History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples'
    environments, not because of differences among people themselves.
            -Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel

No development of the 20th Century was more unfortunate than the politicization of practically everything.  Possibly the worst aspect of this catastrophe is the degree to which science has been corrupted.  Robert Bork and Tom Wolfe have written eloquently about the consequences of the politicization of the Law (see Orrin's review) and the Arts (see Orrin's review) respectively, but these are essentially human constructs, so some corruption is inevitable and probably natural.  But Science lays claim to a special status as a wholly impartial, rational and incorruptible system, independent of human influence, revealing certain immutable  "truths' about the world around us.  Since its right to this mantle has gone largely unchallenged, except by a few intrepid philosophers like Karl Popper and those who are easily dismissed as religious fanatics, the modern tendency of scientists to use scientific theories to prove that their own political views are "correct" is especially troubling.  Environmentalists and population doomsayers have been doing this for so long and have made so many inaccurate predictions that we are mostly wise to their shenanigans.  But there are other, more respected, folks who do much the same thing.  One example that comes to mind is Stephen Jay Gould's book, The Mismeasure of Man (see Orrin's review), which even made the Modern Library Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century, wherein he essentially argues that since the validity of phrenology has been disproved, there is no scientific basis for believing there to be any differences between the human races.  Similarly, this book by Jared Diamond, which even won the Pulitzer Prize, uses scientific sleight of hand to argue that differences in the respective levels of development between human societies are purely a function of environment.  The book is fascinating, entertaining and eminently readable, but it is also either maddeningly obtuse or an exercise in utter intellectual dishonesty, for Diamond's argument is ultimately little more than a house of cards and the bottom card is especially weak.

Diamond, who is an evolutionary biologist at UCLA, has done extensive field work in New Guinea.  A native friend named Yali once asked him:

    Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we
    black people had little cargo of our own?

This book attempts to answer Yali's question.  But it seeks to answer it in a very specific and seemingly underhanded way, by trying to completely discount biological, intellectual and cultural differences and relying instead on environmental happenstance as the sole cause of this disparity.  In one of the strangest moments in the book, Diamond seems to recognize that different ethnic groupings might have genuinely differing intellectual capacities.  In fact, he argues that a native of New Guinea must be more intelligent than a contemporary western European because while we sit around watching TV and eating fast food, they are out trying to figure out how to put dinner on the table (or grass mat or whatever).  Let's ignore, for the moment, the question of who's smarter.  The bizarre thing, given the context of the rest of the book, is that after arguing here that there are such differences, Diamond never even acknowledges the possibility that such differences had any influence on the subsequent development of human societies.

Instead, he argues that societies developed almost exclusively according to their geographical setting and the ease of domestication of the flora and fauna located nearby.  At the end of the last Ice Age, some 11,000 or 13,000 years ago, virtually all human societies were at a similar hunter-gatherer stage of development, but from that point on they diverge drastically.  It is Diamond's contention that the Fertile Crescent in mesopotamia was endowed with a package of grains and animals which were especially easy to domesticate, along with an ideal climate for doing so.  Once humans can grow or raise their own food they settle down and form communities. These are gradually aggregated into nation-states with population densities that allow for divisions of labor and an elite class of intellectuals and so on.  These nations eventually became expansionist and began to encounter and conquer the less organized societies.  Living in close proximity to animals and grains, the developed societies were exposed to devastating diseases.  Their members acquired some level of resistance to such diseases, but when they came into contact with the undeveloped peoples, who had never been exposed to these germs, the diseases were particularly lethal.  And as the developed nations continued to progress they became more and more advanced until they had technologies like steam power and guns which gave them a prohibitive advantage in their encounters with the undeveloped world.  Thus, the ultimate differences in levels of development between societies are very real, and they allowed the "developed" nations to dominate the "undeveloped", but in Diamond's view the reasons for this all trace their way back to the fact that wheat and cows sprang full blown from Hera's head and dropped into our laps ready to be planted or milked.

Given A, no doubt B and C and D follow nicely.  So let's look at this initial point most carefully--what of the idea that certain grains and animals were just sitting there waiting to be used by man?  Diamond does a great job of demonstrating that most of the animals and foodstuffs that we have ever domesticated occurred in abundance in only those places where domestication occurred.  But wait, that's kind of circular isn't it?  At one point, when he's talking about human domestication of dogs, he marvels at the mechanics that allowed us to eventually breed the dachshund after starting with the wolf.  But then when he examines why horses were domesticated but zebras were not, he simply avows that it was because zebras are bad tempered.  Hello?  Are we to believe that the ancient ancestor of the modern horse was essentially tame before we ever put a halter around it's neck?  And is it really the case that we couldn't breed zebras for a few generations and get them to the point where they are more manageable?  Ditto the cow vs. the buffalo.  Diamond makes a huge production out of the fact that while a large variety of large herd animals occur in the Fertile Crescent and the rest of Eurasia, very few such animals occur in places like Australia and the Americas.  But what of the buffalo?  Shouldn't the fact that there were so few animals to choose from have given the Native Americans even more impetus to domesticate bison?  Suppose they are trickier than the Ur-cows that we tamed, shouldn't that superior intellect that Diamond maintains results from more challenging life circumstances have enabled them to tame a more difficult beast?  We don't know Diamond's answers to such questions because he necessarily ignores them.

In a letter to The New York Review of Books, refuting some points made in their review of his book, Diamond states that:

    Historians' failure to explain history's broadest pattern leaves us with a huge moral gap. In the
    absence of convincing explanations, many (most?) people resort, consciously or unconsciously, to
    racist assumptions: the conquerors supposedly had superior IQ or culture.  That prevalence of racist
    theories, as loathsome as they are unsupported, is the strongest reason for studying the long-term
    factors behind human history.

Okay, suppose that we grant him that most of us assume racial differences help explain the differing levels of development in different human societies.  Suppose we further grant that this supposition is unfounded and pernicious, that it is racist and not simply racialist--racism implies that the more successful culture is superior in some abstract sense, while racialism would merely notice a racial component to the relative success levels of these cultures.  Does any of this justify using  parlor tricks and shoddy reasoning to try and replace the arguably racist assumptions with totally dubious environmental ones?  I suppose you could argue that it is better in societal terms to have our faulty understanding rest on the dicey assumptions which are least hurtful to other people, but this is not science, it is social engineering.  We should not grant it the same implicit level of authenticity which we typically allow to scientific theory.

The book is truly fascinating and Diamond's grasp of 13,000 years of human history is really impressive.  But his argument is finally just so silly that you have to question either his motives or his own understanding of the material he presents.  I'll assume that his motives, though perhaps noble, lead him to propound a dubious scientific theory in order to undermine racially based theories that may or may not be equally weak.  This is a book to be read and enjoyed, but with a skeptical eye.

(Reviewed:02-May-00)

Grade: (C+) Orrin C. Judd

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