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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   32543 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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I don't understand how he was ever taken seriously,

I have never met anyone who read the book who thinks that; it is nothing if not carefully argued. Of course, most people who criticize are actually criticizing media misrepresentations of the argument.

Can you recommend some kind of a summarized version of his argument, that does not misrepresent him? "Carefully argued" doesn't do much for me. It's not hard to argue for something carefully, and the result being something that should never have been taken seriously to begin with. Guns, Germs, and Steel would be a good example.

I read it many years ago, but this seems to be pretty good: https://www.coursehero.com/lit/The-End-of-History-and-the-Last-Man/plot-summary/

I am curious why you see Guns, Germs and Steel as something not to be taken seriously.

Note, that to me, "not to be taken seriously" implies that it can be summarily disregarded, whereas something that is carefully (and thoroughly, I should have included that as well) might be wrong, but cannot be dismissed, even if it wrong; it must be engaged with. Of course, there are some exceptions, such as works based on clearly erroneous factual premises, but that does not seem to me to describe either Guns, Germs and Steel or The End of History.

I read it many years ago, but this seems to be pretty good: https://www.coursehero.com/lit/The-End-of-History-and-the-Last-Man/plot-summary/

Thanks!

Note, that to me, "not to be taken seriously" implies that it can be summarily disregarded, whereas something that is carefully (and thoroughly, I should have included that as well) might be wrong, but cannot be dismissed, even if it wrong; it must be engaged with.

I disagree, this sort of approach is easily hackable by mining scholarly works for whatever data suits your idea and shaping it into a narrative that is trendy with the current zeitgeist, thus ensuring few people will be interested in challenging you to begin with, and the remainder is too intimidated by the sheer magnitude and obscurity of the material you've dug out.

Massive Theories of Nearly Everything belong in the same category as musing of your local pub philosopher until they withstand the test of time, and many challenges from opponents.

You might ask how are you supposed to challenge something without taking it seriously, but at least half of what I meant by "taking seriously" would be something more like "putting on a pedestal". When 4channers were freaking out about what's going on in Wuhan circa 2019, while all the experts were asleep, no one was taking them seriously. You could still engage with their arguments though.

but that does not seem to me to describe either Guns, Germs and Steel

Didn't it spend pages upon pages talking about how lucky Europeans were because they started off with caloric and easy to cultivate crops, and easily tamable animals, only for it to turn out that ancient European plants/animals were about as useful to humans as those anywhere else, and what the authors were comparing were products of generations of artificial selection to wild plants/animals?

I disagree, this sort of approach is easily hackable by mining scholarly works for whatever data suits your idea, shaping it into a narrative that is trendy with the current zeitgeist, thus ensuring few people will be interested in challenging you to begin with, and the remainder is too intimidated by the sheer magnitude and obscurity of the material you've dug out.

Yes, but isn't that a claim that the argument might be wrong, rather than a claim that they must be wrong? It seems to me to be an argument for skepticism, rather than an argument for dismissal out of hand.

Didn't it spend pages upon pages talking about how lucky Europeans were because they started off with caloric and easy to cultivate crops, and easily tamable animals, only for it to turn out that ancient European plants/animals were about as useful to humans as those anywhere else, and what the authors were comparing were products of generations of artificial selection to wild plants/animals?

  1. As a possibly non-relevant aside, the book is about why Eurasia developed more quickly than elsewhere, rather than Europe.

  2. Glancing at my copy of the book, he says: "Experimental studies in which botanists have collected seeds from such natural stands of wild [fertile crescent] cereals, much as as hunter-gatherers must have been doing over 10,000 years ago, show that annual harvests of up to nearly a ton of seeds per hectare can be obtained[.] ... [In contrast,] [c]orn's probable ancestor, a wild plant known as teosinte, ... was less productive in the wild than wild wheat . . ." So he certainly at least tried to compare like with like. In addition, that is only one of three advantages he claims that Eurasian cereal plants had over wild plants elsewhere; the others, he argues, are that they are annuals, and that most are plants that "usually pollinate themselves but are occasionally self-pollinated." I don't know whether either of those attributes can be changed via artificial selection. Re animals, he notes that only 14 of the world's large (100lbs+) herbivorous animals were ever domesticated (including only 13 of 72 in Eurasia) and notes that even modern efforts to domesticate large wild animals other than the "ancient fourteen" that were domesticated failed, and makes arguments why so few have been domesticated.

  3. Most importantly, that is an argument that Diamond is wrong, or that that he overstates his case. But it is not an argument that "no one ever should have taken him seriously," and I note that on the Wikipedia page on the book, Joel Mokyr is cited as saying that "Diamond's view that Eurasia succeeded largely because of a uniquely large stock of domesticable plants is flawed because of the possibility of crop manipulation and selection in the plants of other regions, the drawbacks of an indigenous plant such as sumpweed could have been bred out, Mokyr wrote, since 'all domesticated plants had originally undesirable characteristics' eliminated via 'deliberate and lucky selection mechanisms'", which sounds like the criticism you are citing.* But he is also quoted as saying that the book is "one of the more important contributions to long-term economic history and is simply mandatory to anyone who purports to engage Big Questions in the area of long-term global history". And I will say that one of the strengths of the book is that is explicitly states the assumptions behind its arguments, repeatedly refers to possible weaknesses in supporting evidence, and also repeatedly suggests avenues for future research which might undermine some of its claims.

  • But I note that, re teosinte, Diamond's argument is not that such changes were impossible -- they obviously weren't -- but that they took a very long time (at p. 137), which helps explain why development in the Americas lagged behind development in Eurasia (and, of course, it is the lag that he seeks to explain).

Glancing at my copy of the book, he says: "Experimental studies in which botanists have collected seeds from such natural stands of wild [fertile crescent] cereals, much as as hunter-gatherers must have been doing over 10,000 years ago, show that annual harvests of up to nearly a ton of seeds per hectare can be obtained[.] ... [In contrast,] [c]orn's probable ancestor, a wild plant known as teosinte, ... was less productive in the wild than wild wheat . . ." So he certainly at least tried to compare like with like.

It has been ages since I read the book, so I might be conflating a bunch of things, and it's also been quite long time since I heard the counter arguments. Does he name any of these studies? Wheat outcompeting corn is unintuitive right off the bat.

Yes, but isn't that a claim that the argument might be wrong, rather than a claim that they must be wrong? It seems to me to be an argument for skepticism, rather than an argument for dismissal out of hand.

I edited some things in so maybe you missed it when you wrote your response, but I disagree with your definition of "taken seriously". Like I said Channers schizzoing out about COVID weren't taken seriously, even though they were right, and were making arguments that should have been addressed.

Wheat outcompeting corn is unintuitive right off the bat.

Wild wheat outcompeting teosinte seems plausible. Wheat's ancestors look like slightly stunted wheat; maize's ancestors look like they're barely even the same plant.

But that makes sense when looking 10,000 years ago. Native Americans managed to domesticate teosinte anyway, and by 6,000 years ago (when Eurasia hadn't yet quite figured out that whole "writing" thing, so they hardly had an insuperable head start on civilization) you'd think it would have become an advantage.

There's an interesting hypothesis (postdating Diamond? I think I loaned out my GGS copy a decade ago and never ended up getting it back...) that potatoes (even better nutritionally than corn) might not have been an advantage for civilization in particular because "leave it in the ground until you need it" doesn't reward the sorts of planning and storage and trading and so forth that lead to large scale social organization ... but maize is the same sort of "harvest it in season and dry it and store it" crop as the Old World grains. Potatoes are also a problem because in between all the good New World regions for growing potatoes are thousand-mile stretches of lousy regions for growing potatoes (Diamond does talk about the ease of spreading crops East-West along climate isoclines, rather than North-South), but maize at least can be grown over a contiguous area stretching a continent and a half, and it was.

There's an interesting hypothesis (postdating Diamond? I think I loaned out my GGS copy a decade ago and never ended up getting it back...) that potatoes (even better nutritionally than corn) might not have been an advantage for civilization in particular because "leave it in the ground until you need it" doesn't reward the sorts of planning and storage and trading and so forth that lead to large scale social organization ... but maize is the same sort of "harvest it in season and dry it and store it" crop as the Old World grains.

Sounds like a hypothesis mentioned in James Scott's Against the Grain. (Although, weren't potatoes a staple on the famously centralized Inca empire? I might be wrong)

They were. (though apparently they could be preserved by poor-man's freeze-drying in the cold mountains, via an Incan staple food "chuño"?) I don't recall any other ancient place potatoes were a staple, either. They didn't make it to North America from South America directly, they made it via Europe.

I don't understand the Inca Empire at all. If I were to name obstacles to their growth, "their food plants were too awesome" would be low on the list, way behind "their territory was a thousand mile strip of poorly navigable mountains and their best boats were rafts".

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