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The Rice Thresher
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by Aalok Mehta Thresher Staff
His April 10 speech, the fifth and final presentation in this year's President's Lecture Series, was titled "Guns, Germs and Steel" after his 1998 Pulitzer-Prize winning book of the same name. He focused on the importance of environmental factors in shaping the major events and trends in human history. Diamond is a professor in the University of California at Los Angeles' School of Medicine. His theory proposes that the domination of Europeans and Asians over the rest of the world is the result of luck, their success simply a by-product of the distribution of domesticable plants and animals and the shapes of the continents. "The broadest pattern of history ... seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments and not the biological differences among people themselves," Diamond said. "In particular, the availability of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication ... contributed decisively to the varying rates of rise in agriculture and herding, which in turn contributed decisively to varying rates of human population numbers, population densities and food surpluses, which in turn contributed decisively to varying rates of epidemic infectious diseases, writing, technology and political organization," he continued. Diamond is a physiology professor, but he said he was intrigued by the question of why history unfolded as it did. He asked why the people of Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and North America are so similar physically and genetically, while the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent and New Guinea are so different. His quest to find an answer led to the publication of Guns, Germs and Steel, a book that Paul Harcombe, a professor in Rice's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department who introduced Diamond, called a "monumental treatise on human history." In England, it is subtitled "A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years," Harcombe said. The key to understanding this puzzle, Diamond said, is looking at the lifestyles of ancient peoples. "Until ten and a half thousand years ago, every human everywhere in the world made his or her living as a hunter-gatherer," he said. Because natural food sources were scarce, hunter-gatherers had a low population density, ranging from one person per square mile to one per 100 square miles. They also lived a mobile, nomadic lifestyle and did not have much stored food. Diamond said these factors, in addition to the fact that mothers could only carry one infant at a time, prevented these societies from growing rapidly or developing complex technology or government. "The characteristics of a hunter-gatherer society, which characterized everyone on the world until 10,000 years ago, are low population density [and] long birth spacing, not much in the way of complex technology, lack of social stratification and simple political organization," Diamond said. "All of those things began to change ten and a half thousand years ago with the development of agriculture and herding: the farming lifestyle." Diamond said farming allows the same land to feed more people. Compared to hunter-gatherers, farmers had much greater population density, around 1,000 people per square mile. Farmers were able to store food and the population could grow more rapidly because mothers did not have to wait for infants to reach walking age before having another child. A surplus of food also meant that not everyone had to farm; people could take on specific trades. Thus, farmers developed complex technology, socially stratified societies and centralized government. "The farmers and herders from the homeland spread too rapidly, taking advantage of their enormously greater numbers, their more powerful technology, particularly military technology, and their armies and superior political organization," he said. Farmers conquered the hunter-gatherers and carried their crops, livestock, languages and genes with them around the world. "In modern times, a metaphor for how the farmers spread is given by the title of my book," Diamond said. "When I'd written my book and was trying to figure out a title for it, my wife, who's my editor, came up with the idea Guns, Germs and Steel because guns, germs and steel exemplify the ingredients of Old World success. "The result of the fact that the people who got farming and herding earliest expanded, overran everybody else, is that today ... maybe 95 or 98 percent of you in this room today speak languages that 10,000 years ago were confined to one of two tiny areas of the world: the Fertile Crescent or China." Furthermore, Diamond said it was only luck that those particular areas developed farming first and therefore triumphed culturally and politically over other societies. Europeans' earlier development of farming is, Diamond said, the reason they possessed advanced technology like steel and guns while the Native Americans they conquered possessed only stone tools. Diamond said he hopes this theory will reduce popular racist overtones about human history - overtones that are all too prevalent because up to this point historians had not come up with an explanation for the basic facts of human history. "The reason people fall back on these racist explanations is that historians have not told them what is the correct explanation for the most obvious fact about history," he said. "I think it should be clear that the European conquest was just the culmination of historical processes that took 13,000 years," he continued. "It was the result of ... the different distributions of domesticable wild plant and animal species around the world, and the different shapes, areas and distances among the continents." Some scientists have critiqued Guns, Germs and Steel because it uses non-verifiable historical methods rather than current scientific method. Diamond is not worried. "We should surely be able to understand human history because introspection and preserved writing give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we are ever going to have into the ways of past dinosaurs," Diamond said. "For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations of these broadest patterns of human history."
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