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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.
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?
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.
As a possibly non-relevant aside, the book is about why Eurasia developed more quickly than elsewhere, rather than Europe.
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.
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.
I understand your objection, but I think Diamond's book is one of those that taken as how he states it fits into the not even wrong category. You read the book, and it all sounds very science-y and convincing. But then you think about it again and it occurs to you that, hmm wait a minute, how can you even suppose to think about what a "wild" pig, chicken, horse etc actually is? The fact is the ostensibly wild populations of these things are hopelessly interbred with escaped chickens and horses from the early and current selectively bred populations, and its not easily done determinable when breeding really started.
Then you did down into things like his zebra arguments, and they are just obviously rubbish because there are multiple instances of Europeans going to Africa in the 1800s and early 1900s and remarking on how easy to break zebras are, and it seems his zebra-horse comparison is actually like 180 degrees from what actually was the difficulty level. And then you have to think to yourself, "huh, if he got this super easy thing so wrong, how much else is just him spinning nonsense?" And then even small inquiries indicate yes. And your logical conclusion is delving into the rest is simply a massive waste of time and energy.
But, breaking an animal is not the same as domesticating an animal. As noted on page 159: "Elephants have been tamed, but never domesticated. Hannibal's elephants were, and Asian work elephants are, just wild elephants that were captured and tamed; they were not bred in captivity. In contrast, a domesticated animal is defined as an animal selectively bred in captivity and thereby modified from its wild ancestors, for use by humans who control the animal's breeding and food supply."
And of course to this day zebras have not been domesticated.
What is the actual definition of "domestication"? Like, I see this elsewhere in the thread:
...But this seems to be a fairly loose definition.
Zebras can be tamed, and they can be bred in captivity, and these can be done in a handful of generations from completely wild animals. Is there a reason to suspect that another two or three hundred generations of selective breeding would not render them completely domesticated?
Diamond observes that certain species were not domesticated, despite being very similar to species in other areas which were domesticated. He concludes that the species which were not domesticated were therefore harder to domesticate. This might make sense if domestication was pursued equally effectively in all the areas in question, but what evidence do we have that this was the case? What separates Diamond's thesis from a post-hoc rule that all the animals that were domesticated were therefore the easiest to domesticate, and the animals that were not couldn't have been? If zebras are harder to domesticate than horses, but easier than wild boar, doesn't that invalidate his thesis?
No, he makes an argument re why that was the case. His argument might be wrong, but it indeed an argument. He does not simply conclude that they were undomesticable from the mere fact that they were not domesticated.
I didn't posit that he argued it, but rather concluded it. I think someone can argue rationally for a conclusion they've drawn irrationally, a process commonly known as "rationalization". One of the better evidences that this is happening is that their arguments are consistently wrong in their favored direction, ignoring obvious evidence to the contrary, collecting only the evidence that helps their conclusion and repeatedly missing anything to the contrary. If his argument is wrong, maybe that's because he made a mistake, or maybe it's because he's rationalizing. If he's rationalizing, it raises the question of whether he actually has a legitimate argument at all. It seems to me that this is a reasonable question to ask, isn't it?
Notably, I don't actually know, because I haven't read the book and am getting the arguments involved second-hand. This would work better if people would dig into the arguments more, rather than arguing about arguments about the argument. But fuck it, I needed audio anyhow. Piracy time.
As I recall, one of the strengths of the book is that he often acknowledges the existence of contrary evidence and arguments, and attempts to address them. Whether he does so successfully, I do not recall, but he certainly does not generally ignore countervailing evidence.
The entire premise of the book is an attempt to explain why people in Papua New Guinea have so little while white people have so much. Do you recall him addressing the argument that you would get if you posed that question here?
Diamond just knew that it had nothing to do with "ingenuity or individual skill." He did not have to prove that; he just knew it.
His answer is fabulous, as it presumes that animals and plants can be radically different depending on the continent they are in (hence zebras and horses) but denies that any such difference could exist between people from different continents. A zebra is from Africa, and we can presume that it cannot be domesticated because of its genetics, but genetics only work for plants and animals. We could never countenance such a claim about an African person.
He completely fails to engage with the other side and refuses to even consider the possibility that some countries did well because of individual decisions. It has to be geography that matters, not decisions made by people. Even on this point which he believes because of Marxism, he can not be consistent, as he blames China not dominating the seas on the decision of a single emperor. Basically, he is a hack that refuses to argue.
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