What went wrong?
While it do have a bunch of issues many that denounces it seems to do so simply because it don't allow them to use a limited period in time (That may very well have ended before they themselves live) to make themselves look better than another culture, country or race or claim their accomplishes are due to their race just being superior (Which becomes hard to do if someone tells you another race now worse off used to be better off than you while pointing out that "no, they didn't use too have a majority belonging to your race, invasions don't work that way")
The book seem to have a habit of attracting pictures of Zebras and electrically fenced buffaloes for some reason.
An entomologist deciding he could write about a book about human history and then thinking he was talking about something new because of his complete lack of knowledge about history or archaeology.
There's nothing really wrong with the facts of the book, but the points Diamond makes are pretty juvenile and show a complete lack of knowledge of the fields he was discussing. He basically ended up making similar argument to academics from the early 20th century. There's a reason actual academics don't like Diamond, and it's because he popularized seriously outdated theory and based his work on generalizations.
>>998531
I finished it yesterday. I think its great.
>>998833
Ornithologist actually. But that's not his main field either.
He did receive some formal education in anthropology, history, geography and environmental history at least. Unsurprisingly, this led him to environmental/geographical determinism.
>>998531
It triggers /pol/tards so its despised here
>>998875
Yeah, you're right. I can't believe I slipped up on that one. I think I was getting his background mixed up with Leslie White. Either way, the guy doesn't have much a background in anthropology or history, which is obvious if you're familiar either of those fields and have read his stuff.
His environmental determinism makes sense given his geography background, though. He reminds me a lot of White, who came up with all kinds of weird theories about human social dynamics based on his study of ants. I'm sure the stuff makes sense based on his field, but within the field he's trying the write in, it doesn't quite do what he thinks it does. Diamond would have been a cutting edge anthropologist during White's time, but that was 60 years ago. Now it's just outdated, and kind of annoying to see people claiming Diamond is revolutionary.
>>998921
>Diamond would have been a cutting edge anthropologist during White's time,
Honestly, that applies to most popular science writers.
>>998531
An environmental determinist somehow convinced himself that differences in climate and general environment, plus 100,000 years of evolution, didn't have any evolutionary effect on the most important part of the human body. However, civilizations rise and fall based on the height of the cereals a particular people have access to.
>>998968
>civilizations rise and fall based on the height of the cereals a particular people have access to
Kinda true, though. All great men know this.
>>998989
i highly doubt that maize is what you got from that book
>>998989
>corn
>posting maize
>>999032
Most translations use the word "corn".
I read the book and enjoyed it. Didn't realize he was peddling outdated theories. What can I read to update myself?
>>999051
Try world-system theory.
>>999051
There's an edited volume called Questioning Collapse that's basically a point-by-point response to his book Collapse. It's not the best response that could exist, because the authors are mostly coming from the perspective of resilience theory, which is also leans towards environmental determinism, but it works well as a good collection of responses and does a good job of pointing out some of the basic flaws Diamond's generalizing and arguments.
>>998531
>Arboginal are more intelligent than the the western people, westerners are only went ahead of them because muh geography
Droped at this
thinking you can talk about disease and otherwise disregard the influences of heredity
>>998968
>didn't have any evolutionary effect on the most important part of the human body
But he didn't say this.
>>999520
he omits it which is clearly the books politcal purpose
>>999525
>the books politcal purpose
It's not a conspiracy. It's a perspective on history.
>>998833
>There's nothing really wrong with the facts of the book
https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2cfhon/guns_germs_and_steel_chapter_11_lethal_gift_of/
Bad history had a thing where they tore apart all the chapters of the book, this is the only one that still shows up in search.
>>998531
it didn't give any validation to very small and very loud minority of stormfags and /pol/tards.
The book is not wrong, the high calorie and easy to grow Wheat and Rice crops gave Europe/East Asia the advantage right out the gate and livestock/beasts of burden further facilitated the rise of the local peoples.
the most valid criticism I've seen is that it rarely takes culture and the culture's values into consideration. Best example being Japan's Sakoku policy and culture before the Meiji restoration. Sakoku choked Japan's ability to advance forward because the values installed by the people to avoid foreign contact hurt the Japanese nation's potential, which their full potential being realized only after the Meiji Restoration and the beginning of the Empire.
Or that Catholic Church's policy of dismissing scientific theories as heresy if it did not tie into the glory of God, leaving many forward thinkers to die at the stake before the Enlightenment/Renaissance allowed for people to advance in technologies.
TL:DR- it's a great general overview of the big picture, but leaves the finer details and other elements such as human and cultural decision making out of the equation.
>>999417
Yep.
Did you guys buy the idea that before the westerners arrived the african tribes were living in small villages away from the lowlands and rivers and therefore didn't die in droves from malaria before as they do now? I thought it was a sad state of affairs anyhow.
>>998531
It fails to take evolution in account
It explains that Africans were initially inferior because of geographical context, but it fails to aknowledge that, with time, evolution printed this inferiority in their genes
>>998531
Well the book is wildly popular and the movie (miniseries?) adaptation was pretty okay.
So, nothing really
>>998531
Predetermined conclusion undermined what could otherwise have been an interesting, albeit basic study of how societies form and progress
>>1000427
>with time, evolution printed this inferiority in their genes
That doesn't really happen.
>>998531
Nothing, it's a book ostensibly about world history written by someone who has no training in or understanding of history, that has nonetheless sold millions of copies. Pretty outstandingly successful, imo.
>>1000739
explain
>>998531
The fact that it pisses off /pol/ and tumblr types alike makes me think it is probably accurate.
I was looking for Guns, Germs and Steel in a bookshop recently. Couldn't find it, but picked up Why the West Rules (For Now) instead - anyone here read it? How's it rate?
>>1000746
Really? I've met so many people who consider themselves experts on history because they've read this book.
>>1001903
Niall Ferguson loved it, and he's based
YOURE A FUCKING WHITE MALE
>>1002069
>Ad Hominem All-caps Ferguson
>Based
Spotted the Anglo.
>>999904
>Or that Catholic Church's policy of dismissing scientific theories as heresy if it did not tie into the glory of God, leaving many forward thinkers to die at the stake before the Enlightenment/Renaissance allowed for people to advance in technologies.
>>1001409
What do the tumblrians hate about it?
>>999904
>Or that Catholic Church's policy of dismissing scientific theories as heresy if it did not tie into the glory of God, leaving many forward thinkers to die at the stake
Like who? Tell me one scientist who was burned at the stake before the Renaissance.
>>998531
I saw a video of the author. He honestly comes off as a white-guilt kind of guy.
>>999904
>Or that Catholic Church's policy of dismissing scientific theories as heresy if it did not tie into the glory of God, leaving many forward thinkers to die at the stake before the Enlightenment/Renaissance allowed for people to advance in technologies.
>>/leftypol/
Reminder that author is seriously believed that these guy are more intelligence than their white counteparts.
>>1002182
They sure are more intelligencer than you.
>>999904
>Catholic Church's policy of dismissing scientific theories as heresy
>>1002182
It's hard to find a group of people where the average IQ doesn't exceed 80, but alas.
>>1002094
tumblrinas probably hate it because the idea of Western Europe's dominance isn't directly tied to the fact white men are evil.
It'd be like if you wrote a book about why Jews control big businesses and didn't mention it was because Jews are the scum of the earth who hate whites. Stormfaggots would be mad.
>>1002197
t.Oooga Booga
>>998531
the problem people have with this is that the author seems obsessed with trying to claim primitive societies were somehow so much fucking better than European societies but were somehow also cosmically cheated by geography (likely a scheme by those jealous subhuman Europeans) which destroyed their chances to be the masters of the earth
>>1001387
Why would that environment select for dumbness? Where is the causal link?
I think that is his point.
>>998721
you may want to work on your grammer
>>1002182
When does he say that?
>>998531
It didn't fit the narrative of history you learned on YouTube and /pol/
>>1001903
Pretty good read desu. He really brings up some interesting points and if you want to gain some more insight into the academical debate he's a good start.
>>1002094
http://www.livinganthropologically.com/anthropology/guns-germs-and-steel/
"First, Diamond’s account makes all the factors of European domination a product of a distant and accidental history: “For Diamond, guns and steel were just technologies that happened to fall into the hands of one’s collective ancestors. And, just to make things fair, they only marginally benefited Westerners over their Indigenous foes in the New World because the real conquest was accomplished by other forces floating free in the cosmic lottery–submicroscopic pathogens” (Wilcox 2010:123).
What Diamond glosses over is that just because you have guns and steel does not mean you should use them for colonial and imperial purposes. Or handing out smallpox-infested blankets from sick wards. One of the supposed values of Western civilization is to care for the sick, not to deliberately spread disease. “Pizarro had the capacity and resources to behave with remarkable brutality in the New World. But the mere capacity to behave brutally does not absolve him from having done so” (Errington and Gewertz, Excusing the Haves and Blaming the Have-Nots in the Telling of History, 2010:340).
Diamond has almost nothing to say about the political decisions made in order to pursue European imperialism, to manufacture steel and guns, and to use disease as a weapon."
>>1002667
Is he obsessed with that though? His thesis seems to be more about loaded geographical dice rather than inherent superiority/inferiority
>>999904
>Or that Catholic Church's policy of dismissing scientific theories as heresy if it did not tie into the glory of God, leaving many forward thinkers to die at the stake before the Enlightenment/Renaissance allowed for people to advance in technologies.
This is the most retarded thing I've ever seen posted. Not only will you not be able to name a single scientist burned at the stake pre-renaissance your idea that a scientific theory could do anything other than tie into the glory of God is nonsense. Literally every scientific theory does the same thing from a theological standpoint. Explain how God's creation works
>>1002999
Maybe he is just really cynic and assumes anybody else in the same scenario would've done the same shit.
>>1002670
Its more like different kind of societies have different selection criteria
In an industrial society, a high IQ is far more valuable than for hunter gatherers
>>1002670
Africa favors a r selection "spray and pray" line of development, there was abundance and too many natural hazards that could not allow cognition to be as valued.
>>1003778
>>1003759
You people missed the point entirely
The point is that there is absolutely no reason to suggest the more intelligent didn't pass on their genes in Africa.There would be no reason for them to die and the dumb to succeed them
>inb4 some fat neckbeard claim Africa is easy mode like inbred he is
>>998989
>Maize =/= Corn in that time period
pls
>>1003778
But they weren't any more fertile than the rest of the world until a few centuries back. And infant mortality was also very wide worldwide. And it's not like they spawn more at once, or have shorter spawning periods. How did they display r strategy, compared to the rest of most humans anywhere else?
>>1003805
black babies gestaste more quckly and have earlier onset of motor skills, Phillpe rushton has a lot of work on the ethnic differences in context of r/k. There seems to be a biological truism where what develops fastest is typically simpler.
There was no agriculture, which does select for intelligence in its own way, but there was otherwise available sustenance which did not taking as much planning to acquire.
>>1003801
There is good reason to claim there is indiscriminant death in africa through disease and fauna that uniformly affect the dispersion. Furthermore, I didn't think he went too far into the influence of climate, while geography does leave some imprint, experience with winter or lack thereof seem to follow IQ. The winters pruned the otherwise low IQs then as they do today if you consider the homeless that pass each season
>>1001903
I'm inclined to dismiss anything Niall Ferguson likes because he is clinically retarded.
check out why nations fail instead
>>1003851
>black babies gestaste more quckly and have earlier onset of motor skills,
On motor skills, the conditions in which babies are kept affect the rate of development to a great extent. If you keep your baby's legs wrapped, he'll take longer to take his first steps as he will exercise his legs less often.
>There was no agriculture, which does select for intelligence in its own way, but there was otherwise available sustenance which did not taking as much planning to acquire.
Bantus had agriculture earlier than Germanics.
>>1003851
>Rushton
>>1003851
>cultural achievements
>"low" "high"
How do you measure this?
>>1003893
and the bantus would be wiser than their neighbors. Agriculture demands more brainpower than herding which exceeds hunter-gatherer.
>>1003907
Just how many Africans are hunter gatherers?
I'm pretty sure these are just small meme groups
>>1003931
those lifestyles shaped the genome of their ancestors Lamarck
>>1003907
Were the Bantus, who apparently had farming and iron works before Christ was born, smarter than Germanics, who were largely nomadic hunter-gatherers until the times of the late Roman Empire? Or is the premise that agriculture requires more g than hunter-gathering unfounded?
>>1003936
Like European hunter gatherers?
There was agriculture in Africa before Germania
>>1003965
>generations of winter
We're not on Westeros.
Are you talking about the Ice Age? Are Inuit (you'd call them "Eskimos") particularly intelligent?
>>1003988
if you compare apples to apple they are the smartest hunter-gatherers, as opposed to abbos which are the polar divergence
jared diamond wrote this book to knock over a strawman and failed, I have seeen better unracist explanations of why Africa is backwards and undeveloped on /pol/
cattle cultures existed throughout Africa as well as horses, the problem is disease makes horses prohibitively expensive and pastoralism less productive than say the mongol steppes
*tips giraffe*
>>1003801
Beeing smart isn't free.
Your brain needs more energy, and a more complex system is always more prone to error, thus higher risk of mental ilness.
If you can't really benefit of your intelligence, dumb people are gonna outbreed you, since they need less calories and have a lesser risk of mental ilness
>>1004000
If you compare Inuit to Germanic, on your axis Inuit should be about as smart as Germanic if not more so, them being hunter-gatherers living in freezing climates, often even harsher than Ice Age Europe would've been.
By the way, the Indo-Europeans arrived in Europe after the last glacial period - Europe was relatively temperate by then.
>>1004029
but sadly inuit live in such a hostile enviroment that agriculture could never catch on
>>1004050
Agriculture could have caught on in Germania, as it did eventually, but it didn't until very late. Why?
>>1004076
because Germany didn't have rivers that gave optimal conditions for agriculture, like egypt or mesopotamia.
>>1004082
Okay time for you to fuck off back to your special ed class
Don't have maps for this going back thousands of years but here is current data.
>>1004106
>>1004076
It was basically a big forest. You gotta clear that shit up before you start growing crops.
>>998531
muh dick
>>998721
Can you English?
From what I underetand he espouses a very simplified form of what New Archaeologists were saying 50-60 years ago. It's not 'wrong' but there's a reason we've largely moved beyond that line of thought.
>>1002182
>>999417
Someone who honestly thinks that the sole reason why groups of people are successful is because of environmental factors is as fucking retarded as someone who thinks it's purely genetics.
This book belongs in the same trash can as a creationism textbook, it has about as much scientific merit.
What the fuck is the current obsession with 'everyone being equal in every way', it's like a mental illness that has infected the West.
>>1004076
it was around in the bronze age and neolithic...
>>1003944
>citation needed
>>1003938
>Were the Bantus, who apparently had farming and iron works before Christ was born, smarter than Germanics, who were largely nomadic hunter-gatherers until the times of the late Roman Empire?
You have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. They weren't even nomadic hunter gatherers in the bronze age
Why does Jared Diamond say Africa had domesticable animals?
Zebra literally looks like a horse. Is he really implying zebra cant be selectivly bred into an animal one can ride?
>>1006493
This.
He's fucking retarded. Does he seriously think that wild horses were originally placid amd docile, ready to serve humans? They were selectively bred to have these qualities.
>>1006452
If you are talking about Bantus, they had both agriculture and iron by about 400 BCE, a quick search shows.
I might've driven the Roman memes too hard, those describing Germanics as uninterested in agriculture compared to Celts, much more driven to hunting and war. We do know that the Germanic groups that invaded the RE were semi-nomadic, rather than true settled peoples. Sorry I distorted reality, I was very eager to jump into discussion yesterday.
>>1000739
It does, generations of malnutrition doesn't fare well on the genetic dispositions of the respective groups.
>>1006652
Lamarck pls.
>>1006493
>>1006555
Horses weren't big enough for transportation. And horses weren't initially bred for mounting. They were bred for meat, which meant horses got bigger and bigger over generations. Eventually they had backs strong enough to carry human adults.
No-one sat down to think "if I breed the strongest horses together, eventually my great-grandson might be able to ride around on top of one". Breeding horses for food made sense for the Eurasian steppe nomads, who were the only guys who domesticated horses.
>>1006680
but thats my point.
Neither horses nor zebras were initially suited for riding.
Only through selective breeding, we got horses that can be used for riding, and such a thing could have also happend to zebras.
>>1006695
If humans had a reasonable reason to domesticate zebras in the first place, sure. Nobody domesticated horses for riding them is the point. Nobody saw the future. They just saw horses were an easily mobile source of food, one of the best available in the steppe, and that was just dandy because they were necessarily nomadic.
>>998833
>thinking he was talking about something new because of his complete lack of knowledge about history or archaeology.
This at least is true. For all his books.
>>1006730
How's this one?
>>1006730
Better. Don't you have a table with the data in km2 instead of this pretty useless stuff?
>>1006727
>Jared Diamond, in his acclaimed book "Guns, Germs and Steel" (Norton, 1997), there are six criteria that animals must meet for domestication. Many species come close, but very few fit the bill.
K E K
So he pretty much made some shit up to try to justify his claim that it was because there weren't any animals to domesticate.
>>1006651
>I might've driven the Roman memes too hard, those describing Germanics as uninterested in agriculture compared to Celts, much more driven to hunting and war. We do know that the Germanic groups that invaded the RE were semi-nomadic, rather than true settled peoples. Sorry I distorted reality, I was very eager to jump into discussion yesterday.
And it was the celts that all but disappeared as a culture and germanic people that went on to create and drive western civlisation to this day.
I think germanic tribes were more driven to hunting and war because they lived in the forest. Its said that celtic culture resulted from a fusion of pastoral, semi-nomadic indo-europeans, and sedentary, more agricultural basques. Before the germanic people showed up, there were no people in most of germania, so they kept their nomadic indo-european culture pure of any influence.
>>1007732
>germanic people that went on to create and drive western civlisation
You mean they picked up the pieces of Roman civilization.
>>1007151
I think most of his points stand. Like, we know that some blacks tamed cheetahs, but cheetahs didn't breed in captivity. So it wouldn't really make practical sense to say cheetahs can be domesticated, since you'd have to pick up every generation from the wild.
>>998531
If competition and wars influenced the growth of great powers than decades from now, Africans and Arabs will rule the world.
After all, they are getting very good at civil wars and killing ethnic groups they don't like.
>>998531
He is correct on some things though.
Geography has a lot to do with the success of a population.
I mean, you can't expect people who live in a mountain range to be as successful as people who live in square mile after square mile of fertile land to be as successful.
