This is a new series, but also a continuation of our reading of Godel, Escher, Bach. But we're doing a new book: Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.
Today we will go over the Prologue, and we will do one chapter a week.
I encourage this to be slow blogging - the very opposite of "breaking". I will leave this on my hot list for a week, so comment any time during the week.
When we get near the end of GGS, I'll start a poll for the next book
Ground rules: I expect vigorous discussion. But I expect civil discussion. A sign I saw in a restaurant said
Be nice or leave
If you want to have a flame war, go elsewhere, please.
OK, here is a very brief synopsis for those who didn't read the prologue:
While working on the island of New Guinea, the author meets a local politician named Yali who asks the following questioning:
Why do the White people have so much cargo, and the natives so little?
where 'cargo' means all the technology and geegaws and stuff.
The whole book is an attempt to answer this question, but first, Jared Diamond (henceforth JD) poses the question in various ways; the first version is above. The second version is a formalized and generalized version of this:
Why did wealth and power become distributed as they are now, rather than in some other way?
the third version moves back into history and asks
Why, in 1500 or so, were wealth and power unevenly distributed across the world?
He goes further back to ask his final version:
Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?
The whole book is an attempt to answer this, but JD provides some possible answers here in the prologue, if only to knock them down. But I think he goes astray in one of his answers, and I think he misses at least two possible reasons.
The first possible reason is something along the lines of
Eurasians are smarter
(with variations such as "stronger" or whatever)
This has long been a popular answer (mostly - surprise! - among Eurasians) but JD rapidly knocks it down as the racist blather that it is. But, in doing this, he gets into what I regard as some racist blather of his own; he says that, in his experience, people from places like New Guinea are smarter than White people. He says this after admitting that he doesn't really know what intelligence is (I agree with him on that one! My training is in psychometrics, and the one thing intelligence researchers agree on is that they don't agree on much). Then he gives some reasons why e.g. New Guineans might be smarter. But this is nonsense. Native peoples are better able to live in their environment; but, OTOH, the non-native people are better able to live in their environments. We have no good way of measuring intelligence even in one culture, much less across cultures as different as the ones JD wants to compare. And the reasons he advances could easily be turned to arguments that are the opposite of what he wants - indeed, some White supremacists have made such arguments about Blacks in the USA.
The next possible answer is that northern climates, with their rigors, naturally create people who are tougher in some way. JD knocks this down by noting that it is often the people from southern or tropical climates who lead (both in the Americas and in Eurasia).
The third answer has to do with lowland river valleys being important. JD says that this fails to survive scrutiny because the advances that were based on being in river valleys (e.g. irrigation systems) came after the development of advanced societies, not before.
The fourth answer he considers is the one that gives the book its title; The Eurasians, and especially the Europeans, had guns, germs and steel. The Africans, Americans, and Australians did not. But, as he points out, the interesting question then becomes why they had them.
Two answers that JD does not consider are
God wanted it that way
and
Pure dumb luck - some butterfly flapped its wings one way, and if had not done so, things would have been very different.
Both of these last two are hard to deal with; I am an atheist, so I don't believe the first, but I can't defeat it. And, as a statistician and psychologist, I know that people love to attribute things to causes, whether they have causes or not.
The rest of the prologue is some rather annoying self-congratulation, and an outline of the rest of the book.
So ....
Discuss!