giselle wrote:
If we ever learn how to manage fish stocks, the wild fishery might go on to great things. I hope so, wild fish tastes better than farmed fish! I found it interesting that JD talks about the Japanese tradition of raising and slaughtering grizzly bears but did not mention that Japan is one of the greatest fishing nations of the world. At some points, I think he leaves out obvious facts because they don't support his argument.
I think there is adequate evidence to suggest that the farming life can be 'nasty, poor, brutish and short' as well .. it may have been the cradle of our modern civilization but there were many pour sods along the way who paid a big price. It's hard to imagine what it would have been like to be amoung the first humans in an unoccupied area and somehow survive ... it takes time and energy and a huge amount of work to clear land and make a farm productive especially with rudimentary tools. So they must have relied on hunting-gathering initially.
I found the Spacious Skies chapter unconvincing. I'm sure that similiar conditions at similar latitudes does mean that crops are more likely to do well, but there are so many other significant factors as JD admits at the end of the chapter. Altitude is a big one. Even a casual observer can see that crops that are doing well in a lowland area and possibly into the foothills of a mountain range quickly fade out with rising altitude. And rainfall often varies with altitude, soil conditions, winds .. I just think its a huge leap to attribute so much to latitude and continental axis.
Just an aside but JD's focus on the Pacific made me think of the travel and migration of Polynesians over huge distances where the Melanesians did not migrate in this fashion even though these people (as JD points out) were of the same stock originally. In fact the Melanesians were quite the opposite, generally staying within one valley, island or other defined area hence the survival of so many unique languages.
I think I'm not getting your point about JD not mentioning fisheries, giselle, I mean as far as his central theory is concerned.
JD seems to do a solid job of presenting how almost all of us shed our hunter-gatherer ways and became settled folks dependent on agricultural surplus. It was truly evolutionary, though food production is sometimes called a revolution in human society. It was almost glacially slow. I share your feelings about the loopholes in the "Tilted Axes" chapter. To his credit, JD brings up the exceptions to his rule, but these do appear to water down the force of the east-west dominance in Eurasia. I was skipping ahead to the chapter titled "The Future of Human History as a Science," and from reading that I concluded that JD would have been wise if, right off the bat, he had told us what his book attempts to do and what it doesn't. In that chapter, he brings in the variations of history caused by culture, by the influence of extraordinary individuals, and by mere chance, all of which begins to make it clearer that JD is attempting an explanation of human history on the very widest scale. He's giving us the view from 25 miles above the earth, not the near view that shows us where our swimming pool is. He therefore may seem to be backing off in that late chapter, acknowledging that human history, looked at as a science, will never be close to physics in its precision, and that his theory can be only a general one. But scientific methods can be applied to understand history better, and this I think he himself does in the book.
I'm going to post a little about the criticisms of the book soon. The most telling one in my view is that the book often reads like a "Just So" story, in the vein of "How the Leopard Got His Spots." Why did China, with all of its early advantages, not lead the modern world in place of Europe? Well, it got to the point where its main strength--geographic simplicity and political unity--became a hindrance. It went from "just right" to "too hot," in Goldilocks terms. Europe, on the other hand, built up to the "just right" level of fragmentation that fostered innovation through competition and held it long enough to have its way in the world. It's clear that had China actually maintained its lead, all of its supposed weaknesses could have been counted as its strengths and that Europe's fragmentation would have counted against it. In other words, this particular methodology of Diamond's suffers from easy reversibility and is much too convenient. There are times in the book when Diamond might have been better off saying, "Dunno, but here's just one way we could look at this problem."