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Honestly these read like a list of political charges that accuse Diamond of saying bad things about indigenous people (which is sort of the opposite of his thes

Honestly these read like a list of political charges that accuse Diamond of saying bad things about indigenous people (which is sort of the opposite of his thesis) rather than a substantive critique of that book. Is there a critical response that goes deeper into the scientific merits of his claims? I found the book an interesting meditation on the connections between land, plants and animals, the kind of society that can form as a result, and knock-on effects from that process (like the dependence of diseases on city living). The level of hostility to this work in the linked reviews seems out of proportion to its alleged deficits.

tptacek 6y ago
The AskAnthro comment isn't great, but has links to much better sources. The sci-hub cite I gave, though, isn't political. It opens by pointing out basic errors in Diamond's work --- his omission of agriculture in the Pacific Northwest, his just-so story about lack of domestication of animals in the Americas being a result of over-hunting. In fact, the Sluyter article seems to go out of its way not to accuse Diamond of disfavored politics, and focuses on its research and reasoning. You can do better on this, though; for instance, it turns out there's a whole subsection of the AskHistorians wiki covering GGS, with entries observing: * Diamond's understanding of genetic data for the human disease load during colonization is faulty * The inability of Spanish conquistadors to hold conquered territory once captured * That Diamond risibly oversimplifies the naivete of cultures like the Inca, which somehow spent centuries conquering an entire continent only to be left ignorant of the very concept of invaders (I liked this one because it referred to Diamond as "not even an anthropologist"). * That Diamond's understanding of the Inca empire as being absolutely controlled by Atahualpa and thus his overthrow --- which is also apparently rendered inaccurately in the book --- doomed the Incas... where was I with this sentence? At any rate, it's apparently not true. * That the most important conquests of Central America occurred between native powers, and that colonizers had repeated false starts during them and took root mostly after wars between indigenous people had ravaged the continent. I thought I might take a stab at summarizing everything r/AA and r/AH have to say about the book, but it'd be like summarizing Wikipedia. I own Diamond's book and have read chunks of it and remember enjoying it, but here am just reporting that among experts in these fields, it doesn't have a good reputation, even as pop science. The criticisms seem mostly procedural (and, to an extent, about turf --- Diamond's training is in hard science, not social science), not political.

tptacek 6y ago

The AskAnthro comment isn't great, but has links to much better sources. The sci-hub cite I gave, though, isn't political. It opens by pointing out basic errors in Diamond's work --- his omission of agriculture in the Pacific Northwest, his just-so story about lack of domestication of animals in the Americas being a result of over-hunting. In fact, the Sluyter article seems to go out of its way not to accuse Diamond of disfavored politics, and focuses on its research and reasoning. You can do better on this, though; for instance, it turns out there's a whole subsection of the AskHistorians wiki covering GGS, with entries observing: * Diamond's understanding of genetic data for the human disease load during colonization is faulty * The inability of Spanish conquistadors to hold conquered territory once captured * That Diamond risibly oversimplifies the naivete of cultures like the Inca, which somehow spent centuries conquering an entire continent only to be left ignorant of the very concept of invaders (I liked this one because it referred to Diamond as "not even an anthropologist"). * That Diamond's understanding of the Inca empire as being absolutely controlled by Atahualpa and thus his overthrow --- which is also apparently rendered inaccurately in the book --- doomed the Incas... where was I with this sentence? At any rate, it's apparently not true. * That the most important conquests of Central America occurred between native powers, and that colonizers had repeated false starts during them and took root mostly after wars between indigenous people had ravaged the continent. I thought I might take a stab at summarizing everything r/AA and r/AH have to say about the book, but it'd be like summarizing Wikipedia. I own Diamond's book and have read chunks of it and remember enjoying it, but here am just reporting that among experts in these fields, it doesn't have a good reputation, even as pop science. The criticisms seem mostly procedural (and, to an extent, about turf --- Diamond's training is in hard science, not social science), not political.