Quoth Louis P: > As soon as it came out, he began waving Jared Diamond's
book in our face. "See," he shouted, "we had nothing to do with black
people's suffering."<
His interpretation of the book is wrong. It sounds like he hadn't read the
book. It's always a big mistake to praise (or, for that matter, dismiss) a
book without reading it. It's the Bob Dole style of reviewing.
>I do know that Jim Blaut makes a few dismissive comments in Diamond's
direction. <
what were they? are they valid?
> I am just not motivated to read these characters, who seem to be a
subspecies of social Darwinism.<
I don't know about Diamond's previous book(s), but _Guns, Germs, and Steel_
is not social Darwinism, since Eurasian "superiority" is only in terms of
"might makes right" and acquired immunities. He does reject the good guys
vs. bad guys interpretation of history.
Louis quotes a FINANCIAL TIMES review of Diamond's "Third Chimp" book:
>To a disinterested observer from another planet, he reminds us, humanity
>would be classified as just another large ape, a very close cousin to the
>chimpanzees. We share more than 98 per cent of our genes with the two
>chimp species, giving a closer correlation than between birds like the
>Chiffchaff and Willow Warbler that are indistinguishable to the casual
>observer. But that extra two per cent has made all the difference, and has
>been responsible for everything that stems from our upright posture,
>larger brains and strange sex and social lives. Those behavioural
>differences, Diamond argues, have been at least as important as sheer
>brain capacity in lifting us above our congeners.
It would be interesting to compare Diamond's perspective with that of
Engels on the transition from ape to human. Engels, if I remember
correctly, embraced the then-popular Lamarckian theory of evolution (since
he didn't know about Gregor Mendel's work). But otherwise Engels'
manuscript (which Stephen J. Gould says is pretty good once you get past
the Lamarckism) doesn't seem to contradict Diamond as sketched above. Is
there an expert in the house?
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
