Scientists put Jared Diamond's continental axis hypothesis to the test

https://www.psypost.org/scientists-put-jared-diamonds-continental-axis-hypothesis-to-the-test-heres-what-they-found/

by nickcotter • 2 years ago

143 229 2 years ago

I found the more mundane explanations in "Why Nations Fail" to be far more convincing than the geographical determinism of "Guns, Germs and Steel"

Vinnl5• 2 years ago

They seemed largely complementary to me? Guns, Germs and Steel was mostly about how people, culture, ideas and skills spread across the world, whereas Why Nations Fail seemed to be mostly about what happens after that, at a nation state level.

To be honest I didn't understand why they felt the need to position it as a rebuttal of GG&S when reading it either.

alephnerd4• 2 years ago

Geographic arguments are a very common tool in pop Social Sciences, for example the correlation between landlocked states and poverty or supposed American exceptionalism due to the fertile Midwest (while ignoring similar agrarian immigrant countries like Brazil and Argentina).

Furthermore, the kinds of argumements that Diamond would provide weren't actually "tested" per say. Social Sciences are a "Science" (albeit flawed in some shape or form), but are dependent on validating a hypothesis in a reproducible manner as well, hence why economics has basically become applied math since the 50s (and similar changes in other fields like Sociology, Linguistics, Polticial Science, and Anthro as well)

There isn't much difference between grifters like Perun or Zeihan and Jared Diamond.

Also, Jared Diamond doesn't have a background in Economics or Political Science - he is an Ecologist/Environmental Scientist (and one of the best ones at that), and as such reading GGS induces Dunning-Kruger for those with a background in Comparitive Politics.

jcranmer2• 2 years ago

Jared Diamond is a pretty big proponent of environmental determinism. This can be somewhat obscured in GG&S itself, but his follow-on book Collapse is a pretty naked advertisement for environmental determinism, and he harps on a lot about it in interviews and the like. In fact, the introduction to Why Nations Fail (if memory serves correctly) includes some discussion by people who saw the book before it was published, and one of those discussions was Diamond, who complained that the book rejected environmental determinism as a major factor (to which the authors responded "the evidence just doesn't hold up, what more do you want us to say?").

A lot of the complaints about GG&S are to some degree a complaint about Diamond in general being mapped on to the least offensive of his works, and if that is the only exposure you have to Diamond, it can be seem like the complaints are coming out of left field.

borissk• 2 years ago

Even if the layout of the land didn't give an advantage to Eurasia + Mediterranean Africa, the sheer size did. It had a lot more arable land, more space for nomadic tribes (capable of fast travel and spread of culture and technology), more resources, more people. Brief study of geography and climate would make it obvious that areas like Mediterranean, Middle East, India and China will become centers of civilization. All these were connected by land and sea routes, that made it possible to exchange knowledge (and germs). Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia didn't stand a chance.

0823498723498722• 2 years ago

The Americas and Australia lacked horses until their (re-)introduction by europeans, whie sub-saharan Africa resisted repeated attempts to introduce horses.

We can guess the effect that might have on exchanges by considering: unmounted but encumbered people travel at about 25km/day; spanish missions in California were about 50km apart; Pony Express riders with relay remounts could cover 120km/day.

wavefunction• 2 years ago

You make it sound like sub-Saharan Africans were offered an unparalleled opportunity with horses and rejected them out of some sort of pique. A quick search indicates that endemic diseases in the region made the husbanding of horses completely impractical until they could be bred over centuries to be resistant to the diseases transmitted as easily as say... a bite from an insect.

The Pony Express lasted all of 18 months and was apparently financially unsustainable.

tomjakubowski• 2 years ago

In 1491 people in mountainous South America had domesticated alpacas and llamas, which are better suited than horses for steep, alpine slopes. The horse was quickly abandoned by Spaniards in such terrain.

dan_mctree• 2 years ago

To my untrained eye, the eastern United States and Uruguay + surroundings also seem like great places for civilizations to thrive. But for some reason those areas did not seem to have particularly large civilizations before the colonization period. Does anyone know of a good reason why these areas were relatively unpopulated compared to the areas you mention but also compared to say Mexico?

brabel3• 2 years ago

Do yourself a favour and just read the book we're talking about. It explains exactly these questions, and many more, even if the current trend is to criticize those explanations because "there could be other factors as well" (which Diamond does acknowledge, but perhaps not enough for everyone).

staminade• 2 years ago

To be fair to Diamond, his arguments in GG&S are bit broader in scope than just the the continental axis hypothesis. The disparity in domesticable animals between Eurasia and other continents always seemed more persuasive than the axial argument. Although it is true that he leans too far into determinism and discounts cultural and economical factors.

RecycledEle• 2 years ago

The domestication if animals has far more to do with the humans domesticating them than the animals.

lolinder• 2 years ago

You're going to need to elaborate on what exactly you mean if you make an incendiary claim like that.

Jared Diamond's argument is that for an animal to be domesticated it needs to have a very specific collection of traits—tameability and ability to breed in captivity being two important ones—and that there weren't any sufficiently good candidates for domestication in the Americas, Africa, or Australia (besides the llama in South America, which they did domesticate).

With which part of this argument do you disagree? What candidates would you propose for domestication in non-Eurasian continents?

scubadude• 2 years ago

Go domesticate a tiger shark ...

eszed3• 2 years ago

One question I've had about domesticable animals that I've never seen addressed - likely because, to be fair, it's unfalsifiable - is How many of the North American large animal species wiped out in the first waves of human settlement would eventually have been domesticable? If the answer is "some, probably" (which doesn't seem unreasonable), then continuous human habitation is a relevant (continental) factor for cultural advancement.

There were horses, at least, not tremendously different morphologically from Asian species, but which (most likely) had not inherited an instinctual fear of humans.

JackFr4• 2 years ago

An interesting section of GG&S addresses how zebras have never been domesticated (for a number of reasons) despite superficially seeming quite similar to horses.

My point is, I guess, it’s hard to know and counterfactuals with hypothetical species are probably not definitive.

CSMastermind4• 2 years ago

The theories are linked. Diamond's assertion that Europeans conquered the world because they had an easier time domesticating animals makes sense if you're talking about the Americas, but not so much when talking about Africa, which was in constant contact with Europe and in theory should have been able to trade for any technology invented there.

Simply saying that Africa didn't have domesticable animals isn't good enough because, certainly, they could have imported them along with other technology from Europe.

The continental axis hypothesis is his answer to this. He says crops (and later animals) could be more easily moved east to west rather than north to south because the climate will change less. In his mind, this explains why Africans didn't adopt European advancements in agriculture and animal domestication.

You don't need a study to debunk this theory within the context of Diamond's overall hypnosis; you need a globe and some measuring tape. Africa's east-west axis (4600m) is only 8% smaller than its north-south axis (5000m), which in turn is almost identical to Eur-Asia's (4,900m). The only time this isn't true is on a distorted map like the Mercator projection he uses in the book.

Sub-Saharan Africa is not some wasteland that couldn't support these animals and crops. And this is obvious when you consider that colonial empires brought their crops to Africa without the need to fundamentally change them for the climate. Colonial holdings in Africa often produced a good chunk of the grain for their empires as a whole.

Axis theories aside, Diamond is just factually wrong about the origins and timelines of domestication. Many of the crops and animals that supposedly helped Europe dominate the world were widely present in Africa centuries before European invasions.

Romans explored into Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1st century BC; Turks and Arabs had established trade routes deep into Africa by the 6th century AD; the Indian Ocean, including the coast of Africa was continually interconnected through trade going back to the bronze age at least, and trade caravans across the Sahara have been recorded in ancient Egyptian records.

This is covered well in Diamond in the Rough: Reflections on Guns, Germs, and Steel https://www.jstor.org/stable/24707701

You could fill a book disproving his theories, but I'll point out one last thing: trying to explain European conquest through the lens of continents is super weird. Africa, let alone any other 'continent,' is a vast and diverse place. The idea of continents in and of itself makes less and less sense the more we learn about geography. You could as reasonably draw continental boundaries in dozens of other ways that would make more sense than the ones Diamond presents in his books.

kurthr• 2 years ago

I just found the continental axis theory kinda weak when describing Europe, because both the trade and the cultures were dominated by the presence of the seas (Celtic, Mediterranean, Black, Caspian) that connect it all from England to France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and all the way to Tehran. The closest you have in the temperate parts of Africa are Lakes Albert, Edward, Kivu, and Tanganyika to Lake Malawi, and perhaps Victoria. The great lakes are too far north, and the rivers of India and China are too sparse. You can barely traverse Australia today. Again, just look at a globe.

There are boats (in Denmark no less) that are 10000 years old. Drawing of trade boats in Egypt are 6000 years old. I'd be surprised if travel and trade by boat wasn't common at the earliest stages of agricultural civilization.

LudwigNagasena2• 2 years ago

You don't need a study to debunk this theory within the context of Diamond's overall hypnosis; you need a globe and some measuring tape. Africa's east-west axis (4600m) is only 8% smaller than its north-south axis (5000m), which in turn is almost identical to Eur-Asia's (4,900m). The only time this isn't true is on a distorted map like the Mercator projection he uses in the book.

Surely Eurasia is around twice than that? You don't need a distorted map to see that the distance between Portugal and Japan is far greater than the distance between Senegal and Somalia.

tuatoru• 2 years ago

Animals, including domesticated, mostly require fairly narrow biomes to thrive.

In Africa there were all sorts of parasites and microbes that played havoc with attempts to grow European animals outside these lucky spots.

The Americas were too isolated and recent; Africa was too connected and old.

thaumasiotes4• 2 years ago

The continental axis hypothesis is his answer to this. He says crops (and later animals) could be more easily moved east to west rather than north to south because the climate will change less. In his mind, this explains why Africans didn't adopt European advancements in agriculture and animal domestication.
You don't need a study to debunk this theory within the context of Diamond's overall hypnosis; you need a globe and some measuring tape. Africa's east-west axis (4600m) is only 8% smaller than its north-south axis (5000m), which in turn is almost identical to Eur-Asia's (4,900m). The only time this isn't true is on a distorted map like the Mercator projection he uses in the book.

Why is that a refutation? Diamond says that Eurasia's east-west axis is much longer than Africa's east-west axis. You're responding that Africa's east-west axis is almost as long as Africa's north-south axis. So what?

(Your following paragraphs make sense as refutations of Diamond, but I don't see how that one does.)

runarberg7• 2 years ago

I haven’t read GG&S (and I’m probably not going to; as this question gives distaste in my mouth) but is it not addressed that the Americas did indeed have domesticated animals pre-contact? I mean they had (among others) llamas, alpacas, dogs, turkeys, ducks and guinea pigs. Apart from domesticated animals they also had very powerful crops like maize, and—probably the best crop of them all—the potato.

I hear this myth quite often, but apart from it not being a good hypothesis, it simply isn’t true, like at all.

But all that is to the side, that I really really hate the question of European domination. I honestly wished the people would stop asking that question, and instead focus on the damage and horrors Europe inflicted on the world with their colonial mania.

jahewson• 2 years ago

Some fair points but you’re really downplaying the inhospitality of much of sub-Saharan Africa wrt productive agriculture. The tsetse fly lays waste to livestock and the thin soils make ploughs useless.

Colonial holdings in Africa often produced a good chunk of the grain for their empires as a whole.

Only Egypt, nowhere else.

ffgjgf13• 2 years ago

but not so much when talking about Africa, which was in constant contact with Europe

Sort of, but it wasn’t exactly direct and straightforward, the Sahara was close to impassable and following the Atlantic coast was infeasible until the ~1500. And there were pretty complex civilizations in Ethiopia, Mali etc. in later periods when trade/travel become more feasible.

You also have the climate in sub-Saharan Africa which is generally not very hospitable and there are far enough to the South didn’t really have much contact with Eurasia at all.

Romans explored into Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1st century BC; Turks and Arabs had established trade routes deep into Africa by the 6th century AD; the Indian Ocean, including the coast of Africa was continually interconnected through trade going back to the bronze age at least, and trade caravans across the Sahara have been recorded in ancient Egyptian records.

I confused. I assumed that you were talking about much earlier periods, are you saying that there weren’t complex civilizations in sub-Saharan Africa during those times? And yes while the Romans could get past the Sahara (like the Carthaginians allegedly were able to reach the Souther hemisphere or even sail around Africa) it was hard, expensive and rarely worth the effort so there was very little direct contact.

somenameforme8• 2 years ago

Can you offer cliff notes on what/why you found his argument persuasive?

For one who has relatively little interest in reading such a book, the claim seems quite outlandish. For instance Africa has everything from monkeys to elephants, and most have been tamed. Even the common exception of zebras isn't really an exception. One can find countless examples of them being tamed to varying degrees [1], but there seems to be no large scale and competent multi-generational effort to achieve that at scale. Taming in many species is a process that happens over many decades to centuries. And when you look at other places like Russia, everything from foxes to bears have been tamed.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2014/09/20/349856240/my-little-zebra-it-...

mr_toad2• 2 years ago

Domesticated means more than tamed. Domesticated means bred in captivity for so many generations that their behavior and physique has changed. You can tame a wolf, but it won’t be a dog.

Vinnl5• 2 years ago

I really liked Guns, Germs & Steel. Not necessarily because I was immediately convinced that it explained everything and that was the end of it (I don't have the relevant expertise to be the judge of that), but just because it showed me a way of looking at the world at a way larger scale than I had previously done, and was very engaging while at it.

It makes sense that such theories like the continental axis hypothesis may turn out to play some role, but not be a single cause-and-effect. Earth is a pretty complex system, after all.

lock-the-spock• 2 years ago

You might enjoy this as well, similar big picture and fascinating, but a bit more scientific and focused on the human element.

The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

Vinnl5• 2 years ago

Thank you, I've added it to my reading list!

epivosism3• 2 years ago

100% agree w/this recommendation. The title is pretentious and put me off, so I missed out for a few years, but the contents are amazing. He has another related book, The Secrets of our Success, which is good. I'm happy that despite everything, at least a few people are doing cross-domain research and trying to put together and test ideas for how humanity came to be.

WalterBright4• 2 years ago

"The Triumph of the West" by Roberts has a similar thesis.

https://www.amazon.com/triumph-West-J-M-Roberts/dp/076070850...

It's been a long time since I read it, but as I recall the theses were that individual rights and freedoms coupled with things like the scientific method is what resulted in triumph.

zeruch2• 2 years ago

That book, along with Peter Turchin's "Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall" made me a fan of 'Cliodynamics' (a field name Turchin coined) as a concept. It, along with general ideas in Complexity Theory, I find more useful for making sense of large human/societal systems than just "single bullet theory" case studies.

TuringNYC• 2 years ago

I read Turchin's book, but what I didnt understand was how you could fit large-parameter models on such a small number of instances provided by history, w/o cherry-picking examples? What is the intuition?

mwbajor• 2 years ago

You're never going to find a solid answer to these questions. The best you can do is ask yourself "does this seem reasonable".

bhk• 2 years ago

Doesn't sound like science at all, does it?

Vinnl5• 2 years ago

That is absolutely fine to me. (I mean, I'd like answers, but I've gotten used to the idea of limits to our knowledge.) What I appreciated so much is that is broadened the range of potential answers for me, emphasising just how much I'm never going to find solid answers.

opo• 2 years ago

The AskHistorians group on reddit has a section of the FAQ devoted to Jared Diamond which you might be interested in:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...

LudwigNagasena2• 2 years ago

I don't really understand the hate /r/AskHistorians has for Diamond. When you look at the assessments of Foucault there, he basically will be criticized for somewhat similar things yet with a far more forgiving and even praising tone. I guess one can read into Diamond implicit atonement of the sins of white people because "it's just geography"; and it is just too much for some people, especially for this specific demographic who is into humanities and Reddit.

sershe• 2 years ago

A pretty good response: https://blog.daviskedrosky.com/p/jared-diamond-a-reply-to-hi...

This FAQ is mostly ideologically-driven and, at the very least, willfully misinterprets what Diamond says in his books in a way that I think is impossible to explain by accidental misreading or even misunderstanding; only by intentional misinterpretation driven by an agenda. I've read Diamond, then many years later this FAQ, then the above response; then cross-referenced all 3 to see who's lying.

I used to say all modern humanities are worthless garbage, except history. After that exercise, assuming AskHistorians crowd is representative, I'm not so sure about history...

ramses03• 2 years ago

"A Short History of Mostly Everything" by Bill Bryson is next for you.

lmm4• 2 years ago

I hope not. That book is more of a collection of biographies of a handful of random researchers than the details of what they're actually researching.

Vinnl5• 2 years ago

I did actually read that, but it hasn't really stuck with me. I think (but based on faded memories) that it was mostly things I'd already seen in school, with more detail? It didn't really open up new ways of looking at the world for me.

Alternatively, I was just too young to realise and appreciate that. It's been a while since I read it.

huytersd2• 2 years ago

What you really need to read is David Reich’s who we are. Totally based on genetic data and talks about how the “aryans” basically wiped out the male population of Europe and took all their women displacing them completely. Another branch went off to India and it has a pretty good breakdown of the genetics of the Indian population as well.

ithkuil• 2 years ago

Just a minor detail: when a population takes all the women of another population and has kids with them, it doesn't completely wipe out the previous genetic footprint since obviously the mothers contribute to half of the genetic material (and she in turn got half of it from her father)

KevinMS2• 2 years ago

My hypothesis is better (and its probably pretty common): easy living (temp, soil, etc) and navigable waterways (lots of ports) made the difference. When conditions are comfortable for civilization, there's plenty of time to think about things, and with lots of ports its easy to spread those ideas. This is probably why places like Egypt, Greece, Italy, Minoa, etc, get the gold medal for early civilizations.

truculent2• 2 years ago

Scholars generally acknowledge six cradles of civilization. Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Indus valley, and Ancient China are believed to be the earliest in the Old World,[1][2] while the Caral-Supe civilization of coastal Peru and the Olmec civilization of Mexico are believed to be the earliest in the New World.

Temperate climates, maybe, but ports?

eszed3• 2 years ago

If you expand the theory to encompass riverine ports that would cover five of the six. I don't know enough about Olmec / Mexican geography / development to speak to that.

KevinMS2• 2 years ago

ports are like the internet of the olden days. Don't forget to include the Nile River, which was navigable both ways, and used extensively, and which conveniently connected to the med sea.

mistrial92• 2 years ago

this map misses large scale organized predation and murder that were rampant in many places.

paganel2• 2 years ago

The findings suggest that factors such as the movement of peoples

These are heavily influenced by geography.

direct and indirect cultural exchanges

This are heavily influenced by physical proximity, which, of course, is heavily influenced by geography.

Of course that geography is not destiny, at the end it of it all nothing is, but it plays a very big part. And the historical truth is that Karakorum (located towards the Eastern end of the Eurasian landmass) had a lot more closer connections to places like Budapest and Kiev (located towards the Western end of the Eurasian landmass) compared to the connection between, let's say, Cairo and Johannesburg.

As such, saying that "Jared Diamond is wrong" without looking at concrete historical facts from our past does not help anyone, no matter if the people doing it like to brandish themselves as "scientists".

andrewflnr4• 2 years ago

As such, saying that "Jared Diamond is wrong" without looking at concrete historical facts from our past does not help anyone, no matter if the people doing it like to brandish themselves as "scientists".

Good thing the article didn't really say that, then? They explicitly agreed with some of his proposed mechanisms.

paganel2• 2 years ago

These are direct quotes from the article:

However, the researchers discovered that these environmental barriers do not consistently favor Eurasia over other continents. This finding directly challenges Diamond’s assertion that Eurasia’s geographic orientation provided a unique advantage in the spread of agricultural and other critical innovations.
Instead, the study indicates that the facilitation of cultural spread by geographical and ecological conditions is a global phenomenon, with no clear bias towards Eurasia.

which to me says that indeed the authors of the article intended to say that Diamond was "wrong", at least that's how I interpret the part with "challenges Diamond’s assertion".

saalweachter2• 2 years ago

So apropos of this pop history author, my "oh shit, being compelling and interesting doesn't mean it's correct" anecdote comes courtesy of another book that was popular around the same time as Guns, Germs and Steel, 1421: The Year China Discovered The New World.

I read it, found it all very plausible and interesting.

I read Gavin Menzies next book, 1434, found it equally interesting and compelling.

Then I read his third book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis, and found it just as plausible as his first book.

Except the prior plausibility in my head of a Minoan civilization maintaining global trade was way, way lower, and so I didn't just accept it as uncritically as I had the first two books, and that made me realize how unskeptically I had been reading the first two books, and other books in the genre.

It was a more enjoyable life lesson than most, all things considered.

arethuza• 2 years ago

When I was about 10 or so I read the Erich von Däniken book Chariots of the Gods and was absolutely fascinated - eventually (and I don't know how) I came to understand that just because something is written in what seems to be a non-fiction book doesn't mean it's remotely true. Nearly 40 years on I can still remember my rage on realising this.

alephnerd4• 2 years ago

Haha I fell into the same trap around 15-25 years ago!(but tbf, elementary school me was going through cryptozoology phase)

von Daniken really knew how to write in academic prose, which only sold it further.

zwayhowder• 2 years ago

I keep a dozen books by von Daniken and his contemporaries on my bookcase to this day. Not because I believe them, but to remind me that I once did. I like to blame the X-Files, but the 90s was a funny time and I don't even remember buying all these books, but I sure believed them for a while.

HPsquared• 2 years ago

See also Graham Hancock.

0823498723498722• 2 years ago

I personally think Ancient Aliens ought to be required watching in english classes. The way they smoothly slip down that slope from non-controversial statements of the form "X." towards statements of the form "Ancient Astronaut Theorists believe X; could it be true?" usually beats even political discourse.

throwaway_839672• 2 years ago

I used to watch Ancient Aliens as entertainment, and was usually not convinced by their claims. But it did reveal the cultural and historical ignorance that we have of other nations.

You can basically say anything about a culture that the audience is not familiar with, and they will think it is plausible.

For me, AA jumped the shark when they claimed that Vikings came from "nowhere" and "suddenly" had sea faring technology. Obviously the Aliens had given them the technology through the god Odin, who was also an alien... what other explanation could there logically be?

There was so much wrong with those claims, that I just turned off the TV. I decided to be more careful about looking at shows about aliens and conspiracies, because I am afraid that it will slowly change my ability to distinguish fact from fiction.

In reality, the ships were based on a long history of ship making with incremental improvements and did not suddenly appear. Anyone could find this easily, which indicates to me that they don't care to make even a slight effort to moderate their claims.

That got me thinking of all the other programs I watch that are not necessarily as "inventive" as AA. What other false statements are said about other cultures that I am not aware of?

Beijinger• 2 years ago

"I read Gavin Menzies next book, 1434, found it equally interesting and compelling."

As a trained STEM Scientist, I found this book utterly nonsense and non-scientific.

"Then I read his third book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis, and found it just as plausible as his first book."

For me this is not very promising. "As plausible as his first book"

taejo• 2 years ago

In the rest of the comment you're replying to, the commentor indeed concludes that being as plausible as the first book means the first book isn't so convincing after all

lmm4• 2 years ago

I rated 1421's credibility pretty low from the introduction onwards - he talked about matching Chinese maps to how he'd seen things from seaports, which sounds like a very easy way to see whatever you want to see, and some stuff about the same kind of chickens which felt like extremely thin evidence to hang extraordinary claims off of.

I haven't got to GGS yet, but given that the top reddit "debunking" is pretty open that its main argument is "his conclusions are racist, therefore he mush be wrong", I'm feeling a little more hopeful.

u32480932048• 2 years ago

Despite having his book, I anticipated this story being about how some aspect of a jewelry store's marketing is hogwash, and there was in fact no discernible difference between their specially-sourced diamonds and any old diamonds dug up from control sites around the globe.

_whiteCaps_• 2 years ago

If you're looking for an alternative view, check out "The Dawn of Everything" by Graeber and Wengrow.

epivosism3• 2 years ago

I loved Debt for the ideas, but I abandoned this since it seemed to be pushing their politics so hard. I've read Zinn, GGS, later pop science anthropology books, 1491, 1493, as well as kept up with john hawks, razib, etc as far as paleogenetics; I wanted to like this book but a lot of it didn't add up - the theory was so complicated and specific. There also didn't seem to be much room left for the evolution of larger scale social structures... yet to me the way things went in history seems obvious. Most of the actors and roles in early human history have cultures shaped by their survival imperatives - and the variety of belief systems we know about match the needs of that culture. Anyway, I would love to hear a good defense or explanation of the book, to make sure I haven't missed anything! I abandoned it possibly 1/3 in, and then read reviews, which mostly confirmed what I had been thinking, so I never went back.

mckn1ght• 2 years ago

I’m almost done with it and I’ll say that I hated the first part, found many of the specific examples interesting throughout the middle, and although there are some interesting insights later, it’s an utter failure from a narrative standpoint as a whole. It really would have benefited from a much stronger editor, if there even was one at all.

CSMastermind4• 2 years ago

It's weird to see the people in this thread stating the generally accepted scientific viewpoints downvoted while those praising Diamond are upvoted.

Diamond is a skilled and persuasive writer, who's had success as a pop science writer but the theories he pushes to put it lightly are largely not accepted within academic communities.

Some, like the stories of ecocide featured in Collapse, have been completely and thoroughly debunked. That book is about as academically rigorous as The Lorax and fills the niche: a modern ecological morality tale for a modern Western audience.

JackFr4• 2 years ago

The problem is to non-academics, it’s all a bunch of Just-So stories and Whig histories, so it’s difficult to judge and the more compelling writer is gonna win.

Sakos3• 2 years ago

The problem is that it seems like the scientific community has largely failed at communicating their findings to the wider public. Where are the books like Diamond's that tell people what modern science has found about the same topics? Pop Sci is extremely popular, but scientists refuse to write them, so you get books by people like Diamond that hit the mainstream and then you get subreddits like r/askhistory getting mad about it. You can't get mad when your entire field has failed at educating the public.

rcxdude3• 2 years ago

The problem is that "the academic view" is a messy web of ideas and findings, with a lot of uncertainty and inconsistencies. That's a hell of a lot harder to sell and engage people with than a simple and elegant idea that's eloquently explained, even if said idea is almost certainly wrong.

salynchnew• 2 years ago

As an aside, the debunkers were also quite entertaining (at least as entertaining as GGS), although they weren't generally commercialized or marketed to the same degree.

I loved the team's demonstration that showed the complexity of Easter Island's civilization, and included a demo of how the moai statues were "walked" into place.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11613

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvvES47OdmY

int_19h10• 2 years ago

Part of the problem is that pop-sci debunkings of Diamond - which is of course what the general public reads, as opposed to actual papers - tend to be very explicitly ideological, and often start with that angle rather than addressing the actual problematic constructs that Diamond presents. And, conversely, Diamond's books, while factually questionable in many ways, are written in a language that reads very dry and sort of "science-neutral". Given the cultural climate of our times, this inevitably conjures an image of someone doing hard science being attacked primarily for "inconvenient" views.

Simply put, if you want to convince people that Diamond is wrong, don't start by telling them that his books are bad because racism/colonialism/..., even if that is true.

ggm2• 2 years ago

No love for Gruber?

eggdaft4• 2 years ago

Diamond’s ideas seemed pretty intuitive to me. The idea that geography is the primary shaper of civilisations seems _very_ likely to be true in general. I’ve read other books on the impact of geography on military defence and how that shapes geopolitics, for example.

Having worked in academia for many years, when I see academics attack a book such as GGS my instinct is to question their motives. Academics can be very egotistical and territorial. A priori, it is very difficult to imagine a situation where academics would say to any book like Diamond’s “oh yes this is a really great point and we need to learn from this guy” and very very likely to say “this guy doesn’t know anything about (less important factors that I know a lot about)! What an idiot! He even gets the date of this event wrong, proving I am clever and he is wrong.”

So when I hear about academics attacking something that seems to be fairly obviously correct at least at a very general level, my instinct is not “oh, yes, this guy must be completely wrong” but rather “this guy is probably mostly right but of course there will be a lot of other factors and it will be very easy to pick apart his book if you so wish, especially if your ego relies on you finding fault with him.”

I’m not so easily dissuaded that GGS isn’t mostly right that geography and in particular agricultural factors are the broad strokes of history, rather than the less permanent and smaller scale “Gaussian noise” of cultural events that intuitively are likely to mostly even out over time.

FranzFerdiNaN2• 2 years ago

Ah yes, the ''this feels right to me, a layman who knows nothing about it, so clearly he is right and people attacking him just are out for a cheap hit'' defense. A classic.

eggdaft4• 2 years ago

No, just I have a lot of experience of academia so I’m wary of motives.

bryanrasmussen5• 2 years ago

In fighting there are various factors at place, the size and speed of those in the fight, the area they are in, the training. Some areas are more conducive to victory for specific body types and training. This kind of dynamic plays out everywhere, the race is not always to the swift but you should place your bets that way.

Geographical factors would seem to be this kind of importance that establishes a long dominance and strong chance of success, sure, but what Geographical factor allowed for Industrialism to be established in Western Civilization, with all the force multipliers that Industrialism gives? Almost all countries nowadays are industrialized therefore there is no geographical factor that prevents industrialization in those nations.

Finally, historical trends seem not really to last more than 200-400 years, which 200 years really seems like the kind of thing that can be effected by a cultural issue - somebody who was a really bad king came along and reined for 70 years and destroyed the country, now you're in a weakened condition and get picked on by everyone else for the next 130 years. Yeah - your country's rich geographical resources finally lead to comeback but it just does not seem a very profound or interesting point the more I think about it.

Radim2• 2 years ago

what Geographical factor allowed for Industrialism to be established in Western Civilization, with all the force multipliers that Industrialism gives?

Wasn't there a whole book devoted to exploring exactly this question?

Now what was its name…

Gud• 2 years ago

Geographical factors would seem to be this kind of importance that establishes a long dominance and strong chance of success, sure, but what Geographical factor allowed for Industrialism to be established in Western Civilization, with all the force multipliers that Industrialism gives? Almost all countries nowadays are industrialized therefore there is no geographical factor that prevents industrialization in those nations.

the Industrial Revolution started because Great Britain had an over abundance of coal, so another point for the geographical theory?

ohthehugemanate2• 2 years ago

It has been a very long time since I read GGS, but I can tell you haven't yet... and judging from this comment I bet you would find it fascinating.

To give a top-of-my-foggy-memory answer to your question about industrialization, here are some of the contributing factors as I recall:

- Head-start: agricultural settlements started in Mesopotamia about 10k BCE, and branched out from there. That's the earliest record we have anywhere in the world of a farming culture which allowed specialized classes to emerge (builders, rulers, administrators, inventors, etc etc) and the basis for emerging technology. e.g. in the Americas it looks like this happened 5k years later.

- More wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication. Only a small % of wild plants and animals are suitable and useful for domestication, and they were overwhelmingly concentrated in Europe. Wheat, barley, and beans were farmed earlier and are easier to farm than rice (East Asia) and potatoes/corn (Americas). There are no African or American animals with the capacity for burden and domesticability of european horses, donkeys, and oxen, and we haven't even talked about cattle, pigs, goats, sheep, etc.

- the mix of small arable geographical area and concentrated population centers led to constant war in Europe, which drove a lot of technological innovation, especially in metallurgy. Europe is also particularly rich in iron and coal, which gave another advantage to pre-industrial tech branches (to use a Civilization analogy). In contrast, China was extremely politically stable and had less need for tools of war like hardened steel.

- The relatively limited available land and population also motivated invention in European farming methods, which was not the case in e.g. China, where human labor is in many places still cheaper than technological efficiency. Human labor intensive farming methods from the 6th century are still in use in many parts of China, because that's just more effective than the alternative.

- Constant war improved infrastructure between cities, too (thank you Roman empire). Hundreds of years later this accelerated trade beween population centers, contributing to many features that characterize industrialization as it happened in Europe. Including: a merchant class, production geogrpahically separated from sale, etc.

- Early advantages were determining factors in colonialism and wealth extraction from other continents. i.e. because Europe had better guns, more germs, and better steel (ha), when they arrived in the Americas they wiped out the indigenous populations.

Please don't take this as a unilateral endorsement of the ideas in the book - I'm not qualified! If nothing else the whole question is post-hoc... "why did Europe achieve European-defined success before any other continent achieved European-defined success?" In any case the ideas are interesting and I bet you would enjoy thinking about them, as I did.

ak_111• 2 years ago

"Academics can be very ...territorial"

Ironic statement given the context.

pipes• 2 years ago

I think his theory on what happened to Easter island has been debunked? I wasn't convinced by guns germs and steel at all. It seemed to ignore the fact that western Europe was a cultural backwater for most of known history. Anyway it was a long time ago that I read it, so I could be remembering it wrong.

chongli6• 2 years ago

Northern Europe didn't take off until the invention of the moldboard plough. The Romans took advantage of the looser, sandier soils around the Mediterranean which didn't need such a heavy plough to work. To bring the moldboard plough into fruition required the development of better steel and the breeding of heavy horses, something that was just not possible earlier on.

Manuel_D• 2 years ago

Diamond explicitly calls out the fact that Western Europe was a backwater for most of history until a few hundred years ago in the first dozen pages of the book.

sethammons2• 2 years ago

the transmission of cultural traits among 1,094 traditional societies

So people had already been living in a given zone. When Europeans first arrived in America, had the locals not already been there and learned the ways of that land and shared, famously the first Thanksgiving in US education, the new arrivals would have perished.

fedeb95• 2 years ago

"Eurasia’s geographic layout inherently facilitated a quicker spread of critical innovations compared to other regions of the world, such as the Americas and Africa."

sadly, "critical" and "innovation" are semantically characterized as both important and good because who made those critical innovations dominated with weapons other trivial and unoriginal populations.

Edit: I havent't read the book but such hypothesis are quite sterile considering how populations move (and used to move) around the globe. We are taught a pretty static idea of ancient civilizations, while they probably move more than us.

rancour• 2 years ago

What an abhorrent shitpost.

Scientists put Jared Diamond's continental axis hypothesis to the test

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