Gregg Easterbrook reviewed Diamond's current book, "Collapse," in a January 2005 review in the New York Times that caught my eye. It is a successor volume to "Guns, Germs and Steel," for which Diamond won a Pulitzer Prize. Easterbrook's review called them "magnificent books: extraordinary in erudition and originality," but probably wrong. Those with a background in complexity theory may lack Easterbrook's skepticism.
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Diamond's main point in "Guns" is that the dramatic differences between the rate and extent of cultural development in various global regions is not a result of differences in intelligence due to race or ethnicity. Instead, Western European culture (for example) is dramatically different from that of sub-Saharan villagers (for example) due to differences in the starting resources, environment and geography for those cultures. "Starting," in this sense being measured in geological age ... back from the initial evolution of human society, presence of indigenous plants and animals in various continents and the impacts of the Ice Age and the subsequent rise of the sea level separating once-joined islands and continents.
Bringing his expertise in evolutionary biology and biogeography, he studies multiple instances of differences in climate, prehistoric availability of native plants and animals, and geography that affected the spread of new technology across regions. Those technologies included such basic skills as crop raising, domestication of indigenous animals and tool use. Once a locale got a "head start," its resulting population growth and food surplus enabled it to advance much faster than isolated cultures without access to the same technology and resources. As those with such a head start advanced, they left the less fortunate farther and farther behind as their technological development compounded. The head start people sometimes subjugated or exterminated the less fortunate, as the natives of America experienced.
Easterbrook criticizes Diamond for not giving more weight to "culture and human thought as forces in history," describing Diamond's as "single-explanation" theories that "come perilously close to determinism." I found Diamond persuasive in "Guns" and look forward to reading "Collapse," in which he turns from applying his theories to the success of societies to the failure of those that were once successful.
In his epilogue, Diamond gives a nod to complexity and chaos theories, and acknowledges the role of individual leaders, as well as that of chance in determining the direction of history. Students of the science of complex networks and "cascading failure" will see parallels in Diamond's evaluation of the vulnerability of ancient China to the perverse whims of its centralized government and the resilience of politically fire-walled modern Europe. Students of the theories of "disruptive technologies," the economics of networks and "tipping points" will see parallels in Diamond's description of the head start obtained by chance that enabled the beneficiary culture to dominate or wipe out neighboring cultures without the same advantages.
You may judge for yourself after reading this valuable, well-writen and fascinating book by a professor of physiology at UCLA School of Medicine, author of "The Third Chimpanzee". Jared Diamond, "Guns, Germs and Steel."
Posted by dougsimpson at June 22, 2005 10:27 PM