Jared Diamond Controversy

Controversy over Diamond's views summarized at two blogs

http://www.froginawell.net/japan/?p=106
http://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/28/cultivating-ignorance/

Discussion tends to focus on the secondary implications of Diamond’s historiographical(evolutionary) method, which is where the problem lies. The confusions of biological and cultural evolution have persisted since the time of Darwin, and yes, of course, Herbert Spencer, who first made all the basic mistakes, Darwin catching fleas from this and other sources. Darwin is exempted from scrutiny, while everyone else is subject (justifiably) to close quarters. The subtitle to Darwin’s text Origin should remind us that racial extermination lurks behind the cover of a scientific thesis on evolution.In this context Diamond is goodhearted, plays ball with the regime, but what is his claim to a theory of history? Close to zero. The confusing influence of reductionist biology and the debatable assumptions concerning Darwinian givens leaves nothing but ‘flat history’ approaches, and the resulting theories of competition and conflict. Diamond successfully coexists with this regime in a clever PR strategy, conscious or unconscious, by displacing historical dynamics to the silliest form of explanation, environmental determinism. The latter thesis simply makes no coherent sense of the development of global civilization which shows the heretical factor of directionality, although this is hard to detect/analyze in current methodologies. The great prize/stumbling block of historical theories is the rise of the modern, and it is interesting to consider Jim Blaut’s _Eight Eurocentric Historians_ for his acute (whatever one thinks of Blaut’s views) dismantling of the theories current in this field. There Diamond’s thesis is really a non-thesis