The Jared Diamond discussion thread

[Knight-Dragon]

Moderator Action: Moved to History.

 

[mrtn]

...Diamond argues that the physical shape of Eurasia - west to east - made it easier for civilization to develop there because the climatological conditions made it easy for crops to spread. He cites the example of wheat, which he claims flourished from Japan to Spain. This is factually inaccurate as the staple crop of the Far East was rice. Moreover, "west to east" means nothing in terms of climate. Siberia and England lie on the same latitude.
....

Never heard of Chinese noodles? The South of China eats rice. The North is much too dry for that, they live on wheat and other dry-growing crops.

Diamond claims that the spread of wheat from Spain to Japan was critical to the development of civilization. He seems to have a vision of billowing plains of wheat extending unbroken for thousands of miles. That's not how it worked - I happen to know that the staple crop in much of Spain during the Middle Ages was pasta.
...

Stolen Rutters already posted the link about pasta, which is made from wheat.

And I'd say that the OP is misleading, as Diamond spent years in New Guinea, not just "visiting the natives".

 

[Stolen Rutters]

Never heard of Chinese noodles? The South of China eats rice. The North is much too dry for that, they live on wheat and other dry-growing crops.

Stolen Rutters already posted the link about pasta, which is made from wheat.

And I'd say that the OP is misleading, as Diamond spent years in New Guinea, not just "visiting the natives".

When he made that pasta reply, I thought he was joking. He might just not know how to cook... or know what ingredients are actually in most food, but not knowing what pasta is made of is too much of a stretch to believe he was serious.

Making a claim that Spaniards didn't eat wheat, but pasta (a food that just so happens to be made mostly from ground up wheat)... that was just too funny.

For the record, most foods today are made up of high fructose corn syrup, at least in the US. Maybe that's what he was thinking. (I am joking, of course. It's only the third most common ingredient in our diets.)

 

[MCdread]

Didn't BBC make a joke report in the 50s or so (maybe at April's foul) about some swiss farmers that grew spaghetti trees and how they harvested the crop and prepared it until it was delivered as end product to the market? I heard quite a few people called to ask more info and about how could they import it and if the climate was suited, etc.

 

[Mott1]

Diamond takes that argument and stretches it over thousands of years and millions of square miles, to the point at which it becomes a reductio ad absurdum.

I have not read the book however if Diamond is indeed presenting the "arable land determines the advanced civilization" argument, then I agree it is quite absurd. I'm sure agriculture played an important role in the developement of early civilization, however there are many factors that contribute to civilization developement.
Does he acknowledge societal ideologies or institutions as possible inhibitors?

I'll have to pick up those books, sounds interesting.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

Yes, you should never just accept what you read as gospel (well unless you are religious and are actually reading the gospel, but even then I think you shouldn't just believe the interpretation you are given, either...) I so need to read this book.

I'm still getting through The Medieval Machine, written in the 1970s, about the industrial revolution of the European middle ages (the water and horse powered one in the tenth through the fourteenth century, not the more recent one built on steam engines and oil).

He claimed in the mid seventies that the current industrial revolution has lasted as long as the medieval one and pointed to the oil shocks as evidence that this one may be at its end and hard times should close out the twentieth century.

(Of course the computer revolution hadn't really spread to the public, so history writers aren't expected to have seen it coming in the seventies...) His argument that the mid and late middle ages weren't a dark age at all has spread pretty far nowadays, but speculation that we were destined to follow the same rise and fall has been pretty much shot down due to parallels being too fundamentally different.

I still have to read Diamond's book. Atropos has got me really interested in it. I was actually under the impression that he was claiming that guns (and steel) and disease (germs) was the difference that helped Europe dominate the world during the colonization era (too simplistic in my view... what was the underlying difference that allowed Europe to advance to that state in the first place?), but that is mostly based on the title. I wasn't very interested in that book until now. It seems like it goes more deeply into why Europe was first to dominate the world.

 

[Leifmk]

I have not read the book however if Diamond is indeed presenting the "arable land determines the advanced civilization" argument, then I agree it is quite absurd. I'm sure agriculture played an important role in the developement of early civilization, however there are many factors that contribute to civilization developement.

He doesn't do that, quite: Rather, he points out that the development of any kind of civilization at all requires organized food production and distribution on a large scale, for which arable land is one (though not at all the only) necessary requirement.

Does he acknowledge societal ideologies or institutions as possible inhibitors?

Oh, absolutely. Check out Collapse for a rather in-depth look at how some different social systems cope with potentially civilization-threatening problems.

 

[Leifmk]

I wasn't very interested in that book until now. It seems like it goes more deeply into why Europe was first to dominate the world.

Ah, yes. Yes, it does. At some considerable length.

 

[sydhe]

Didn't BBC make a joke report in the 50s or so (maybe at April's foul) about some swiss farmers that grew spaghetti trees and how they harvested the crop and prepared it until it was delivered as end product to the market? I heard quite a few people called to ask more info and about how could they import it and if the climate was suited, etc.

Behold:
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/spaghetti.html
I saw the actual report once on Candid Camera. If you have Real Player, you can click on the link at the bottom and watch it; the visual quality leaves a lot to be desired, but the sound is good.

 

[ShannonCT]

I still have to read Diamond's book. Atropos has got me really interested in it. I was actually under the impression that he was claiming that guns (and steel) and disease (germs) was the difference that helped Europe dominate the world during the colonization era (too simplistic in my view... what was the underlying difference that allowed Europe to advance to that state in the first place?), but that is mostly based on the title. I wasn't very interested in that book until now. It seems like it goes more deeply into why Europe was first to dominate the world.

The "germs" part of the book was quite eye-opening. Diseases that affect humans usually come from domesticated animals. The old world had a lot more species that were fit for domestication by the time humans started farming. Part of this was just luck, and part of it was the fact that humans migrated to the new world fairly late and were already skilled hunters. The new world immigrants killed off some of the species that might have become domesticated animals. As it was, the Americas only ended up domesticating one large mammal, the Alpaca, while Eurasia had 13. By the time the old world met the new, Europeans were walking biohazards.

 

[magritte]

While Diamond does push geographic determinism a bit far at times, Atropos is oversimplifying his arguments to the point of absurdity. Diamond's point is that the Middle East had a larger number of potentially cultivable plants and domesticable animals, more than anywhere else. It wasn't just wheat--although wheat was a staple for all the Old World cradles of civilization including India and China. One terrific bean is hardly going to create an agricultural civilization, particularly not in a community isolated from any other agricultural peoples.

As far as the climate, naturally climate's aren't identical over whole latitudes. However, you can grow wheat in a more or less continuous band from Spain to northern India, a very long E-W distance without major modification, but moving a shorter distance northward into Siberia requires faster-ripening wheat and southward into the humid tropics is problematic.

Diamond doesn't spend a lot of time on cultural factors, though he does acknowledge their significance. He discusses circumstances in which new technologies were rejected in China and Tasmania as examples. He makes an argument that technologies are only likely to be rejected in relatively isolated societies because technophobic societies in direct competition with others are going to be conquered by their more technophilic neighbors.

One of the weakest arguments in the book comes from this as he tries to argue that China's unity over long periods of time is geographic in origin. I didn't buy that. The East China plain is much smaller than the northern European plain--what significant geographic barriers are there between the Low Countries and the Urals? China may not be cut up into peninsulas like southern and western Europe, but paradoxically the most persistent large empire Europe had until the development of Russia held sway over that most geographically compartmentalized landscapes. I also felt he exaggerated the barriers to northward spread of corn in North America. Adaptation to increased seasonality would certainly be a factor, but the description of northern Mexico and Texas as an agriculturally impassable desert is off. The semi-arid plains of Tamaulipas and South Texas are traversed by several rivers (most notably the Rio Grande) that could have become the nuclei for agricultural civilizations. Actually, the Rio Grande did in New Mexico, but not in its lower reaches.

The book is definitely worthwhile reading and yes, Stolen Rutters, the focus of the book is trying to understand why Europeans had guns, germs, and steel.

 

[Plotinus]

Diamond was trying to prove that differences in development are not the result of differing ingenuity among the local inhabitants. His evidence for this was that the inhabitants of New Guinea are ingenious. In other words, the argument is completely circular.

Laying aside all the points about factual accuracy or not, and in what climates pasta grows naturally, I simply can't see why this is a circular argument.

 

[Mott1]

While Diamond does push geographic determinism a bit far at times, Atropos is oversimplifying his arguments to the point of absurdity. Diamond's point is that the Middle East had a larger number of potentially cultivable plants and domesticable animals, more than anywhere else. It wasn't just wheat--although wheat was a staple for all the Old World cradles of civilization including India and China. One terrific bean is hardly going to create an agricultural civilization, particularly not in a community isolated from any other agricultural peoples.

As far as the climate, naturally climate's aren't identical over whole latitudes. However, you can grow wheat in a more or less continuous band from Spain to northern India, a very long E-W distance without major modification, but moving a shorter distance northward into Siberia requires faster-ripening wheat and southward into the humid tropics is problematic.

Diamond doesn't spend a lot of time on cultural factors, though he does acknowledge their significance. He discusses circumstances in which new technologies were rejected in China and Tasmania as examples. He makes an argument that technologies are only likely to be rejected in relatively isolated societies because technophobic societies in direct competition with others are going to be conquered by their more technophilic neighbors.

One of the weakest arguments in the book comes from this as he tries to argue that China's unity over long periods of time is geographic in origin. I didn't buy that. The East China plain is much smaller than the northern European plain--what significant geographic barriers are there between the Low Countries and the Urals? China may not be cut up into peninsulas like southern and western Europe, but paradoxically the most persistent large empire Europe had until the development of Russia held sway over that most geographically compartmentalized landscapes. I also felt he exaggerated the barriers to northward spread of corn in North America. Adaptation to increased seasonality would certainly be a factor, but the description of northern Mexico and Texas as an agriculturally impassable desert is off. The semi-arid plains of Tamaulipas and South Texas are traversed by several rivers (most notably the Rio Grande) that could have become the nuclei for agricultural civilizations. Actually, the Rio Grande did in New Mexico, but not in its lower reaches.

Thanks for the overview, a very cognizant presentation. I am a bit disappointed that he doesn't spend much time on the cultural aspects of civilizations, I strongly believe that ideological environments are essential factors in civilization development. A thorough examination on this vital societal component is necessary to achieve a complete understanding of civilizational evolution (or stasis).
However I'll save my crticism once I purchase the book.