Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Jared Diamond is a biologist writing about social science in Guns, Germs, and Steel. In a way, this book is a rebuttal to The Bell Curve; that book argued that Northern European Caucasians were inherently superior, and inferred that efforts to bring other races to equal status would only waste time and resources.

Diamond's book is equally skewed, arguing that Europeans have accomplished nothing to reach their powerful position, but merely benefitted from fortuitous environmental factors. Perhaps a qualified social scientist could have effectively argued this case - but I doubt that any would try.

Diamond makes many egregious errors, combined with clumsy oversimplifications. Time and again, he shows an ignorance of and disinterest in historical or cultural causes for the outcomes he describes; he always attributes these outcomes to technological or biological factors instead. His interpretation of Cortes' conquest of the Aztec Empire should make any Latin American historian weep.

It's incredibly saddening that this book has reached such a large and credulous audience.

For some time I had planned to read this book. The title suggests a scientific examination of how and why European nations had evolved to subjugate less developed cultures. I was fine with the author's assertions until I hit page 19 and Diamond stated that in his opinion the people of New Guinea are smarter than the average European or American. This assertion is then supported by Diamond's personal observations and no scientific data. That was it for me. I have no personal problem with the suggestion that one cultural group could on average be smarter than myself as an American but base that assertion on fact not opinion. In the end I would suggest that cultural and socio-economic factors affect the achievements of any society. In other words, God gave us all a brain. We all have equal potential but it's how that potential is developed and utilized that affects the outcome. Diamond's unsupported observations smack of left wing apologist ideology and I have better things to do with my time.

This book will be read by historians, not because it gives an accurate history, but because it shows how far academics are willing to go to deny the obvious: that human groups differ (races, ethnicities, clines -- call them what you like), and that these differences can explain at least some differences in outcomes. Sure, culture matters, and geography matters. But wow. Diamond sure is eager to dismiss the alternatives.

A much more compelling book is Cochran and Harpending's [[ASIN:0465020429 The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution]]. One of the authors, Gregory Cochran, recently wrote the following devastating review of Diamond on his blog. Here it is:

Jared Diamond’s thesis, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, is that regional differences in civilizational achievement are entirely caused by biogeographical factors, while regional differences in ability have had no effect. It isn’t that he believes that there are no such regional differences: he argues that the populations with the fewest achievements are the most intelligent !

In particular, Diamond argues that people in PNG (Papua New Guinea), are significantly smarter than the average bear. “in mental ability, New Guineans are probably genetically superior [my emphasis] to Westerners”: p21. “Modern ‘Stone Age’ peoples are on the average probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples. ” p 21.

This is sufficiently odd that readers of GGS often refuse to admit that Diamond ever said it. They’ll deny that it’s even in the book. They tend to replace this meme with another of their own device: you see, hunter-gatherers are innately better at hunting and gathering – at their own way of life – than developed peoples would be. Of course that doesn’t really work either, since innate superiority at obsolete tasks ( a born buggy-whip maker?) doesn’t necessarily translate to modern superiority, or even adequacy.

I’ve only seen this claim – PNG Über Alles – in one other place, ever. A character in a book by Poul Anderson said “The only true humans on earth, my friends, the main line of evolution, the masters of the future, are the lordly Melanesians. ”
Of course that character was feigning insanity, but still.

In arguing that the last actually are first – that populations that invented calculus and gunpowder and penicillin are duller than those that invented very little – Diamond dismisses the entire field of psychometrics. He mentions no evidence, doesn’t even bother to argue about it. It’s his personal impressions of the locals in PNG versus everybody from Alfred Binet to the College Board. The word “IQ” isn’t even in the book.

It’s a ballsy approach – implying that the whole field is just pointless crap, not even worth discussing. It’s how I would deal with astrology or gender studies. It’s how everybody should have dealt with Freudian analysis.

The problem with Diamond’s non-argument is that aptitude tests actually work. A one-hour paper-and-pencil test gives a reasonable estimate of a student’s general problem-solving ability, which is why everybody uses such tests. The Army find that the top scorers make much more accurate tank gunners – it’s hard to ignore a 120-millimeter DU shell.
Regional scores on IQ tests and other educational tests ( PISA, etc) do track regional differences in S&T achievements. Not perfectly – northeast Asians have the highest scores but have not made the largest contributions to the development of modern technology – but pretty well. Populations that have low average scores on such tests have contributed very little to the development of modern science and technology.

If there was some fatal flaw in our methods of testing academic aptitude, you’d see some people (or whole populations) that scored low ( say 80) but were still whizzes at electrical engineering or molecular biology. That doesn’t happen. To be fair, we do see many people with high scores embrace various forms of madness, everything from Koreshanity (Why, this is Pellucidar, nor are we out of it.) to Fomenko’s New Chronology (Gary Kasparov). But then they’re intelligence tests, not sanity tests.

If Diamond were right (and the tests wrong), there would be tremendous opportunities for arbitrage, just as sabermetrics let baseball managers identify undervalued players. For example, if people from PNG were indeed significantly smarter than the world average, UCLA could develop powerhouse departments, full of likely future Nobelists, at low cost. People would eventually try to look intelligent by putting a bone through their nose. Why hasn’t this happened? Pure stubbornness? Shouldn’t Harvard pre-emptively adopt this policy, in order to stay on top?

If Diamond were right, hunter-gatherers and other backward peoples should be able to catch up with the developed world rather easily, being smarter. In fact, they should be able to rapidly surpass us: even a moderately higher average IQ in a population greatly increases the fraction that scores above a high threshold. PNG should be shot with genius. Yet there’s no sign of it. Diamond acknowledges as much. “We see in our daily lives that some of the conquered peoples continue to form an underclass, centuries after the conquests or slave imports took place. ” p 25. ” Yes, the transistor, invented at Bell Labs in the eastern United States in 1947, leapt 8,000 miles to launch an electronics industry in Japan – but it did not make the shorter leap to found new industries in Zaire or Paraguay. The nations rising to new power are still ones that were incorporated thousands of years ago into the old centers of dominance based on food production, or that have been repopulated by peoples from those centers.”

“Prospects for world dominance of sub-Saharan Africans, Aboriginal Australians, and Native Americans remain dim. The hand of history’s course at 8000 B.C. lies heavily on us.” p 417.

Why should that be so? If hunter-gatherers are ” probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples”, why doesn’t it show? Maybe they aren’t plugged into the old-boy networks, but why don’t they win the math contests and chess tournaments? Where’s their Paul Morphy, their Ramanujan, their George Green? Mathematicians, at least, would cheerfully hire a grizzly bear as long as it ate fewer undergraduates than it solved Hilbert problems.

Where are the practical payoffs? “Many of the living descendants of the Aborigines who survived the era of European colonization are now finding it difficult to succeed economically in white Australian society.” p 19. Again, if they’re so smart, why aren’t they rich? Why do they flunk algebra?

Perhaps we should consider dysgenic effects. Because of low birth rates among highly educated women, IQ is probably declining today in developed countries, at ~1 pt a generation. Probably this hasn’t been going on for very long. . But if it goes on long enough, a day may come when the minds of the men of the industrialized countries fail, leaving the inhabitants of Sentinel Island the smartest people on Earth.
But it is not this day.

Enough about the thesis: it’s a mess. Measurements don’t support it, and none of its implications have gone through the formality of actually happening. Back to the book itself, which is not all bad.

You see the idea that biogeographical circumstances shaped the rise of civilization and technology is not at all crazy. The mistake is assuming that that is the only factor, or that those circumstances never change the peoples exposed to them: never change them above the neck, that is. Diamond is happy enough to admit that selection for disease resistance changed Eurasians and Africans.

Diamond emphasizes the important of domestications of animals and crops, the big step towards civilization. This allowed vast increase in population size and social complexity: you can’t overemphasize its importance.

He discusses various ways in which parts of this big story support his thesis. Often they don’t really, but the discussion can still be interesting.

Most significant domestic animals were domesticated somewhere in Eurasia or North Africa, only a couple in South America (llamas and vicuna), nothing in the rest of the world. Diamond argues that this wasn’t because populations varied in their interest in or aptitude for domestication. Instead, the explanation is that only a few large animals were suitable for domestication.

He’s unconvincing. Sure, there were places where this was true: what were the Maori in New Zealand going to domesticate – weta? And Australia didn’t have a lot of large mammals, at least not after people wiped out its megafauna. But there are plenty of large animals in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet none were domesticated. He argues that zebras were wilder, more untameable than horses – but people have tamed zebras, while the wild ancestors of horses (tarpans, which survived into the 19th century) were usually described as untameable. The wild ancestors of cows (aurochsen, which survived into the 17th century) were big and mean. They enjoyed impaling people on their horns and flinging them for distance. The eland is a large African antelope, and by Diamond’s argument it must be untameable, since the locals never tamed it. But in fact it’s rather easy to tame, and there’s now a domesticated version.

The key here is that one can select for disposition, for tameness, as well as obvious physical features, and an animal can go from totally wild to cuddly in ten generations – remember the selection experiment with Siberian foxes. In the long run disposition is not a big obstacle. Selection fixes it – selection applied to above-neck traits.

Diamond makes a similar argument about domesticating plants as crops: only a few plants were suitable for domestication, and part of the reason that some populations never developed crops was a lack of suitable plant species. I’ll give him Eskimos. but that’s about it.

Here his argument is far weaker: there are a buttload of plants that could be domesticated and might be quite useful, yet have not been. Enthusiastic agronomists keep trying to get funding for domestication of jojoba, or buffalo gourd, or guayule – usually government interest runs out well before success.

The reason that a few crops account for the great preponderance of modern agriculture is that a bird in the hand – an already-domesticated, already- optimized crop – feeds your family/makes money right now, while a potentially useful yet undomesticated crop doesn’t. One successful domestication tends to inhibit others that could flourish in the same niche. Several crops were domesticated in the eastern United States, but with the advent of maize and beans ( from Mesoamerica) most were abandoned. Maybe if those Amerindians had continued to selectively breed sumpweed for a few thousand years, it could have been a contender: but nobody is quite that stubborn.
Teosinte was an unpromising weed: it’s hard to see why anyone bothered to try to domesticate it, and it took a long time to turn it into something like modern maize. If someone had brought wheat to Mexico six thousand years ago, likely the locals would have dropped maize like a hot potato. But maize ultimately had advantages: it’s a C4 plant, while wheat is C3: maize yields can be much higher.

Why didn’t people domesticate foxes, back in the day? Is it because foxes are solitary hunters, don’t have the right pack structure and thus can’t be domesticated, blah blah blah? No: they’re easy to domesticate. But we already had dogs: what was the point? You had to be crazy like a Russian.

One other factor has tended to suppress locally-domesticated plants – what you might call alien advantage. If you grow a crop near its origin, there will be local pests and pathogens that are adapted to it. It you try growing it in a distant land with a compatible climate, it often does very much better than in its own country. So… crops from Central and South America have done very well in Africa, or sometimes in Southeast Asia. Rubber tree plantations work fine in Malaysia and Liberia but fail in Brazil. Maize is the biggest crop in Africa, while manioc and peanuts are important. Most cocoa is grown in Africa: most coffee is grown in South America.

Sometimes, Diamond was wrong, but in a perfectly reasonable way, not in the devoted service of a flawed thesis, but just because the facts weren’t all in yet. We all need to worry about that.

He considered the disastrous impact of Eurasian and African diseases on the inhabitants of the New World, contrasted with a much smaller impact in the opposite direction, and concluded that a major factor had probably been transmission from domesticated animals. Eurasians domesticated quite a few animals, Amerindians not many – perhaps that was the explanation. In Guns, Germs, and Steel (p 207), he mentions measles, tuberculosis, smallpox, influenza, pertussis (whooping cough), and falciparum malaria as likely cases of transmission from domesticated animals.

We know a lot more about this we did twenty years ago, since we’ve been sequencing the genes of everything in sight – and it appears that Diamond was mistaken about the most important members of that list. TB appears to be ancient in humans, smallpox probably came from some East African rodent, while falciparum malaria seems to have derived from a form of malaria carried by gorillas. Measles really does descend from rinderpest, a cattle plague, but then rinderpest (and mumps) probably descend from bat viruses. Domesticated animals do play a role in influenza, along with wild birds. I don’t think we know the origins of pertussis.

So why then was the Old World such a fount of infectious disease? Well, it’s bigger. Civilization was older, had had more time to pick up crowd diseases. Humans have close relatives in the Old World that carried important pathogens (chimps and gorillas), while Sasquatches are germ-free. Important pathogens, especially those with insect vectors like malaria, maybe couldn’t make it to the New World through ice-age Beringia. Transportation and trade were more advanced in the Old World, and spread disease more efficiently.

I don’t think that Diamond was making excuses for Amerindians in this, as he was when talking about domestication: having lots of plagues isn’t usually considered an accomplishment. Origination in livestock seemed like a reasonable idea at the time, considering the state of the art. It seemed so to others as well, like William McNeill. It’s not totally wrong – definitely true for measles – but it’s not a huge part of the explanation.

Sometimes Diamond was right. He says that it’s a lot easier for crops to spread east and west than north and south, and he’s correct. Middle Eastern crops worked in much of Europe, especially southern Europe, and also were important in India and China. On the other hand maize had to adapt to shorter growing seasons as it spread into North America: this took time. Post-Columbian spread of maize in Africa was much faster.
Geographical barriers were major factors in slowing the spread of civilization. Although a few distressed mariners must have occasionally crossed the Pacific in ancient times, nothing significant (in terms of crops or ideas) seems to have made it across before Columbus. Amerindians had to develop everything themselves, while populations in the Old World were sharing seeds and ideas (and plagues). Having to invent everything from scratch is a disadvantage, no question.
The geography of the Americas greatly inhibited contact between Mesoamerica and the Andean civilization: even today the Pan-American highway doesn’t go all the way through. The Sahara was even worse, but most of the budding civilizations of Eurasia did manage some contact.

We could use more serious work on macrohistory and the rise of civilization: it’s an interesting and important subject. In particular I’d like to see a really smart and detailed comparison of the two totally independent births of civilization in the Old and New Worlds. But this book isn’t serious. The thesis is a joke, and most of the supporting arguments are forced ( i.e. wrong). Perhaps the most important thing we can learn from Guns, Germs, and Steel is that most people are suckers, eager to sign on to ridiculous theories as long as they have the right political implications.

Published and used in schools as historic fact, when in reality it is merely the author's supposition--as a geologist, no less. Fine book if it is presented as the author's "take" on how societies evolved. Otherwise it is a great disservice to these young people who just assume things.

I was very disappointed with "Guns,Germs and Steel"- there's nothing new in this book and alot of amateurish speculation trying to be "important and new". Jared Diamond is a New Guineaophile and this book is an answer to one of these "on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, etc." New Guinean's question of why white people have all the cargo (stuff). 425 pages later the answer- "thats how things worked out". This book is seriously flawed- there are no notes or references; the bulk of the middle part is incredibly boring; and his conclusion that anyone occupying western Eurasia would have eventually ruled the world leaves out the very important factors of chance and CULTURE. I really can't do justice to all of the speculation, jumping to conclusions, disregarding of uncomfortable facts, "discovery" of already known facts, and denigration of accepted theories that goes on in this book. I took notes too lengthy to list here. Actual history (especially military history) seems to be one of the author's weak points, and he covers up his lack of knowledge with lawyeristic bluster. The crux of the book is the "collision at Cajamarca", when Pizarro kidnapped Atahualpa in front of a supposed 80,000 Inca warriors. No amount of fancy-pants theories about food production and crowd germs explains this incident if you leave out CULTURE. The Incas succumbed as if under a spell. Their cultural hallucination gave way to the brutal, reality-based culture of the Spanish. This book suffers from a smartypants attitude which is extremely annoying. If you read alot of history books and Archaeology Magazine then you already know all this stuff. Mr. Diamond is no Daniel Goldhagen- there's nothing new here.

I'd always wondered why the cavalry never arrived through history's battles astride zebras. They are, after all closely related to horses -- why did Africans never make that leap to stripped horse flesh when their Eurasian cousins were able to commanded the non-stripped version thousands of years ago?
Diamond answers this question and provides other fascinating information in this extremely logical and well argued book (zebras have far nastier tempers than horses and are not domesticable).
This is human history at its most basic. The question answered is why some peoples achieved more advanced developmental trajectories than others over the last ten thousand years.
Diamond's history is the history of homo sapiens, not historical man. In fact, he shows how the history of our species interacted with basic geographical and biological facts in all parts of the world to produce "history" as most of us know it (at least through the age of colonialism).
This book proves, at its most elemental level, that people are people. Which continents our ancestors migrated to almost totally explains the stage of development reached by different peoples five hundred years ago when world's collided. In this, Diamond presents clear and convincing evidence and arguemnt that history up to a point was pre-ordained.
What elements preordained development levels among people? The presence or absence of domesticable plant and animal species and the breadth of lattitude possessed by the continents. The Eurasian land mass was the clear winner in nature's draw which meant that those who were lucky enough to inhabit it had developed clear advantages over other peoples of the world by the time they met.
Diamond makes this point through clearly marshalled evidence, sound conclusions and simple yet elegant prose.
In this, the book is a breakthrough work: it explains convincingly much about the lack of differences between peoples and the absolute importance of location, avaialable food and animal speciies in determining such critical success factors for development as agriculture, village life, and the emergence of writing and technology.
The title of this book more accurately could have been "Lattitude, Grass Plants and Large Mammels." Guns, germs and steel are not the focus, but the result of those percursor elements, which are discussed much more that the title words. I also found that the author repeats him self and his basic points a lot. His case is well made, but made over and over again. At times the book got boringly repetitive. At other times, iteresting tidbits arising out of the author's case pulled me back in.
Having said that, this is an important book, even monumental for the clarity and convincing manner in which Diamond presents his thesis.

I read this book when it first came out. I'm very interested in pre-history and the relationship with the evolution of man and the environment, and a fan or former Diamond books. I read it and I liked it. It is well done.

Why am I reviewing it now? Because more and more as I read magazine articles, histories, discussions of global warming and avian flu, Diamond's book and the theoretical framework he develops is referenced.

Diamond's thesis is that the wide trends of human history were heavily influenced (determined is too strong a word) by geographic and environmental factors. He draws on the theory of Island Biogeography (read Song of the Dodo for a great popular account) to say that people on the large Eurasian landmass had intrinsic advantages over those on the other continents, including exposure to germs that strengthened their immune systems, lots of domesticable plants and animals etc.

Not everyone agrees with this analysis, but everyone is having to react to it.

The obvious criticisms of the theory are that it is applying a backwards pattern on historical expediency and deriving inevitability. It also has been seen by a few as yet another attempt to justify the unique position of Europeans and their descendents in the world...with all the possible related racism thereby "excused". I believe Diamond escapes these traps through good exposition, even-handedness and sensitivity.

4.5 stars.

Rather than rehash the geographic determinism, cultural determinism, and racial determinism debates (you can read that in the other reviews), I will simply give you a flavor for the book by offering you my favorite quote (from page 399 of the 1999 edition):

"Had Africa's rhinos and hippos been domesticated and ridden, they would not only have fed armies but also have provided an unstoppable cavalry to cut through the ranks of European horsemen. Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have over-thrown the Roman Empire. It never happened."

Now that's quite a mental picture!

In short, the author pulls together current archeology and anthropology with ad hoc reasoning to come up with a story to explain the disparities seen in the modern world, rediscovering Marxism in the process.

After decades in New Guinea bird-watching, the author writes in the prologue his goal is to explain why "...Europeans, with their likely genetic disadvantage and (in modern times) their developmental disadvantage, end up with much more [material success]. Why did New Guineans wind up technologically primitive, despite what I believe to be their superior intelligence?"

The author assesses superior intelligence based on the native's ability to find their way in the jungle, where Europeans find themselves lost. In this way, the uniquely human ability to abstract knowledge symbolically is discarded as a sign of intelligence in favor of finding ones way around a jungle -- an ability found in creatures with microscopic brains.

The author says New Guinean's genetic superiority is due to their not being affected by indiscriminate diseases like Europeans. They were naturally selected for intelligence. Specious stuff -- and the book is filled with it.

The West obviously dominates encounters with other cultures due to superior technology, organization, etc. This does not yield the right answer, so these are called proximate causes. In order to get the right answer (dumb luck), it is necessary to push the origin of the advantage back 13,000 years into conveniently prehistoric times.

The author is up-front with his intentions; one knows from the start of the book that he believes people of the third world are the same or, preferably, better than we (he) are, despite the actual results obtained, evidence of which we see around us generation after generation.

At times, the author seems unhappy with civilization. We live in a world dependent on complex systems we don't have the time or ability to understand. If ones feels guilty about seemingly unearned material wealth, its easy to feel (falsely) virtuous by identifying with those who don't have it.

One major problem is the author assumes that human history is only a product of economic forces. He speculates whether individuals have any effect on the broad sweep of history before concluding they probably don't.

Others who think like this are usually called Marxists. Replace the book's take on aboriginal people with the proletariat and the underlying philosophical assumptions lead in the same direction. The author is probably not a Marxist, just starts with a set of assumptions that lead inevitably to its rediscovery.

Marxism has been discredited at tremendous cost, yet keeps popping up to delight Pulitzer Prize committees and PC types in academia. They share interest in pushing the buttons and turning the knobs to direct the automatons that are us toward their perfect society. They have adopted a material-causation worldview at odds with reality; it keeps failing. They don't know why, since they are barely aware of their underlying assumptions (or the alternative is unthinkable). Thus, the same erroneous ideas keeps recycling in different guises, always with the hope the next take will be the guide to man-made Utopia.

A different "assumption" one could make is that humans are moral agents who initiate new chains of cause-and-effect without preceding causes. This assumption is supported by most of human history in that people who accept it as true create things of lasting value. It would have resulted in a totally different book.

By instead adopting the (failed) materialist model of human history and treating people as automatons responding to economic forces, the author ends up writing a book filled with interesting but often selective facts, linked by irrelevant conclusions that can only mislead people from actual lessons of history.

Truth, justice, and fully realized human potential will not be found by romanticizing the desolation of the Third World or by propping up stone-age peoples while denigrating "ourselves". Just the opposite.

But there are those who feel a spiritual calling they cannot respond to directly due to their irreligion; they think they find it by taking responsibility for those worse off than themselves. Others just know that if they can turn the whole world into the Third World, it's easier to be "on top". Kings need peasants. It is these two groups for whom this book will click. How else can one explain the dismissal of math, science, philosophy, in favor of "jungle knowledge" as a sign of intelligence?

People have been recommending this book to me for at least a dozen years. I am happy to have at last gotten around to it. Professor Diamond basically says, to vastly oversimplify things, that geography is destiny. Some societies succeed and others don’t primarily because of their location. If our ancestors were in an area where there were plants and animals suitable for domestication, they had a head start, because food production made people available for specialized tasks, which ultimately led to a stratified, organized society capable of carrying out larger projects. This makes sense to me. The Americas, Africa, and Australia did not have enough animals suitable for domestication, and the few suitable plants were, for the most part, inferior to those of Eurasia. Thus, Eurasians came to dominate the earth, rather than Africans, Native Americans, or New Guineans. Diamond stresses that this dominance came not from innate superior strength and intelligence, but rather from their advantageous geography. This was his reason for writing the book.

I appreciated the way that Diamond approached his material from multiple disciplines. He supports his arguments with archaeological evidence, genetic testing, paleolinguistics, climatology, et cetera. This kind of scholarship was very impressive in his examination of the migrations of peoples.

The only part of his argument I didn’t really buy was his idea of “continental axes.” According to Diamond, Eurasia has a natural east-west axis, which allows the rapid diffusion of crops and innovations. The Americas and Africa, on the other hand, have north-south axes. To my way of thinking, there are too many exceptions for this to be completely accurate. One thing that puzzled me was why Diamond never examined the idea that if Polynesians were capable of travelling in rafts and canoes from Indonesia to Hawaii, why couldn’t the Indians of the Pacific Northwest, who were adept whalers, travel by boat to Tierra del Fuego, if they wanted to? Was the so-called “bottleneck” of Panama really that great an obstacle?

Before reading any work of history it’s good to remember what Orwell said: “He who controls the past, controls the future.” Virtually all history writers have an agenda. Diamond states his up front. He also rather disturbingly hints in a couple of places that some people could interpret one’s disagreement with him as an act of racism.

I enjoyed this book and found it very stimulating and provocative reading that asks big questions and tries to answer them.