First off *Guns Germs and Steel* is just an opinion. Its mostly a story, there is no science in it at all. I re read, just to make sure it wasn't the total hokum it appeared to be in the beginning and its worse than ever. Its been soundly discredited by scholars brighter than me.
(((((((((((Just one excerpt from one scholar
Objections
There are several objections to his theory that Prof. Diamond anticipates. One is the absence of controlled experiments. If Prof. Diamond is right, had Bantus literally switched places with the inhabitants of Europe 10,000 years ago today’s Bantus would occupy the world role Europeans do now. What direct corroborative evidence is there for this? Prof. Diamond cites the failure of Europeans to domesticate African wildlife and the keenness with which Plains Indians adopted horses to show that personnel is irrelevant, but anecdotes are no substitute for systematic comparative studies.
This weakness is not fatal. As Prof. Diamond observes, other hard-to-test theories about remote origins, like evolution and continental drift, get by on indirect evidence because of their great explanatory power: if they are correct, they explain a great deal. But Prof. Diamond’s account is much weaker, and does not actually explain what it claims to, because it does not adequately distinguish the conditions necessary for civilization from those sufficient to produce it. The distinction, one Prof. Diamond fully acknowledges, bears stressing. You can’t start a fire in the absence of oxygen—oxygen is necessary for combustion—but it does not follow that once you have oxygen you automatically have combustion. The presence of oxygen does not explain the Chicago fire.
Likewise, Prof. Diamond is no doubt right that a large industrial society cannot form without plentiful food, compliant animals and contact with outside ideas. The descendants of a band of Europeans stranded on a Pacific atoll 5,000 years ago would not be building moon rockets today; a potential Newton would be too busy gathering coconuts to wonder why they fall. But it does not follow from this near-truism that just any human group with crops, animals and outside contacts will rise as high as European man—that, given these factors, civilization is automatic. It certainly does not follow that any two human groups will exploit these resources to precisely the same extent.
In fact, different groups as they now exist plainly do not respond identically to identical inputs. Japanese played no part in the creation of modern science, but once exposed to it they embraced it, and now lead the world in making cars, computers and other high-tech gadgets. Africans have been aware of European technology for just as long, but microchip firms have not sprung up in Kenya.
Prof. Diamond replies that unlike Kenya, Japan can build on "a long history of literacy, metal machinery, and centralized government," ultimately traceable to flora, fauna and stimulating ideas imported earlier. However, the "history" of any individual begins at birth, so Prof. Diamond’s theory predicts that Kenyans reared in the west should be just as adept at technology as the average westerner. But we do not find this. Descendants of Africans have lived in the US for ten generations, and have been immersed in its culture (and unconnected with Africa) for at least five. Yet black contributions to technology remain negligible. As is well known, American blacks reared from infancy in middle-class white households show adult levels of IQ and scholastic achievement barely above the American black mean. Similarly, though less dramatically, Koreans reared in European families display IQs characteristic of Koreans, not the slightly lower ones of their adoptive parents. Current members of different groups do not exploit resources, including knowledge, with equal efficiency, and there is no reason to think they did so in the past. Given everything we know, if we returned in a time machine to Africa circa 10,000 BC and transplanted the Bantus to a land of milk, honey, horses and heavy-seed grasses, they would not take to city-building as readily as their Eurasian contemporaries.
All of which suggests that the comparatively easy domestication of foodstuffs and animals in Eurasia at most only accelerated group divergences already under way. This in any case is what evolutionary logic demands. The different environments they had occupied for tens of thousands of years previously would have forced Africans, Europeans, Asians and Amerindians apart by 8,000 B.C.
Prof. Diamond devotes only two dismissive sentences to this idea:
"Many northern Europeans assume that technology thrives in a rigorous climate where survival is impossible without technology, and withers in a benign climate where clothing is unnecessary and bananas supposedly fall off the trees. An opposite view is that benign environments leave people free from the constant struggle for existence, free to devote themselves to innovation."
What Prof. Diamond should have done at this point was to ask which scenario is more plausible, and, if possible, integrate these ideas into his own hypothesis. Instead he resorts to a debater’s trick: meet an unwelcome idea with its polar opposite, and hope the two cancel each other out.
This blindness to human evolution is the great weakness of Guns. I mentioned earlier the selective pressures applied to Eurasians by the transition to farming. Surprisingly—amazingly—Prof. Diamond traces the genetic effects of domestication on plants and animals (today’s dogs and cats have smaller brains than their feral counterparts), on animal-borne diseases, and on the human immune system, but it never occurs to him that domestication, agriculture and urbanization might also have altered the domesticators in far-reaching ways. That this did in fact happen is a central theme of contemporary sociobiology.
Take the ability to soothe a nervous horse. The neurological basis for this ability must have shown up from time to time as a mutation, but in the absence of horses it conferred no survival value, and did not take hold. But once horses were tamed, the ability to handle them became valuable, hence fitness-conferring, hence fixed in the population. Or take foresight, always somewhat useful, but possibly more useful, hence more apt to be selected for, when grain must be stored, seeds husbanded, and other tasks requiring visualization of the future must be done.
Cooperation and Morality
But the deepest changes in the human psyche induced by urbanization concern co-operation and intelligence. Everyone in a small band of hunter-gatherers is related, so general altruism enhances inclusive genetic fitness. By aiding any other band member, even at some cost to myself, I automatically aid a carrier of some of my own genes. Greater concern for closer relatives aside, no advantage accrues to discrimination about whom to help. But when (thanks to farming) hundreds of people live together, pure helpfulness may subordinate my own genetic interests to those of an unrelated stranger. Being able to tell relatives from non-relatives suddenly becomes adaptive, and the enhanced cognitive abilities needed to do so are likely to develop.
Many evolutionary psychologists trace much of modern man’s intellectual attainments to the cognitive demands of multiperson interactions (Eurasian man’s, of course, but this they don’t say).
Therefore, even if, improbably, early Eurasian urbanization was an accident, hundreds of generations of city life itself would have molded Eurasians to differ from Africans, Australasians and Amerindians in significant genetic ways: to be more intelligent, more gregarious, and to adopt norms closer to the golden rule. In fact, Richard Lynn, Edward Miller and J. P. Rushton, who have conjectured about the evolutionary effects of climate during hominid evolution, could easily add the genetic changes triggered by urbanization to their models of prehistory.
But how could Prof. Diamond, a self-proclaimed evolutionary biologist, have missed these arguments about the effects of urbanization? They are not the preserve of a tiny coterie. There is now a highly developed mathematical theory of the evolution of cooperation, expounded in several books well known to academics, and articles about it appear regularly in top journals, like Science, Nature and Journal of Theoretical Biology. Prof. Diamond must know of these developments. Why does he ignore them?
In part, because of Occam’s razor. Since (Prof. Diamond thinks) race differences are not needed to explain history, looking for them is pointless.
To a certain extent this conviction is justified: if we didn’t already know from other evidence that the races differ, his case would be quite persuasive.
Guns is easily the best environmentalist anthropology ever written. But Prof. Diamond’s scientific edifice stands on the usual moralistic foundation. He makes very plain his opposition to "racism." Unlike Stephen Jay Gould, Prof. Diamond is too honest to cheat for ideological reasons, but he so dislikes "racists" that he can’t separate his desire to refute them from the happy feeling of actually having done so. I honestly wonder how Prof. Diamond would react if forced to deal with the detailed evidence of race differences that has been accumulating for the past half century.
Michael Levin is in the Department of Philosophy of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
This review originally appeared in the July, 1998 issue of American Renaissance. A copy was faxed to Jared Diamond before publication with an invitation that he respond to it but he chose not to.)))))))))))))))))
There are so many scholarly refutations of Guns, Germs, and Steel, it has become a whole cottage industry of itself.
