Environmental Determinism

Modern Geography gets around this by insulting Marx for being an empiricist and ranting about how he uses too much logical positivism

Wasn't Guns & Germs totally debunked some time ago already?

>Marx
>empiricist
>not a young-helgelian idealist/rationalist
modern geography is retarded

How could 'environment influences development' be debunked?

Did they find a population who industrialized an isolated and resource-free island without any outside contact?

>migration is impossible
>trade is impossible
>humans are literally glued to the ground they're born on

If GG&S were debunked, none of the environmental factors you list would matter.

That would mean humans could accomplish just as much in an environment where migration, trade, and expansion is impossible as they did in the real world.

it was "debunked" in the same way darwin was "debunked"
strawman, did you even read the book?
and even if you can migrate you will not invent ships iy you don't have accses to the ocean

half of the book is about trade and migration retard

It completely looks over other civilizations developing away from the eurasian plateau, which is his convenient excuse for MUH PERFECT ENVIRONMENT FOR CROPS AND CATTLE. The Mehulah and Chinese civilizations pretty much prove him wrong on that account.

He substracts geography for history and assumes social interaction between groups had no parts to play, as if there was no sense of agency in early humans.
He erronuously assumed north american people were only hunter gatherers when there is clear evidence tribes from california to british columbia were very much capable of domesticating plants and had done so as far as 5000BC
anthropology.si.edu/archaeobio/r12_ena.html

He contradicts himself regularly. In one case he argues that eurasia had the largest amount of domesticable animals out of all the continents, then later he confirms that North American continent early humans hunted down to extinction the majority of Pleistocene mammals which could have been domesticated. So which is it? Both continents clearly had access to domesticable animals but the occupants of one wiped them out, while the other domesticated them.

He also makes retarded statements like "mesopotamian maize is not as rich in nutrients as chinese grain". Even though we know about the role of Sorghum in the development of agriculture in east asia, and that came from a tropical environment. Once again shitting on his large latitudinal vs tropical arguments.
Also he pretends china's success (which is barely second to europe) was only possible because both share the same temperate climate. Even though any geographer should know the vast deserts and inhospitable mountains which occupy huge scopes of that "temperate belt".

Oh and lmao@ "africa had no real metallurgy"
ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/calendar/articles/20160617

Nobody is saying environment doesn't play a part. but he cherrypicks and oversimplifies/ignores everything that might falsify his theory.

Isn't saying that Europeans only conquered the world because they got lucky geography the opposite of racism?

People who make that argument realize the alternative explanation is that Europeans are naturally superior?

It's actually fairly uninformed. Guns & Germs ignores loads of shit that doesn't suit its argument. It's patronising as hell. As if to say to all non europeans that it isn't truly their fault that they "couldn't compete". Reeks of white burden/hero complex.

All science is wrong, so it is not so much racist as it is bullshit

This sound awfully like a disjointed copy pasta.

>As if to say to all non europeans that it isn't truly their fault that they "couldn't compete".

It isn't though at all lol.

But the reality is that they couldn't compete, and EnvDet is a much less harsh way bust still reasonable way of explaining it.

Environmental determinism is as stupid as saying Africans have lower than average IQs because their brains can't work as well in the heat.

This sounds awfully like a non-argument.

One of the silliest things in GG&S is the idea that the Inca were more gullible than the conquistadors because they didn't have written fiction or history.

It's not though. It's saying how the environment has a physical effect on societies and states as they develop. It's not even comparable at all.

Once again nobody is saying environment doesn't play a role in shaping a society. The issue is the "overly deterministic" argument the book makes, as if it was the only factor that mattered. And to create that illusion Diamond omits loads of shit on purpose. Like I said in my longer post above, he actually pretends native north americans didn't even know how to domesticate plants (or were just starting to) when we know it's absolutely false.

He actually makes the other civilisations/cultures sound more retarded than they were on purpose.

Non physical geography is trash.

No it's because cording to the book without writing Incas have no a reliable way to transfer military knowledge and the limitations of an oral culture

Spaniards had a written guide basically of them taking over Aztec and applied this new found knowledge vs the Incas.

Pizarro was fucking illiterate!

>It's patronising as hell.
This. That's one of the weirdest things about the book to me. To put it very simply, Diamond's argument boils down to "it wasn't genetics that made non-Europeans inferior, they just lived in worse environments, so it isn't their fault they ended up inferior."

I've seen tons of threads asking why racists and sjw both hate the book; the reason is that it's obvious Diamond was trying to make anti-racist arguments, but used such a shitty line of reasoning that the book ended up being unintentionally racist. So, accuracy, shit research, and Diamond's lack of credentials aside, everyone hates it because it's too racist for the mainstream to accept, and not racist enough for the /pol/tards to accept.

The underlying issue is that Diamond says in the book that he's only looking at environmental factors. It's not that he's forgetting other factors, it's that he's not examining them. Have people who criticize this book read it? It's not long and it's not hard.

Have you heard of the book 'The 10,000 Year Explosion'?

So because environmental determinism was co-opted by nazis for their ideological purpose, it is inherently racist? That's bogus, dude.

Wouldn't it be more fair to say that environmental determinism was appropriated by the nazis to solidify imperialist beliefs?

>Like I said in my longer post above, he actually pretends native north americans didn't even know how to domesticate plants (or were just starting to) when we know it's absolutely false.

Varied based on the group. Also lack of domesticated beasts meant that they had less exposure to diseases.

>it's that he's not examining them
Which is a major flaw. Diamond admitting that doesn't make the book not shit. And it's clearly the result of Diamond writing outside of his depth. The very kind of arguments Diamond was exploring in that book were mainstream social science 40 years before Diamond wrote it, but he seems completely clueless about that, or why those arguments fell out of use. For people in fields revelant to the book, it ends up coming off as a poorly written work operating on a seriously outdated theoretical model, with no awareness of that fact.

How can it be a flaw? The book is about environmental determinism. He mentions the other factors that critics mention, and says he is not comparing them.

>you don't bark, you don't fetch, you aren't a dog at all
>stupid cat

>haha dude I'm just not looking at the other factors
>haha it's okay though because I admit it
>srsly tho geography is everything

If you have a book that says 'I am looking at X not Y', why would you criticize it for not looking at Y?

You have not read the book we're discussing.

t. Diamond

If you had read GG&S you wouldn't think it implied 'geography is everything'.

If you had heard of it online, then that's probably all you know about it.

Ratzel, Mackinder and Diamond are the triple bogeymen of academic geography

>I am looking at X not Y', why would you criticize it for not looking at Y?
I would criticize it if it didn't understand X, and this history of how it has been applied in the relevant field, which is exactly what Diamond does. If he had written his book in 1955, it would have been pretty cutting edge, but he didn't. Imagine if someone wrote a pop science book telling everyone about how amazing Newtonian physics is for describing everything, but didn't discuss special relativity or quantum physics. Would you really not expect people to give it shit for focusing on an outdated model with no awareness?

>If you had heard of it online
And that's the kicker right there.

That is where everyone is hearing it. So like it or not the Legacy of GG&S is not "geography is not the only thing but it's probably really important", it's "geography is the only thing". Because from CC to CGP, that's the idea being thrown out there, it's what everyone hears so it's what the legacy will become.

It's funny and sad to read pomo human geography hacks dismissing Guns Germs and Steel, Connectography, and The Revenge of Geography in the same breath as the most eeevil books known to man as though they were Voldemort's diary horcrux

Did it not read like pop science to you? Because that's what it was.

If someone wrote it in 1955, /pol/smokers would be on here defending it.

The field it's about does not have laws like newtonian physics and special relativity. It's a body of history, and we can examine trends. Not an apt comparison. When examining a body of works like that, you must pick some things and leave others, or you are explicitly looking at the whole thing. Diamond says he's looking at environment. And if you remember the book, he does so partly because history produced 'natural social experiments' in Polynesia, where culture and genetics were constant, but outcomes still varied.

The insane part is that the unvoiced alternative is 'it was just luck'.

Honestly if they're the kind of people that just watch vids on YT and go with whatever they say I would rather they dismiss it outright than have an entirely warped view on the material. Unfortunately it seems they're doing both.

The shitty part is that the sentiments are shared widely by people with PhDs in Geography

>people with PhDs in Geography
Thats because everyone with a phd wants to validate their schooling

>Did it not read like pop science to you?
It does, because that's exactly what it is. And it gets treated as such by academia. the issue is that lots of people seem to get butthurt about that and act like Diamond it's a valid work of social science that makes sound conclusions and should be accepted by academia.

If you're making that point that actual social science should ignore it, then I agree with you.

>If you're making that point that actual social science should ignore it, then I agree with you.

I'm making the point that it was only ever pop science. Internet /pol/acks are the ones who think it's very important, people who have read it don't.

>valid work

It is valid. It's an examination of geographical and biogeographical factors in history.

Or you don't consider any pop science valid?

I can understand dismissing geographical determinism due to lack of convincing evidence or conflicting factors, but how on earth do people come up with the idea that it's racist? I can't understand it. If anything geographical determinism is anti-racist. Do the people calling it racist just not get what it's about?

Because the fundamental texts of the theory from the 19th century were heavily imbued with nationalistic racism by the authors. The theory became "discredited" after World War 2 because the Nazis believed it justified invading Poland

But that has nothing at all to do with the current theory. What kind of pseudo-intellectual discards an entire school of thought based on the history of an idea rather than its merits or arguments?

It implies that certain peoples were destined to be colonised because of where they happened to be living. It reduces historical agency by arguing things like "the X people could never have developed technology Y because they lacked environmental feature Z"

Same people who think a language is dumb solely based on how it sounds.

Every explanation based on evidence is going to deny the 'but we're just magically better' arguments that people seem to prefer.

What we have seen is that in every environment, every human population develops increasing sophistication, and every population is subject to collapses in organization.

This is fair, then again it sounds like you actually read it. Most who criticize it haven't.

So because it's old it's bad?
That's not really an argument. also this

You are using the term 'inferior' to describe an entire society, Diamond doesn't, so you infer it from the book.

What do /you/ mean by 'inferior'?

I think it's user projecting his beliefs so he thinks that Diamond is making a claim of inferiority when in reality he really isn't.

What's even worse is that its projected on to scholarship making geography a hackneyed and obstructive field. Unless you talk about "imagined" geographies and call geopolitics "hegemonic discourse" ad infinitum good luck publishing scholarly work in any modern day geography journal

But he was Cortes distant cousin, and they meet in Spain after the Cortes conquest of Mexico and just before the third and last Pizarro voyage to Peru.

>If someone wrote it in 1955, /pol/smokers would be on here defending it.

Similar books were written and published before in the late 1800s, early 1900s.

Surprised those racist fucks haven't started a circle jerk over Friedrich Ratzel, his entire political geography canon was about how people in warm climates are naturally weak and lazy because of their resources and diet and how German resources = German strength.

If you take a population thriving through migration and trade without any resources, you get Singapore.
Singapore only has blooming trade because of its geographical location, thus still being subject to environmental factors

It's more like if you bought a book called "Intro to Classical Mechanics" and got buttmad that it left out relativity and quantum theory