How does Diamond show history operating? How do we see Diamond's thesis at work in the Pacific Northwest?

How does Diamond show history operating? How do we see Diamond’s thesis at work in the Pacific Northwest?

Read the Jared Diamond speech and answer the following questions. Make sure you provide context from the text book.

How does Diamond show history operating? How do we see Diamond’s thesis at work in the Pacific Northwest?
“Jared Diamond Lecture” (10/28/2000)

… Why didn’t history turn out the reverse way? Why is it not the case that if you go to Europe nowadays, Europe is populated by Native Americans or Aboriginal Australians, and the last Europeans are confined to reservations in poor land up in the mountains? Why didn’t it happen that way? This is the biggest question of history. The answer depends not on knowledge within history. …

As background, initially I’m going to run through portraits of people from different parts of the world, just to remind you that while we’ll be talking about seemingly abstract concepts – history, competition, society, fates of peoples – what we’re actually talking about is the fates of individual people like you and me. A convenient starting point to understanding the big pattern of history is to look at the landscape of human diversity around the world. There are parts of the world with enormous diversity of people in appearance and in language and in their genes, contrasting with other parts of the world where everybody looks and speaks and genetically is very similar to each other over large distances. Among the most diverse parts of the world is of course the Indian sub-continent; four major language families, a thousand languages, enormous diversity of people in appearance in their genes. Also diverse is my beloved New Guinea – again, a thousand languages in less than one tenth the area of Australia, very diverse people in appearance, and genetically. Aboriginal Australia was of course very diverse and sub-Saharan Africa, also enormous variations among the peoples of sub-Saharan African in their appearance, languages and genes.

Those diverse parts of the globe contrast with other areas where people are very similar over large distances. For example, nearby to the north west, tropical South East Asia and island South East Asia, from the Malay peninsular out to the Philippines and Indonesia all the way out to Polynesia, over that vast realm everybody looks the same, genetically rather similar, all the language is related. Europe, although Europeans yes, different in hair color and eye color, beneath the skin Europeans are very similar to each other genetically, a rather homogenous continent. Native Americans, all the natives of North America, Central America and South America from the Arctic to Terra del Fuego are quite similar to each other, an homogenous hemisphere. And what can be called black sub-equatorial Africa, that’s to say the peoples of the African continent; if you subtract the Pygmies and the Khoisan people, then you are left with black sub-equatorial Africans, all of them very similar to each other, speaking closely related languages.

Why these differences between heterogeneous parts of the world and homogeneous parts of the world? Is the answer just a matter of time? Is it the case that parts of the world where people arrived just recently haven’t had time to develop much human diversity and parts of the world where people have been living for the longest time are the really heterogeneous areas. Well the time factor would explain why Native Americans are so similar. Native Americans’ ancestors arrived in the New World only something like 13,000 years ago, so there just hasn’t been time to evolve much diversity in the New World. But the time factor certainly does not explain the other contrasts that I mentioned. For example the famous fossils of Java man, or maybe it was Java woman, tell us that people have been in Island South East Asia for at least l million, maybe 1 million 800 thousand years. Why, in this long time have people ended up so homogenous from the Malay Peninsular out to Easter Island. Or again the famous fossils of Heidelburg man or maybe she was Heidelberg woman, tell us that people have been in Europe for at least 600,000 years and recent discoveries tell us that people have been in Europe, or at least in Eurasia for again, 1 million 800 thousand years. Why in that enormous expanse of time have Europeans ended up all so similar and not evolved much diversity.

And then the continent where humans evolved, where humans have been the longest is of course Africa. People have been in Africa five million years as shown by the Australopithacene fossils. Why is it in 5 million years all black sub-Saharan Africans ended up so similar to each other? These old parts of the world where people are homogeneous contrast with the second youngest continent as far as human population is concerned, namely Australia, where people have been living, Australia and New Guinea people have been for something like 55 to 60 thousand years – much less time than people have been in tropical south east Asia, Africa or Europe. Why is it that in this time New Guineans and Australians have evolved far greater diversity than in Europe, South East Asia and Africa?

Either something has happened to homogenize the populations of tropical South East Asia, Europe and Africa relatively recently or that something has happened recently to promote rapid diversification of the human populations of Australia and New Guinea. And it turns out that the former explanation is the correct one. The populations of tropical South East Asia, Europe and sub-Equatorial Africa were homogenized by what are called the agricultural expansions of the last 13,000 years. Here’s the story on the agricultural expansions.

13,000 years ago all human populations everywhere around the world were hunter-gatherers gaining their living not by growing food but by gathering and hunting wild plants and wild animals. Hunter-gatherer populations for the most part are relatively mobile or semi-nomadic because they move seasonally to follow the seasonally shifting food supply. That means that hunter-gatherers also live at low population densities, typically 1 person per square kilometer or less. Partly that’s because most of the wild plants and animals out there are inedible to us humans; there’s just not that much food for humans out there in the far Australian desert. And in addition, because hunter-gatherers shift camp every few weeks or every few months the woman has to carry her baby with her until the baby is old enough that it can walk fast enough to keep up with the adults – that’s about the age of 4. And so hunter-gatherer societies space out their children in various ways to intervals of 4 years. That long birth interval and the low density of edible food result in the low population densities of hunter-gatherers.

Hunter-gatherers also have rather little in the way of material possessions. If you’re going to shift camp every few weeks the last thing you want is lots of big pots and a printing press or an iron forge. In addition, because all able bodied adults are involved in the task of gathering or hunting food, hunter-gatherers don’t accumulate surpluses of storable food that can be used feed people who will devote all their time to figuring out how to smelt iron and devise bows and arrows and atomic bombs and write the B minor Mass. So, for those two reasons hunter-gatherers have rather simple technology, including no metal tools. Then finally, hunter-gather societies are relatively egalitarian, again because hunter-gatherers don’t accumulate storable food surpluses there are not the storable food surpluses to feed people who will not go out and gather their own food but will instead devote themselves full time to being tax collectors and priests and professional soldiers and senators and other parasites upon society.

So that’s the situation with hunter-gatherers. All that changed about ten and a half thousand years ago with the rise of agriculture which, for the first time in human history, permitted the development of sedentary populations living next to their fixed food supplies, namely living next to their gardens and their orchards and their pastures. The population densities of farmers and herders typically are ten to a hundred to a thousand people per square kilometre and that’s many orders of magnitude higher population densities than with hunter-gatherers.

Farmers live at those high population densities partly because out there in the orchard or the wheat field everything growing there is edible to us humans so it’s a high density of food. In addition, because farmers don’t shift camp every few weeks they do not have the problem of carrying the baby or the babies around with them, and therefore farming families can and do have children at birth intervals typically of every two years. So the result is that the development of farming produced a population explosion. The origins of farming also produced an explosion of human technology; partly because people don’t have to have the problem of carrying the iron forge on their backs every three weeks they are planted in a fixed village and therefore people can afford to develop bulky, heavy technology.

In addition, farming produces food surpluses that can be stored or dried and those food surpluses grown by a few peasants can be used to feed some people who do not devote themselves to food production at all but can devote all their time to figuring out how to smelt copper and iron and how to develop writing systems and then how to develop superior weaponry. In addition the storable food surpluses are a temptation for some people in the society to say, Hi folks, there are those storable food surpluses there, I am willing to take upon myself the burden of being your chief, backed up my army of tax collectors and by this standing professional army which we will use to go smoosh the people next door and also to put down revolts of any of you peasants here. And the result is that the development of farming resulted for the first time in human history in marked social stratification, in the development of standing armies and priests and tax collectors and kings and bureaucrats. So for all those reasons we now have a whole batch of reasons why farmers have been able throughout human history to drive out or kill hunter-gatherers. One, there were far more farmers than hunter-gatherers. Two, the farmers have centralized political organizations with standing armies. Three, the farmers have superior technology including superior weapons. And then finally, as I’ll mention, the origins of farming were associated with the origins of infectious diseases derived from our domestic animals, diseases to which the farmers themselves eventually became genetically or with antibodies immune, but to which the hunter-gatherers had no such immunity and so the germs of the farmers wiped out the hunter-gatherers.

We now have a whole series of reasons then, why throughout human history farmers have been able to drive the hunter-gatherers out of all land suitable for food production. We’ve seen examples in the last 5 centuries, examples witnessed by literate Europeans who were doing the expansion and the exterminations. We’ve seen in modern times European farming societies replace, exterminate, drive out, subjugate, infect Aboriginal Australian societies, the sand populations of southern Africa, West and North American Indian societies, native Siberians, but these replacements of hunter-gatherers by farmers began much earlier, they are not something just of the last 500 years.

Given the tremendous advantage that farming provides to farmers vis-à-vis hunter-gatherers, it might then seem puzzling why was it not the case that all over the world hunter gathers went out and domesticated whatever wild plants and animals were round them, became farmers and developed these tools of power? Why is it for example that Aboriginal Australians didn’t just go out, domesticate kangaroos and eucalyptus trees and become farmers and herders? It turns out that the origins of farming and herding around the world were surprisingly local and this is particularly striking when you consider the parts of the world that are the most productive areas for growing food today. California, the breadbasket of the United States, had no independent origins of food production. Agriculture arrived in California from the outside. The great plains, the other breadbasket of the United States, all of Europe, which has the most intensive agriculture in the world today, the Cape of South Africa, the Pampas of Argentina, south western and south eastern Australia, the breadbasket of your continent, almost all of the Indian Sub-continent, tropical South East Asia, Java, which is perhaps the most densely populated farming society in the world today. All these places that I’ve just named which are the centres of food production in the modern world, none of them had indigenous origins of agriculture. Instead agriculture was imported into these areas from the outside.

The reason for this paradox is that the agricultural lifestyle that developed had to compete with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and an entire package of productive crops and animals was required for hunter-gatherers to settle down, become farmers and to be able to out-compete other hunter-gatherers. It turns out that only a tiny fraction of wild plant and animal species out there can be usefully domesticated and the result of this is that those few areas of the world that did have numerous domesticable wild plant and animal species, those few areas became the few centers of food production. There were not more than nine of them around the world and there may have been as few as five centers of origin of food production.

This paradox that so few plants and animals can be usefully domesticated is clearest for animals, say mammals. You might say, well there are 4000 species of wild mammals around the world; even the Australian continent has hundreds of wild mammals so why didn’t the people of any area just go out and domesticate some of the wild mammals around. Well, reflected out of the 4000 species of wild mammals, two thirds of them are rats and bats which do not lend themselves to being milked and hitched up to carts but that still leaves about 150 species of big terrestrial omnivorous or herbivorous mammals that you would think would be candidates for domestication. And every continent has multiple big wild mammalian herbivores or omnivores who you think could have been domesticated.

It turns out that of those 148 candidates actually, only 14 big wild mammals were domesticated and became valuable domestic animals. And of those 14, 13 were species of the Eurasian continent. Those 13, (and let me see if I can remember them), those 13 valuable wild mammals were the cow, sheep, goat, horse, pig, the reindeer, donkey, Arabian camel, Asian camel, water buffalo, yak, gaur, Bali cattle. O.K. 13 Eurasian species. There’s only one large wild mammal that’s not a Eurasian mammal, happens to be a New World mammal that was usefully domesticated. Can anybody here think of that one valuable domestic mammal of the new world? Llama, people here have been reading my book, that’s correct. The Llama, the only big animal mammal domesticated in the New World.

Well you might say initially, that seems surprising. Why again didn’t Aboriginal Australians just go out and domesticate koalas and kangaroos. Why didn’t sub-Saharan Africans go out and domesticate zebras and rhinoceroses. It turns out that for a wild mammal species to be domesticable it has to possess something like half a dozen different characteristics and if it fails on any one of those characteristics it can’t be domesticated. For example, obviously you can’t domesticate a mammal whose food we humans are not able to supply and that knocked out of consideration koalas, which eat only leaves from one of six species of tall eucalyptus trees. That disqualifies koalas. In addition, no herdsman is going to have the patience to domesticate a mammal that takes a long time to grow to maturity. Gorillas would be a fabulous meat production mammal, they eat all sorts of vegetable food and rubbish. Why are there no barnyard gorillas? Because it takes 25 years for a gorilla to reach maturity, to reach the age for the slaughterhouse and no herdsman is going to wait 25 years to slaughter his barnyard gorilla.

Another requirement for mammal species to be domesticated is that it’s got to have a suitable disposition. Grizzly bears in the United States would be a great meat production animal, they eat all sorts of rubbish, garbage and they grow to maturity and they’re ready for the slaughterhouse in less than 5 years. But grizzly bears have one strike against them – an unpleasant disposition. Obviously you can’t domesticate an animal that refuses to breed in captivity. There are some wild mammals that we’ve just not been able to breed in captivity. For example, the mammal with the finest wool in the world, the vicuna, that little wild camel of Peru, all the vicuna wool even today, still comes from wild caught, captured or killed vicuna because nobody’s been able to get vicuna to breed in captivity. And cheetahs, which would have been the most valuable hunting companion in the world; who would go out hunting with a dog if you could take your pet cheetah along with you. Until the last couple of decades humans had no success getting cheetahs to breed in captivity. Still another feature disqualifying many mammal species from domestication is the lack of suitable social structure. The ideal herd domestic animal is one that has a follow-the-leader social structure where’s there an alpha dominant followed by the second in command, the beta male, followed by the third in command etc. etc. An animal with a follow-the-leader social structure, you can get a small boy or girl with a shepherd’s crook and then the hundred sheep believe that that small boy is the alpha sheep and they’ll follow it. But, there are many mammal species that do not have that follow-the-leader social structure, such as kangaroos and the big horn sheep of North America, and that makes those animals difficult or impossible for a human herder to control.

Also you don’t want to attempt to domesticate an animal which, when you shut it in within a fence, panics and dashes itself against the fence and kills itself like gazelles or deer, or which jumps over the fence with a single bound, again like gazelles, and so we’ve never domesticated gazelles. We’ve never domesticated any of the 42 species of deer except the one deer species that does not panic when fenced and that is the reindeer. So those six restrictions eliminated the vast majority of the world’s mammals as candidates for domestication, leaving only 14 of which 13 happen to be Eurasian.

It turns out even more surprisingly that the vast majority of wild plant species cannot be domesticated. That’s especially surprising because there is something like 200,000 species of higher plants, tens of thousands of species even in Australia. So why didn’t native Australians, Aboriginal Australians go out a domesticate some of these tens of thousands of plant species? Again, the vast majority of wild plants disqualify for one reason or another as being suitable domesticates and the few suitable domesticates that were left were concentrated in certain parts of the world.

For example, consider the large-seeded cereals or grasses that provide more than half the calories of people today. The large-seeded cereals like wheat, barley and rice and corn. Around the world there were only 56 wild species of these large-seeded cereals, most live in soak zones with Mediterranean climates and the great majority of them lived in the eastern Mediterranean. 32 out of the world’s 56 large-seeded wild cereals are in the eastern Mediterranean and Australia only has one such species and California and Chile only one or two species. So of course people of the eastern Mediterranean had an enormous head start on plant domestication; they had around them more species of valuable wild plants. The result of all this is that plant and animal domestication began in that part of the world that had the most wild plants and animals lending themselves to domestication, namely in the area called the fertile crescent of the eastern Mediterranean, that area that extends from modern Iran and Iraq, from Syria to south eastern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon; that’s where grew the wild ancestors of wheat and barley and peas and sheep and goats. Around 850 BC hunter-gatherers of the fertile crescent assembled a package of 8 valuable crops providing them with carbohydrate and protein, fat and fiber and they also assembled a package of 4 valuable domestic animals – cows, sheep, goat, pig and later horses, that provided them with meat and hides and leather and milk and traction.

Soon after the origins of agriculture in the fertile crescent 8500 BC or maybe equally early, food production arose independently in China with the domestication of different plants and animals; millets, rice, pigs independently, chickens and water buffalo and later food production developed independently in maybe as many as 7 other areas, the Highlands of New Guinea, Mexico, the Andes, the south eastern United States, Ethiopia, Africa’s, Sahel zone and tropical West Africa. But those 9 places that I’ve just named are the only places where agriculture might have arisen independently. Agriculture never did and never could arise independently in Australia, California, South Africa, Europe, the Indian sub continent etc. etc. From those 9 homelands of food production agriculture then spread around the world; in some cases it spread as a result of the crops and animals themselves spreading and being adopted by local hunter-gatherers. That’s what happened in southern Africa where the Khoisan people of southern Africa acquired cows, sheep and goats from herding people farther to the north and became herders themselves. Usually though the hunter-gatherers around the world never had the chance to acquire domestic plants and animals because the farmers and herders themselves spread too rapidly carrying their crops and animals, replacing, killing off, infecting the hunter-gatherers.

(A slide was shown here) This is a map of the world to illustrate how the shapes of the continents influenced the spread of crops and animals around the world. If you look at a map of the world perhaps the most obvious thing about the shapes of the continents is that the Eurasian continent is long, 10,000 miles long from the east to west, relatively narrow from north to south. The Americas in contrast are long, 10,000 miles from north to south, from east to west never more than 3000 miles wide, narrowing down to 40miles wide at the Isthmus of Panama. And the African continent again, is long from north to south, narrow from east to west. Well, you might say, isn’t that a curious fact about geography. So what? It turns out that that fact of geography had enormous consequences for human history. Crops and animals of course can spread most easily at the same latitude always encountering the same day length, the same seasonality, the same germination schedules, much the same habitats and rainfalls and diseases and so once a crop or animal was domesticated anywhere in the Eurasian continent it was able to spread pretty quickly.

For example, once wheat and barley were domesticated in the fertile crescent at the east of where you see Turkey on the map, within a couple of thousand years wheat and barley and horses had spread west to the Atlantic coast of France and east to the Pacific coast of China and even into Japan. Rabbits spread along the east-west axis whereas in the new world, because of the north- south axis, when a crop or animal was domesticated anywhere it couldn’t spread very far without encountering a climate or rainfall pattern or a habitat or a disease to which it was not adapted. The result is that llamas domesticated in the Andes of South America. Llamas,the only pack animal of the new world, never spread the mere 1000 miles north to the highlands of Mexico which would have been an ideal habitat for llamas because in between was the hot, steaming, wet, Isthmus of Darian where llamas can’t thrive.

Mexicans invented wheels and the Indians domesticated llamas but in the New World the wheel never met the pack animal and so there was never any wheeled animal transport in the New World. Again sunflowers domesticated in the south eastern United States, never spread the mere 700 miles south into Mexico, again because of difficulties of spreading along a north south axis.

In modern times the advantages that the farmers had over the hunter-gatherers were summed up in the metaphorical title that my wife thought up for my book Guns, Germs and Steel, which is a metaphor for the advantages of technology and Germs and military power that have allowed farmers throughout human history to wipe out or drive out the hunter-gatherers. These expansions of farmers from just a few homelands, of which the earliest two were the fertile crescent and China, these expansions of farmers have the consequence that today 90% of the people in the world speak languages which 10,000 years were confined to two tiny areas; the fertile crescent, which is the centre of origin probably of Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic and Dravidian languages and China, which is the centre of origin Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian etc. etc. languages. The languages of all the rest of the world were submerged in the expansions of farmers from the fertile crescent of China.

I mentioned that the expansions of farmers took place not just in modern times but in ancient times. The clearest ancient cases – clearest because the immigrant farmers and the indigenous hunter-gatherers were so different from each other in their skeletons and their technology. One of the clearest of those ancient expansions is the so called Austronesian expansion, by which farmers originating from the coast of southern China expanded out of southern China carrying their crops like rice and millet and chickens and pigs to Taiwan, then to the Philippines and then to Indonesia, the Malay Peninsular out through Indonesia to the Pacific to become the Polynesians. Within a few thousand years those Austronesian speakers spread over that vast realm and that’s why today everybody from tropical south east Asia, from the Malay Peninsular out to Polynesia looks very similar and speaks closely related languages, because they all resulted from a spread of farmers beginning 4000 BC replacing the original populations of Indonesia and Philippines who were related to and similar to modern New Guineans and Aboriginal Australians.

The other major ancient farming expansion that’s well understood is the so called Bantu expansion in sub-Saharan Africa. The reason why most of the people of sub-Saharan Africa all look the same, the black farmers speaking Bantu languages, is that starting around 3000 BC farmers in tropical west Africa who domesticated African crops such as African yams and then acquired iron, spread, beginning around the time of Christ, from the Equator south to southern Africa replacing the original hunter-gatherer populations of sub Equatorial Africa except in those couple of areas unsuitable for agriculture; that’s to say the Mediterranean zone of the cape where the Khoisan people survived, so called Bushman, Hottentots and the Congo rain forest where the Pygmies were able to survive.

 

There was also a major expansion in Europe in which old European hunter-gatherers were replaced by invading fertile crescent farmers. Well, when one thinks of the expansion of Europeans around the world, my guess is that when I started to talk about these replacements some of you were getting ready to crawl under your seats with embarrassment because you thought that you might be subjected to a racist diatribe. And the fact is that, if you ask most people why is it that Europeans conquered Australia, or why did Europeans spread around the world, again and again within the last few months I talked to cabinet ministers, I talked to leaders of American industry, I talked to academics, and the standard response for why Europeans conquered native Americans and Aboriginal Australians etc. etc. is, “well, er, ah, um. I know this isn’t nice, (is anybody looking?) I don’t like to say this but let’s face it, it’s because Europeans are smarter, they have more genetic intelligence and besides they had the work ethic of the Judaeo Christian tradition and all that.” And people will say that, despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever for any genetic superiority of Europeans. People say that simply because an alternative explanation for the grand pattern of history has not been apparent, and so of course people fall back on the transparent racist explanation. People assume that because people look different on the surface, it’s assumed that they are also different in their brains, despite the lack of any evidence. The fact is the European conquest of the world was just the culmination of historical processes that took 13,000 years. In 1492, when Columbus set sail, some peoples were living in empires with writing and steel tools and other peoples were hunter-gatherers without steel tools and a bad level of organization. Of course the empires with the steel tools wiped out or drove out the hunter-gatherers without the steel tools, so the world of 1492 produced the world of today. But the world of 1492 could only have resulted from development since 11,000 BC, namely different rates of development of food production; not because of any racist reasons but simply because of the effects of environment, namely that the domesticable wild plant and animal species were distributed very unevenly around the world and that different continents had different axes.

If you would like a controlled experiment to prove that Europeans are not intrinsically superior you might say, well let’s sprinkle Europeans in different environments and come back in a few thousand years and see how they fared. History performed that experiment. Around 1000AD there were some Europeans who stayed home in Europe and other Europeans who set sail for Greenland, and come back 600 years later and the Europeans who stayed home in Britain were writing the play of Shakespeare and the Europeans who set sail for Greenland had gone extinct, bested in competition with the stone tool using Innuit Eskimo hunter-gatherers. So much for European superiority.

Or if one were to consider the Australian consideration one might naively say, here’s a continent where Aboriginal Australians have been living for 40,000 years, in come Europeans in 1788 and within a short time in a continent inhabited by other peoples for 60,000 years, within a short time there is a democracy with agriculture and writing and metal tools – perfectly controlled experiments, same environment different people, doesn’t that prove that the difference had to do with Europeans and their superiority. But in fact, just reflect on the bases of European ‘superiority’ in Australia. All the advantages of Europeans were imported from the outside. All the crops; wheat, barley, potatoes, corn were brought in from Eurasia or from the New World. The domestic animals; it’s not that the first European herders here learnt out to domesticate kangaroos and wombats – which they haven’t – they brought in the cow, sheep, goat, pig and horse. The metal tools that were brought in stemmed from fertile crescent metal technology that began 5000 BC; it was not the case that the first fleet independently figured out how to smelt iron. And similarly, the political structure for democracy was not reinvented from scratch here but came in directly from 1000 years of experimentation in Britain which built on 5000 years of experimentation with complex societies in the fertile crescent. In short, the advantages were important.

Well, of course there were many important factors in world history. I promised you that I would summarize world history in 45 minutes, I’ll keep my promise but there were many important factors that I’ve not had time to discuss in these 45 minutes and that I do discuss in my book Guns, Germs and Steel. For example, I’ve said little or nothing about the distribution of domesticable plants to which I devote three chapters of my book. I haven’t said anything about the precise way in which the development of riding and technology and government and organized religion depended on agriculture and herding. Those are big subjects that again I wrap up in three chapters in my book. I haven’t discussed with you the fascinating reasons for the differences within Eurasia between China, India, the near East and Europe; a subject that I wrap up in nine pages, and I haven’t discussed with you the effects of individuals, great men like Alexander the Great and the effects of cultural differences unrelated to the environment on history, which I dispose of in two pages. For that, turn to my book but it’s now time to summarize the overall meaning of this whirlwind tour through human history with its unequally distributed guns and germs.

When I started trying to write about the excitement of science for the general public, I quickly encountered an occupational hazard of the academic who would like to communicate to a broad public and that occupational hazard is to encounter the journalist who says to me something like the following – and it happens again and again – “Mr Diamond, I know that you’ve devoted the last 7 years of your life to reading those hundred or thousands of books and articles and condensing the history of everybody into this 420 page book, but Mr. Diamond, please remember, our TV viewers and our radio listeners and our newspaper readers are busy people. Would you please summarize your book and all of history in one sentence for our busy readers and listeners?” And I’ve learned to summarize everything in one sentence. The one sentence would go something as follows: “The broadest pattern of history, namely the differences between human societies on different continents seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments and not to biological differences among people themselves.” And once you’ve given the journalists that one sentence you can usually slip in a second sentence with many clauses. “In particular the availability of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication and the ease with which those species could spread without encountering unsuitable climates, contributed decisively to the varying rates of rise of agriculture and herding, which in turn contributed decisively to the varying rates of rise of human population numbers, population densities and food surpluses, which in turn contributed decisively to varying rates of rise in epidemic infectious diseases, riding, technology and political organization.”

Now as a biologist practicing laboratory experimental science, I know well that many scientists are inclined to dismiss these historical interpretations as unprovable speculation because they are not founded on what’s considered the hallmark of science, namely, replicated laboratory experiments carried out by little people wearing white lab coats. And the same objection can be raised against any of the historical sciences including astronomy, evolutionary biology, geology and paleontology. Of course that same objection can be leveled against the whole field of history and most of the other social sciences, that’s why we are uncomfortable about considering history as a science. History is classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific. But let’s remember the etymology of the world science. It’s not derived from a Latin word that meant ‘replicated laboratory experiments carried out by little men wearing white lab coats’, instead the etymology of our word science is the Latin word sciential which means knowledge.

In science we seek knowledge by whatever methodologies are available and appropriate. There are many fields that nobody hesitates to consider science even though replicated laboratory experiments in those fields would be immoral or illegal or impossible. For example astronomers cannot turn Aldebaron or Betelgeuse on, increase the luminocity of Sirius and maintain other stars as unmanipulated controls. Geologists can’t start a glacier here and stop an ice age over there, and paleontologists cannot experiment with designing a new set of dinosaurs and then exterminating them again. Nevertheless astronomers, and geologists and paleontologists have still gained considerable insight into their historical fields by other means. And so we should surely be able to understand human history, because introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we shall ever have into the ways of past dinosaurs.

For that reason I’m optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history. Thank you.

 

 

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