Guns, Germs, and Steel makes some good points, but I think Diamond glosses over some things that a good researcher in that field should note and discuss, especially the feedback loop between genetics, culture and environment. He gives a totally inadequate argument for why China should lag so far behind the West after having such an amazing headstart (this last is a good refuattion to the argment that environment is the main dictator of cultural progress).

His thesis that the availability of foodstuffs and pack animals dominates cultural development, yet he does a very poor job in explaining the development of advanced civilizations in the Near East when the domesticated horse was not much larger than a llama. It's an interesting book, but one to be read with a shaker.

I’m going to defend Jared Diamond, because I think he’s been getting slogged around the dextrobloggohemisphere rather more ferociously than he deserves. Guns, Germs and Steel was an entertaining, thought-provoking book, IMHO; a little breezy, and certainly not the whole story, but Diamond identified some environmental factors that helped to explain why cultures developed as they did in different parts of the world. Commenter John is being somewhat simplistic in criticizing Diamond for giving an inadequate account of China’s development; nobody has explained why China produced so many innovations before the West, but William McNeill and others have suggested that innovation might have been stifled by China’s strong central authority, and Diamond suggested some geographic factors that might have contributed to that centralization.

Collapse is a different kettle of fish. As an account of the detailed process of environmental collapse in several earlier cultures I thought it was well done; Diamond did a good job of collecting some obscure facts about Easter Island and the southwestern US. The weak part of the book was the later, prescriptive chapters, where Hanson rightly nailed Diamond for offering a fairly weak rehash of of lefty liberal bromides. But Diamond did raise some issues that are worth discussing seriously. Much of the criticism he’s been receiving has been pretty unhinged--like, I don’t know, a Texas state legislator talking about evolution.

utron, my point exactly is that the McNeil hypothesis pretty much throws a huge variable into a model of cultural or technical development not accounted for by geography. Diamond's thesis is that environment is the major controlling factor in cultural development. Diamond does not control for cultural feedback to natural selection in his theories. In fact, he flat out states that New Guineans are "smarter than we are" to show that there are no genetic differences that would account for developmental differences. Based on his travels in the Pac Rim, he rejects the notion that ethnicity has a realtionship with development. In saying that, he admitted that, based on his own preferences and prejudices, that he is excluding a hypotheis before testing it. Now, I would agree that the average Westerner is pretty dull and uncurious, but that is more a function of not having to fight for basic needs and not having to engage in constant warfare.

Of course culture plays a huge role in technological development, and Diamond gives a few examples in GGS (notably the discarding of the bow in the Pac Rim), but ultimately he dismisses the possiblity that culture helps in natural selection of genes that lead to more certain behaviors without having adequately tested the hypothesis.