That book is so garbage, psudoscientific, empirically wrong, sinophobic, and I'm probably forgetting a bunch.
Also lol to it's explanation for no beasts of burden in Africa. Sorry, folks have actually mostly domesticated the zebra. The explanations for why Zebra's were not domesticated after all this time are a massive cope. Even worse copes are the non recognition/misunderstandings of Elephant usage in large numbers for warfare / burden from Africa to India,
"It is possible that having evolved under pressure from the many large predators of Africa, including early humans, they became more aggressive, thus making domestication more difficult.[104] However, zebras have been trained throughout history. In Rome, zebras are recorded to have pulled chariots during amphitheatre games starting in the reign of Caracalla (198 to 217 AD).[105] In the late 19th century, the zoologist Walter Rothschild trained some zebras to draw a carriage in England, which he drove to Buckingham Palace to demonstrate that it can be done. However, he did not ride on them knowing that they were too small and aggressive.[106] In the early 20th century, German colonial officers in East Africa tried to use zebras for both driving and riding, with limited success."
Oh and also Africa had cattle and donkies and the donkey was actually domesticated in Africa.
West African empires like Mali, Songhai, and the Oyo Empire famously maintained massive cavalry units. They adapted horses to tropical conditions, using them for state-building and warfare long before the arrival of Europeans.
>Environmental Determinism is the ultimate racism.
Diamond says that the reasons Europeans colonised South America (rather than vice versa) is largely due to geographic factors, not due to any inherent genetic superiority of European over South Americans. I don't see how that is racist. Quite the opposite.
What if it's due to neither environmental nor genetic factors but ideas. Europe was backward until it re-absorbed classical learning and absorbed newer ideas from the Orient, which led to the renaissance and everything that followed. Did Europeans suddenly gain 40 IQ points in that time? No. Did their environment change? No.
For some reason a lot of people have a huge problem with this explanation, actually preferring either environmental determinism or racism. This is in spite of what seems to be a lot of historical evidence for it in the form of causal influence: ideas are introduced somewhere (inventions, methods, philosophies, languages, mathematics, literature, etc.) and large changes follow.
His entire section/epilogue on "Why China isn't actually a counter example to my whole thesis, tee-hee!!" AKA Chapter 13 literally goes into "well the emperor there had so much power and could unilaterally keep their technology levels down with stupid trade restrictions so that's why Europeans put them through the century of humiliation and eclipsed them!" and other nonsense is straight up massive Sinophobia and very racist.
Diamond makes broad genetic/intelligence claims about whole populations, rankes societies as "advanced/backward" constantly and describes conquest as inevitable
"in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners"
"modern "Stone Age" peoples are on the average probably more intelligent"
"some societies seem hopelessly conservative, inward looking, and hostile to change."
Actual quotes from this so called bastion of liberalism
"China’s connectedness eventually became a disadvantage" [because] "a decision by one despot could and repeatedly did halt innovation."
China = monolithic, obedient, centralized, despotic, stagnant; Europe = pluralistic, competitive, innovative.
Diamond turns "Chinese authoritarianism" into a transhistorical condition produced by the land itself. I'm all about the LVT and Georgism and all but this is doing too much service for land.
In other words, the old Orientalist story survives perfectly well after the race science has been supposedly removed from the chassis. Better still, Diamond treats Ming maritime policy, imperial bureaucracy, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution as variations on the same ancient geographical bug, as though two thousand years of Chinese politics were basically the Yangtze River repeatedly pressing the "authoritarianism" button with it's floods!!!
It's been more than a decade since I have read it, but I remember Diamond writing specifically about the relative lack of domesticable animals in sub-Saharan Africa. Mali, Songhai, and Oyo didn't "[adapt] horses to tropical conditions", they imported already domesticated animals from elsewhere (North Africa). It is telling that none of your examples are in Central or Southern Africa.
Also, domestication is the process of breeding animals over multiple generations to make them more pliable and is not the same as training individual animals to pull a carriage. The very first sentence of the paragraph that you quoted from the Wikipedia article on zebras is "Attempts to domesticate zebras were largely unsuccessful."
Go take a look at where Kenya is located on a map and where Donkey's were first domesticated and tell me that I didn't cover sub-Saharan africa again with a straight face.
That first sentence "attempts were largely unsuccessful" is a cope from wikipedia editors who are mad that it keeps being brought up by race realists who are using this blurb to justify their own racism. Consider that it was a literal Rothschild who did the most recent almost-domestication. 4chan is on this like fly's are on horses (but not Zebra's, or horses painted like Zebras - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-22333-7)
The part I quoted without the unnecessary pre-thinking done with that first sentence is all I need. It was quite possible to get most of the way there over short periods of time with money and effort.
> Environmental Determinism is the ultimate racism.
I don't see how this is true, even somewhat? Saying that the environment you're in shapes your culture, progress, and overall development as a society, makes perfect sense. Saying that the environment does not play a huge factor in this leaves open only the option of that development being genetic/hereditary, doesn't it? You'd be blaming the failure or shortcomings of civilizations, current and previous, on the genetic predisposition of their peoples. That feels far more racist to me than saying, "This area did not have X resources in available and sufficient quantities to allow them to develop Y improvement".
I understand that this was often used to justify colonialism, which I want it to be very clear I strongly disagree with. But, it would feel deeply wrong to say that all things are possible to progress in all areas. For example, we could NOT expect some hypothetical area with very poor soil health and little water to become a great improver of early agriculture. Likewise, areas with no easy access to copper, tin, iron, etc, would be unlikely to begin using those resources for farming implements. An area with all of this in abundance would have a much EASIER time developing these things.
I read Guns, Germs and Steel recently and loved it. After finishing it, I was wondering how well the theses had held up in the time since it was published and did some research, and seems like most (though not all) of the major points have held up pretty well or even been strengthened by recent evidence. However, the book seems to have attracted a surprising amount of hate, which this reminds me of! It feels to me like an instinctive hateful backlash to a remarkable achievement, like "crabs in a bucket syndrome" or the Einstein quote -
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”
I think it got a lot of criticism because it was very wide ranging and some experts felt that Diamond was encroaching on their turf. Also it made a lot of sales, which probably provoked some envy. IIRC (some years since I read the book) Diamond made clear that a lot of the ideas were speculative.
I'm pretty sure Julian Jaynes' work is entirely hypothetical and is thought if as just an interesting idea rather than actually having any semblance of truth to it... unless you actually believe the Greeks were amongst the first humans to truly emerge with consciousness which seems farfetched to me
> unless you actually believe the Greeks were amongst the first humans to truly emerge with consciousness which seems farfetched to me
To the extent that human consciousness can be described from within itself as something distinct from a pan-consciousness of all things, is it farfetched to consider it as not existing until it did emerge? In what artifacts could someone discern the threshold at which consciousness arose?
The meat of the book is the references, not the extreme interpretation that catches most peoples' attention. No hallucinations please unless something like substances were involved.
The plasticity of the brain whether damaged or not is emphasized, and uneven recovery of language skills gives some clues.
Monkey see, monkey do was certainly a thing before humans arrived and it's not been left behind very completely at all.
In a world where almost everybody starts out in early childhood learning to read & write at the same time, and it is structurally taught largely to right-handed kids from right-handed examples, and this has been going on since like "written history"[0], this can not help but provide an overwhelming mainstream norm about what side of the brain is for what. Especially when it comes to language. You could almost think of it as a force acting to confine language, or more so the writing part of literacy to one side of the brain more so than the other. The bulk of the highest-educated and most respected vocabularies have been largely built through literacy rather than orally for quite some time, it wasn't always like that even with equivalent vocabularies, and that part lasted longer than the part since literacy got popular.
For those where it doesn't perfectly apply, like left-handed people, those who don't read and/or write, those who learned from left-handed people, those that taught themselves, etc, that all adds up to a small minority and of course there is great pressure to conform. But that doesn't mean the same language ends up in the same parts of the brain as the "normal" specimen in the jar.
The most recent development is the way more early writing is accomplished using both hands on a keyboard like never before when it was traditionally penmanship for generations back.
Now some people actually "think" in language more so than others, some not at all, plus often bilingual works too.
I'll go ahead and say it, if you were up there in the highlands where Dolly Parton was born back in the 19th century before they really got to building schools, you could find an "illiterate" culture often having a wider vocabulary than those in places like Boston where they had schools continuously since arriving on the continent. Unlike PNG the hillbillies of the Smokies descended directly from a literate culture, they just didn't bring many books that far up the mountains, and odds are they would be lost to mildew by the mid 1700s.
Sometimes you also get the idea that when they were feuding, they just didn't understand each other and everything was fine among the disagreeable factions as long as everyone stayed on their own mountain. People had lost the ability to read, and when they only had one book that was probably the Bible but they couldn't literally decipher it any more. It was still holy though for the faithful who would pretend to read from it while more or less "lip-syncing" the scriptural quotes that had been passed down orally ever since.
Maybe that's where the saying comes from; "If I had half a brain I'd ." From those who have no history of using less than both halves even for language, so they naturally don't do what the mainstream does? While simultaneously recognizing that they don't even have the same first half that the formally educated (whom they often respect so highly) do possess.
With PNG you've got to figure all the highlanders have language and stuff well-imprinted in their brains like anybody else, "just" not with the pattern recognized as most common to outsiders.
That doesn't mean their superstitions were based on hallucinations of any kind, among different cultures you can expect different parts of different halves of the brain to be doing some of the same things differently. Especially when they have always been isolated from each other.
There might even be a tendency going far back into "modern" literate culture, where the "literate" half of the brain is generally respected most when it is brilliant enough to get by on its own, and that ends up predominating.
Anyone who comes along and has always used all their brain may still have an orthogonal advantage. That could be why professor Diamond attributed the PNG highlanders as perhaps more intelligent than most in general. Or with a cool million of them there's got to be an Einstein or two. What would an Einstein casually having twice as much brainpower than previously imagined be like?
[0] Recent written history, the kind that means the most to a literate culture. Note the way with some traditionally illiterate groups how oral history can easily go back many generations further.
That's true, but hear me out. I wear reasonably priced, "nice" watch — a Seiko 5 GMT. Quartz watches tell time better. I wear this one because I think it's a good looking watch and like the way it looks and feels on me. Although quite practical as far as such things go, it's definitely in the "jewelry" category. I paid more than a well-working quartz digital costs purely because I found it attractive, not because it's an objectively amazing watch. I get the appeal of jewely.
So... instead of spending $5k on that blood diamond, spend that much on a larger, prettier, flashier, objectively better lab diamond. Now you or your lady friend can enjoy a bigger, nicer, even more luxurious diamond for the same price. You can still spend $5k if you wish, but end up with something more mind-blowing.
Now a days the imperfections themselves in the rings are what are valued in natural diamonds.
People from India, thailand, Myanmar etc have not and probably won’t for a very long time abandon a strong preference for natural diamonds, regardless of how much “better” the lab grown ones are.
That's some kind of urban joke on 4chan yet the far more objectively cruel act of mass male circumcision at birth happens daily and hardly anyone bats an eye at it.
Why have horror movies when real life is all I need? Unironically!
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