Talk:Guns, Germs, and Steel/Archive 3

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Talk archives for Guns, Germs, and Steel (current talk page)
<< 1 < Archive 2 Archive 3 Archive 4 > 3 >>
Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents

Criticism of Theory of History

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.) He also fails to explain the importance of the individual, as many countries received a direct increase in their standard of living because of key individuals. By implying that those individuals were just members of their respective groups undermines the significant contributions that those individuals provided.

This part of the criticism is very weird. Is defining "history" as “a study of human actions” anywhere close to the mainstream ? Does studying environmental factors is somehow not correct according to the historical orthodoxy ? It doesn't seem to me that either of these is true. If these two concepts are not mainstream, at least who supports them ?

The rest of the paragraph seems completely misdirected - it refers to the very modern times, oversimplifies the interventionism/free market issue (interventionism refers to government action in a free market economy, so there's no opposition here; the East Asian countries are pretty interventionists) and refers to the resources issue, that doesn't seem to be considered important by the book etc. The influence that individuals may have does not make the study of historical trends somehow invalid.

This section would need a complete rewrite before returning to the article. Taw 06:26, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

It is a weird and untenable definition. The articles on history and Prehistory are relevant hereDHBoggs 15:50, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

European domination of Asia and Native American defeat of Vikings in Vineland

How does the theory account for these?matturn 03:03, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

I've only read about half of the book, but I don't think he talks about Native Americans "defeating" the vikings in Vineland. He suggests limited contact between the two (says the first "significant" contact was in 1490's) and I think that the Vikings were driven out by natural conditions as much as natives.
As far as European domination of Asia, it seems to me he explains it by saying (for various reasons) they developed certain key technologies (war ships that made all others obsolete, better metal working, practical guns etc) which allowed them to dominate in Asia (and elsewhere). Everything but the germs basically ;)TastyCakes 23:38, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
The book doesn't claim to explain every bit of history. The hypothesis is that better natural resources (animals, plants, geography, weather) allowed peoples in Europe AND Asia to more easily develop agrarian cultures then other locations, such as sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. With farming culture comes sufficient food supplies for larger human populations and specializations such as metal-working, math & writing for harvest management, etc. In hunter-gatherer societies, these specializations don't happen as EVERYBODY is scavenging for food all day long. These specializations are the beginnings of a technological advantage that snowball over time. A society that is lucky in geographical location not only benefits from the trade of goods and ideas, but also exposure to many diseases from other populations (and eventually gaining immunity to those diseases). The hypothesis does not claim to explain events much latter in human history. For example, Europe's technological progress after the dark ages (nor why Europe entered the dark age) nor why China stayed technologically stagnant after the 1600's are beyond the scope of the hypothesis. Dyl 07:29, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Plant foodstuffs not mentioned in the article

Besides domesticated animals, plant foodstuffs (eg. cereals/grains) of different geographical regions is a major topic in the book. This is not mentioned in the article. Dyl 08:52, 8 March 2006 (UTC)


Europe And Not The Rest Of Eurasia

This article focuses too much on Europe. Why is it people always look to Europe when thinking of a dominate civilization. Europe has only caught up to the rest of Eurasia by 1500, and took the lead only at around 1800. Even in Ancient times only Greco-Roman civilizations were advanced while the rest of Europe were living no better than Native Americans and Native Africans below North Africa. On the other hand Southwest Asia (Arabia, Persia, ect.) South Asia (India, ect.), and East Asia (China, Korea, ect.) have dominated the world in technology far longer than most European "civilizations". China was vastly ahead of the world in technology for most of history.. If this book talks about civilization up to 1500s then Europeans shouldn't be mentioned too much, except for Greco-Roman and late Middle Ages Europe. Yet from this article it seems that Europeans are talked about most. Zachorious 04:40, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, said that in the "Europe or Eurasia?" section above. The book is not Eurocentric, but Eurasiacentric. IMO a lot of the discussion of Eurocentrism in this article is out of place and not relevant to the book, but so far I have been reluctant to just delete it. --JWB 18:24, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
I don't see what parts are problematic. Some of the large criticism/response sections could probably be split into smaller sections or summarized using Wikipedia:Summary style. I would expect Europe and Asia to be central topics because part of the purpose of the book is to examine why these continents have been more developed.--Nectar 18:59, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
"Europe and Asia" is a central topic of the book, but "Europe vs. Asia" is not, in deliberate contrast to most conventional history. --JWB 02:14, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
I agree about the criticism being summarized & split off onto a seperate article. As I see it this article focuses far too much on the criticism and not enough on the actual substance of the book. This book is popular non-fiction, not academic. Books and other references can act as counter-examples and comparisons to the assumptions and ideas in GGS and use those in place of a long-winded crit section. --Nick 17:58, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Eurasian hegemony

"But the book is not merely an account of the past; it attempts to explain why Eurasian civilization, as a whole, has survived and conquered others, while refuting the belief that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual or moral superiority." Where is this belief that is being refuted? Who believes that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual or moral superiority? Did Jared Diamond invent this idea? Someone help me with this. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by ShadowyCaballero (talk • contribs) 18:09, 25 July 2006.

It's a very common unstated or implicit belief, especially among cultural conservatives. Probably not common among academics (although Allan Bloom springs to mind as a likely candidate to hold such a belief), but it definitely is among the hoi polloi of Western culture. —

goethean ॐ 18:13, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Also see Social Darwinism. The most common belief even among intellectuals not so long ago. -- bcasterline • talk 19:37, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
It seems that this is a belief only held by white supremacists. Anyone familiar with chaos theory would agree with Diamond. - User:ShadowyCaballero

Do you really feel that the view that the belief in a theoretical European cultural superiority is an invention?. It was the most clear cut and widely held view until fifty years ago and is still held by a great many people. This has little to do with whether its correct, just that it exists and has for an extremely long time. what about manifest destiny or the British attempt during its rule over a third of the world to make all of their subject peoples as British as possible or the laughable claims that Africans were akin to beasts of burden or the still widely held modern nationalistic belief that this country whichever one it may be, is the greatest country in the world. Colin 8 00:49, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, that is a pretty sloppy and misinformed use of "chaos theory" which does not apply to the material Diamond is referring to. Moreover, this is not a belief limited to avowed or self-identified white-supremists. James Blaut argued that it is pervasive in Academia [1]. Slrubenstein | Talk 10:53, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Delisted GA

It seems that this article did not go through the GA nomination process. Looking at the article as is, it fails on criteria 2 in that it does not cite any sources. Most Good Articles use inline citations. I would recommend that this be fixed and submit the article through the nomination process. --RelHistBuff 15:24, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

This article is more Euro-centric than GGS ever could be!

I've read the book. One astonishing aspect of GGS is that Diamond hardly even mentions Europe! No, really! Diamond spends much more time talking about New Guinea and the Pacific Islands that he does about Europe. If one sits down and actually reads the book, Eurocentrism is the antithesis of what Diamond is arguing. He never argues for environmental determinism, and even anticipates this accusation in his book. He rather looks at the "broades pattern of human history", which is that the CONTINENT of EURASIA has been host to the predominately most complex societies with the most complex sociopolitical institutions and technology.

I can't understand why this article just blindly lists criticisms that so-obviously run counter to Diamond's own position in his book. Contrary to this article's words, Diamond does not just "never explicitly argue for racism" he ACTIVELY argues AGAINST it. It's the main thesis of his entire book!!! The book's main point is that no peoples are culturally or biologically superior to any other peoples, and thus there must be other reasons for the trend of history to be that Eurasia (including parts of Africa) was the primary location of major world civilizations, and why civilization on the other continents took such a different course. His conclusion, far from "environmental determinism", looks at a whole host of factors that have more to do with system dynamics than anything else. His ideas are echoed in The Human Web, a more recent book.

This article, in an attempt to be fair, is distorting the truth by allowing any criticism to pass equally, without weighing the validity of the arguments against the actual work itself. We don't have to be POV to acknowledge the differences between valid critical arguments and completely uninformed ones.

In particular, as others have noted, Diamond does not focus so much on Europe, but on EURASIA. In fact, in his new edition, he has added material that discusses the reactions to his work. One of the main things he talks about is that since his book was published a major public question has not been to ask "why Europe"--why was EUROPE in particular the eurasian region to spring to dominance so quickly with so much hegemony (another was "why NOT China"). The reason these are popular responses to the book is simple: he never really addressed European Ascendency with any depth! Instead he focuses on Eurasian societal evolution, and not Australia or the Americas. He never goes into too much analysis exploring why Europe ended up dominant, perhaps because it's fairly obvious that European dominance has only existed for barely 500 years. He implies this to be an anomolly resulting from a variety of chance events combined with other basic geographic, environmental, and sociopolitical factors. It's a theory of convergence more than anything else, and it's only implied. So these criticisms appear to come from folks who either didn't read the book at all, didn't read it closely, or who perhaps went into the book harboring some preconceived notions that tainted their interpretation.

Others here seem to agree in principle, so the article should be changed to reflect reality. I'm not saying get rid of criticism, just that we should be more selective about the criticism we include as to whether the critic seems to have any clue what Diamond was actually saying.

Merge Anna Karenina principle here

The article Anna Karenina principle is linked only from here and is of no use outside the context of GGS book. There is no info whether someone else have picked the name, so several articles just for a book (even if it was the best one ever) is useless.

It is also rather short which makes a very good candidate for a merge. Section here would be better to read than to navigate to another article. -- Goldie (tell me) 10:36, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

I didn't know about this article. However, now that I see it, I think the real issue is that it should not be called "the Anna Karenina principle." In fact, Diamond is refering to a principle well-established in ecology and cultural ecology. I imagine his calling it the Anna Karenina principle is part of his attempt to popularize and reach a general audience through non-scholarly more friendly language. And there is a real (meaning, predates Diamond, is what is used by scientists) name for this: Liebig's law of the minimum: growth is limited by the minimum availability of one resource rather than by the abundance of all resources (there are other ways of putting it). I do not know of any references to an Ana Karenina principle that predate Diamond's book. Frankly, I would just propose speedy deletion of the AK article, merge the contents here but provide the correct link to the Liebig's law article. Will you do it, or should I? Slrubenstein | Talk 10:51, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
I would redirect AK to here (since it is called that in this book), but mention and link to Liebig's law from this article. — goethean ॐ 14:30, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
I haven't read the book and know about it only from The Big Wire. Level of knowledge about the Liebig's law was even lower :-( Thanks for educating me ;). For the merge - I can do it, NP. Just avoiding to be way too brave, and trying to be more cooperative. It seems that I haven't read the talk page either, there was already a merge proposal before (#Anna Karenina principle). But you'll have to add the reference what is the relevance of Diamond's AKP to Liebig's. -- Goldie (tell me) 14:32, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
This makes sense, Slrubenstein | Talk 16:52, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

I can't agree. I don't care if it only has relevance to this article. Many wiki subjects deserve to have very long articles. This might be one. Very long articles are awkward in the wiki format. Breaking them into pieces this way makes sense to me. I read the AK matter with interest, separately. I have just skimmed the main article, because it is so long and complex... 69.87.199.69 13:39, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

---

Stop this obsession with merging articles. From the general reader's point of view, the pedia is much easier to use if the articles are on separate pages.

What is this?

This shows up in the article as displayed on my screen, under controversial claims.

In Chapter 5, Professor Diamond contends that the natives of Papa New Guinea fashioned boats out of hollowed out tree trunks to transport themselves to Australia. In reality, the could have built wings and flew.

It's clearly nonsense, but it doesn't appear in the "Edit" page, so I can't delete it. Help?

Gun History needed

This article needs much more info about the history of guns, and/or links to such. People coming to wikipedia seeking the history of guns end up here and find little help. 69.87.199.69 13:43, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

removal

  • What I removed:
Professor Tom Tomlinson argues in a review of Guns, Germs, and Steel that Diamond's approach ignores "much of the current literature on cultural interactions in modern history" and that Diamond omits "almost all of the standard literature on the history of imperialism and post-colonialism, world-systems, underdevelopment or socio-economic change over the last five hundred years."[2] Though Diamond's book is a popular history that is not primarily interested in engaging academic debates, this point exposes a failure of the book to deal sufficiently with competing hypotheses that is especially problematic in light of Diamond's calls for history to be written as a science.
  • Why I removed it:
  • If you read the review, you'll see that that excerpt is meant to be descriptive, not critical. It's not even an argument: the Book's prologue makes clear that the question is why the eurasians got guns, germs, and steel, not what it did after they got them. Don't revert me until you've responded to my points here. Go ahead and revert it in the meantime if you want to discuss and we'll put a dispute tag on it while we discuss. --Urthogie 21:35, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
  • I've reverted with slight editing because I don't feel your deletion of this point of criticism is justified. The book review in which this argument is made is both descriptive and critical. Diamond ignores the literature and theories mentioned by Tomlinson. I also disagree with your point on the purpose of the book. The top paragraph of this article says: "But the book is not merely an account of the past; it attempts to explain why Eurasian civilization, as a whole, has survived and conquered others, while refuting the belief that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual or moral superiority." The section you deleted essentially claims that Diamond ignored 'intervening variables' such as imperialism and colonialism that matter for how Eurasian civilization survived and conquered others. This is significant in regard to writing 'history as a science.' --InSpace 09:40, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Gun History not needed

The book isn't about how guns impacted the balance of power but rather how the geographic location of civilization affected the enviornment and organisms in the fertile areas, therefore creating a more sophisticated culture. The history of guns isn't really a main idea in the book.

Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.