Guns, Germs, and Steel

There's two camps of people who hate his book.

The right hate him for attributing Europe's success to luck. They don't like the idea that Europe got the where it is due to the geographic conditions that allowed them to cultivate land and stop hunting-gathering.

The left hate him for what they feel is imperialism apologia. They don't like the idea that Europeans invade others because it's human nature and had Native Americans got the upper hand, they would have invaded Europe.

In general, I think the main thing that irks people is the environmental determinism.

No, my dad used to work there though and that's where he met him.

>racist(or Pro-White) view in today's anthropology.
Environmental determinism is the opposite of pro-white racism. It implies that Europeans did nothing to earn their success.

Linear history theories don't explain anything properly
people need to separate their minds from the Christian concept of linear time

Is the thesis the same as the Reversal of Fortune paper? Because that one was shit

I don't know I've never read it.

Care to elaborate?
Linear theories are not supposed to be nuanced, just be able to explain the outlines.

They are husband and wife nothing to see here.

Can somebody summarise this? I'm not wasting 2 hours of some /pol/-tier "refutation".

>not controversial
>inevitably correct

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You should probably get off ur high horse, he's a good yter and does a lot of studies

>dude zebras lmao
>dude Papa New Guinea lmao

>This book is criticised here for being anti-White propaganda.
Actually This book is criticized everywhere to be badly conceived speculation.

If I recall correctly, he said Zebras could be tamed but not domesticated. This is why you should read books and not get your education from imageboard pictures.

Yup. It's a bad book because it's shit history. Read "Why the West Rules... for Now" instead for an overview of history.

This isn't Yea Forums. It's a history textbook that has political issues around it. His prose is shit. Read Dosto.

He's still wrong, taming is step 1 of domestication

Elephants are easily tamed but nobody has domesticated them yet. It's not that simple.

>Basically, the book is insightful, and you should read
Should people also read Mein Kampf?

>Goldman Sachs Business Book of the year Award
holy...

>Reading historical books telling you how to think, instead of studying the prime sources by yourself, and making your own conclusions.

"We wuz kangz n shit cuz of some dumbass fucking rock theory that defined South America and the rest of Western human civilization": The book

There is no value in that book, it's just used by leftists to deflect and have some source during an argument, book itself is trash.
youtube.com/watch?v=qvaxPH3ftUQ

kek

It’s a good video and Faulk is a nice guy that hates nazis and alt-right. He says the thesis could apply to Polynesians maybe but he extends it too much. He then shows how other races didn’t utilize food, animal, and land in the productive ways Europeans did.

Divorced or the woman dead within 2 years then

he summarizes his refutation in the first 10 minutes and then goes on to go into detail on each point.

Friendly reminder that this book contains ZERO (0) citations and is the result of Jared going native; one big attempt at justifying the people of Papua New Guinea as "the most powerful race on the planet"

This book has been torn apart by anthropologists. don't even waste your time

Jared Diamond doesn't have a doctorate in anthropology

Nice to see someone reading and talking about books on here that aren't what's always posted. I've never read Guns, Germs, and Steel but I've heard a lot about it. If you have the book on hand, would you mind giving an example of his "bet you thought you guys were clever" remarks? I'm intrigued by how biased he sounds.
Also, if you like analytical works on world history, I really liked Salt, it's very in-depth on how one product changed world history. Well written and he never really goes overboard with his claims.

>But the author feels the need the speculate that these primitive people are actually more intelligent than the average White person, because, apparently, in the West we live lives so comfortable we don’t need to think. Not only are primitive people just as capable as us, we’re actually dumber!
This is true though. Technology has made us dumb as fuck and we can't do anything on our own anymore. Placed in the wilderness we would starve or be eaten by wild beasts. Aboriginals know what's up.

muh geographic determinism. that's all you need to know. he disgards, culture, psychology etc and boils it down to what is growing in your backyard

just because you can survive in the wild better doesn't make you more intelligent. by that standard animals at the top of food chains are the most intelligent out there. part of being intelligent is building advanced civilizations where I will never have to deal with an animal outside of a zoo. and that's what white people did.

I agree with you basically entirely. I also dont believe that the animals in africa can't be domesticated, seems like bullshit to me, domestication takes a long time.

You're right, but there's a dropoff point where the people the civilization produces are inferior to those who those who created it. This is what we're seeing now, and exactly what we need is a return to "savage" conditions to reignite the innovative and survivalistic spirit of the human race.

You're right, this video
gives multiple examples of animals that hadn't been domisticated by Africans and Amerindians for thousands of years and then white people came over and literally domesticated them in minutes. Most notably the Zebra and the Llama.

Land said something like 'all social progress is dysgenic' which I found hilarious.

Because it takes a long time and Europeans havent been there for long and arent even really trying to domesticate any of those animals since they dont run shit in Africa anymore.

I don't necessarily disagree, but you're shifting the topic. The point is that Papua New Guineas could never build a civilization comprable to white people's even if they lived the same exact environment as white people.

I like this book a lot op

Domestication is a form of selection, it can be applied to EVERY creature.
nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/08/fox-dogs-wild-tame-genetics-study-news/
Horses were just as difficult to domesticate as Zebras, have you ever seen an untamed horse? They're fucking harder to approach than deer.

Meant for

Faulk is the only right wing YTer you should care about. His entire gimmick is mountains of sources, and anti dogmatism. This is opposed to the usual MAGA sycophants and Ben Shapiro types who DECAPITATE libtard SJWs C󠀀UCKS

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You could say this about literally every subject. Who has time to be an expert in everything?

He gives a sort of reference list but it's in the form of a bibliography.

Read it and it really changed how i felt about the white race (I grew up in a very racist environment)
Seems like a like /pol/tards care more about feeling superior than rationally weighing the evidence.

>The core content in Guns, Germs, and Steel is fairly uncontroversial: a short history of plant and animal domestication, and the benefits that this gave people around the world. Then the implications follow. Diamond posits that this decisive advantage was the fundamental reason that Europe beat its competition, because it lead to writing, technology, weapons, and immunity. This is also not that radical an idea - at some point, all humans were very similar so a geographic discrepancy must have led to developmental differences.
If you followed Diamond's idea and didn't know anything about the world you'd expect hyperadvanced civilisation dominating the entire world in the fertile crescent. This kind of made me think Jared was a troll.

What's the difference between one and another, user?

Why don't Papuans become academics right after being taken out of jungle, if they're so smart?

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This is a much better book.

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I agree that reparations are bullshit but your lack of empathy and beliefs about conquest make you sound like the savage.

They'd have to be raised from birth in a Western family.

Some of them are...

They are smart enough to know that academia is bullshit.

I’ve read the book. Jared Diamond is either retarded or disingenuous. He understands environment can affect a civilization and people’s behaviors, but it cannot affect them via natural selection. Wtf?

>Christian concept of linear time
you mean Western concept. In Christian theology time does not exist.

?? Wut it does

I think a good comparison would be you can teach a dog to do tricks but the dog's offspring will not be born knowing how to do those tricks, you'll have to repeat the whole process every time

I started reading it and I dropped it after only a few dozen pages.
Writing a history book to prove a point is by definition dishonest as fuck.

Holy shit this is such a brainlet post

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The progressive theory of history that proceeds from the ancient to the modern era
Op says
>It’s also possible that if they (abos) were placed in Europe 15,000 years ago, they might have invented the computer by now.
No thought is given to whether the Abo culture has a need for computers, or the Chinese or Romans. Looking at history and culture only from a Western perspective is like wearing horse blinders. That's why books like Guns Germs and Steel fail from the outset. Oswald Spengler showed that each culture perceives the flow of time differently, so GG&S is trying to explain the flow of history purely from the Western perspective of progressive linear time i.e. that the modern age is the "end of history" and the ultimate goal of all mankind since the stone age.

The most disingenuous thing i've ever read. If you want a real anthropological alternative i recommend the following

Understanding Human History by Michael Hart
10,000 year explosion
Genes, race and human history

Does the storm pity the shipwrecked?

>the absolute state of /fa/

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no, because storms can't reason

That looks pretty good for Yea Forums. The picture you quoted isn't /fa/, it's foreveralone subreddit.

Some processes just naturally happen. In this case, the weak are enslaved by the strong. That's just how things are. Not wrong, not right, they just are.

>No thought is given to whether the Abo culture has a need for computers
Literally a whole chapter is about dispelling the myth that necessity is the mother of creation.

But isn't the whole process of domestication to:

1. Tame wild animals, have them bear offspring
2. Selectively breed the offspring that are more receptive to taming or "friendlier" towards human
3. Continue step 3. until domesticated animal is produce

I don't see why we wouldn't be able to do that with zebra, especially in subsaharan africa for uses similar to horse (although they're probably not as strong or practical as horse, but then again could be fixed with selective breeding).

>your lack of empathy and beliefs about conquest make you sound like the savage
Yes, and?

Because the taming process would still have to be repeated every generation and that takes a lot of fucking work. It might be 100 generations before a naturally friendly zebra is seen.

Name my bands Yea Forums

>left and right

How about this: the highest IQ population developed fucking everything in the world, and in turn was able to subject other populations

Wrong, idiot. It's pro-white because it states that Europeans are superior. The reason why is irrelevant to the thesis.

It's akin to left claiming that somebody isn't ACKTUALLY rich because their parents gave them wealth. It's a basic logi al fallacy.

zebras are more like donkeys than horses. they're the same size and speed of donkeys (smaller and much slower than horses, obv) and so rely on other survival tactics such as running in zig-zag patterns, stampeding in large, densely packed herds, and stripes to blend in with each other and the tall grasses. also not only are they much more aggressive than horses(less likely to kill you but a shorter temper and stubborn, like donkeys) but they're also less genetically diverse so breeding a domesticated subspecies would take more generations than horses.

zebra farms do exist, people have tamed a few zebras before, but its not the sort of animal you want to ride. its not Africa's horse, its Africa's weird aggressive donkey.

didn't expect to drop a bunch of zebra facts today

It’s preposterous to assert that any one factor can explain the growth of civilization

you're a weakling. that's the problem. and unfortunately it's this weak element in western civilization that led to it's downfall.

Well of course if you just transplanted them they wouldn't be able to do anything like whites but they evolved in different places and conditions. They're a product of their environments and that's something I think Diamond is correct about, even if he makes some sloppy generalizations and glorifies the Papuans too much.

Coming at it from the perspective of somebody who is into Mesoamerican history, it's shit.

His core point, that geography influences how cultures develop, is solid; and I think a lot of the shit he gets either from left-wing academia in terms ofg "defending white supermacy/colionalism" is moronic, but he overestimates the degree to which that is the case/underestimates other factors, such as cultural influences and random chance, as well incorrectly assumes technology develops/"advances" linearly, when it doesn't, often, ironically, due to environmental differences (How Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations developed differently due to their climates and geography and the near absence of beasts of burden is a good example) and cherrypicks evidence

He also just straights up makes tons of factual errors regarding precolumbian cultures. Not even just bad methodology or bad analysis (tho that too), just straight up errors regarding their capabilities and societies. IIRC, he repeats the protein deficiency meme, states that New World civilizations didn't have true writing systems, etc. It's obvious he knows very little about Precolumbian socities and drastically underestimates the capabilities of Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations and has a lot of false preconciened notions about why the Spanjish conquest played out how it did

Combined, it leads to him incorrectly concluding that the European conquest of the Americas, and, more broadly, that European global domination, was inevitable, when both of those are fundamentally incorrect notions (see desuarchive.org/his/thread/5526254/#5526329 and boards.fireden.net/v/thread/441551507/#441565260). It's from >reddit; but

np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2qn5us/myths_of_conquest_part_one_a_handful_of/ and other posts in that series; and np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2bv2yf/guns_germs_and_steel_chapter_3_collision_at/

it's not satan incarnate as it's made out to be and there's some neat ideas in it, but it's also deeply flawed and needs to be read with a pound of salt in hand and other works that give contrasting conclusions/corrections. 7 myths of the Spanish conquest isn't perfect either but it's way more solid and is a good contrasting work

I think that user is doing a poor job explaining what he's trying to say, which is that it's erronous to assume that societial and technological progression innately follows the model it did for europeans. Again, to look at Mesoamerican socities, despite not inventing bronze till around 1200/1300 AD, by 300AD they had urban cities with formal goverments with 100,000+ people, extremely complex water mangement systems, etc. Via a european technological or social progression model they'd be "stone age" socities yet they match and Bronze and Iron age ones in most regards, at times even Classical ones, rarely even eclipising them in complexity

You effectively wrote 4 paragraphs to say absolutely nothing.

kek

> by 300AD they had urban cities with formal goverments with 100,000+ people

*by 300BC ; i'm specifically talking about El Mirador here.

I'm pretty sure I did.

>His core point about envoirmental factors influecing how socities develop is decent but he neglects other equally important factors
>He makes a lot of errors when it comes precolumbian socities which leads him to making incorrect conclusions
>I linked further resources clarifying on all this
>I clarified to another user about what the first user meant by Linear approaches to history being flawed

I understood it you doofus.

Came here to post this, Jared Diamond is a white-hating Jew and as a Jew who loves whites i hate him

Except the Andeans did domesticate llamas you moron.

The difference is that EUropean and American colonists signed treaties with Native Americans, which they then promptly ignored.

By this logic you also don't support laws at all and think society should jsut involve the strong people taking what they want.

But of course you don't support that, because then Tyrone would come in and kick your ass and steal your TV.

>it states that Europeans are superior
It literally does the opposite you troglodyte.

I am a half jew, but fucking this. I don't love his politics but alt hype is intelctually honest and his unique perspective produces gems like this video on occasion.