Guns, Germs and Steel

>>1244447

Stated reason: oversells geographical determinism.

Real reason: hurts the self-important fee-fees of poltards.

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>taking geographic determinism seriously

>So what exactly is wrong with this book?

the author is jewish

The overall premise is fine. It has a bad reputation because it's completely misunderstood on the internet. The average /pol/ autist thinks its claiming that Africa had no civilization because zebras couldn't be domesticated, or that Europe ruled the world because of its geography. It's not.

The actual purpose of the book is to illustrate the advantages that Eurasia had over the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa and Australia, mostly to do with agriculture and cultural interconnection, which lead to its civilizations arising at an earlier date, spreading over larger areas, developing more advanced technology and eventually conquering most of the world. The effect of disease is also central.

It has problems though; it does actually try to explain European hegemony over the rest of Eurasia with geography (though it is only a tiny part of the book) in an extremely simplistic way, plus there are plenty of historic errors, but they rarely actually detract from the main premise. I think I read that some of the ideas about the origins of Eurasian diseases presented in the book are also wring, but I forget the specifics.

Most of the hate for it comes from stormfags who don't like its anti-racist arguments and SJWs who think it's trying to blame climate rather than evil whiteys for inequality in the world.

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Literally all of it.

It's factually incorrect, irrational, popsci written by an autist

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>>1244466
I wish I could respawn you in a shithole right now.

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>>1244674
Please release "Race, Discipline, & Christianity" so we can know what really caused civiiviviviviization.

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>>1244447

>>1244651
This is what I got from it. I don't really understand how you could get "the Americas would have rule the world is they had horses and cows" interpretation came about.

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It has nothing to do with genes


Ggs for patricians coming through

>>1244735
Does this guy actually think that the Silk Road, the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean trade routes didn't exist?

>>1244461
>oversells geographical determinism.

Geography constrains every political decision to some degree, it cannot be oversold easily as being a root cause in history.

>i-it's all geographic determinism guys
>but the West did better than Asia because of the free market

>>1244447
Diamond was a liberal ornithologist whose bleeding heart just couldn't accept that physical nature is the primary determinant in evolutionary success.

Because it is a political book attempting to reconcile the fantasy of racial egalitarianism with the world we see which makes it painfully obvious this is a fantasy. It is a fantastic work of mental gymnastics, suitably written by a Jew.

>>1244447
https://archive.org/stream/fp_Jared_Diamond-Guns_Germs_and_Steel/Jared_Diamond-Guns_Germs_and_Steel_djvu.txt

>In case this question immediately makes you shudder at the thought that you are about to read a racist treatise, you aren't: as you will see, the answers to the question don't involve human racial differences at all.

>in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners

>>1245416
And for context

>Today, most live-born Western infants
survive fatal infections as well and reproduce themselves, regardless of
their intelligence and the genes they bear. In contrast, New Guineans have
been living in societies where human numbers were too low for epidemic
diseases of dense populations to evolve. Instead, traditional New Guineans
suffered high mortality from murder, chronic tribal warfare, accidents,
and problems in procuring food.

>Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those
causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies. However,
the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional European
societies had little to do with intelligence, and instead involved genetic
resistance dependent on details of body chemistry.

>Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New
Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern Euro-
pean and American children spend much of their time being passively
entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American
household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional
New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive
entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively
doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults.
Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood
stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the
irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation.

>>1245489
That evidence is less compelling than /pol/'s IQ tests. Why do you defend this shitty race bait book?

>>1245517
Because it's about geographic and environmental factors, which are interesting and important. And in biology, "superior" doesn't mean what /pol/ thinks it means.


In the context of his other books you could legitimately argue that the New Guinea way of life might be more evolutionarily successful in the long run, eg if unsustainable western practices lead to collapse.

>This book employs the comparative method to understand societal collapses to which environmental problems contribute. My previous book (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies), had applied the comparative method to the opposite problem: the differing rates of buildup of human societies on different continents over the last 13,000 years. In the present book focusing on collapses rather than buildups, I compare many past and present societies that differed with respect to environmental fragility, relations with neighbors, political institutions, and other "input" variables postulated to influence a society's stability. The "output" variables that I examine are collapse or survival, and form of the collapse if collapse does occur. By relating output variables to input variables, I aim to tease out the influence of possible input variables on collapses.

>>1244447
Sick of posting massive replies everytime this shit is posted so I'll just sum up

>premises based on counter-factual history in many cases
>sometimes blatant misinformation
>not taken seriously in academia because of how fucked it is
It's a meme book like People's History of the United States. You can go on Jstor right now and find 5 negative book reviews for every positive one.

>>1244447
Its like Black Lives Matters: it takes an uniformed and unscientific approach to a problem and gives its husk the most unarguable demeanor that you look awful having reservations against it.
"Oh you think guns, germs and steel didn't play a part in conquering the New World. Are you sure you're a history student?"
"Oh you think Black Lives Matters is a government funded platform for insurrection? Are you a racist?"

>>1244466
>Thinking geographic determinism is the problem with the book
>Not knowing its a half-witted, near-sighted take on GD used to arrive at the author's preconceived disdain of Euro-centerism.
Shiggy diggy indeed.

>>1244708
>This