Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

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The central thesis of Guns, Germs, and Steel doesn't hold up that well when you compare it to facts. One point to make is that maize was very readily adopted by North American culture to a strong degree (it took historians a while to realize that North Americans had in fact developed agriculture independently of Mesoamerica). By contrast, there was no major transfer of crops along the Eurasian interior between the independent agricultural discoveries in Mesopotamia and China.

Another thing to point out: the American staple of maize is very nearly a complete provider of essential nutrients (just add beans), which cannot be said for Eurasian crops. And maize is the highest caloric yield crop, followed by potatoes. As 1491 points out, when the Mesoamericans faced the Spaniards, the Spaniards were probably suffering from lifelong malnutrition... and the Aztecs weren't.

The evidence is, in fact, that Mesoamerica in particular won the agricultural lottery, meaning that Eurasian supremacy cannot be based on agricultural superiority.

It's been a while, so I don't remember the details. But he does go on about domesticated animals that are useful in agriculture for tilling fields (mainly oxen, horses as well), and that they enable not just being well-fed, but achieving a large surplus.

He also goes on about how there were no large animals to be domesticated, completely ignoring the bison, and basically just saying the llama and alpaca don't count.

Llama and alpaca really don't count. They are much smaller and much weaker than cattle. You can breed them to be bigger, but there may be limits to that; there may also be a path dependence to it, in that they started in one economic niche and there was no reason for a concerted effort over dozens or hundreds of generations to make them stronger.

Bison are much more problematic IMO for Diamond. The most I've seen on them is that they are surlier than cattle. But it's not like aurochs were cuddly fur friends in the beginning either.

> They are much smaller and much weaker than cattle.

Same with Donkeys.

Totally agree w/ Bison.

edit: It is worth considering the maximum extent of the Inca Empire roughly coincided with the greatest distribution of alpacas and llamas in Pre-Hispanic America, so I think they had a major influence.

I think you treat his thesis in a too m literal sense. He is speaking of broad patterns. There will of course always be various other factors playing a part. If you look at several areas of the world his ideas seem to stack up quite well. The lack of animal domestication in the Americas and its consequences seem like a strong point to me. He also offers a plausible explanation why there was so little domestication.

If you read his latter books, Diamond makes it quite clear that he really does believe that the environmental situation of a culture is the most important factor in its successes and failures. (Collapse is especially egregious in this regard).

One of the main problems of Guns, Germs, and Steel is that it ignores a lot of evidence that is challenging to its thesis. To be fair, some of that evidence wasn't available when the book was first written, but Diamond's more recent comments indicate that he still believes in now-discredited theories (such as Clovis-first peopling of the Americas), and some pieces of evidence are fairly obviously wrong even when he wrote it (such as the fact that most latitudes don't actually have climactic continuity, and the ones that do involve civilizations that were "backwards" for most of history, such as the steppe nomads).

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