“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — First sentence of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy This is the second of two discussions about Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, published in 1997. Last time, I focused on the role of “Eurasian” diseases (to which European invaders had […]
Jared Diamond
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Guns, Germs and Steel, Part 1: Lethal Diseases
“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?” — Yali, a Papua New Guinean politician, in conversation with Jared Diamond. “Cargo” here refers to inventions and manufactured goods. When Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of […]
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Our Worst Mistake, Part 2
Last week, we looked at anthropologist Jared Diamond’s claim that the Neolithic Revolution, when most hunter-gatherers settled down to become farmers, was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” Since Diamond popularized this “revisionist” thesis, sociologists and anthropologists have seized on it to explain everything from the subjugation of women (not generally […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Our Worst Mistake, Part 1
The downturn in human nutrition began long before Ray Kroc brought Big Macs to the masses, Coca Cola conned developing countries into buying their addictive sugary concoctions and Nestlé weaseled its way into babies’ bellies with formula milk. Long, long before. Archeologists call it the Neolithic Revolution, the series of events that started in the […]