I don't understand why there's so much controversy and criticism over this book

I don't understand why there's so much controversy and criticism over this book.

I've read pieces about how it is Eurocentric or racist, but he explicitly states that he is not making the argument that European culture or "progress" for lack of a better word is any better than hunter-gatherer societies, and he is just talking about why it happened.

Another one I've seen a lot is that Diamond is trying to oversimplify world history and explain everything that ever happened as a result of geographical determinism. This makes more sense, but again, he explicitly says in the first 30 pages or so that he is not presuming to explain all of world history, or assert that his ideas are all right, and that things are much more complicated than he could cover in one book. He literally tells you to read his book with a grain of salt.

Can someone explain to me why modern historians seem to hate it so much?

Other urls found in this thread:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecog.01566/abstract
circ.ahajournals.org/content/114/25/2757
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because le niggity nigger niggers XDDD!!! le commie joo conspirasee and le fucking nigger kike academic ivory tower cultural marxist hordes le shitting up le white utopia XDD!!!! le niggers le cant into le zebras and le hippos because le 60 IQ nigger fagets and le white people le did le everything and everyone saying otherwise is le commie kike niggerlover shill!!!!11!!!

Jared Taylor on suicide watch

Unironically visit askhistorians

also
>e explicitly says in the first 30 pages or so that he is not presuming to explain all of world history, or assert that his ideas are all right, and that things are much more complicated than he could cover in one book. He literally tells you to read his book with a grain of salt.

You don't get to say lol what I'm saying might be bullshit don't believe me lol as if that means its fine to write a dumb, deterministic and oversimplified book

It's not about that, I suppose. It's just that you don't need to write a 500-something-page book to cover points that could very well fit into a 60-page essay, but it's just my opinion. It's the same thing over and over again, like a bad student struggling to come up with things to fill up his thesis.

Btw, in the book, Diamond explicitly states that all he wants is to explain why it was the Spanish who murdered the fuck out of hapless Incas, and not vice versa; alas, he never answers the most difficult question: why on Earth would several thousand people armed with clubs not try to use those clubs on 120 people with sharp metal sticks? I mean, come on, imagine you are walking down the street with 10 of your friends and you see a guy in a cuirass holding a sword. I'm sure you could restrain him with some losses.

This honestly. I'm not really educated enough to argue against his thesis, but the book itself is poorly written and full of filler. He's out to make money is all.

>I mean, come on, imagine you are walking down the street with 10 of your friends and you see a guy in a cuirass holding a sword. I'm sure you could restrain him with some losses.

I seriously doubt it, unless you and your mates are seriously suicidal then you're going to break and run once he slices up the first one or two of you, most battles consist of one side getting demoralised and retreating rather than crazy fights to the finish. Even if you are so incredibly determined / brave / suicidal and you consider restraining this guy to be worth multiple of you being killed or maimed I would still give the guy with a sword a decent chance of winning, it would depend how good at fighting you and you mates are and how good he is with the sword.

Apparently among other reasons zebras weren't domesticated because they had known humans for too long.
Humans make projectile weapons so large savannah animals learned that to stay alive they need to be at a large distance from humans at all times, so zebras would just run off

That isn't what he is doing though, he's offering one possible explanation. And even if it isn't a universal explanation, it is certainly a factor in why some peoples were able to technologically progress much faster than others.

For example, early humans arriving in Australia shooting themselves in the foot down the road by quickly killing off all the animals that didn't recognize them as hunters, leaving them no viable options for domestication.

What are dingos?

seriously I know people hate le reddit here but read what the people on askhistorians have to say about it. They have actual sources and shit

>What are dingos?
Dogs?

There is evidence that Aboriginal Australians did domesticate dingoes to a similar degree that other early humans did with wolves and dogs elsewhere.

>you consider restraining this
You don't.
This isn't policework.
You bash his head in.
Even more so if he doesn't have fully covering armor

>Apparently among other reasons zebras weren't domesticated because they had known humans for too long.

Nah. Zebras could have been domesticated just like horses, dogs, or cattle. The first horses were just as skittish and hard to ride, they just have been selectively bred for desirable traits for literally thousands of years.

Anyways, GG&S is just pop-history. It oversimplifies and exaggerates some things (not necessarily a bad thing) but this really triggers academics (and wanna-be academics on reddit and Veeky Forums).

There is also definitely an element of jealously. Diamond wrote one of, possibly the most, widely read/sold/discussed books about history as someone without a background in history (he's an ornithologist or something). That really pisses off a lot of people who have wasted their entire professional careers in academia trying to do exactly that. Academia tends to attract some of the most petty, egotistical, '4eversmarts' around so this to be expected.

Books like his are what happens when your mind is on 9000 layers of Marxism and you think material circumstances is the cause of culture.

I dunno, they still teach Discourse on Inequality.

This is a dog

I just told you the reason why they couldn't, regular horses didn't know himans as long as zebras.
We agree in that zebras aren't particularly wilder than pre domesticated horses

Which one is the slave?

Dingos are dogs the abos un-domesticated

>I just told you the reason why they couldn't, regular horses didn't know himans as long as zebras

You are right you did just post that on an anonymous Mongolian basket weaving forum. But that doesn't make it in any way true. Domestication ability being based on how long animals have "known" about humans (whatever the fuck that means) is pants on head retarded.

God, this guy is Veeky Forums

It is fucking true though, it is observed that these animals normally stay at a fixed minimum distance from humans, this is to avoid projectiles
But that is Veeky Forums territory.

The problem with the Marxisting view of history is that it starts of as something very useful: Why would tribes that migrate change morals over the generation

It also enables gauging of things like degeneracy by urbanism for premodern socities,
wealth by infrastructure,
administration power by language spread,
and several other simple constructs.
Sadly, its not a replacement for proper research, which might be impossible due lack of archaeological evidence.

It wasn't me that suggested restraining him and I don't see how the tactic of "bashing his head in" if you don't have a weapon yourself makes any difference to my post.

Like literally 99% of all wild animals do?

Because analogies forget time as a aspect.
Its one thing for a momentary situation, that is resolved by leaving.
Its another when it happens over decades, where history has shown the abused will often resort to poison, assault, guns.

actually no, a lot of megafauna with not enough fear of humans died, small animals naturally avoid unfamiliar bigger animals and predators are risk averse

>megafauna dying out because of humans

When will this meme die?

Not that it matters, we have wild horses right here where I live and they are extremely skittish if you try to approach. Wild camels are downright dangerous, yet both are ridden all around the world. Why? Thousands of years of selective breeding for the traits you want.

because it is rather pointless.

even if you defeat that first group of Spaniards. you know more will just come. so unless you can advance your civilization enough to match the spanish the next time. you are going to be ground down.

all of which is made more difficult by the old world diseases cutting your population down.

Because it happened in the americas and with the wooly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros etc., using 'meme' to discredit something real makes you sound like a fucktard

This.

How else would you explain why Africa is full of large mammals while megafauna in the Americas and Australia all disappeared as soon as humans came around?

>you know
Nope
>unless you advance
Life isn't Rise of Nations.
>muh disease
As usual, the only worthwhile point

But user, the fucking Elephant is still around. Thats literally megafauna.

I still don't see what difference this makes to what I said. I replied to a claim that 10 unarmed people could restrain one guy with a sword. I wasn't making a wider point about anything.

it is simple really.

Eurasia/NAfrica runs east to west. you have huge bands of similar climates for similar plants and animals. so the different pockets of starting civilizations were able to expand and exchange ideas and goods with each other. they all got to built of each other's work.

sub saharan africa and the Americans run north to south.

australia and the pacific islands are too isolated.

Who have a completely different habitat than the woolly ones, the woolly ones were driven to the north because the ice age ended and they were finished off there. In the americas the late arriving humans were too technologically advanced for creatures like giant sloths to adapt in time.

Zing!

Proboscidea are gene compatible enough to breed.
Ergo the argument holds no water, because its a still living megafauna.

Elephants evolved side by side with early humans and their ancestors in Africa. Megafauna on other continents did not. Thus, when Homo sapiens spread to these other continents, they brought their advances in hunting with them and used them on animals which had no idea what the fuck a human was.

They were all hunted to extinction in a short period of time before they had enough generations to adapt to life with the new superpredator.

Are you saying the woolly mammoth should have lived then because it could have traveled to Africa from America and mated with elephants?

This isn't a tough concept to grasp.

non sequitur, why the fuck would that mean the woollies didn't get driven to extinction by us, also strawman, I was never stating that all megafauna went extinct rather that ones who didn't have time to adapt did. So the focus is on the animals in the americas where humans arrived late. A very large amount of megafauna did die out because of us.

No user, elephants are a part of the same Order as mammuts and other extinct elephants: Proboscidea.

Which essentially means there is not enough radical differences in species, for elephant to survive IF HUMANS EXTINCTED THE MAMMOTH.
Nevermind that extinction of megafauna generally happens roughly at the same time as major climate changes in the region.
I.e Sarcosuchus, Mosasaurus, Titanoboa, etc.

So for humans to have extincted megafauna, there needs to be real reasoning backed by archaeological evidence that holds water.
Not "Oh, we where there at the same time, must have KILLED THEM ALL"

Same order is great and all but it doesn't mean shit if they're still living on different continents with different predators.

There is plenty of archaeological evidence to suggest humans killed the mammoths (cave paintings, skeletons, etc) are you trolling?

This has to be bait, somebody can't actually believe that they being able to breed is more significant than habitat, diet or behavior

It is a meme and your argument as to why zebras weren't domesticated is "because they knew about humans for too long" so save the fucktard description for yourself.

Megafauna died out in the americas because of dramatic environmental changes, not because hunter-gatherers were slaughtering them en mass with their primitive stone weapons. This is of course ignoring the even more blatantly obvious problem with that hypothesis, human population in relation to animals, which would have been so minuscule it wouldn't have mattered even if they were able to kill every large animal they ran across.

Because correlation does not equal causation for starters. We don't even really know when humans first showed up in the americas, every few years the date keeps getting pushed back and most of the earliest sites along the west coast have likely been lost to the ocean. We don't even definitively know how many animals have gone extinct in recorded human history let alone pre-history extinctions and their associated causes.

>Elephants evolved side by side with early humans and their ancestors in Africa. Megafauna on other continents did not. Thus, when Homo sapiens spread to these other continents, they brought their advances in hunting with them and used them on animals which had no idea what the fuck a human was.

How fast do you think evolution works? Animals can't evolve fast enough to keep up with human technology anywhere on earth.That's ridiculous.

>They were all hunted to extinction in a short period of time
The fossil record says otherwise. Humans and megafauna lived side by side for most of our pre-history.

As with all things, the truth is in the middle.

He is not a historian. His views and opinions should not be accepted as fact or scholarly, as most normies do, which is a big part of why he catches all the flac.

However, it is a good starting point for someone trying to think about world history from a different vantage point or who is curious about the same questions he is trying to answer. The problem is when people read the book, stop there and consider themselves experts.

Also worth noting that I think it's important in this day and age on the sole grounds that it is a popular book that dismisses race being tied to intelligence in the field of genetics, which is a popular alt right opinion these days.

Tamed=/domesticated you mong

This.

Jared Diamond is right about everything.

Didn't I just fucking give the example of the woolly mammoth? the one that was driven north because of climate change and which was then driven to siberia by humans? Don't claim to be an authority on a not yet settled debate, climate was a major distabilizing factor while humans were too, they were complimentary to each other in destroying megafauna in many cases. Climate vs humans here is still a thing but it is more and more likely that they were both responsible.

>it is a popular book that dismisses race being tied to intelligence in the field of genetics
that is one of the book's many failings but why do you think it's noteworthy?

It generally is, because you need radical changes if you live in a specialized species.
And generalist species are rare, i.e Crocodiles, Humans, Sharks, Cats.

How did they know more would come

>then driven to siberia by humans?
How would they do that? Humans have not been observed to chase longer than 18-24 days. Thats some 1400 miles.

That is one of its accuracies.

>Didn't I just fucking give the example of the woolly mammoth?

You responded to the other guy about that, but it doesn't matter because it's a weak af argument that you are only beating on because your original regarding domestication failing in africa because "the zebras knew about humans" is even more retarded.

lmao

>he explicitly says in the first 30 pages or so that he is not presuming to explain all of world history, or assert that his ideas are all right, and that things are much more complicated than he could cover in one book

>Haha you don't get it dude you can't criticize me I said this book had flaws!

>thinking IQ is a good indicator of innate intelligence
lmao

Its nothing but nigger excuses that have no merit in reality because they are constantly contradicted.

No surprise Jared is also a jew, it honestly pisses me off how sinister this race of humans are.

pick any metric you like, school grades, SAT/ACT, income, crime prevalence, the numbers line up really well across the board

Humans really did kill off all the Quaternary megafauna.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecog.01566/abstract

All of which are an indication of cultural circumstances and nothing more. Nurture > nature.

then compare equally rich whites and blacks
do the poorest whites have better cultural circumstances than the richest blacks?

also that's why IQ is preferred, the tests are less reliant on education or culture than the other factors

Because matching shapes on an IQ test, something monkeys can do, isn't culturally neutral?

>Unlabeled axes
>No argument that supports the idea
>No archaeological evidence

You are fundamentally misunderstanding the point.

Elephants coexisted with humans since before we even split off from chimps. For every evolutionary step we took forward, they had a chance to take a step forward too and learn to coexist with us, the most important of which would be recognizing us as dangerous predators.

But when Homo sapiens left Africa, they had all those steps forward under their belt. Other animals had taken no evolutionary measures for coexisting with humans. And thus they were unable to adapt before they went extinct.

Such animals had survived or at least adapted to numerous ice ages and climate changes beforehand. You think it's coincidence that the one that killed them was the one that happened to be around when a new smart hunter came along?

Income doesn't matter when you're still growing up in a society where you are looked down on as inferior. Look up the self fulfilling prophecy and stereotype threat in terms of psychology.

>All of which are an indication of cultural circumstances and nothing more.

No it's not. Nurture matters, in fact it matters a lot, but IQ is biological to the core.

Deal with it.

stereotype threat is unverifiable bullshit and all the other excuses are unquantifiable and vague nonsense made up after the fact which fails to explain for example why the white-IQ gap is so stable both across time and space
if it was all culture you'd expect it to have narrowed significantly from the 50s and 60s and that it be different in Alabama than NY but that's not the case indicating the true cause is not caused by culture

It's actually not. Hunter-gatherer societies don't even register the same optical illusions because exposure to simpler, more ordered shapes makes the way you process visual information different from the way of most humans that ever lived (surrounded by complex, messy environments without neat straight lines and perfect circles).

Really funny how anonymous history buffs with no credentials whatsoever take it upon themselves to make sweeping generalizations based on outdated science when the overwhelming majority of the scientific community disagrees with them.

This whole thread reeks of /pol/, I thought racism wasn't allowed on this board?

The overwhelming majority of the scientific community agrees with me that IQ is not a social construct.

If it was a social construct, literally everyone would be as smart as Einstein simply by having adequate nutrition and education during childhood and adolescence, and yet that's not even close to being the case.

You're as blind as you are stupid.

Why even bother? We whites won because we are better, simple.

>the overwhelming majority of the scientific community disagrees with them
that's not the case though, there is no good consensus and no commonly accepted cause of the white-black IQ gap
only that it can't possibly be genetic because that would be r-racist despite there being no other coherent explanation

Not him, but I wasn't talking about IQ in racial groups, I was simply talking about the concept of IQ to begin with.

Denying that some people are simply more intelligent than others by nature, is literally leftist groupthink.

Are you that Brazilian from /int/?

no but he sounds like a smart person

Sure there are genetic differences between people, but all findings go back to there being more genetic diversity within groups than between groups. As in, there is a whole lot more difference between the average white dude (like you) and someone like Einstein than there is between you and the average black dude. Sorry to burst your superiority bubble

are you retarded? nobody claimed any differently

>As in, there is a whole lot more difference between the average white dude (like you) and someone like Einstein than there is between you and the average black dude.

Are you retarded?

So if you agree that the genetic differences between racial populations are so minute that they are neglible and matter no more than the difference between two people of the same race what are you even arguing?

they're not "so minute that they are negligible"
the differences between Einstein and the average white guy is insane, so is the difference between a white mongoloid tard and the average white person

the difference between the average white and average black aren't as big as that but they are very noticeable and there are much fewer genius blacks and many more retards or semi retards

the implications are that blacks are significantly poorer than whites and in much fewer numbers in high positions in society because they are on average significantly more stupid (about 1 st. dev.) so there's nothing unusual or wrong with that

>So if you agree that the genetic differences between racial populations are so minute that they are neglible
circ.ahajournals.org/content/114/25/2757

All of you are fucking retarded, there is more genetic difference between you and a genius in Africa then you and some retard in Serbia.

>As in, there is a whole lot more difference between the average white dude (like you) and someone like Einstein than there is between you and the average black dude.

That might be true, but you should say that instead of saying that IQ is a cultural construct, because that makes you look like an ignorant idiot.

what's your point?

There are no minute differences at all.

you're retarded
the difference in black and white iq is about 1st. dev. which is a very non trivial difference

It's not a weak nor mine argument, it's from national geographic
So what, they obviously didn't literally chase them to siberia, they fled

This is about genetic difference not IQ difference and niggers have less brain volume, thats a consistent soft tissue difference that is evidence of a high degree of genetic distance from us white people.

That's racist rhetoric, that is not allowed on Veeky Forums

Get the fuck out.

He's right though and the rule is enforced frequently.
Mods have deleted even something like the vikangz meme

that isn't racism though, you can look up brain volume - it's a well established fact africans have smaller brains than europeans and east asians larger

Why is it okay to acknowledge that blacks will win every marathon due to genetics vut not that they just might not be as smart?

Reddit is that way >>>>>

So saying things that happen and are on the fucking sticky is Reddit. Everyone here has to act like a racist edgy nazi kid all the time or else you're from reddit. got it.

Imagine if a hundred light skinned people you've never seen before ride in on fucking shorthaired non-retarded llamas and start summoning the power of thunder and smoke to smite the ever-living fuck out of the guy next to you.

the sticky making janitors are redditors that has been known for a long time