I'm reading a Pulitzer-prize-winning book, called "Guns, Germs, and Steel," by Jared Diamond. It's an analysis of why societies evolved the way they did.
It starts by recounting some major events in Europe's conquest of the New World. It asks why it is that such an absurdly tiny collection of Spanish conquistadors were able to defeat the greatest empires the New World ever knew, in almost no time. The immediate answers are that the Europeans had better technology and stronger diseases. But Diamond examines why that came to be.
Diamond's political motivations show pretty plainly. He's putting together an explanation that makes racial explanations unnecessary. Previous generations of anthropologists were drawn towards the idea that there was something innately superior in the racial makeup of the peoples who came to dominate the world (and thus something innately inferior in the racial makeup of those who came to be dominated). Diamond works from geographic explanations to show that the racial ones are unnecessary.
For the most part, Diamond's argument is highly convincing. For most of the people in the world who came to be dominated, it is pretty clear how geography would have dictated that outcome. For example, various island peoples lacked a critical size of population, enough outside contacts, enough indigenous plants and animals that were good candidates for domestication, and even basic mineral resources (coral and volcanic islands lack iron deposits and coal, for example). These factors prevented them from developing writing, advanced military technologies, and even the kinds of potent diseases that colonizers unwittingly bring to bear on populations they're subjugating.
The section on germs is particularly interesting. Diamond argues that nearly all epidemic diseases crossed over from domestic animal populations, and thus that they naturally evolved in places where people lived in close contact with large herds of animals. Thus, the Old World was a giant petri dish for the evolution of epidemic diseases -- and every time such a disease crossed over to human in one area, it wasn't long before it had been shared throughout the Old World. This gave rise to much stronger natural immunity to epidemic diseases among Euroasians, compared to virgin populations in the Americas and the South Pacific.
That's why, by the time Europeans were actually fighting to dominate people in those areas, the native populations had been reduced by up to 90%, by the diseases that ran ahead of the Europeans. Meanwhile, although there were native diseases in the conquered areas (particularly Malaria and Yellow Fever from the African tropics), there was far less infection running the opposite direction. Europeans gave New Worlders epidemics of plague, small pox, measles, influenza, etc., while the New Worlders had very little luck returning the favor.
There was also an interesting discussion of why, despite the size and natural richness of the Americas, there were so few good candidates for domestication. At least among animals, the reason is likely that the earliest Americans wiped out the animals (like the horse), that might have been domesticated. The problem is that by the time humans arrived in the Americas, they were already at an advanced stage of stone-age technology. Therefore, they had the ability to wipe out most big mammal species (like horses), faster than those species could adapt, leading to extinction. By comparison, in the Old World the first encounter of these domesticatable species (pigs, horses, cows, camels), and humans took place much earlier, when the humans were still not nearly as good at hunting. So, the animals had time to adapt to the human pressures, and weren't driven to extinction before they had a chance to be domesticated. In a nutshell, the original Americans decimated their environment, putting them at a disadvantage when they reached the stage of domestication.
I'm not sure I'm 100% convinced by Diamond's arguments. For example, he makes much of the difficulty of innovations to travel on a North-South axis, versues and East-West axis. That's how he explains why writing was able to travel from ancient Sumer throughout the whole of Europe and Asia, whereas it never really made it out of Mesoamerica, to the Incans or the Mississippi Valley cultures. Although, geographically, the innovation of writing covered a whole lot more distance in the Old World than it would have had to travel for Mayans to share their innovation with mound-builders in North America, or Incans in South America, Diamond says that climate changes across latitudes made the North-South axis of the Americas a much bigger hurdle,even with shorter distances, than the East-West axis of Eurasia.
Likewise, he uses this continental-axis explanation to explain why the Old World shared regionally-developed domesticated crops and animals so quickly, while in the New World they took forever to travel, if they traveled at all. For example, a crop perfected in the Fertile Crescent (wheat) didn't take long to be used from France to China, whereas most crops perfected in the New World (beans) didn't travel, or took thousands of years to be adopted elsewhere in the New World. For that reason, even after humanity reached the stage of domesticating plants and animals, in the New World, that process proceeded much more slowly than it had in the Old World -- leading, for example, to thousands of years of delay for corn to make its way from where it was first domesticated to most of North America, despite the ridiculous fertility of the Mississippi Valley.
Similary, whereas domesticated horses and pigs were quickly adopted from one end of the Old World to the other, domesticated llamas and guinea pigs never made it from South America even as far as Central America, before the Euroepans. I'm not sure I buy that the the continental-axis phenomenon is quite that important, but it is a very clever way to try to explain the very different rates of adopting innovation in the Old and New worlds.
I'm also not sure I buy that so many Old World animals were so much easier to domesticate than New World animals. Diamond tries to explain why this is, but I'm not completely convinced. For example, in the Old World, the Reindeer was domesticated, whereas in the New World various comparable animals (like the elk), were not. In the Old World, the water buffalo was domesticated. In the New World, the American Bison was not. The pig was domesticated, but comparably-sized New World animals like the Beaver, Raccoon, Capybara, etc., were not. And, most interestingly, there were species present in both areas, that were only domesticated in the Old World (like the apple).
Regardless of whether you find each individual explanation convincing, overall Diamond sets forth a really strong framework for understanding these different courses taken by Eurasia, compared with the Americas, Australia, and the South Pacific. It's well worth a read, and will make you think of History in much broader terms than before.
For my own part, I'm a little more open to the racial explanations for the course of history, which I'm sure Diamond would consider utterly abhorrent. However, let me specify that this isn't typical racism on my part, in the sense of thinking my own race superior to others. When I look at history, the most important technological and sociological innovations came from Semitic and Persian peoples, Egyptians, Greeks, Italians, and Chinese. My own racial ancestors, the Scots, Irish, Norwegians, and Germans, were some of the longest hold-outs against civilization, and some of the slowest to adopt its innovations, in all of the Old World.
Long after Chin started the Great Wall, the Egyptians perfected the pyramid, the Greeks invented philosophy, and the Romans built a city with millions of people, my ancestors were living in grubby little huts, in grubby little communities, and patting themselves on the back for figuring out how to stand a big stone up on its side. My ancestors didn't domesticate any major crops or animals, they didn't independently invent writing or various advances in agriculture, etc. They were dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world, until about the end of the Middle Ages. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that there was a racial component to that.
Perhaps, genetically, my ancestors' minds were inferior when it came to the task of making those early innovative leaps. Maybe the Northern-European brain just wasn't up to the wild leap of creativity necessary to invent writing, or to domesticate a new animal. I admit that Diamond's explanations are more convincing than the racial ones, but the way with which he is so wildly eager to discount even the possibility of a racial component strikes me as political correctness and unscientific thinking. Better to at least remain open to the possibility.
People can be racially more likely to be tall or short, light or dark, full of fast or slow twitch muscles, and succeptible or resistant to various diseases. In light of that, is it really inconceivable that people can also have different racial probabilities of being good at different kinds of thinking? I mean, the human brain is just a physical organ. Why is it so impossible to imagine that, like every other organ, its exact features may tend to differ from one genetic group of humans to another? Shouldn't we at least admit the possibility?
