Rating: Summary: Is food or hunger the answer? Review: It has been a long time since I have read a book which has lead me to reflect on my thoughts every few pages. "Chaos" and "Godel, Escher Bach come to mind. The author clearly has written a position paper espousing his own politically correct view of the development of dominant societies. However, there is enough objective content to educate more than persuade. The author does raise a few straw arguments counter to his own position only to knock them down quickly. One factor in the spread of dominant societies the author does not address is the natural or innate argressiveness of a society. A parallel situation in nature is the unleashing of africanized "killer" bees on South and North America. What has led to dominance of the species is its aggressiveness and not its ability to produce food from the same plants as the European honeybee. I have seen gifted, high IQ, well-nourished children routinely bested by aggressive younger children. When the means of food production reached the hardy people of northern climates tested by poor resources and harsh climate, the combination was explosive. I believe the spread of Christianity also helped by stabilizing these agressive societies enough to turn their energy outward on the world instead of their neighbors. I finished reading this book months ago and it still can keep me up at night.
Rating: Summary: a bad case of "smartypantsism" Review: 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, while obvious (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 and ARCHAEOLOGY magazine then you already know all this stuff. Mr. Diamond is no Daniel Goldhagen- there's nothing new here.
Rating: Summary: Nice Try; Won't Fly. Review: Diamond ostensibly wrote this book to refute the idea that ethnic groups naturally differ in average intelligence. That makes him very popular and gets him glowing reviews and moral applause. Unfortunately, there's nothing worse for a cause than arguments that don't fly. For starters, the evil heretics, the hereditarians, (even the notorious Philippe Rushton) don't claim that Europeans have the highest average IQs. They claim that Chinese, Japanese and Jews do. Whites are in the mediocre middle, actually. So, if the critics were logical, they would accuse these "despicable racists" of being Asian Supremacists, or Jewish Supremacists, not White Supremacists. And then no heroic exertions attempting to explain away the triumph of the WEST would be necessary. Indeed, Diamond is only helping the heretics to explain why, despite their higher natural intelligence, the East Asians didn't beat us to it. The "racist" hereditarians can now help themselves to the explanation Diamond so kindly offers. As for refuting the growing mountain of evidence supporting an IQ test score heritability of .70, nothing Diamond says has a prayer of disputing the likes of MZ-apart and adoption studies, so nothing he blathers on about climate has the power to offer any positive threat to "racist" hereditarianism.
Rating: Summary: In depth explainations of the patterns of human societies Review: This book is excellent. The book deals with the broad patterns of human societies from expansion to death. It proves conclusively the ecological basis of human society. Patterns of human history are so well explained by ecological, biological, and geographical factors that any other sort of explaination pales in comparison. This is a must read for anyone interested in Island Biogeography and Human Ecology. Probably the reason why other reviewers are squemish about this book is they still want to believe humans are somehow unique rather than being highly social animals tied like all other creatures to our physical and biological environment. All other notions are either racist or nonsense, Jared Diamond is right.
Rating: Summary: yeah, yeah, yeah... Review: Outside of the tedious repetition and somewhat pedantic style of writing, my primary issues with this book are: 1) Almost flippant references to anthropology and anthropological theory. Diamond makes it sound as it cultural anthropology is a transparent and non-complicated discipline (one need not even be educated in anthropology to write a best-selling book on the subject.) This is a familiar - in my opinion - mistaken view of professionals in the "hard sciences." 2) I disagree with the views that Diamond articulates in the final chapter - that history should (let alone can) become a science, and that this will enable people to make a better future. My opinion is that to successfully challenge racism require a change in the terms of the debate - which may mean getting away from "scientific" thinking altogether.
Rating: Summary: Fascinating, Brilliant, Exhaustively Researched Review: This work builds such a logical explanation for the author's theories regarding the origins of people and why we evolved differently in different places and at different rates of change. This book is not only a completely enjoyable read, but is a fascinating exploration into the origin and evolution of various cultures throughout the world. It has certainly given me pause to rethink alot of ideas that I held regarding the origins of race and culture. Highly recommended. I think classifying this in the young reader category is inaccurate, though a young person would undoubtably benefit from the ideas in this book, however I feel that this was not the audience that the writer was necessarily addressing.
Rating: Summary: All of the book could have been done in 50 pages Review: Fascinating topic, unbelievably rambling writing style. Author does an OK job following his various lines of argument, to the point you believe him, but I was very bothered by two things in his writing (aside from the incessant rambling). The first was the absence of a recognition that chance must have played a big role in where we ended up ... but the author seems convinced that the reader needs a rational, pattern-based explanation for everything. That is tantamount to biological determinism. There couldn't be an explanation for EVERYTHING. The second "bother" is that the author never, never ever, has an alternative explanation for anything. It would help alot if we had an idea of what the realm of "scholarly debate" on some of these topics is. Yet the book is written as if nobody else ever investigated these issues, and came up with an equally compelling argument contrary to this author's. The author seems intellectually honest enough to recognize that there are other explanations for things, but he spends no time exploring those other explanations in his rush to come up with a believable explanation of his own. Alot of the foregoing could be forgiven if only the book was well written.
Rating: Summary: Great Book, Minor Flaws, Responses to the Critics Review: I concur with most of the favorable reviews. The subject and thesis are fascinating. The delivery is less than perfect. The fact that the thesis is also politically correct does not make it any less compelling. Addressing some of the unfavorable reviews below: Repetitive? Yes, but certain dynamics neccessarily repeat. Culture, Food production, language, writing and other technologies (and animal and plant species themselves) make their transfer from the peoples of one geographical location to those of another based on the same repeating factors: presence or absence of geographical and climatalogical barriers, density of population (i.e. "critical mass"), and finally whether the receiving culture is otherwise primed to receive. This point neccessarily has to be repeated throughout the book. Technology transfer across geographical boundries. The criticism here is that the author picks and chooses which technologies could have been expected to transfer. ("The easy ones transfer, the hard ones don't," implying that the Australians, for example were to stupid to make use of Indonesian tools, or the Sub-Saharan Africans to use writing.) I found no contradiction here. The individual nature of each advance in technology determines whether it will (a)likely transfer and (b)"stick" in a new location. The analysis is very neccessarily case by case, depending on need, availiblility of raw materials, climate, population density, and stage of prior cultural development. Can even the greatest salesman really sell refrigerators to Eskimos? -- or even to New Guineans, if they don't have electric plugs? The Mexican wheel. I too noted the contradiction here. The lack of a beast of burden does not render this technology any less valuable. Why didn't Aztec kids who played with toy wheels grow up to be Aztec adults who pushed wheelbarrows or pulled carts up ramps to build pyramids? Is it possible that Diamond has stretched too far in "discovering" an Aztec wheel in the pictures on Aztec pottery? I agree that the photos add nothing. Some intermediate junior editor pulled out his set of old National Geographics and threw in a few photos to make the book more salable.
Rating: Summary: Good Book for the Average Person Review: Overall, Mr. Diamond offers an interesting and compelling argument as to why different societies and cultures developped differently. His argument was clear, and the book made for easy reading. For people who have little knowledge of this subject and who, in light of recent attention to the matter (e.g. The Bell Curve, Origins of Race), want to learn more, this book would be a good starting place. My only reservation in recommending this book is that it is not a book for an advanced student. Having good basic knowledge of history and anthropology, I found much of the book to be too elementary and very repetitive. My mother, however, who had little knowledge of the subject, loved the book. My basic recommendation: if you don't know much about the development of human races and cultures, this book provides an easy-to-understand introduction to the subject. If, however, you are looking for a ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting scientific tract, this is probably not the book for you.
Rating: Summary: The historical biogeography of the 'haves' and 'have-nots' Review: 'Guns, germs, and steel' is a highly readable scholarly work by the distinguished author of 'The third chimpanzee.' It is also a very important book, one bound to generate (as it already has) considerable debate and more research. On the one hand, it deftly exposes pseudoscientific and racist arguments about how some people were able to conquer other people; on the other, it offers a cogent account, with plenty of evidence from different fields (linguistics, anthropology, genetics, botany, and zoology, among others), of how the world came to be what it is since the last glaciation (i.e., about 12,000 years ago). As Paul Ehrlich said, it's a 'whirlwind tour' of world history, but one worth taking.In this book, Diamond is primarily interested in ultimate, not proximate, causes. His main argument is simplicity itself: some people were at the right time and the right place to harness whatever nature gave them--and, as a consequence, were able to end up with several advantages over those people they eventually conquered. Evidently, the biogeography of plants and animals was different on every continent and played a crucial role in the development of human history; Eurasia, for example, had more plants and animals that could be domesticated just because its large size guaranteed large numbers to experiment with, whereas, say, Australia, due to its relative isolation and aridity, had almost nothing to offer to those who settled there. Eurasian people, therefore, were able to abandon their nomadic lifestyle early and settle in large groups that would allow them to develop the necessary guns, germs, and steel to conquer other people. Although the main argument of 'Guns, germs, and steel' is convincing, I found that towards the end the book becomes repetitive. The last chapter is particularly disappointing because, instead of elaborating his initial argument of how to treat history in more scientific terms, Diamond ends up saying things he already mentioned throughout the book, and adds nothing to what other people (e.g., Ernst Mayr) have said on the subject. That chapter could have rounded up the book very nicely; instead, it exposes the book to very serious criticism. I also question the many plates with pictures of representatives of different human 'races' because they really don't add anything to what the book is talking about (those plates would have been more appropriate in his previous book, 'The third chimpanzee'). Despite this, however, I highly recommend this otherwise excellent book to anyone interested in human history and to those keen on battling racist views.
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