Jared Diamond’s Contention Regarding the Predetermination of Societies Due to Environmental Pressures

(Based on His Training as an Evolutionary Biologist)

BY: Giovanni JRC

            Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies raises a number of interesting points.  However, it also brings to light some questions that need to be addressed.  One such question was, how did Jared Diamond’s training as an evolutionary biologist influence his contentions regarding the development of cultures?   Another question was how Diamond interpreted humans and their societies as shaped by forces beyond their control?  In fact he maintained that the subjugation of some cultures was as inevitable as the expansion of the rest.  Lastly, one must also consider the way men explained why, prior to the writing of this book and others like it, some civilizations advanced technologically and culturally while others did not.   

Evolutionary Biology is a scientific discipline which centers on the notion of natural selection.  Natural selection is the process of propagating desired traits within a population.[i] When this happens, the population evolves.  Beneficial new genes quickly spread through a population because members who carry them have greater reproductive success, or evolutionary fitness.  The primary stimulus for this process is the environment.  In fact, Should environmental conditions change, new traits may prevail.  Because Jared Diamond is an evolutionary biologist, he purports that all organisms are subject to changes in the environment in order to survive and succeed.  Human beings included.  In fact, he claimed that the fates of societies depended on the environment they inhabited during the Neolithic period (as early as 9000 BCE).  Additionally, he argues that men unknowingly sealed their fates when they migrated to various parts of the globe.  This was because the island or continent a group of people settled in, determined whether they would progress into a civilization or stay as hunting and gathering societies.  According to Diamond, the speed at which a group developed into a civilization was also determined by the environment.  This, therefore, established who would have the most tools available to subjugate the late developing civilizations.  According to him, such determining factors were the axis of orientation of the continents, the isolation of each culture, and the size of the continents inhabited.  He also stated that it all began in the absolute environmental advantages the Levant had in Eurasia.  One important point he made was that these environmental factors would have prompted the development of complex civilizations regardless of who the inhabitants were.  Thus, it was not the Europeans’ abilities; they were just recipients of an environmental “head start.” Certainly, this is analogous to the evolutionary biologists’ notion that all organisms were subject to environmental pressures.

According to Diamond, the reason why some continents were inhabited earlier than others was purely due to the environment’s limiting where humans can and cannot go (see figure 1).[ii]  From Africa, humans migrated to the Levant as early as 1,000,000 BCE and then spread eastward where the climate was similar.  It took these groups thousands of years, however, to move northward and southward (and across continents) due to the environmental barriers the ice age presented.  Because of these environmental limits, those who were able to settle in a specific location first, had the “head start” in developing their culture and therefore were first to develop tools to subjugate. 

According to Diamond, the Levantine inhabitants were the first to develop agricultural strategies because they “settled down” first.[iii]  In fact, he stated that the first civilizations came from this small area in the globe due to its environmental characteristics.  One characteristic was the Levantine climate.  Diamond stated, “One advantage of the Fertile Crescent is that it lies within a zone of so-called Mediterranean climate, a climate characterized by mild, wet winters and long, hot, dry summers.  That climate selects for plant species able to survive the long dry season and to resume growth rapidly upon the return of the rains.”[iv]  Another environmental factor that caused human advancement in the Near East, and eventually the rest of Eurasia, was the abundance of wild flora and fauna that could be easily domesticated into food-yielding crops and livestock.[v]  Such quantities, according to Diamond, provoked the development of the first civilizations in the Levant.  Of course, a criticism to his contention was that none of this would have happened without the ability of man to domesticate and determine which plants would yield the most food.  But, in the mind of an evolutionary biologist, this was a byproduct of the environment and not the other way around.  In fact, he never mentioned that direct competition between the inhabitants of this small area prompted the need for better food acquisition.  For, had there not been any competition, humans would not have had the need to adapt to farming and herding.[vi]  

Because of the “head start” the Levantine inhabitants enjoyed when it came to food production, they were able to amass large amounts of wealth therefore resulting in the development of complex civilizations such as Sumer, Syria, Babylon, Persia, and others.  Because of this, they were able to support non food-producing individuals that were able to develop new types of technological advancements such as complex forms of writing and agriculture.  As a result, most of the Near East’s neighboring societies began copying and improvising these technologies and agricultural strategies. Therefore, they developed their own forms of civilizations.  However, the farther a culture was from the Levant, the less chance they would acquire new “civilizing” strategies.[vii]  According to Diamond, this notion of cultural adoption by neighboring societies leads to two other environmental determinants to the fates of civilizations.  These determinants were the axis of continents, their relative isolation, and the size of the continent.              

Because most of the tamable plants and animals were domesticated in the Levant, the flora and fauna became conditioned to yield productively only in a Levantine climate.  Therefore, only cultures that happened to settle in lands that had climates and seasons similar to the Levant would be able to adopt the Levantine agricultural strategy (specifically, the Eurasian continent along the east-west axis).  Regarding this, Diamond said, “The answer depends partly on the east-west axis of Eurasia.  Localities distributed east and west of each other at the same latitude share exactly the same day length and its seasonal variations.”[viii]  Thus, he claimed that because of the environmental similarities of various cultural regions, such as Portugal and Northern Iran, these societies were the beneficiaries of environmental characteristics inherent in their territories.  In fact, the main reason they were able to develop civilizations earlier than societies located in a north and south axis was because they were able to implement agricultural strategies their environment “allowed” them to use.    Conversely, Diamond provided the interaction between pre-Columbian Mexico and the southwest and southeast U.S. as an example for the failure of a north-south axis cultural exchange. According to him, the variability in climate and land types prevented the spread of Aztec agriculture to the Amerindians.[ix]  Thus, their environment prevented them from developing into more complex civilizations.  However, it is notable that subsistence farming strategies were employed by some Amerindians during the Neolithic period.  Hence, it may have been their choice not to take up agricultural practices because their current strategy worked sufficiently.        

According to Diamond, another reason why the Eurasian continent developed faster was the fact that Eurasia was one solid land mass.  Thus, people in Eurasia were always interacting with each other while other societies were isolated.  Because of this, various strategies in agriculture and technology were available to everyone in Eurasia through trade and various other exchanges (see figure 2).[x]  In contrast, the absolute isolation of the Aztecs or Incas, for example, prompted these civilizations to come up with their own “civilizing” strategies.  Thus, they developed far slower than their distant Eurasian neighbors.  As a result, they were eventually subjugated by more advanced Eurasian civilizations such as Spain and Portugal by the sixteenth century.  An event Diamond determined to be inevitable due to environmental pressures.   

Another environmental advantage the Eurasian continent had was its sheer size (54,745,500 sq km).[xi]  Because of this, it held more people than the other continents.  These people represented a greater probability of technological innovations coming from the area.  Diamond stated, “Larger populations mean more inventors and more competing societies.  [This] by itself goes a long way toward explaining the origins of guns and steel in Eurasia.”[xii]  It is worth noting that, according to Diamond, it did not matter who the people were in Eurasia.  What mattered was that the environment made the possibility of invention greater no matter who populated it.

One important aspect of the environmental factors Jared Diamond gave was that these characteristics would have prompted the development of complex civilizations regardless of who the inhabitants were.  In fact, his main contention was that had the aborigines been the ones to populate the Eurasian continent, they would have been subjected to the same environmental pressures to create a complex culture.  By Jared Diamond’s definition, cultural differences were byproducts of the environment be it through its axis of orientation, its sheer size, or its relative isolation.  Hence, it was not by the actions of the Eurasians that caused them to progress into more complex societies though they eventually subjugated the ones’ who stayed as hunters and gatherers.  Through Diamond’s reasoning, it could easily have been the aborigines who became world powers, had they stopped in the Eurasian continent instead of continuing eastward to Australia and New Guinea.  According to Diamond, specific groups were predestined to be conquerors and others to be subjugated depending on which part of the globe they settled.  This was due to the environment’s characteristics that determined what a society can and cannot do. 

Though Jared Diamond’s explanation eliminates the human element of choice, it certainly makes sense.  This was because throughout history, humans had always needed to adapt to the environment depending on where they were in the world.  In fact, one of the more effective traits the human species have in order to survive was their ability to adjust.  The only difference was that the Eurasians had the greater need to adapt due to competition for technology, food source, and others.  Conversely, aborigines, Amerindians, and others, did not experience as much of what evolutionary biologists called “environmental pressures” to adapt.  Because of this, they did not devote as much time in developing variable strategies.  This, therefore, led to their inevitable subjugation by those who had no choice but to come up with variable survival strategies such as guns, germs, and steel. 

One criticism regarding Diamond’s work was that, he failed to mention that humans had as much influence on their environment.[xiii]  In fact, humans possessed an equal ability to change the environment as much as the environment can alter a civilization.  Nonetheless, his explanation was far better than other models.  In fact, prior to Diamond’s contention that it was the environment that determined who became subjugated and who became the conquerors in the future.  People ascribed the colonizers’ successes to a number of obviously biased explanations.  One was the idea that it was their mandate from God.  According to Pizzaro’s companions who wrote upon the fall of the Peruvian town of Cajamarca in 1532, “They have conquered and brought to our Holy Catholic Faith so vast a number of heathens, aided by His holy guidance.”[xiv]  Certainly, this would be impossible to prove.  Another explanation was that the subjugated people were limited to very primitive capabilities.  This was obviously disproved by an Arkansas Cherokee named Sequoyah who, in 1810, observed that the colonizers made marks on paper, and that they derived great advantage from it.  By 1820 he developed a writing system for the Cherokee using the letters from an English spelling book.  Within a short span of time, the Cherokees achieved almost 100 percent literacy.[xv]  Another erroneous explanation was that of racial superiority.  According to Diamond, “An enormous effort by cognitive psychologists has gone into the search for differences in IQ between peoples of different geographic origins now living in the same country. In particular, American psychologists have been trying for decades to demonstrate that black Americans of African origins are innately less intelligent than white Americans of European origin.”[xvi]  Certainly, this had also been disproved by works of men such as Stephen Jay Gould in his book called The Mismeasurement of Man.  He demonstrated that the means to determine the “IQ difference” were racially biased therefore the results would have been as well.  Thus, despite the flaws in Diamond’s argument, it certainly makes more sense than the ones given above.  Then again, history had always been written by the winners (or those whom the environment pressured to use guns, germs, and steel).