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 okay Nov 21, 2009
What can I say about this book that has not been written already? It seams the author has a view then went out to write a book that proves this view. Interesting ideas but there is not one chapter that would prove his theory wrong. I find that odd that everything points to him being right.
Diamond in the rough. Nov 17, 2009
The critiques of Guns, Germs, and Steel show it is a very controversial book: many reviews, very long, very incisive.
The main idea of the book ¯ that history on the largest scale is determined by geography and biology ¯ I have never seen presented so thoroughly. Diamond analyzes suites of plant and animal species available for domestication, and shows how the combinations gave some cultures inestimable advantages over those less endowed, which allowed them to abandon the wandering life-style of the hunter-gatherer, and use the food surplus to support indirect contributors who could build social and political structures, warfare organizations, alphabets, and technologies. A tremendous headstart over others.
He also shows how the orientation of the continents (Eurasia east-west, across a narrow batch of climates, the Americas and Africa north-south across a wide batch of climates) made it easy for agricultural discoveries to pass between Asia and Europe, but almost impossible for them to be disseminated on the other continents. And of course, it was agricultural advances that made all the others possible. Fascinating idea.
But so many faults.
Diamond combines Europe and Asia into "Eurasia", which may be acceptable as geography but not as history. The fact is that the Fertile Crescent (source of European culture) and China (Asian culture) are two very separate fonts of civilization, that led in very different directions, and combining them is unrealistic.
Several times he says the last Ice Age ended 13000 years ago. Now an Ice Age takes 100,000 years to build up, as icecaps advance south, and about 50,000 to melt back, and they are still melting. I don't think any geologist can say to within a millennium or so when the last ended or next will start, but it is clearly simplistic to insist on 13,000 years ago as the cusp between two Ice Ages. If it were, the Earth would have been detectably cooling over historical time, not warming.
The "Germs" part of GG&S is another oversimplification. If the settled peoples of the world gave the others animal-derived diseases like smallpox and influenza, the hunter-gatherers gave back anthrax, plague, and siphylis. The fact is that microbe transmission took a tremendous leap, in both directions, after the discovery of navigation, and all peoples were equally affected; but the civilized peoples were in a better position to study and confine disease. Diamond's text leaves the impression that Europeans deliberately used disease as a weapon, which he doesn't document.
Then there is the circular reasoning about domestication of animal and plant species. Certainly, the peoples of the crescent had a fortunate suite of plants and animals available to them, and this gave them a headstart (not a new idea), but other peoples had other groups available. But (Diamond says) the other groups were "undomesticable". Why undomesticable? Well, obviously, because they weren't domesticated! Diamond blames the plants and animals as "undomesticable", instead of blaming the people who failed to domesticate them. A case in point (which Diamond claims to address but never does) is the bison: the European bison ("wizent") was domesticated to give our cattle, but North Americans never domesticated the American version.
But the worst of GG&S is the bias. Apparently all historians and anthropologists are racist - except, of course, Diamond. In the nineteenth century, some European thinkers concluded that other races were intellectually inferior to Caucasians, but no one has thought that in the twentieth, which is when almost all of modern anthropology was worked out. Diamond's racist historians never existed - they are straw men, invented only to be maligned. I was particularly affronted by his view that examiners of intelligence tests, following WW II, "tried to show" that US blacks were less intelligent than whites. With thousands of test results pouring in over decades, they naturally analyzed them for whatever stats they could get. The tiny, but statistically-significant, difference between blacks and whites was discovered, but quickly attributed to flaws in the test structure, differences in education opportunities, and problems with administering the tests. It is obvious that racial differences in intelligence (if any) are infinitesimal in comparison with the range of differences within any one race. And now, so many people of all backgrounds have been thrown together into the modern work pool that it is quite obvious that anyone can do anything. There are winners and losers, still, of course, but not because of race. Everyone has known this for half a century, but Diamond tries to make it racist, to make something offensive out of it.
If Diamond had ignored his predjudices and focussed on his technical material, GG&S would be a better book.
 amazing book Nov 16, 2009
ever since my anthropology teacher assigned me this book in high school its been one of my favorite books. jared diamond gives an excelent discription of how human societies have developed in so many different ways.
Really good (especially if you like sorghum) Nov 07, 2009
Great book! If you're going to say anything about politics you kind of have to read this book. Which is a shame because it's really long and hard. I nearly threw it on the floor about ten times because I was so sick of reading about different cereal crops and locations. But you know how it is -- you have to include a lot of proof if you're not going to say that rich white nations really deserve to be that way cos of their skills and hard work.
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How to win a Pulitzer. Oct 22, 2009
Apparently, if you can put together a couple of hundred pages arguing all races of people are equal, awards committees all over the globe are going to be tripping over themselves to give you a prize. Jared Diamond, congratulations on the Pulitzer. Even so, Diamond's work is readable, informative, and makes excellent arguments that the world is the way it is today because of geography, specifically, that large land areas oriented east-west, like Euro-Asia, are more likely to expand their agricultural successes, and hence their population and influence, due to there being similar climates at similar latitudes, and the serendipity of high yield plants such as wheat and domesticable animals such as oxen, occurring in some regions and not others. And if the differences are from these environmental factors, than they certainly cannot be from race. Had the Aborigines wondered to the Fertile Crescent and the Caucasians to Australia a few thousand years ago, then today the Aborigines would be suffering the guilt of Western Civilization while the Caucasians live happily in the Outback. Diamond may be right, but he certainly doesn't hide the fact that, when it comes to race, he is anything but an unbiased researcher: "the objection to racial explanations is not just that they are loathsome". Unbiased researchers don't condemn a possible conclusion, or any conclusion, in the prologue as loathsome without tainting their objectivity and undermining their obligation to follow the facts wherever they may lead. Worse yet, while he asserts that all races are about equal, just subject to geography and serendipity, he can't help but to commit the same loathsome act he himself condemns by claiming New Guineans are of "superior intelligence." This aside, Guns, Germs, and Steel offers a fascinating look at the last fifty thousand years of brutal conquests by the technologically superior societies over the less advanced with genuine insights into the underlying reasons that made it possible.
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