Debating Guns, Germs and Steel

[Guest guest]

I was reading one of my favorite blogs and ran across this posting by Jane

Galt www.janegalt.net . I've seen a fair amount of reference to

Diamond here on the list and I thought you all might like to see it.

Formatting is a little hard as I'm having to work with text only.

I don't have time to play with this post/thread but I'll enjoy any

discussion that may ensue.

Ron

GGS blogging

Brad de Long and a few others have been doing a lot of Guns, Germs and Steel

blogging. The topic: is Diamond a racist? Since one of my main

complaints with the book is that he spends a huge amount of time trying to

conclusively disprove something that rather few people in his readership

demographic believe--that the low technology level achieved by peoples

outside of Eurasia by 1500 was the result of their inherent genetic

inferiority--I don't think this is a debate I'll step into.

The more interesting critiques, like Burke's, fault Diamond

for being too much of a geographical determinist; what about culture, asks

Mr Burke? I agree that he's overdeterministic, but no one has made a cause

for my favourite candidate for explaining the technological difference:

luck.

Having convinced me that Eurasia simply had better crop candidates than

anywhere else, Mr Diamond undercut his argument when it came to a discussion

of corn. Wild corn, it turns out, is a remarkably bad candidate for

domestication. In it's native state, corn ears are about the size of a human

fingernail. It took milennia to breed the succulent sweet corn that I

enjoyed last night.

So what other food candidates are there that people didn't try to

domesticate, or didn't have the patience to stick with? Or that didn't

produce as good mutations at the right time? Or where there was no

agricultural genius to invent, say, the rice paddy? I found other arguments,

such as the point that it is easier for domesticated food crops and animals

east-west than north-south, still very compelling, but the argument that

Eurasia just lucked out on domestication candidates suddenly lost a lot of

its lustre.

It turns out I wasn't the only one. The inimitable Caplan had the same

thought:

[caplan] " According to Diamond, the horse is just easier to domesticate and

gives a bigger bang for your buck than a llama or a zebra. What made

Diamond's argument especially convincing to me was his claim that since the

integration of the world economy, scientists and entrepreneurs have tried

mightily to domesticate non-Eurasian animals, with little success.

Zebras... "

[diamond] " were tried out as draft animals in 19th-century South Africa, and

the eccentric Lord Walter Rothschild drove through the streets of London in

a carriage pulled by zebras. Alas, zebras become impossibly dangerous as

they grow older...Zebras have the unpleasant habit of biting a person and

not letting go. (Guns, Germs, and Steel, pp.171-2) "

[caplan] More generally:

[diamond] " In the 19th and 20th centuries at least six large mammals - the

eland, elk, moose, musk ox, zebra, and American bison - have been the

subjects of especially well-organized projects aimed at domestication,

carried out by modern scientific animal breeders and geneticists... Yet

these modern efforts have achieved only very limited successes. (Guns,

Germs, and Steel, pp.167-8) "

[caplan] But doubt about this argument started to well up in me when I

reflected on Diamond's history of corn:

[diamond] " Archaeologists are still vigorously debating how many centuries

or millenia of crop development in the Americas were required for ancient

corn cobs to progress from a tiny size up to the size of human thumb, but it

seems clear that several thousand more years were required for them to reach

modern sizes.(Guns, Germs, and Steel, pp.171-2) "

[caplan -- remainder of post is Caplan's comments] Or to take a more

familiar example, look at what we've done with wolves! We've turned them

into everything from the noble Lassie to the irritating poodle. It really

makes me start thinking, " Sure, the zebra is hard to domesticate now; but if

we worked on them for a few hundred years, I bet the change would be

amazing. "

On reflection, it's not surprising that modern science has failed to

domesticate animals like zebras. It would probably take generations, so the

investment wouldn't pay a reasonable rate of return. And we've already got

something better, anyway.

But if breeding useful animals takes centuries, I don't see this as a great

explanation for why Eurasia did so much better than Native Americans and

Africans. You'd just wind up asking, " Why were Eurasians more successful

breeders?, " which seems like a special case of " Why were Eurasians more

economically successful overall? "

Admittedly, there is more to Diamond's argument, and it's worth reading in

its entirety. He also says that the wild ancestors of the Eurasian flora and

fauna were initially closer to being useful to man than the non-Eurasian

flora and fauna.

Maybe he's right, but I'm worried that Diamond's suffering from hindsight

bias: If the Eurasians domesticated the horse, it must have been inevitable,

right? But if the Incas had shown up in Europe in 1492 with deadly llama

cavalry, and mowed down backward European infantry, I suspect modern Incan

historians would have declared the horse a hopeless candidate for

domestication too.