
Diamond, Max (son) - Short biography
- Jared Diamond, professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles ... began his scientific career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography. [from Guns, Germs, and Steel (2005)]JARED DIAMOND is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Until recently he was Professor of Physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine. He is the author of The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?; Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the widely acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, which also is the winner of Britain's 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize.
Dr. Diamond is also the author of two other trade books: The Third Chimpanzee, which won The Los Angeles Times Book award for the best science book of 1992 and Britain's 1992 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize; and Why is Sex Fun? (ScienceMasters Series).
Dr. Diamond is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship ("Genius Award"); research prizes of the American Physiological Society, National Geographic Society, and Zoological Society of San Diego; and many teaching awards and endowed public lectureships. In addition, he has been elected a member of all three of the leading national scientific/academic honorary societies (National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society).
His field experience includes 17 expeditions to New Guinea and neighboring islands, to study ecology and evolution of birds; rediscovery of New Guinea's long-lost goldenfronted bowerbird; other field projects in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. As a conservationist he devised a comprehensive plan, almost all of which was subsequently implemented, for Indonesian New Guinea's national park system; numerous field projects for the Indonesian government and World Wildlife Fund; founding member of the board of the Society of Conservation Biology; member of the Board of Directors of World Wildlife Fund/USA.
http://edge.org/memberbio/jared_diamo... - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- Places of residence
- Los Angeles, California, USA
- Map Location
- Massachusetts, USA
Members
Discussions
AUGUST - SPOILERS - Collapse in The Green Dragon (October 2014)
Reviews
Jared Diamond begins his book with a question: "[W]hy weren't Native Americans, Africans and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians?" The obvious answer in my mind is that they simply had no interest in waging a war of genocide against the rest of the world, that indeed these cultures would have considered such an effort insane. But this answer does not satisfy Jared Diamond, because he cannot fathom that a culture could simply not be show more interested in conquest and genocide. He cannot fathom that a culture might not want to be an empire, that a culture might not want to be European. He is looking outward from a European culture and asking why other cultures are different from his own.
It quickly becomes clear that he is unaware of this bias, as it does not occur to him to even consider whether the answer to his question lies in culture. Rather he frames our potential answers for us as follows: geography, or overt racism. Jared Diamond dismantles the argument of the overtly racist position ("Non-whites failed to wage genocide and conquest against the rest of the world because they are too stupid") in favor of the covertly racist position ("Non-whites failed to wage genocide and conquest against the world because they didn't have the geographic advantages that Europe and Asia did"). By comparing all societies against a European model, the author is inclined to see all other societies as "failed Europes" that "lack" certain attributes. That there is absolutely no evidence that non-Eurasian indigenous people had any interest in conquering, subjugating, or exterminating the rest of the world is apparently a moot point. Again and again he talks about how non-Europeans "failed" to match some European 'achievement', without bothering to provide evidence that they ever even had any interest in it. To get a sense of the absurdity of this, imagine that he had chosen African hunter-gatherer societies as his model instead. Would it then make sense to talk about how Europeans "failed" to achieve a communal society, an autarkic foraging-based economy, and a total absence of war? It would only make sense if Europe had a clear cultural interest in making these achievements. Otherwise, this is a textbook example of ethnocentrism, or the evaluation of another culture by the standards of one's own.
Within another hundred pages or so, it becomes clear that Diamond is fundamentally an amateur in many of the subjects he professes knowledge in. His background is in geography, biophysics, and physiology, and yet has written a book built heavily dependent on the fields of anthropology, archaeology, ecology, and history. He argues, for instance, that Clovis peoples hunted megafauna such as mammoths to extinction, in spite of the clear impossibility of such a feat. (Indeed, a much more plausible theory now suggests that a comet impact was largely responsible.) He also gives a retelling of the old myth that native people reached America by following a land bridge and an "ice free corridor", despite current evidence that areas as far south as Chile were populated before the land bridge supposedly opened up. (The idea of a land bridge crossing and ice free corridor were never strongly supported by anthropological evidence, they were simply conjectured on the racist assumption that native people were incapable of sea travel.)
Another example of incompetency is when he makes the claim that most 'chiefdoms' are "kleptomaniac" societies in which the elites steal from the common members of the society, without actually using examples from the "chiefdom" societies he mentions. Instead he speaks of "chiefdoms" in a mythical sort of way, as if they were all fundamentally the same, and then tells us a story about this generalized, unnamed chiefdom. In this way he can advance his theory of cultural evolution without providing any factual evidence to support it. And in fact the societies he does claim to be chiefdoms are often very different from his idealized portrait of "the chiefdom". For instance one of the "chiefdoms" he describes in the book are the "Kwakiutl" (who are actually the Kwak'waka'wakw; 'Kwakiutl' was the name of a single Kwak'waka'wakw band that was mistaken by early anthropologists for the name of the larger group). But rather than being a "kleptomaniac" society in which the top members steal from the bottom, Kwak'waka'wakw society is based politically on potlatching, a system in which leaders are ranked not for how much they accumulate from the commoners, but how much wealth they can give away to them. Only by continuously giving can a leader show that he is worthy of the community's respect and maintain his status. A situation completely 180 from Jared Diamond's simple system for caricaturing diverse societies, which comes us to us incidentally from antiquated works of anthropology, such as Peter Farb's "Man's Rise to Civilization As Shown by the Indians of North America", first published in 1968).
These are just a few of the more striking examples. He often reveals his lack of a hand in more subtle ways, as for instance when he describes the 9% annual death rate of First Nations people in Saskatchewan from European germs as "incredible". But this rate is hardly so incredible. Where I live, just to give an example, 90% of the local population (the Kalapuya) died over a period of three years when malaria was introduced to the area. If he had researched the subject in any depth he would have found that the death rate in Saskatchewan was actually fairly typical.
It also becomes clear that Diamond did not research his question to find an answer, but rather answered his question and then handpicked evidence to support that answer. Even still, much of his evidence is flaky at best and lends itself better to other explanations. For instance, he tries to explain that the apparent naivete of American Indian leaders in the face of psychopathic conquistadors was due to a lack of history books. Even if we ignore Diamond's ignorance of the complex oral histories in these societies, this argument seems rather impoverished. A much more likely answer is that these cultures had simply never come into contact with behavior so callous, arrogant, and mythomanic as that presented by the conquistadors, and thus were unable to prepare themselves against it. If this reasoning occurred to Diamond, he was careful to ignore it, as it directly contradicts his thesis. Indeed, Diamond took great care not to present any explanations that discouraged his overall conclusion, gambling that exhibiting unwavering confidence in a carefully constructed story would prevent people from noticing his academic shortcomings.
Considering his book was a bestseller and won him both a Pulitzer Prize and a documentary series, it appears that his gamble paid off quite handsomely. show less
It quickly becomes clear that he is unaware of this bias, as it does not occur to him to even consider whether the answer to his question lies in culture. Rather he frames our potential answers for us as follows: geography, or overt racism. Jared Diamond dismantles the argument of the overtly racist position ("Non-whites failed to wage genocide and conquest against the rest of the world because they are too stupid") in favor of the covertly racist position ("Non-whites failed to wage genocide and conquest against the world because they didn't have the geographic advantages that Europe and Asia did"). By comparing all societies against a European model, the author is inclined to see all other societies as "failed Europes" that "lack" certain attributes. That there is absolutely no evidence that non-Eurasian indigenous people had any interest in conquering, subjugating, or exterminating the rest of the world is apparently a moot point. Again and again he talks about how non-Europeans "failed" to match some European 'achievement', without bothering to provide evidence that they ever even had any interest in it. To get a sense of the absurdity of this, imagine that he had chosen African hunter-gatherer societies as his model instead. Would it then make sense to talk about how Europeans "failed" to achieve a communal society, an autarkic foraging-based economy, and a total absence of war? It would only make sense if Europe had a clear cultural interest in making these achievements. Otherwise, this is a textbook example of ethnocentrism, or the evaluation of another culture by the standards of one's own.
Within another hundred pages or so, it becomes clear that Diamond is fundamentally an amateur in many of the subjects he professes knowledge in. His background is in geography, biophysics, and physiology, and yet has written a book built heavily dependent on the fields of anthropology, archaeology, ecology, and history. He argues, for instance, that Clovis peoples hunted megafauna such as mammoths to extinction, in spite of the clear impossibility of such a feat. (Indeed, a much more plausible theory now suggests that a comet impact was largely responsible.) He also gives a retelling of the old myth that native people reached America by following a land bridge and an "ice free corridor", despite current evidence that areas as far south as Chile were populated before the land bridge supposedly opened up. (The idea of a land bridge crossing and ice free corridor were never strongly supported by anthropological evidence, they were simply conjectured on the racist assumption that native people were incapable of sea travel.)
Another example of incompetency is when he makes the claim that most 'chiefdoms' are "kleptomaniac" societies in which the elites steal from the common members of the society, without actually using examples from the "chiefdom" societies he mentions. Instead he speaks of "chiefdoms" in a mythical sort of way, as if they were all fundamentally the same, and then tells us a story about this generalized, unnamed chiefdom. In this way he can advance his theory of cultural evolution without providing any factual evidence to support it. And in fact the societies he does claim to be chiefdoms are often very different from his idealized portrait of "the chiefdom". For instance one of the "chiefdoms" he describes in the book are the "Kwakiutl" (who are actually the Kwak'waka'wakw; 'Kwakiutl' was the name of a single Kwak'waka'wakw band that was mistaken by early anthropologists for the name of the larger group). But rather than being a "kleptomaniac" society in which the top members steal from the bottom, Kwak'waka'wakw society is based politically on potlatching, a system in which leaders are ranked not for how much they accumulate from the commoners, but how much wealth they can give away to them. Only by continuously giving can a leader show that he is worthy of the community's respect and maintain his status. A situation completely 180 from Jared Diamond's simple system for caricaturing diverse societies, which comes us to us incidentally from antiquated works of anthropology, such as Peter Farb's "Man's Rise to Civilization As Shown by the Indians of North America", first published in 1968).
These are just a few of the more striking examples. He often reveals his lack of a hand in more subtle ways, as for instance when he describes the 9% annual death rate of First Nations people in Saskatchewan from European germs as "incredible". But this rate is hardly so incredible. Where I live, just to give an example, 90% of the local population (the Kalapuya) died over a period of three years when malaria was introduced to the area. If he had researched the subject in any depth he would have found that the death rate in Saskatchewan was actually fairly typical.
It also becomes clear that Diamond did not research his question to find an answer, but rather answered his question and then handpicked evidence to support that answer. Even still, much of his evidence is flaky at best and lends itself better to other explanations. For instance, he tries to explain that the apparent naivete of American Indian leaders in the face of psychopathic conquistadors was due to a lack of history books. Even if we ignore Diamond's ignorance of the complex oral histories in these societies, this argument seems rather impoverished. A much more likely answer is that these cultures had simply never come into contact with behavior so callous, arrogant, and mythomanic as that presented by the conquistadors, and thus were unable to prepare themselves against it. If this reasoning occurred to Diamond, he was careful to ignore it, as it directly contradicts his thesis. Indeed, Diamond took great care not to present any explanations that discouraged his overall conclusion, gambling that exhibiting unwavering confidence in a carefully constructed story would prevent people from noticing his academic shortcomings.
Considering his book was a bestseller and won him both a Pulitzer Prize and a documentary series, it appears that his gamble paid off quite handsomely. show less
FINALLY! THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION EVERYONE'S BEEN ASKING!
And the answer is... we don't know. That's also the answer to a lot of related sexual questions from menopause to penis size. Humans are outliers and we don't really have any definitive answers. What we do get however is a hell of a lot of speculation. Now some of this is based solidly in research science, such as the glamorous collecting of monkey piss to try and analyze which monkey is in estrus and when. The remainder is show more unfortunately a lot of "just so" storytelling, using evolutionary theories and sexual selection and a dash of social science findings to create plausible scienc-y sounding narratives for why humans are an outlier. Diamond's books often stumble as they try to answer the big questions on this very same step. One illustration of the problem with this is exemplified in the book as he describes two competing theories for why human females have "hidden" fertile periods and not a gigantic glowing ass. One theory says this is to create defensive monogamous relationships, the other says it's creating a society where everyone's sleeping around which protects women and children as any male could possibly have fathered the kids. Diamond tries to synthesize the view by saying it's a bit of one and a bit of the other. The only real hard science here is a comparative view of other primates and their evolutionary strategies.
It's not so much the evolution of human sexuality as it is "some plausible sounding evolutionary explanatory models that might explain" human sexuality. How satisfying that ends up being depends a bit on what you went into the book wanting and how much you like asking "how do you actually know that". show less
And the answer is... we don't know. That's also the answer to a lot of related sexual questions from menopause to penis size. Humans are outliers and we don't really have any definitive answers. What we do get however is a hell of a lot of speculation. Now some of this is based solidly in research science, such as the glamorous collecting of monkey piss to try and analyze which monkey is in estrus and when. The remainder is show more unfortunately a lot of "just so" storytelling, using evolutionary theories and sexual selection and a dash of social science findings to create plausible scienc-y sounding narratives for why humans are an outlier. Diamond's books often stumble as they try to answer the big questions on this very same step. One illustration of the problem with this is exemplified in the book as he describes two competing theories for why human females have "hidden" fertile periods and not a gigantic glowing ass. One theory says this is to create defensive monogamous relationships, the other says it's creating a society where everyone's sleeping around which protects women and children as any male could possibly have fathered the kids. Diamond tries to synthesize the view by saying it's a bit of one and a bit of the other. The only real hard science here is a comparative view of other primates and their evolutionary strategies.
It's not so much the evolution of human sexuality as it is "some plausible sounding evolutionary explanatory models that might explain" human sexuality. How satisfying that ends up being depends a bit on what you went into the book wanting and how much you like asking "how do you actually know that". show less
Diamond in the Rough
Albert Einstein spent the last half of his life trying to fit the universe into one elegant formula. He did not succeed. Jared Diamond is trying to do the same with national political crises in Upheaval. He has developed a list of 12 factors that show up in times of crisis at the nation level. The degree to which the nation deals with those factors (if at all) determines how successful it will likely be in dealing with it.
The book exists at three levels: the individual, show more the nation and the world. The factors relating to their crises can be quite similar. The bulk of the book is on seven countries Diamond has had relationships with, having lived and/or worked in them. They are Indonesia, Japan, Germany, USA, Australia, Chile and Finland. They’re all different, and they all handled their crises differently. Some are still in crisis.
A crisis is a serious challenge that cannot be solved by existing methods of coping, Diamond says. The examples include foreign invasion, internal revolution, evolving past previous bad policy, externalizing problems, and denial of problems.
As for the US, Diamond sees it entering a crisis of identity and survival, riven by self-centered Americans who only care about themselves and today – right up to the top. Perspective, reflection and especially co-operation and compromise are absent from this crisis.
These are Diamond’s 12 factors for national crises:
1. National consensus that one’s nation is in crisis
2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something
3. Building fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved
4. Getting material and financial help from other nations
5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems
6. National identity
7. Honest national self-appraisal
8. Historical experience of previous national crises
9. Dealing with national failure
10. Situation-specific national flexibility
11. National core values
12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints
The Chinese word weiji means crisis. It component characters are wei for danger and ji for opportunity. As in many clouds have silver linings. The example he gives first is Finland’s stunningly rapid industrialization when faced with $300M in war reparations after negotiating peace with the invading Soviet Union. Finland only had four million people at the time.
Things get dicier at the global level. Looking forward to potential crises like nuclear winter and climate change, Diamond’s model shows the nations of the world, and in particular the USA, are not set, ready or equipped to make the efforts the model stipulates to come out the other side of the crisis decently.
The structure of the book is standardized: a lot of history, some insight from personal relationships, and how the historical crisis fits the parameters Diamond set out. Mostly, it’s a lot of international history; interesting, and probably new to most readers. By far the best chapter is the epilogue, where he tackles the real issues: do national leaders make a difference in crises, and do nations need a crisis to act, or can they anticipate. The answers are sometimes to all the questions.
Diamond has created an interesting matrix for future study, but its application to the real world remains a question mark. It was a good exercise, but of indeterminate value.
David Wineberg show less
Albert Einstein spent the last half of his life trying to fit the universe into one elegant formula. He did not succeed. Jared Diamond is trying to do the same with national political crises in Upheaval. He has developed a list of 12 factors that show up in times of crisis at the nation level. The degree to which the nation deals with those factors (if at all) determines how successful it will likely be in dealing with it.
The book exists at three levels: the individual, show more the nation and the world. The factors relating to their crises can be quite similar. The bulk of the book is on seven countries Diamond has had relationships with, having lived and/or worked in them. They are Indonesia, Japan, Germany, USA, Australia, Chile and Finland. They’re all different, and they all handled their crises differently. Some are still in crisis.
A crisis is a serious challenge that cannot be solved by existing methods of coping, Diamond says. The examples include foreign invasion, internal revolution, evolving past previous bad policy, externalizing problems, and denial of problems.
As for the US, Diamond sees it entering a crisis of identity and survival, riven by self-centered Americans who only care about themselves and today – right up to the top. Perspective, reflection and especially co-operation and compromise are absent from this crisis.
These are Diamond’s 12 factors for national crises:
1. National consensus that one’s nation is in crisis
2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something
3. Building fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved
4. Getting material and financial help from other nations
5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems
6. National identity
7. Honest national self-appraisal
8. Historical experience of previous national crises
9. Dealing with national failure
10. Situation-specific national flexibility
11. National core values
12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints
The Chinese word weiji means crisis. It component characters are wei for danger and ji for opportunity. As in many clouds have silver linings. The example he gives first is Finland’s stunningly rapid industrialization when faced with $300M in war reparations after negotiating peace with the invading Soviet Union. Finland only had four million people at the time.
Things get dicier at the global level. Looking forward to potential crises like nuclear winter and climate change, Diamond’s model shows the nations of the world, and in particular the USA, are not set, ready or equipped to make the efforts the model stipulates to come out the other side of the crisis decently.
The structure of the book is standardized: a lot of history, some insight from personal relationships, and how the historical crisis fits the parameters Diamond set out. Mostly, it’s a lot of international history; interesting, and probably new to most readers. By far the best chapter is the epilogue, where he tackles the real issues: do national leaders make a difference in crises, and do nations need a crisis to act, or can they anticipate. The answers are sometimes to all the questions.
Diamond has created an interesting matrix for future study, but its application to the real world remains a question mark. It was a good exercise, but of indeterminate value.
David Wineberg show less
Reading this made me think of the story of the blind men and the elephant; a Jain version of the story reads:
The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid show more pipe.
At the end of the book, I did find Diamond persuasive enough to be convinced he had part of the truth, but I admit at this point of my life I'm skeptical of simple explanations that purport to explain everything. Granted, sometimes there are cases like that--at the root of the Theory of a Heliocentric System or Evolution by Natural Selection is a pretty simple concept. But think of trying to explain an individual human being solely by his environment. Similarly, Jared Diamond here tries to explain the "broad patterns" of human history by one factor--environment. Geography really.
The argument goes something like this. Humans had a "Great Leap Forward" around 50 thousand years ago--probably through a reorganization of the brain--that allowed them to invent things more sophisticated than crude stone tools and fire. They then spread to every continent but Antarctica, and about 11 thousand years ago, after the end of the Ice Age, came the Neolithic and the first herding and agriculture. But this is where human society became complicated and unequal. Because the different continents offered a different "suite" of animals and plants to choose from for domestication--and in that respect the Fertile Crescent (and to a lesser extent China) were insanely gifted and the continents outside Eurasia poor. Also, the axis of the continents meant diffusion of these developments were much more rapid in Eurasia than the other continents. The package of domesticated plants and animals in Eurasia enabled much greater food production--but also the development of "crowd diseases" such as small pox that came with close association with herding animals such as cattle and sheep. The greater food production caused a population explosion that led to more powerful forms of political association devolping and specialization into professions and crafts and with it the invention of writing and other technologies. And all that is at the root as to why when the Old World and New World came into contact, who would win and who would lose was inevitable.
There is something very appealing about Diamond's hypothesis. It's a theory of history without heroes or villains. Or at least without nationalist triumphalism or finger-pointing. It's the antithesis of racism. Diamond quickly dismisses the racist IQ theories such as presented in Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve. I'm using "racist" here, or trying to, in the objective, neutral definition that it consists of the belief that there are innate differences between subgroups of humans that make some superior to others. Of course, it would have helped if Diamond didn't talk about how he thought natives of Papua New Guinea are probably superior in intelligence to Westerners (tribal warfare and knowledge of natural environment selecting for intelligence more than literacy and video games). But as he'd argue, since that would only cut against the results you'd expect, it doesn't affect his analysis of the important factors that gave some parts of the globe a head start on powerful technologies and social organizations.
I'm skeptical of Diamond's claims for his theory as the foundation of a "science of history" that could explain nearly everything. As with explaining the formation of individual character, I suspect history is formed by an array of factors--from material factors such as those Diamond details to the "Great Men" theory of Carlyle to the cultural and political factors such as those detailed in Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Much of Guns, Germs and Steel read like a refutation of Landes' book, which was actually published a year after this one. I don't want to go into the parallels between the books and contradictions point by point, except I think both works are worth reading and provide food for thought. Both agree that "fragmentation" of political control (which Diamond again thinks might have geographical roots) might explain why Europe, rather than China, was the center of the scientific and industrial revolutions.
I'd give Diamond's book a slight edge over that of Landes simply because I found it more fun to read. I could have done without Diamond's politically correct sensibilities that made it necessary to always put "discovery," "exploration" and "backwardness" in quotes. At the same time his claim that what happened between Pizarro and Incan Emperor Atahuallpa is "well-known" based only on Spanish accounts was eyebrow raising. My eyes did glaze over a bit at the long, involved detailed discussions of linguistics, and many of his points are repetitive. Nothing is cited and sourced. But I found it fascinating to read about that crux between pre-history and history--when and where and why humans first developed agriculture and systems of writing and the development of human diseases. In my geeky way I loved reading about how writing developed independently in Mesoamerica, China and the Fertile Crescent. How writing spread from the Fertile Crescent to Egypt, which developed a system of writing that included an alphabet side by side its hieroglyphs developed into the first alphabet by the Phoenicians. How Sequoyah developed a syllabary for the Cherokee. As a once upon a time political science major in college with my own idiosyncratic political beliefs, I found Diamond's speculations on the formation of the state thought-provoking. I was surprised to find out leprosy is a pretty "new" disease that first appeared in 200 B.C. Given its mention in the Bible, I thought it a particularly ancient malady. And did you know chickens were first domesticated in China? Why we type on a QWERTY keyboard? Well, you would have had you read this book. show less
The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid show more pipe.
At the end of the book, I did find Diamond persuasive enough to be convinced he had part of the truth, but I admit at this point of my life I'm skeptical of simple explanations that purport to explain everything. Granted, sometimes there are cases like that--at the root of the Theory of a Heliocentric System or Evolution by Natural Selection is a pretty simple concept. But think of trying to explain an individual human being solely by his environment. Similarly, Jared Diamond here tries to explain the "broad patterns" of human history by one factor--environment. Geography really.
The argument goes something like this. Humans had a "Great Leap Forward" around 50 thousand years ago--probably through a reorganization of the brain--that allowed them to invent things more sophisticated than crude stone tools and fire. They then spread to every continent but Antarctica, and about 11 thousand years ago, after the end of the Ice Age, came the Neolithic and the first herding and agriculture. But this is where human society became complicated and unequal. Because the different continents offered a different "suite" of animals and plants to choose from for domestication--and in that respect the Fertile Crescent (and to a lesser extent China) were insanely gifted and the continents outside Eurasia poor. Also, the axis of the continents meant diffusion of these developments were much more rapid in Eurasia than the other continents. The package of domesticated plants and animals in Eurasia enabled much greater food production--but also the development of "crowd diseases" such as small pox that came with close association with herding animals such as cattle and sheep. The greater food production caused a population explosion that led to more powerful forms of political association devolping and specialization into professions and crafts and with it the invention of writing and other technologies. And all that is at the root as to why when the Old World and New World came into contact, who would win and who would lose was inevitable.
There is something very appealing about Diamond's hypothesis. It's a theory of history without heroes or villains. Or at least without nationalist triumphalism or finger-pointing. It's the antithesis of racism. Diamond quickly dismisses the racist IQ theories such as presented in Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve. I'm using "racist" here, or trying to, in the objective, neutral definition that it consists of the belief that there are innate differences between subgroups of humans that make some superior to others. Of course, it would have helped if Diamond didn't talk about how he thought natives of Papua New Guinea are probably superior in intelligence to Westerners (tribal warfare and knowledge of natural environment selecting for intelligence more than literacy and video games). But as he'd argue, since that would only cut against the results you'd expect, it doesn't affect his analysis of the important factors that gave some parts of the globe a head start on powerful technologies and social organizations.
I'm skeptical of Diamond's claims for his theory as the foundation of a "science of history" that could explain nearly everything. As with explaining the formation of individual character, I suspect history is formed by an array of factors--from material factors such as those Diamond details to the "Great Men" theory of Carlyle to the cultural and political factors such as those detailed in Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Much of Guns, Germs and Steel read like a refutation of Landes' book, which was actually published a year after this one. I don't want to go into the parallels between the books and contradictions point by point, except I think both works are worth reading and provide food for thought. Both agree that "fragmentation" of political control (which Diamond again thinks might have geographical roots) might explain why Europe, rather than China, was the center of the scientific and industrial revolutions.
I'd give Diamond's book a slight edge over that of Landes simply because I found it more fun to read. I could have done without Diamond's politically correct sensibilities that made it necessary to always put "discovery," "exploration" and "backwardness" in quotes. At the same time his claim that what happened between Pizarro and Incan Emperor Atahuallpa is "well-known" based only on Spanish accounts was eyebrow raising. My eyes did glaze over a bit at the long, involved detailed discussions of linguistics, and many of his points are repetitive. Nothing is cited and sourced. But I found it fascinating to read about that crux between pre-history and history--when and where and why humans first developed agriculture and systems of writing and the development of human diseases. In my geeky way I loved reading about how writing developed independently in Mesoamerica, China and the Fertile Crescent. How writing spread from the Fertile Crescent to Egypt, which developed a system of writing that included an alphabet side by side its hieroglyphs developed into the first alphabet by the Phoenicians. How Sequoyah developed a syllabary for the Cherokee. As a once upon a time political science major in college with my own idiosyncratic political beliefs, I found Diamond's speculations on the formation of the state thought-provoking. I was surprised to find out leprosy is a pretty "new" disease that first appeared in 200 B.C. Given its mention in the Bible, I thought it a particularly ancient malady. And did you know chickens were first domesticated in China? Why we type on a QWERTY keyboard? Well, you would have had you read this book. show less
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