We are reading one chapter a week of Guns Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond. This book is an attempt to find out why the Eurasians have all the stuff, and the Africans, native Americans, native Australians and c. have so little.
I encourage this to be slow blogging. Post a comment any time during the week.
We've reached the end of this book, the next book will be Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention from Fire to Freud, by Peter Watson. We will start with the Introduction
This chapter is partly a wrap up of the book, and partly a call to further research.
I first should say that I don't think "human history" can be looked at a "science"; at least, not as I think of science. That doesn't make it somehow less worthy as a subject, it just makes it different from both the hard sciences and the social sciences. However, what Diamond is studying is on the edge of history as a discipline - definitions vary, but quite a few definitions of history require that it be written, and most of what Diamond writes about is not written.
Diamond makes some claims for further quantization of history (looking at the numbers of species of different types and so on, and the size of different areas of human habitation) but his central argument is not really quantitative either.
He also divides the sciences in a somewhat unusual way - into historical and non-historical sciences, with the former including astronomy, evolutionary biology, climatology, and paleontology). It is true that these sciences are not experimental in the sense that physics and chemistry are, Nonetheless, those sciences rely on the fact that there are great similarities, e.g., between stars. Diamond lists four ways in which the historical sciences differ from the non-historical: Methodology, causation, prediction, and complexity. On each of these, I think, history stands at the far end of the continuum.
Other than that, in this chapter he summarizes what he already wrote - food production started in the Fertile Crescent and in China, leading to those two regions having an early lead in development. The lead passed from these two regions for different reasons - the former exhausted their land, and the latter made central decisions to abandon certain paths. It passed to Europe and western Asia because those regions had the best geography for both food production and the diffusion of ideas and people.