"Guns, Germs, and Steel" and Geographic Determinism

[sgtmac_46]

Kind of misses the point though: who's to say that their's wasn't one of the most advanced on the planet? Certainly not you-our current culture is doomed to failure because of our dependency on the very resource you bring up, as are the Saudis.

To many, the oil beneath the sands of the Middle East is a kind of godsend for them. My take on it is that it’s illusionary wealth in the same way that the mining of gold and silver in the New World by the Spanish ultimately proved to be more bane than boon for them, and the way stealing technology became economic suicide for the Soviets during the Cold War.

What the Arabs have achieved is tantamount to what a student cheating in high school achieves. Both “easy wealth” and cheating provide an instant reward, but neither provide a foundation. And like cheating in high school, once you get locked into easy wealth, you discover you need more and more of it just to keep going.

So, here’s my thesis: the oil the Arabs are selling isn’t a blessing at all; it’s a curse.

From the 16th to the early 19th centuries, the Spanish sent shipload after shipload of mineral wealth back to their country from the New World. But instead of using it for capital investment, the gold, silver, and gems soon left Spain to be spent in other countries to buy the goods those countries produced. In the meantime, those “resource-poor” countries like England, France, and Germany, who hadn’t found gold mines in their colonies or at home, had to depend on developing technology, building factories, and creating trade routes to build wealth. Gradually, Spain, while keeping the facade of being rich, became a country without an economic base, trying to keep up with its resource-poor neighbors who had built industrial bases that sustain them to this day.

Something similar happened with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. They stole technology from the West, rather than develop their own, but in the long run their thievery benefited the West, not the Soviet Union. Like the cheating highschooler, the Soviets discovered that the more complicated technology became, the less capable they were of doing original work because they hadn’t built a foundation. The result was that, although they did make huge strides in a few fields, such as metallurgy and mathematics, they fell way behind in numerous others. What comes to mind is computers. Rather than getting in a race with the United States, as the Japanese did, to develop the tools of the Information Age, the Soviets were content to sit back and just take what they could steal.

The difference in the two economies, the Japanese and the present day Russians, is testament to the rewards of making sacrifices in costly R&D and hard work versus the fleeting rewards of theft. So, technologically and economically, the Soviets/Russians fell further and further behind. Today the Japanese are an economic world power while the Russians are an economic basket case.


It should be noted that the Soviet refusal to understand what it takes to be a major economic power goes back years before the Cold War. As an example, when Henry Ford went to the Soviet Union as a guest of Stalin in the 1930s, Stalin reputedly asked him how the Soviets could build a trucking industry, something required for a modern industrial country. Ford said, “Build cars.” If you create a nation of drivers, trucks and a trucking industry would naturally follow. Ford didn’t believe you could build a trucking industry in a country where the populace rode in mule carts. And he was right. The automobile would have created the foundation for what Stalin wanted. But he couldn’t see it, so the cars weren’t built, trucks never became much of a factor, and the Soviet Union suffered.


There are even earlier examples in prehistory of how “easy wealth” destroys. In prehistoric times, wealth did not go to those societies that hunted and gathered best, it went to those which domesticated cattle and planted gardens.


Now it’s the Arabs who will never really get anywhere until they realize that wealth doesn’t come easy—or, in their case—from a hole in the ground. It comes from hard work, working smart, and original research and development.

That's all very interesting, but is a completely different topic from the conclusion that northkyousa has been trying to come to. In fact, what you just outlined tends to support what I have been saying...that resources alone aren't enough without a good cultural foundation that is able to appropriately utilize those resources.

 

[Makalakumu]

Science requires proof THAT a hypothesis IS true, not proof it ISN'T. It is not my role to disprove your hypothesis, I think you may have a fundamental misunderstanding of science, as it is apparent that your only concern with the issue is to further a political mindset, disregarding as you do any evidence that doesn't fit your conclusions.

You aren't presenting any plausible alternatives that explain the evidence as well as geographic determinism. In fact, all you are saying is that I am biased, which really is a non argument.

Yes, and who they are is a superior form of life (the Neuro-surgeon) and an inferior one (the lab rat). The statement that evolution created them is of no consequence to the discussion of qualitative difference. It's like discussing the works of a particular artist, one may be of far superior quality, the fact that they were both painted by the same artist does NOT make them equal.

Again, by your criteria, bacteria are far superior to humans...hmmmm

The simple fact of the matter is that there are no superior life forms. A lab rat is supremely evolved for that niche and humans cannot suddenly jump in and out compete the rat. This misunderstanding of evolution is the reason why you fail to understand this argument.

They are not poor at all, their wealth, per capita, is as great as any nation on the planet. If domestic natural resources alone are the only reason nations rise to dominance, you might, then, explain how Great Britain (that land of LARGE AMOUNTS of natural resources, lol) or Japan rose to world power levels. I doubt you'll succeed in making that argument based on pure, raw materials alone.

They dominated with superior technology and exploited weaker neighbors and took their resources. Its that simple. It wasn't any ideology that made the differece.

Technology is not ideology. Nor is it the property of one culture. All humans use it and devolop it...and innovation is also environment dependent.

Now that is funny, what criteria is that?

Your claim that one must obviously be superior if one is able to dominate large areas of land mass, resources, and other species. Thus, bacteria are far superior to humans since they do all of this and more.

Or they could just be differently adapted and shaped by their environments. Just like everything else is.

Your whole argument is predicated on a false idea, and that idea is that there is no objective measure of superior or inferior. Further, I suspect that you even know this argument is false, that you are merely making it because you believe it will aid you in damaging a system you disagree with. The ultimate goal seems to be to convince people that there is nothing superior about the current system, so there is no reason NOT to change it. Of course the idea that no idea or system is superior doesn't apply to any system you believe should replace the current one, does it. When science is guided by political ideology, I question it as pseudo-science...

Making assumptions about my motives doesn't damage the argument. It only shifts the focus. The points are clear. You don't understand the subtleties involved. The argument is not nothing is superior or inferior it is that the environment determines whether or not a culture dominates another culture.

 

[Makalakumu]

Now you're becoming more honest in your motives. The discussion of Marx and capitalism shows the true motive for wanting to foster this idea....specifically, to try and prove that capitalism is in no way superior so that you can replace it with......another idea. The very fact that you are trying to do this PROVES that you really don't believe this idea of geographic determinism. If you DID believe it, you would believe that no idea YOU had would in any way make anything better, everything is just an accident. You might want to keep in mind that it was western culture that created the very science that you are using to try and prove that western culture has no greater or lesser value than any other. Further, Diamond might be forced to acknowledge that it is western scientific empirical thinking that he has made a corner stone of his life, thereby proving that he views it as of superior value than other ideals. Science WAS created by western culture, and as it is used to manipulate our entire reality to our will, it PROVES the value of ideas over environment.

More assumptions and less argument. Also, science as a way of knowing and technology are two different things. One is a product of western culture and another is something that all humans do.

Checkmate.

Hardly.

The rest of this discussion is merely footnotes to a lost game on your part, but i'll continue. This part of your post amuses me the most, first you claim the Saudi's are poor, now you assert they are WEALTHY? lol. At least be consistent in the ame posts.

So, we've resorted to intentionally misreading posts in order to discredit an idea and claiming some sort of victory? I said that the Saudis are wealthy, but they are too poor to go the moon. Is that so hard to understand or are you just getting desperate?

I imagine spelling and grammatical errors will be next. I'll be very careful...

We all have similar genes, funny how some are able to exploit their environment far better than others though, isn't it?

Simple, we look at any place where a culture has a disadvantage in resources, but an advantageous idea. Take Great Britain or Japan as examples of being short on resources. Then you compare them with any culture that has an abundance of natural resourcs, say native american culture (who lived on the land you claim is solely responsible for the United States' dominance for thousands of years before Europeans arrived). The Native Americans didn't have the ideas that were required to exploit their natural resources, despite having possession of them for THOUSANDS of years (remember all that oil). If merely possessing natural resources was enough, Native American culture would be one of the most advanced on the planet.

The environment determines what ideas emerge. The environment determines how powerful they become. The environment determines how they spread. You are giving humans too much credit.

Great Britain and Japan benefited from other environmental resources...they imported technology very quickly and they were able to use to take the resources they needed to form the empires they did. The geography of their countries and the proximity of information made this impossible. Not their ideas or culture. They were in the right place at the right time.

As far as the native americans are concerned, again, look no further then the geography. There were huge barriers that prevented the flow of ideas. Diamond addresses these marvoulously. Things like physical barriers, environmental choke points, and continent axis are well supported by evidence. If you want to take this on, then you'll have to provide some counter evidence.

 

[elder999]

That's all very interesting, but is a completely different topic from the conclusion that northkyousa has been trying to come to. In fact, what you just outlined tends to support what I have been saying...that resources alone aren't enough without a good cultural foundation that is able to appropriately utilize those resources.

errr....I'm fairly certain that's what I was trying to do.....just without the whole cultural bias as to what constitutes a "good cultural foundation".

 

[sgtmac_46]

You aren't presenting any plausible alternatives that explain the evidence as well as geographic determinism. In fact, all you are saying is that I am biased, which really is a non argument.

I'm not even sure you know what you're trying to claim. The fact is, if all you are trying to prove that environments shape cultures, the rest of us accepted that fact a long time ago, nothing earth shattering there. Your evidence doesn't proven anything else.

Again, by your criteria, bacteria are far superior to humans...hmmmm

Depends on what criteria your are using. If the criteria is adapting technology to allow it travel vast distances and control it's environment i'm not sure you have a grasp on the situation.

The simple fact of the matter is that there are no superior life forms. A lab rat is supremely evolved for that niche and humans cannot suddenly jump in and out compete the rat. This misunderstanding of evolution is the reason why you fail to understand this argument.

It's not me that has a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution and evolutionary processes. I'm not even sure you have a firm grasp on what your own point is.

They dominated with superior technology and exploited weaker neighbors and took their resources. Its that simple. It wasn't any ideology that made the differece.

Thank you for acknowledging "superior" technology. That's what life forms do. Those that are better adapted route the weak. Remember "evolution". This is why I wonder if you have even a miniscule grasp of the subject matter.

Technology is not ideology. Nor is it the property of one culture. All humans use it and devolop it...and innovation is also environment dependent.

Technology is based on ideas. Ideas create technology. Maybe the problem is a misunderstanding about the idea of cause and effect. A good idea results in technological advantage. All life is part of the environment, your statement that "innovation is environment dependent" is really non-sense. All life is environmentally dependent. It's like saying "survival is environmentally dependent". No kidding.

Your claim that one must obviously be superior if one is able to dominate large areas of land mass, resources, and other species. Thus, bacteria are far superior to humans since they do all of this and more.

Actually, that was also your claim. Remember "superior" technology. My claim was that one culture is superior to another culture because it beat it out and dominated large areas of land mass. Much as one bacteria may be evolutionarily superior by it's ability to be more competative over another bacteria. You see how the this works. It's really a comparison among competing entities. If two cultures compete and one wins and dominates the other, from an evolutionary stand point it is "superior".

Or they could just be differently adapted and shaped by their environments. Just like everything else is.

However you wish to describe it. Words are just a way of describing phenomenon.

Making assumptions about my motives doesn't damage the argument. It only shifts the focus. The points are clear. You don't understand the subtleties involved. The argument is not nothing is superior or inferior it is that the environment determines whether or not a culture dominates another culture.

It does if you don't truly believe your own argument. If that is the case you are merely engaging in sophistry.

More assumptions and less argument. Also, science as a way of knowing and technology are two different things. One is a product of western culture and another is something that all humans do.

lol. Nice spinning, are you getting dizzy yet? You've not added anything new to this conversation. You're stuck at a logical impasse. Your evidence does not support your hypothesis.

So, we've resorted to intentionally misreading posts in order to discredit an idea and claiming some sort of victory? I said that the Saudis are wealthy, but they are too poor to go the moon. Is that so hard to understand or are you just getting desperate?

Nothing about your argument makes me desperate. First you claimed they are actually poor, then they are actually wealthy. You created a strawman by inserted the argument about going to the moon. It doesn't require being able to go to the moon to allegedly be wealthy enough to advance beyond a tribal society. The Saudis apparently either A) Don't possess even that much wealth or B) They are missing something other than resources that will allow them to advance. So which is it. The moon reference on your part is just a red herring.

I imagine spelling and grammatical errors will be next. I'll be very careful...

It's not spelling errors that I find irritating, it's logical reasoning errors. I'm not a spell checker.

The environment determines what ideas emerge. The environment determines how powerful they become. The environment determines how they spread. You are giving humans too much credit.

Again, more logical reasoning errors. You keep confusing the source of a given phenomenon with it's quality. One culture can have greater value than another culture, it can have greater technology, greater ideas. Where that technology and ideas came from is irrelavent. You keep wanting to link one with the other to pursue a political agenda, and even Diamond was not successful in that. He and you are playing a shell game, thinking that if you spend quite a lot of time proving one, you don't have to discuss the other, you can just throw your hands up and say "See". You haven't proven your hypothesis, and that hypothesis is that all cultures are equal. All you've proven is "Well, the environment is responsible for molding cultures". I thought all of us already accepted this fact, and it has nothing to do with what you are alleging it proves.

Great Britain and Japan benefited from other environmental resources...they imported technology very quickly and they were able to use to take the resources they needed to form the empires they did. The geography of their countries and the proximity of information made this impossible. Not their ideas or culture. They were in the right place at the right time.

All you've proven is that superior resources produce superior cultures with superior ideas. Let me see if I can spell it out for you. Modern western culture has been able, by virtue of resources, to produce a situation where we can set aside a group of people who don't have to physically labor. We call them 'academics'. They, in turn, expand our body of knowledge and technology. Therefore, resources has produced a superior civilization. Wow. That's far from "All civilizations are equal, some just had the advantage of resources". One has nothing to do with the other.

As far as the native americans are concerned, again, look no further then the geography. There were huge barriers that prevented the flow of ideas. Diamond addresses these marvoulously. Things like physical barriers, environmental choke points, and continent axis are well supported by evidence. If you want to take this on, then you'll have to provide some counter evidence.

I'll say it again, why native american culture stayed a stone age culture has less bearing than THAT they stayed a stone aged culture. It proves nothing to claim that it was because of their environment. We can accept that and STILL refute that they were equal to our culture. That part of this equation is just wishful thinking on your part and has nothing to do with science, but is mere ideology pretending to be science.

 

[Tgace]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs_and_Steel#Criticisms_of_methodology

A more fundamental argument against Diamond’s thesis is that he does not understand the true nature of history; if history is defined as “a study of human actions” then it must be a study of conscious action and the evolution of ideas, rather than environmental factors. The ability of man to shape his environment and create a positive environment for growth presents many counterexamples to Diamond’s thesis, such as the numerous cases of rapid prosperity achieved by countries with few resources but free markets such as Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan. (Compared with nations blessed with natural resources that have stagnated under interventionist governments, examples: Brazil, Nigeria, and Russia.)

 

[Makalakumu]

I'm not even sure you know what you're trying to claim. The fact is, if all you are trying to prove that environments shape cultures, the rest of us accepted that fact a long time ago, nothing earth shattering there. Your evidence doesn't proven anything else.

The implications of this are such that you refuse to see them. If the environment shapes culture and determines success, then abstract ideas such as capitalism and socialism are irrellevent. This is the argument I've been trying to make from the start.

The only real mistake I've made is that I did not make the separation of concrete/material and abstract ideas more clear...as Hardheadjarhead pointed out. Technology is a concrete/material idea and can allow groups of our species to dominate another group...yet even this is environmentally dependent as we both seem to agree.

Thank you for acknowledging "superior" technology. That's what life forms do. Those that are better adapted route the weak. Remember "evolution". This is why I wonder if you have even a miniscule grasp of the subject matter.

I've acknowledged this point from the beginning of this thread. I even went back and reread the entire thing to be sure that I haven't said anything that could be interpretted as otherwise. As far as evolution goes, the better adapted win out against the lesser adapted...not the weak. The difference is subtle, but important to this argument. Weak is an unsupportable value judgement that you are placing on the lesser adapted.

This fundamental misunderstanding of evolution that you have leads you into thinking that since one civilization dominated another, then one is strong and the other is weak. This preconceived value judgement is causing you to miss all of the environmental factors that determined this contest. Strong or Weak are irrellevant. Lesser adapted is determined environmentally. Your preconceived notions do not exist.

BTW - do you need to keep making inflamatory statments like the ones in bold? Think about how this invective reflects on your character...

Technology is based on ideas. Ideas create technology. Maybe the problem is a misunderstanding about the idea of cause and effect. A good idea results in technological advantage. All life is part of the environment, your statement that "innovation is environment dependent" is really non-sense. All life is environmentally dependent. It's like saying "survival is environmentally dependent". No kidding.

The funny part about this argument is that despite our differences, we are agreeing on the key points.

Actually, that was also your claim. Remember "superior" technology. My claim was that one culture is superior to another culture because it beat it out and dominated large areas of land mass. Much as one bacteria may be evolutionarily superior by it's ability to be more competative over another bacteria. You see how the this works. It's really a comparison among competing entities. If two cultures compete and one wins and dominates the other, from an evolutionary stand point it is "superior".

I am beginning to see that long ago some biology teacher beat..."survival of the fittest" into your brain. That is fine, it is a way of understanding natural selection if you understand the caveat that Darwin himself pointed out. Fittest is not a value judgement. Fittest means better adapted. And Darwin himself states that fittest does not mean strongest or even superior. Evolution happens because of the accidents of environment. Adaptation is driven by these accidents. All value judgements beyond this are completely unsupportable because...and please pay attention...because a species/population/culture/civilization/(and in many ways) an individuals success is an accident of environment.

Nothing about your argument makes me desperate. First you claimed they are actually poor, then they are actually wealthy. You created a strawman by inserted the argument about going to the moon. It doesn't require being able to go to the moon to allegedly be wealthy enough to advance beyond a tribal society. The Saudis apparently either A) Don't possess even that much wealth or B) They are missing something other than resources that will allow them to advance. So which is it. The moon reference on your part is just a red herring.

The point is easy to understand. You're injecting lots of ideas in here that are not mine. The point is simple. The Saudis are wealthy, but not wealthy enough to go to the moon. They are, in essence, to poor to accomplish that goal. Thus, they are too poor to really compete with the United States. There ideas are irrellevant. The environment determined the answer.

Again, more logical reasoning errors. You keep confusing the source of a given phenomenon with it's quality. One culture can have greater value than another culture, it can have greater technology, greater ideas. Where that technology and ideas came from is irrelavent.

What you are really talking about is success. I've dealt with value judgements like quality above. The origin of better adaption is the point. The environment determined this, not the ideology or another form of abstract ideals or religion.

You keep wanting to link one with the other to pursue a political agenda, and even Diamond was not successful in that. He and you are playing a shell game, thinking that if you spend quite a lot of time proving one, you don't have to discuss the other, you can just throw your hands up and say "See". You haven't proven your hypothesis, and that hypothesis is that all cultures are equal.

The boldface statement above caused me to go back and carefully reread this thread. This is your invention. You injected this into the argument and I have never even implied it. This is, by definition, a strawman, because it is far easier to defeat this argument then the argument that I actually have been making. Groups of people have obviously shown that they are better adapted, but this apparent success was not due to anything abstract. It was an accident of environment.

All you've proven is that superior resources produce superior cultures with superior ideas. Let me see if I can spell it out for you. Modern western culture has been able, by virtue of resources, to produce a situation where we can set aside a group of people who don't have to physically labor. We call them 'academics'. They, in turn, expand our body of knowledge and technology. Therefore, resources has produced a superior civilization. Wow. That's far from "All civilizations are equal, some just had the advantage of resources". One has nothing to do with the other.

The interesting thing here is that your strawman pops up in the guise of my argument and then you try to fall back on my original point. You're missing the point, because you don't understand the implications...and I've pointed that out above.

I'll say it again, why native american culture stayed a stone age culture has less bearing than THAT they stayed a stone aged culture. It proves nothing to claim that it was because of their environment. We can accept that and STILL refute that they were equal to our culture. That part of this equation is just wishful thinking on your part and has nothing to do with science, but is mere ideology pretending to be science.

The native americans were less adapted because of the environment, not because of their abstract ideas. Their lot was determined by accident. That is what my point illustrates. Your ideology prevents you from accepting this argument because is devalues our culture and ideas. It threatens the basic tenents of individuality and places a very real limit on the power you think that you have. Your difficulty with this reductionism is the same recycled resistance that people had for heliocentrism. For centuries, science has been showing us that our place in the universe has been getting smaller and smaller and that our supposed power of the environment is getting less and less.


upnorthkyosa

 

[Tgace]

Mr. Diamond seems to have written this book as a means of refuting the old theories about non-Europeans being backward, and in a classic case of political correctness, he actually argues that the inhabitants of New Guinea are more intelligent than their European counterparts. New Guinea--the same country in which cannibalism is believed to still go on in some areas. Here's the gist of the author's argument: Europe's dominance of the world was almost solely an accident of geography; Europe had more natural resources (both plant and animal) than any other continent, and even people stupider than New Guineans couldn't have screwed it up. While there is no doubt that Europe has been blessed with a favorable climate, good soils and plentiful wildlife, the same can be said for many other regions (such as North America, Australia and even West Africa), and Diamond's attempt to explain the difference between them left me unconvinced. Diamond's theory also completely fails to explain the success of Japan--a country that possesses few natural resources. In short, this is a classic case of a guy using selective data to prove a questionable point.

 

[sgtmac_46]

The implications of this are such that you refuse to see them. If the environment shapes culture and determines success, then abstract ideas such as capitalism and socialism are irrellevent. This is the argument I've been trying to make from the start.

Yet Diamond just came out with a followup book extolling certain societal virtues as contributing to their success or failure as a culture. Could it be that you simply don't understand Diamond's point all that well?

The only real mistake I've made is that I did not make the separation of concrete/material and abstract ideas more clear...as Hardheadjarhead pointed out. Technology is a concrete/material idea and can allow groups of our species to dominate another group...yet even this is environmentally dependent as we both seem to agree.

Again, the only real mistake you keep making is mixing ideas up. You keep assuming that the fact that environment impacts what ultimately becomes society is the same as saying that all societies are equal. Environment ultimately impacts what organisms are produced as well, and the organisms that end up surviving are those most able to adapt to new environments, while other organisms die out. You have not proven your hypothesis, which is NOT that environment impacts society. Your hypothesis is that this somehow proves that all societies are equal, which it doesn't even come close to proving. What you are experiencing is a categorical error, believing that one thing is the same as another.

I've acknowledged this point from the beginning of this thread. I even went back and reread the entire thing to be sure that I haven't said anything that could be interpretted as otherwise. As far as evolution goes, the better adapted win out against the lesser adapted...not the weak. The difference is subtle, but important to this argument. Weak is an unsupportable value judgement that you are placing on the lesser adapted.

The difference is semantic. Lesser is as much a value judgement. At some point semantical arguments become completely inane. We can argue all night long about whether "lesser" or "weaker" is a value judgement. We can actually define both in concrete terms, so again, semantical arguments go nowhere.

This fundamental misunderstanding of evolution that you have leads you into thinking that since one civilization dominated another, then one is strong and the other is weak. This preconceived value judgement is causing you to miss all of the environmental factors that determined this contest. Strong or Weak are irrellevant. Lesser adapted is determined environmentally. Your preconceived notions do not exist.

Again, simply more semantical arguments that I believe you are resorting to because you have nothing left.

BTW - do you need to keep making inflamatory statments like the ones in bold? Think about how this invective reflects on your character...

Is this your idea of a preconceived value judgement? lol.

The funny part about this argument is that despite our differences, we are agreeing on the key points.

The only key point we agree on is the fact that environment shapes biology and, by proxy, society. As this is nothing new or earth shattering, I don't see why you sought to create an entire thread on that point alone. It's much the same as creating a thread inquiring if the world is flat or not.

I am beginning to see that long ago some biology teacher beat..."survival of the fittest" into your brain. That is fine, it is a way of understanding natural selection if you understand the caveat that Darwin himself pointed out. Fittest is not a value judgement. Fittest means better adapted. And Darwin himself states that fittest does not mean strongest or even superior. Evolution happens because of the accidents of environment. Adaptation is driven by these accidents. All value judgements beyond this are completely unsupportable because...and please pay attention...because a species/population/culture/civilization/(and in many ways) an individuals success is an accident of environment.

lol "please pay attention", you actually think you are engaging in some sort of sophisticated lecture. That's amusing. An individuals success or failure is based on the adaptive nature of how his biology interacts with his environment, that's a very distinct difference from the conclusion that environment is the sole cause of success or failure. You seem to miss the fact that it's the organisms interaction with and adaption TO it's environment that decides whether it succeeds or fails. The environment is really a testing ground of adaptation. It seems you only have a grasp on part of the equation, either that or you are purposely attempting to leave out key aspects of reality in order to support your conclusions. One of those adaptive traits are ideas. If an idea allows an organism to adapt to it's environment well, then it will survive as an idea. Again, you might refer to Diamond's LATEST book wherein he discusses how cultural ideas can lead to their success or failure as a culture. His conclusion not mine. And since your entire thesis here is based on Diamond, it must be rather disconcerting for him to be veering away from what you believed his conclusions were. You might want to check out "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" By Jared Diamond.

The point is easy to understand. You're injecting lots of ideas in here that are not mine. The point is simple. The Saudis are wealthy, but not wealthy enough to go to the moon. They are, in essence, to poor to accomplish that goal. Thus, they are too poor to really compete with the United States. There ideas are irrellevant. The environment determined the answer.

And you are attempting to make a strawman by setting the true measure of societal material wealth at traveling to the moon. Since only one culture has attained that level of success, despite numerous cultures attaining considerable wealth, it is not relavent in that context.

What you are really talking about is success. I've dealt with value judgements like quality above. The origin of better adaption is the point. The environment determined this, not the ideology or another form of abstract ideals or religion.

lol. ideology is an adaptive trait. I already explained to you that the interaction and success or failure of adaptive traits interacting with the environment has a direct impact on success or failure of a culture. Further, I think Diamond agrees with that conclusion, otherwise he wouldn't have written a followup book outlining what he sees as successful adaptive ideologies gleaned from historical sources. lol.

The boldface statement above caused me to go back and carefully reread this thread. This is your invention. You injected this into the argument and I have never even implied it. This is, by definition, a strawman, because it is far easier to defeat this argument then the argument that I actually have been making. Groups of people have obviously shown that they are better adapted, but this apparent success was not due to anything abstract. It was an accident of environment.

All life should be considered an accident, however that does not alter that some life forms are better adapted than others. That is what we are really talking about, and some traits are more useful as adaptations than others. Ideologies are merely adaptive traits to be emulated, much like some animals emulate traits of other animals for protection or hunting. That is what an idea is, an adaptive trait. The fact that all life is an accident has no bearing on whether or not the bow and idea was a successful adaptation. Again, you are arguing yourself in to a corner. I think you've tried to take Diamond's work in a direction he never intended.

The interesting thing here is that your strawman pops up in the guise of my argument and then you try to fall back on my original point. You're missing the point, because you don't understand the implications...and I've pointed that out above.

That's because your point is not supported by your evidence.

The native americans were less adapted because of the environment, not because of their abstract ideas. Their lot was determined by accident. That is what my point illustrates. Your ideology prevents you from accepting this argument because is devalues our culture and ideas. It threatens the basic tenents of individuality and places a very real limit on the power you think that you have. Your difficulty with this reductionism is the same recycled resistance that people had for heliocentrism. For centuries, science has been showing us that our place in the universe has been getting smaller and smaller and that our supposed power of the environment is getting less and less.

Their environment did not allow them to develop the kind of abstract ideas and concepts that would allow them to be competative. I don't understand why this idea is so foreign to you, except that perhaps you have an ulterior motive that is threatened by this whole concept.

 

[Makalakumu]

***Same recycled arguments that contain the same fundamental misunderstandings. This isn't going anywhere...***

I'll attempt to keep this brief...

1. A societies dominance is determined by the geography and resources in the environment.
2. A societies ideals are also products of the environment, but they have a diminished role.
3. Better and lesser adaptations are determined by the accident of environment.

BTW - Darwin himself spend a lot of time making the distinction between fittest and lesser or better adapted. Why? Because many times the "winners" is not the fittest. They are the freaks, the malformed, the wasteful, bloated, myopic and addicted to oil.

The bottom line is that a society does not rise to prominance because of its ideals, it rises because of pre-existing factors that had far more power then ideals. Thus, the claim that a societies ideals is solely responsible for its success is fallacious.

The obvious question is this..."what real power do ideals exert on a society?"

This is the subject of the book Collapse: How societies choose the fail or succeed. Its a good thing I'm reading this book right now, because the title would seem to contradict the points made above. It does not. It goes further into the topic of geographic determinism and it illustrates how it can determine a societies failure. It also talks about the real power of ideals in response to these environmental/geographic causes.

This is taken from here

Collapse is divided into four parts.

• Part One describes the environment of the US state of Montana, focusing on the lives of several individuals in order to put a human face on the interplay between society and the environment
• Part Two describes past societies that collapsed. Diamond uses a "framework" when considering the collapse of a society, consisting of five "sets of factors" that may affect what happens to a society: environmental damage, climatic change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and the society's own responses to its environmental problems. The societies Diamond describes are:
  • Easter Island (a society that collapsed entirely due to environmental damage)
  • The Polynesians of Pitcairn Island (environmental damage and loss of trading partners)
  • The Anasazi of the Southwestern USA (environmental damage and climate change)
  • The Maya of Central America (environmental damage, climate change, and hostile neighbours)
  • The Greenland Norse, whose society collapsed owing to all five factors, include the final one, an unwillingness to change in the face of social collapse.
  • Finally, Diamond discusses three past success stories:
    • The tiny Pacific island of Tikopia
    • The agricultural success of central New Guinea
    • The Tokugawa-era forest management in Japan.
• Part Three examines modern societies, including:
  • The collapse into genocide of Rwanda, caused in part by overpopulation
  • The failure of Haiti compared with the relative success of its neighbour, the Dominican Republic
  • The problems facing a Third World nation, China
  • The problems facing a First World nation, Australia
• Part Four concludes the study by considering such subjects as business and globalization, and "extracts practical lessons for us today" (p. 22 – 23).

In the prologue, Diamond previews Collapse in one paragraph, as follows.

This book employs the comparative method to understand societal collapses to which environmental problems contribute. My previous book (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies), had applied the comparative method to the opposite problem: the differing rates of buildup of human societies on different continents over the last 13,000 years. In the present book focusing on instead of collapses rather than buildups, I compare many past and present societies that differed with respect to environmental fragility, relations with neighbors, political institutions, and other "input" variables postulated to influence a society's stability. The "output" variables that I examine are collapse or survival, and form of the collapse if collapse does occur. By relating output variables to input variables, I am to tease out the influence of possible input variables on collapses. (p. 18)

One out of the five factors that cause a societies collapse is something our ideals can affect...and that is only if we are willing to change them in response to a changing environment. In a few weeks, when I finish the book, I'll start a new thread on this book.

 

[Tgace]

The Diamond Fallacy.

Diamond Does Not Comprehend the True Character of History

I believe that Diamond's desire to transform the practice of history stems chiefly from the fact that he understands neither the nature of the material from which the historian launches his inquiries, nor what the historian's task is in relation to that material. Diamond has reverted to the view of history held by 19th-century positivists, who believed that the historian is presented with a collection of "historical facts," and that his job is to discover the "laws" or "historical forces" that explain those facts.

For example, Diamond declares that, since the "whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes [in clashes of different cultures] ... they must have inexorable explanations, ones more basic than mere details concerning who happened to win some battle or develop some invention on one occasion a few thousand years ago" (pg. 25). Yet he neither refutes the idea that historical contingency can offer adequate explanations in this regard, nor does he defend his insistence upon "inexorable explanations" of the human past.

Now, despite the recent emphasis in the philosophy of science on how all facts are "theory laden," there is a sense in which it is true that the natural scientist does have the facts to be explained presented to him as a given starting point for his investigations. A certain star just does produce a certain spectral pattern. There may be disagreement as to what the pattern means, or even as to whether it is significant, but there it is. If some astronomer doubts it is so, he can re-create the pattern for himself. Compound A and compound B just do produce a certain amount of heat when combined. The chemist skeptical of the fact as reported can combine them herself and make her own measurement.

But no similar facts are given to the historian. Instead, he is faced with certain artifacts that have survived into the present, and which he takes to be signs of past events that are not present before him, events that it will never be possible to re-create. Nor can the surviving pieces of evidence of past happenings be taken at face value. A text purporting to describe a battle may have been composed to glorify the victor or excuse the loser. A politician's memoirs may have been written with an eye to making him look good to future generations. The inscription on a statue may have been re-inscribed at the behest of a ruler jealous of his illustrious predecessor's accomplishments. The historian is always presented with a collection of initially ambiguous and often, on their face, mutually contradictory pieces of evidence, on the basis of which he attempts to determine what the facts really were. The "facts of history" are not the starting point of his inquiry, but are instead its end product. As Collingwood notes, "The fact that in the second century the legions began to be recruited wholly outside Italy is not immediately given. It is arrived at inferentially by a process of interpreting data according to a complicated system of rules and assumptions" (1946, pg. 133).

To denigrate historical inquiry because it does not mimic the natural sciences in attempting to discover universal laws is to declare that there is no value in simply determining what really happened in humanity's past. Setting aside, for the moment, the question of whether it is even feasible to formulate "laws of history," a question that we will address below, I contend that the effort to discover the historical past is worthwhile in its own right, even if there is another discipline that could discover historical laws. To learn what really occurred in the past is to understand how we came to be where we are today. The knowledge gained through historical inquiry enables us to see how the myriad decisions and actions of our predecessors, the ideas they held, the ideals to which they aspired, the gods they worshipped, and the demons they feared, all combined to create the world in which we find ourselves today.

Lacking an understanding of what real historical research consists of, Diamond winds up doing "scissors and paste" history. His approach fails him in at least the one instance he discusses with which I have the most familiarity: the story of the QWERTY keyboard. He declares "trials conducted in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent" (pg. 248). If that were really true, then the fact that no company employing large numbers of typists, and wishing to double their productivity while at the same time making their jobs much easier—surely a profitable move!—chose to break with convention and switch to this efficient keyboard layout is astonishing.

But we can contain our astonishment. It turns out that the study Diamond cites was severely flawed, showing no evidence of using a genuine control group or random sampling to choose participants. Furthermore, it was conducted by none other than August Dvorak, the inventor of the purportedly more efficient keyboard, who, holding the patent to his design, had a large financial stake in proving the superiority of his model. Later, independent studies did not confirm Dvorak's outlandish claims. (See Liebowitz and Margolis, 1996, or my summary of their findings.)

Diamond also periodically employs the long discredited idea that there is a significant division between "human history" and an earlier time, before the invention of writing, called "pre-history." To the contrary, as Collingwood puts it:

"A consequence of the error which regards history as contained ready-made in its sources is the distinction between history and prehistory. From the point of view of this distinction, history is coterminous with written sources, and prehistory with the lack of such sources. It is thought that a reasonably complete and accurate narrative can only be constructed where we possess written documents out of which to construct it, and that where we have none we can only put together a loosely assemblage of vague and ill-founded guesses. This is wholly untrue: written sources have no such monopoly of trustworthiness or informativeness as is here implied, and there are very few types of problems which cannot be solved on the strength of unwritten evidence" (1946, pg. 372).

Diamond opens his book with a question asked of him by Yali, a New Guinean whom the author met while undertaking biological research on the island: Why is it that Europeans have so much more "stuff" than New Guineans? He laments that most professional historians "are no longer even asking the question" (pg. 15). It doesn't seem to occur to him that the reason for that might be that it is not an historical question. If history consists in showing how the occurrence of some unique event in the past is made intelligible by the particular circumstances that led up to it, then it is categorically unable to address such questions as "Why are Europeans generally wealthier than New Guineans?" As Oakeshott says:

"[The] alleged task is to discern [an historical event's] 'true' character by coming to understand it as an example of the operation of a 'law of history' or a 'law of historical change.' In order to perform this task [the historian] must equip himself with such a 'law' or 'laws.' And he is said to do this in a procedure of examining (and perhaps comparing) a number of such occurrences and situations and coming to perceive them as structures composed of regularities. But this, also, is clearly a mistake: no such conclusion could issue from such a procedure. What this 'historian' needs and what he must devise for himself is a collection of systematically related abstract concepts ... in terms of which to formulate 'laws.' How he may set about this enterprise we need not enquire ... But what is certain is that they cannot be laws of 'history' or 'historical change' because they do not and cannot relate to the circumstantially reported situations he designs to explain, but only to model-situations abstracted from them in terms of these 'laws.' In short, the distinction between such a model-situation (explicated in terms of regularities) and a circumstantially reported situation is not a difference of truth and error; it is an unresolvable categorical distinction" (1983, pp. 81–82).

In the same vein, Mises notes, "The notion of a law of historical change is self-contradictory. History is a sequence of phenomena that are characterized by their singularity. Those features which an event has in common with other events are not historical" (1957, pg. 212).

Diamond does not comprehend the nature of historical inquiry, rendering his attempt to replace what he has failed to understand with his own brand of "scientific history" badly misguided. Nevertheless, I believe that he quite usefully has described a number of common patterns in human affairs. The economist Tony Lawson calls such patterns "demi-regs," by which he means "a partial event regularity which prima facie indicates the occasional, but less than universal, actualization of a mechanism or tendency, over a definite region of time-space" (1997, pg. 204).

But Diamond fails to realize the contingent nature of all such regularities in the social world. As Lawson notes,

"in the social realm, indeed, there will usually be a potentially very large number of countervailing factors [to any particular cause] acting at any one time and/or sporadically over time, and possibly each with varying strength.... [And] the mechanisms or processes which are being identified are themselves likely to be unstable to a degree over time and space.... Indeed, given the fact of the dependence of social mechanisms upon inherently transformative human agency, where human beings choose their courses of action (and so could always have acted otherwise), strict constancy seems a quite unlikely eventuality" (1997, pp. 218–19).

One of Diamond's chief motivations in writing the book under review seems to have been to discredit racial explanations of the course of history. However, if he had comprehended the true character of historical explanation, he would have seen that he was battling a chimera. Race can no more substitute for genuine historical understanding than can geography. How could it possibly explain the concrete particularities of history, when the past presents us with Germans as different as Johann Goethe and Adolf Hitler, Jews as dissimilar as Karl Marx and Ludwig von Mises, Irishmen as far apart as James Joyce and Gerry Adams, Chinese as divergent as Lao Tsu and Mao Tse Tung, blacks like George Washington Carver and Idi Amin, and so on.

Conclusion

Mises categorized the type of history Diamond proposes as "environmentalism." He said of it, "The truth contained in environmentalism is the cognition that every individual lives at a definite epoch in a definite geographical space and acts under the conditions determined by this environment." But, he goes on to note the flaw inherent in all attempts to regard the environment as the "ultimate cause" of historical events: "The environment determines the situation but not the response. To the same situation different modes of reacting are thinkable and feasible. Which one the actors choose depends on their individuality" (1957, pg. 326).

Diamond, I believe, has discovered some very interesting "demi-regularities" in the human past. But he has not realized that, quite apart from the search for such demi-regs, there is a different and quite legitimate discipline called history that concerns itself with discovering the particular antecedents of some unique going-on that explain its occurrence, based on critically analyzing artifacts from the past that have survived into the historian's present.

As I mentioned in the introduction, Diamond's mistake is not merely of concern to scholars. The view that "vast, impersonal forces" largely determine the course of history, whether those forces are taken to be "the material conditions of production," as in Marxism, or geographical circumstances, as in Diamond, naturally suggests that individuals can do little to affect their own future. As a logical consequence, in order to improve the lives of those who have been dealt a poor hand by those forces, it seems necessary to counteract them with another vast, impersonal force, namely, the State. Huge international programs intended to redress the arbitrary outcomes brought about by historical forces are recommended. The cases of countries with few geographic advantages but relatively free economies, such as Japan, prospering, and those of nations blessed with natural resources but ruled by highly interventionist governments, for example, Brazil or Nigeria, lagging behind, are easily dismissed as anomalies by those who are convinced that human action plays an insignificant part in history.

While Diamond's book is filled with valuable insights, it is not, as he would like to believe, the first step in the reformation of history along more "scientific" lines, but only another interesting vantage point from which to contemplate humanity's past. Furthermore, the policy implications of his overreach are a danger to both human welfare and freedom.

 

[hardheadjarhead]

One of Diamond's chief motivations in writing the book under review seems to have been to discredit racial explanations of the course of history. However, if he had comprehended the true character of historical explanation, he would have seen that he was battling a chimera. Race can no more substitute for genuine historical understanding than can geography. How could it possibly explain the concrete particularities of history, when the past presents us with Germans as different as Johann Goethe and Adolf Hitler, Jews as dissimilar as Karl Marx and Ludwig von Mises, Irishmen as far apart as James Joyce and Gerry Adams, Chinese as divergent as Lao Tsu and Mao Tse Tung, blacks like George Washington Carver and Idi Amin, and so on.


The issue of race and the development of culture is hardly a chimera. With the rise of Herbert Spencer's notions of social Darwinism, the spread of eugenics in the late nineteenth and early 20th century, and current arguments over the racial heritability of intelligence as given in "The Bell Curve," one has to stretch quite a bit to ignore what is a huge controversy.

This is an incredibly bad piece of writing, reflective of some of the worst Post-Modern prose I've ever seen.

His listing of Japan as a country that succeeds inspite of a lack of material goods is incorrect. Japan's culture was always on the cutting edge until their three hundred year hermitage. Once introduced to Western culture they readily assimilated it because of the infrastructure that was in place. Japan was...and is...a part of that Europ-Asian grain belt that Diamond lists as being so critical to the rise of cultures in Euro-Asia. This is hardly an anomaly.

The author insists that highly interventionist governments such as those in Brazil and Nigeria are responsible for their languishing economies inspite of their natural resources. Yet these natural resources do not and can not fit into Diamond's paradigm, nor should they. It is hardly reasonable to expect the inhabitants of what is now Nigeria to have developed their natural gas and petroleum resources 30,000 years ago. Contrasting current development in the last fifty years with Diamond's model is absolutely silly.

One must note that China is a highly interventionist government with far superior resources to either Brazil or Nigeria. China's ascendancy as a power in the Pacific rim, then, is an anomaly?

Callahan also suggests that Diamond's model of an agrarian culture overcoming a hunter/gatherer culture is flawed. He then points out the Mongol and Hittite conquests, among others. He fails to note that neither the Mongols or the Hittite's were hunter/gatherer. Their nomadic cultures were quite agrarian in that they were herdsmen. They were a part of the very culture Diamond lists as having ascended over the hunter/gatherers. Diamond lists sheep and horses among those domesticated animals that led to the ascension of Euro-Asian cultures. Moreover, in listing the Goths he lists a group that was comprised of farmers, as were the Turks and Hittites and Dorians. Once their invasions were completed, the quickly settled down to lives on the farm. The Goths themselves moved west with the incursion into their lands by eastern tribes such as the Huns. Prior to that, they were happy farmers...well, as happy as one could be in an age where life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Additionally, the conquests Diamond correctly observes took place far before those Callahan cites, and in no way defuse Diamond's thesis.

Callahan hides a number of flaws in his argument behind a wordy and opaque prose style. He employs some of the worst jargon I've seen out of an academic.

The founders of this site, if you'll read a little further, promotes "classical liberalism," a form of libertarianism that advocates individual action over democracy. It advocates "natural elitism".

Let me suggest to TGace and others here that while such a philosophy might at first appeal to you, you'd best understand that it does not serve you. Men such as Ludwig Mises could give a rat's *** about the likes of us. They are far more than eurocentric. They're aristocrats. While their myth of self determination might sound great to the middle class here in America, and inspires notions of the "American Dream," I suspect you will quickly find your opportunities diminishing in a world of their vision.



Regards,


Steve

 

[Tgace]

http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/ml_ggs.html

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.

But it is also in my interest to help strangers willing to help me back. So there is also pressure to develop the yet more sophisticated ability to keep track of those I have helped, those in my debt, proven welshers (who won’t get my help again), to calculate the odds that I can get away with accepting help today without having to reciprocate tomorrow, and so on. And the more adept urban dwellers became at these calculations, the subtler their interactions became, which selected for even better abilities to handle these interactions.

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.

 

[sgtmac_46]

***Same recycled arguments that contain the same fundamental misunderstandings. This isn't going anywhere...***

I'll attempt to keep this brief...

1. A societies dominance is determined by the geography and resources in the environment.
2. A societies ideals are also products of the environment, but they have a diminished role.
3. Better and lesser adaptations are determined by the accident of environment.

BTW - Darwin himself spend a lot of time making the distinction between fittest and lesser or better adapted. Why? Because many times the "winners" is not the fittest. They are the freaks, the malformed, the wasteful, bloated, myopic and addicted to oil.

The bottom line is that a society does not rise to prominance because of its ideals, it rises because of pre-existing factors that had far more power then ideals. Thus, the claim that a societies ideals is solely responsible for its success is fallacious.

The obvious question is this..."what real power do ideals exert on a society?"

This is the subject of the book Collapse: How societies choose the fail or succeed. Its a good thing I'm reading this book right now, because the title would seem to contradict the points made above. It does not. It goes further into the topic of geographic determinism and it illustrates how it can determine a societies failure. It also talks about the real power of ideals in response to these environmental/geographic causes.

This is taken from here

One out of the five factors that cause a societies collapse is something our ideals can affect...and that is only if we are willing to change them in response to a changing environment. In a few weeks, when I finish the book, I'll start a new thread on this book.

I can sum your basic misunderstanding up far more simply and with far less obfuscation than you are attempting. You (and apparently Diamond) are mixing up the concept of race (a mostly irrelavent concept) with culture. They are not one and the same, and it is this categorical error that accounts for much of the great flaw in your argument. You (through Diamond) attempt to make two simultaneous arguments.

1) That race is irrelavent in determining whether a society succeeds. That environment plays a greater role than racial differences. That argument is not in any way earth shattering and is irrelavent in the way an argument that the world is round is irrelavent.

2) That culture and cultural values, likewise, are irrelavent to whether societies succeed or fail. It is the first point that Diamond's book (and your argument) has been spending it's time trying to prove. You have not given one argument to prove the second point, nor are you capable of doing so as your whole argument is based on the hope that the reader will not notice the fact that the two, culture and race, are not the same thing.

What Diamond does is a clever trick (one you are trying to do). It makes two points, and spends a lot of time and energy proving only one, the easiest one. Then, at the end, he points to the bulk weight of his argument and declares both points proven, finally and conclusively. You can keep spewing that line all day, but it still doesn't prove the second point because culture and race are not the same thing. Your argument is based on the concept that both are indifferentiable, and that is a poor and obvious strawman. I have illustrated time and time again that cultural ideas are able to alter environmental factors. In fact, ideas, by their very nature, are judged as successful or not on their ability to adapt the environment to suit a given need. Everything from the fire to crop rotation to neuro-surgery to nano-technology illustrate how the ingenuity of human beings is able to alter environmental restrictions.

By your argument, your are suggesting that if you get an illness you will not see a doctor. The idea of medicine is a creation of human creative, not some random environmental phenomenon existing seperate from human ideas. Medicine adapts the environment to serve human interests. If human ideas don't have any effect on the environment,and everything is just an accident, then a doctor won't do you any good, the environment will decide whether you live or do. So, do you visit doctors when you are ill?

One of Diamond's chief motivations in writing the book under review seems to have been to discredit racial explanations of the course of history. However, if he had comprehended the true character of historical explanation, he would have seen that he was battling a chimera. Race can no more substitute for genuine historical understanding than can geography. How could it possibly explain the concrete particularities of history, when the past presents us with Germans as different as Johann Goethe and Adolf Hitler, Jews as dissimilar as Karl Marx and Ludwig von Mises, Irishmen as far apart as James Joyce and Gerry Adams, Chinese as divergent as Lao Tsu and Mao Tse Tung, blacks like George Washington Carver and Idi Amin, and so on.


The issue of race and the development of culture is hardly a chimera. With the rise of Herbert Spencer's notions of social Darwinism, the spread of eugenics in the late nineteenth and early 20th century, and current arguments over the racial heritability of intelligence as given in "The Bell Curve," one has to stretch quite a bit to ignore what is a huge controversy.

This is an incredibly bad piece of writing, reflective of some of the worst Post-Modern prose I've ever seen.

His listing of Japan as a country that succeeds inspite of a lack of material goods is incorrect. Japan's culture was always on the cutting edge until their three hundred year hermitage. Once introduced to Western culture they readily assimilated it because of the infrastructure that was in place. Japan was...and is...a part of that Europ-Asian grain belt that Diamond lists as being so critical to the rise of cultures in Euro-Asia. This is hardly an anomaly.

The author insists that highly interventionist governments such as those in Brazil and Nigeria are responsible for their languishing economies inspite of their natural resources. Yet these natural resources do not and can not fit into Diamond's paradigm, nor should they. It is hardly reasonable to expect the inhabitants of what is now Nigeria to have developed their natural gas and petroleum resources 30,000 years ago. Contrasting current development in the last fifty years with Diamond's model is absolutely silly.

One must note that China is a highly interventionist government with far superior resources to either Brazil or Nigeria. China's ascendancy as a power in the Pacific rim, then, is an anomaly?

Callahan also suggests that Diamond's model of an agrarian culture overcoming a hunter/gatherer culture is flawed. He then points out the Mongol and Hittite conquests, among others. He fails to note that neither the Mongols or the Hittite's were hunter/gatherer. Their nomadic cultures were quite agrarian in that they were herdsmen. They were a part of the very culture Diamond lists as having ascended over the hunter/gatherers. Diamond lists sheep and horses among those domesticated animals that led to the ascension of Euro-Asian cultures. Moreover, in listing the Goths he lists a group that was comprised of farmers, as were the Turks and Hittites and Dorians. Once their invasions were completed, the quickly settled down to lives on the farm. The Goths themselves moved west with the incursion into their lands by eastern tribes such as the Huns. Prior to that, they were happy farmers...well, as happy as one could be in an age where life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Additionally, the conquests Diamond correctly observes took place far before those Callahan cites, and in no way defuse Diamond's thesis.

Callahan hides a number of flaws in his argument behind a wordy and opaque prose style. He employs some of the worst jargon I've seen out of an academic.

The founders of this site, if you'll read a little further, promotes "classical liberalism," a form of libertarianism that advocates individual action over democracy. It advocates "natural elitism".

Let me suggest to TGace and others here that while such a philosophy might at first appeal to you, you'd best understand that it does not serve you. Men such as Ludwig Mises could give a rat's *** about the likes of us. They are far more than eurocentric. They're aristocrats. While their myth of self determination might sound great to the middle class here in America, and inspires notions of the "American Dream," I suspect you will quickly find your opportunities diminishing in a world of their vision.



Regards,


Steve

You speak as if you actually believe in the power of ideology, good or bad. I thought the point was that ideology has no real impact. I guess that's not the REAL point is it? I think we are getting closer to the source of your REAL position on this topic. A little bit of manipulating "science" for a political agenda. It's really the sophistry of it all that offends me. As if we are idiotic enough to buy in to it hook, line and sinker the shell game that is being played here, and i'm the idiot for pointing out that the hypothesis doesn't add up to what you and northkyosa (and Diamond) claim. Here's a little hint: When you start out with your conclusions, and then only seek facts that support that conclusion, it IS NOT SCIENCE. As for the power of ideas to alter reality, if you didn't believe in the power of ideas, you wouldn't be giving your warning about the "American Dream", nor would North be spending so much time trying to preach this line. No objective truth but that which serves the cause? Pretty much what I thought.

 

[Tgace]

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19980...on-history-that-feels-good-usually-isn-t.html

And yet, as fascinating as this book is, it is also in important ways destructive. It is untrue to claim, as Diamond does, that the traditional account of the rise of the West was an implicitly racist one. At least in this century, the traditional account of the rise of the West has given credit to its propitious political and social institutions. That is not true only of recent times, when the institutions in question are liberal ones, but of more ancient history as well, when the West benefited from the devolution of power implicit in feudalism and the scope for free thought created by the independence of the medieval Christian church from political control. And that traditional account agreed, with varying degrees of certainty, that those traditions were more or less available to anyone else and would have more or less similar results wherever they were tried. Today Latin American and Asian countries are rocketing toward prosperity (with a bump or two along the way) by mimicking the institutions painfully evolved in England and North America. Curiously, at the very moment when the evidence seems strongest for this institutional theory, we seem most eager to believe that backward countries are the helpless victims of their pasts.

This reproach is especially pertinent in Diamond's case because his own intentions are so stridently polemical. He wants to scold Westerners for ever having looked down on others and to lift up those others who feel demoralized by the West's superior success. "We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in people's status," he writes. "We're assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation of the world's inequalities as of AD 1500 is wrong, but we're not told what the correct explanation is. Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all."

We can all agree that racist arrogance is wrong, both in fact and on principle. But today, racist arrogance is both less prevalent and less dangerous than the opposite danger: a self-pitying refusal to learn from the success of others. History has its victims, of course, and Diamond's account of how those victims became victims is powerful and illuminating. But the best way to deal with one's victimhood is by putting it behind one, rather than lounging upon it and indulging it. History should not be written with the intent to help: it is scholarship, not social work, and its only criterion of success is truth. Still, if it seeks to help, it ought actually to be helpful. And despite its originality and erudition, the lesson that this book seeks to impart is anything but that.

 

[sgtmac_46]

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19980901fareviewessay1423/david-frum/how-the-west-won-history-that-feels-good-usually-isn-t.html

It is for these politically correct reasons alone, not for any real scientific validity, that Diamond is so often cited with such reverence by some. It isn't his science they support, it's his political conclusions. I often believe that some people will forgive any error in fact, so long as the politics are correct. Further, for a group of people who claim that Diamond conclusively proves that cultural ideas and ideology have absolutely no impact on the success or failure of society, they certainly spend quite a lot of time prostylizating to others about it. Could it be that they simply see Diamond's work (perhaps even Diamond himself see's his work) as a tool to damage whatever system they seek to replace. All of this shows that obviously Diamond (and those who cite him) truly believe that ideas have power, otherwise they wouldn't be seeking to convince others of the rightness of theirs.

 

[Tgace]

Exactly..on one hand we are "destroying" the world with our technology and "ideas" and on the other we are pawns of the environment where our ideas and hard work have no value. Which is it? Whichever supports the ideology de jour.

 

[Makalakumu]

One of Diamond's chief motivations in writing the book under review seems to have been to discredit racial explanations of the course of history. However, if he had comprehended the true character of historical explanation, he would have seen that he was battling a chimera. Race can no more substitute for genuine historical understanding than can geography. How could it possibly explain the concrete particularities of history, when the past presents us with Germans as different as Johann Goethe and Adolf Hitler, Jews as dissimilar as Karl Marx and Ludwig von Mises, Irishmen as far apart as James Joyce and Gerry Adams, Chinese as divergent as Lao Tsu and Mao Tse Tung, blacks like George Washington Carver and Idi Amin, and so on.


The issue of race and the development of culture is hardly a chimera. With the rise of Herbert Spencer's notions of social Darwinism, the spread of eugenics in the late nineteenth and early 20th century, and current arguments over the racial heritability of intelligence as given in "The Bell Curve," one has to stretch quite a bit to ignore what is a huge controversy.

This is an incredibly bad piece of writing, reflective of some of the worst Post-Modern prose I've ever seen.

His listing of Japan as a country that succeeds inspite of a lack of material goods is incorrect. Japan's culture was always on the cutting edge until their three hundred year hermitage. Once introduced to Western culture they readily assimilated it because of the infrastructure that was in place. Japan was...and is...a part of that Europ-Asian grain belt that Diamond lists as being so critical to the rise of cultures in Euro-Asia. This is hardly an anomaly.

The author insists that highly interventionist governments such as those in Brazil and Nigeria are responsible for their languishing economies inspite of their natural resources. Yet these natural resources do not and can not fit into Diamond's paradigm, nor should they. It is hardly reasonable to expect the inhabitants of what is now Nigeria to have developed their natural gas and petroleum resources 30,000 years ago. Contrasting current development in the last fifty years with Diamond's model is absolutely silly.

One must note that China is a highly interventionist government with far superior resources to either Brazil or Nigeria. China's ascendancy as a power in the Pacific rim, then, is an anomaly?

Callahan also suggests that Diamond's model of an agrarian culture overcoming a hunter/gatherer culture is flawed. He then points out the Mongol and Hittite conquests, among others. He fails to note that neither the Mongols or the Hittite's were hunter/gatherer. Their nomadic cultures were quite agrarian in that they were herdsmen. They were a part of the very culture Diamond lists as having ascended over the hunter/gatherers. Diamond lists sheep and horses among those domesticated animals that led to the ascension of Euro-Asian cultures. Moreover, in listing the Goths he lists a group that was comprised of farmers, as were the Turks and Hittites and Dorians. Once their invasions were completed, the quickly settled down to lives on the farm. The Goths themselves moved west with the incursion into their lands by eastern tribes such as the Huns. Prior to that, they were happy farmers...well, as happy as one could be in an age where life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Additionally, the conquests Diamond correctly observes took place far before those Callahan cites, and in no way defuse Diamond's thesis.

Callahan hides a number of flaws in his argument behind a wordy and opaque prose style. He employs some of the worst jargon I've seen out of an academic.

The founders of this site, if you'll read a little further, promotes "classical liberalism," a form of libertarianism that advocates individual action over democracy. It advocates "natural elitism".

Let me suggest to TGace and others here that while such a philosophy might at first appeal to you, you'd best understand that it does not serve you. Men such as Ludwig Mises could give a rat's *** about the likes of us. They are far more than eurocentric. They're aristocrats. While their myth of self determination might sound great to the middle class here in America, and inspires notions of the "American Dream," I suspect you will quickly find your opportunities diminishing in a world of their vision.



Regards,


Steve

Moreover, this argument reeks of the same arguments that creationists make against evolution...

Take this selection...

Now, despite the recent emphasis in the philosophy of science on how all facts are "theory laden," there is a sense in which it is true that the natural scientist does have the facts to be explained presented to him as a given starting point for his investigations. A certain star just does produce a certain spectral pattern. There may be disagreement as to what the pattern means, or even as to whether it is significant, but there it is. If some astronomer doubts it is so, he can re-create the pattern for himself. Compound A and compound B just do produce a certain amount of heat when combined. The chemist skeptical of the fact as reported can combine them herself and make her own measurement.

But no similar facts are given to the historian. Instead, he is faced with certain artifacts that have survived into the present, and which he takes to be signs of past events that are not present before him, events that it will never be possible to re-create. Nor can the surviving pieces of evidence of past happenings be taken at face value. A text purporting to describe a battle may have been composed to glorify the victor or excuse the loser. A politician's memoirs may have been written with an eye to making him look good to future generations. The inscription on a statue may have been re-inscribed at the behest of a ruler jealous of his illustrious predecessor's accomplishments. The historian is always presented with a collection of initially ambiguous and often, on their face, mutually contradictory pieces of evidence, on the basis of which he attempts to determine what the facts really were. The "facts of history" are not the starting point of his inquiry, but are instead its end product. As Collingwood notes, "The fact that in the second century the legions began to be recruited wholly outside Italy is not immediately given. It is arrived at inferentially by a process of interpreting data according to a complicated system of rules and assumptions" (1946, pg. 133).

To denigrate historical inquiry because it does not mimic the natural sciences in attempting to discover universal laws is to declare that there is no value in simply determining what really happened in humanity's past. Setting aside, for the moment, the question of whether it is even feasible to formulate "laws of history," a question that we will address below, I contend that the effort to discover the historical past is worthwhile in its own right, even if there is another discipline that could discover historical laws. To learn what really occurred in the past is to understand how we came to be where we are today. The knowledge gained through historical inquiry enables us to see how the myriad decisions and actions of our predecessors, the ideas they held, the ideals to which they aspired, the gods they worshipped, and the demons they feared, all combined to create the world in which we find ourselves today.

In these three paragraphs, the writer contradicts himself by attempting to make a separation between historical inquiry and natural science and then he uses examples that use the very same techniques that natural scientists use to formulate theories.

 

[Makalakumu]

http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/ml_ggs.html

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.

I would be very interested in seeing this evidence. Is race more of a factor in the rise of societies then is conventionally thought? Is there really a superior race? The author implies these questions...

 

[sgtmac_46]

Moreover, this argument reeks of the same arguments that creationists make against evolution...

I guess at this point you are backing away from the defending your argument linking race and culture together, and are merely attempting to engage in an ad hominem attack where you simply try to link the argument of those who disagree with you with creationists arguing against evolution. By proxy, you are claiming that your unproven hypothesis is a supported theory. Nice try.

In these three paragraphs, the writer contradicts himself by attempting to make a separation between historical inquiry and natural science and then he uses examples that use the very same techniques that natural scientists use to formulate theories.

The contradiction is only in your mind. Claiming that the two disciplines have two distinct methods of interpreting information is in no way contradictory. This is by no means the same as declaring that god created the world in 7 days and the argument on your part that it is, is simply more sophistry so as to not have to deal with the actual argument. If anything, your dogmatic defense of your theory sounds more like that of religious fanaticism than anything you've cited above.