Video: "African History Disproves 'Guns Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond"

"African History Disproves 'Guns Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond"--The Cynical Historian (14 min.).  

     If you are familiar with Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond sets out to determine why some societies became wealthy civilizations and others did not. His conclusion was that early civilizations benefited from the ability to cultivate and domesticate various crops and animals that allowed food surpluses and animal labor. This allowed specialization and the formation of elites, and the consequential rise of civilizations. Trade between these civilizations not only spread disease, but insured that civilized peoples would develop immunities to deadly diseases (the "germs"). Civilization and specialization allowed those cultures to also engage in metallurgy, eventually giving rise to industries that produced good quality steel weapons and tools. Finally, European nations developed firearms, which were superior to more primitive weapons. This trifecta allowed Europeans to dominate trade and made them into a powerful military force able to overcome more simple peoples. His particular example is the fall of American civilizations, such as the Incan Empire, to small numbers of Spaniards. 

     In the video above, the narrator concedes that Diamond might be correct as to why the Americas were so easily conquered by Europeans but disagrees with Diamond's explanation of why Africa was unable to develop advanced civilizations. The video not only uses Diamond's own geographical determinates against him, but applies those determinates to Africa to show that Africa benefited from all of the same factors that Diamond used to explain the success of Eurasian civilizations.

     My first exposure to Diamond's work was the National Geographic documentary based on his Guns, Germs and Steel. I found his ideas intriguing, but even then realized that there were significant flaws because it made no mention of cultural or societal traits that may have impacted which cultures gave rise to powerful civilizations. In particular, I did not believe that his theory could explain how Britain and Japan became so powerful given the paucity of their natural resources. Later, after reading Michael Levin's book, Why Race Matters, I was even more convinced that Diamond had missed something. 

       But, I thought, perhaps Diamond may have addressed the issue in his book, and it was just something skipped over in the documentary version. Then I happened upon his book at a library book sale and decided to give it a try. What I discovered is that the reason that Diamond did not discuss cultural or ethnic differences is because, as he explicitly states at the beginning of his book, he simply was not going to consider them. Thus, he had already predetermined that some of the most significant factors were to be ignored. It was not an open minded inquiry. It didn't help that a lot of his data about the rise of agriculture and civilization was outdated and superseded by more recent research.

      I won't go into the subject of the large variances in average I.Q. between ethnic groups because I've mentioned that before. But as an example of cultural influences, I would refer you to a recent article from Phys.org, "Mapping the end of incest and dawn of individualism." 

       If you're from a Western society, chances are you value individuality, independence, analytical thinking, and an openness to strangers and new ideas.

      And the surprising reason for all that may very well have to do with the early Roman Catholic Church and its campaign against marriage within families, according to new research published in Science by Joseph Henrich, chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and a team of collaborators.

       "If you're going to ask the rise-of-the-West question," said Henrich, an author of the paper, "there's this big unmentioned thing called psychology that's got to be part of the story."

       About a decade ago Henrich coined the acronym WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) to describe the characteristics of cultures that embrace individualism. And those groups were weird, which is to say unusual within the rest of the modern world's substantial psychological variation. Most of the prior studies attempting to explain the discrepancies focused solely on geographic or ecological factors.

      Henrich and his collaborators decided to look at how social groups mold the psychology and values of members, the most important and fundamental being the family.

      "There's good evidence that Europe's kinship structure was not much different from the rest of the world," said Jonathan Schulz, an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University and another author of the paper. But then, from the Middle Ages to 1500 A.D., the Western Church (later known as the Roman Catholic Church) started banning marriages to cousins, step-relatives, in-laws, and even spiritual-kin, better known as godparents.

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      Those policies first altered family structures and then the psychologies of members. Henrich and his colleagues think that individuals adapt cognition, emotions, perceptions, thinking styles, and motivations to fit their social networks. Kin-based institutions reward conformity, tradition, nepotism, and obedience to authority, traits that help protect assets—such as farms—from outsiders. But once familial barriers crumble, the team predicted that individualistic traits like independence, creativity, cooperation, and fairness with strangers would increase.

        Using 24 psychological variables collected in surveys, experiments, and observations, they measured the global prevalence of traits that correspond or conflict with individualism. To test for willingness to help strangers, for example, they collected data on blood-donation rates across Italy, finding a correlation between high donation rates and low cousin-marriage rates. With their kinship intensity index, Schutz said, they can also predict which diplomats in New York City will or will not pay parking tickets: Those from countries with higher rates of cousin marriages are more likely to get a ticket and less likely to pay one.

       And, although willingness to trust strangers, as opposed to family or neighbors, is associated with higher levels of innovation, greater national wealth, and faster economic growth, which factor causes which is not yet known.

This is yet more evidence that Diamond's thesis is inherently flawed because he decided to ignore societal, cultural and ethnic differences.