This was a good read. Personally I never got most of the criticism surrounding GGS, I suspect much of it is due to people disliking the fact that Diamond is not a historian/economist/anthropologist by trade and typically academics don't react kindly to people outside their field suggesting new ideas (this does remind me of the reaction A…
This was a good read. Personally I never got most of the criticism surrounding GGS, I suspect much of it is due to people disliking the fact that Diamond is not a historian/economist/anthropologist by trade and typically academics don't react kindly to people outside their field suggesting new ideas (this does remind me of the reaction Alfred Wegener got for his ideas about continental drift). Not to say Diamond got it all right, his work, especially some of the recent stuff is ... odd. In my view the East-West axis part of Diamond's work is the weakest. Sure it is easier to travel east to west but that idea ignores local effects that lead to areas of the same latitude having vastly different climates (for instance Lyon is farther north than Vladivostok, a Köppen map shows even more problems). Regardless I still lean heavily towards accepting Diamond's ideas as opposed to rejecting them.
This was a good read. Personally I never got most of the criticism surrounding GGS, I suspect much of it is due to people disliking the fact that Diamond is not a historian/economist/anthropologist by trade and typically academics don't react kindly to people outside their field suggesting new ideas (this does remind me of the reaction Alfred Wegener got for his ideas about continental drift). Not to say Diamond got it all right, his work, especially some of the recent stuff is ... odd. In my view the East-West axis part of Diamond's work is the weakest. Sure it is easier to travel east to west but that idea ignores local effects that lead to areas of the same latitude having vastly different climates (for instance Lyon is farther north than Vladivostok, a Köppen map shows even more problems). Regardless I still lean heavily towards accepting Diamond's ideas as opposed to rejecting them.