Post 2: Answering Yali's Question
"Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"*
According to Jared Diamond, the above question -- asked by Yali, a New Guinea politician -- motivated him to begin the research that eventually led to Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book that is literally epic in scale. Diamond isn't asking a small question here. Yali's question, and Guns, Germs, and Steel itself, attempts one of the most difficult -- and enduring -- questions ever posed in the social sciences. Why did some people, and some cultures, develop "advanced civilizations" with intensive agriculture, technology, writing and the arts while others continued practice age-old hunting-gathering techniques well into the twentieth century? Why did Europeans conquer the "New" World -- and then the entire world -- instead of the other way around?
As Diamond notes, for centuries (and arguably even today), people answered this question by referring to biological differences. In other words, to race. That is, Europeans conquered the world because they were smarter. Biologically. Innately. Genetically.
Today we know that there are no clear genetic differences between races, and we also know that there are no conclusive and widely accepted tests that associate intelligence with race.^ Biological differences cannot explain cultural development. Unfortunately, though, many people continue to believe -- often inherently and subconsciously -- that biology or intelligence can explain these phenomena.
Diamond takes a different approach. His answer to Yali's question lies not in biological difference, but in geographic difference. In chapters 4-10 of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond begins to explain his answer. Pay particular attention to:
1) the role of food production (farming) in cultural development
2) the definition of plant domestication
3) the role of wild plants in the development (or lack thereof) of agriculture
4) the misconceptions about hunter-gatherers and small-scale farmers
5) the definition of animal domestication
6) the role of wild animals in the development (or lack thereof) of animal domestication
7) the importance of latitude in the spread of crops
In the Atlas, our first week of real atlas work begins with a look at some of the world's physical features. These physical features became the basic landscape from which humans developed subsistence strategies -- from hunter-gatherers to pastoralists to intensive agriculturalists -- as well as transformed and gave meaning.
Happy reading!
*Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, W.W. Norton and Company: New York, 1997.
^This is now widely accepted in the natural and social sciences. For some great websites that discuss race, genetics, and biologicial difference, see:
For a book-length refutation of intelligence tests, see Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, W.W. Norton and Company: New York, 1996.
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