Comments on: Guns, Germs and Steel book review http://www.defeatpoverty.com/2006/08/guns-germs-and-steel-review.html A conversation on global economic issues, ideas & data to help us all become better contributors to defeating the scourge of extreme global poverty Thu, 02 Feb 2012 03:26:56 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Anonymous http://www.defeatpoverty.com/2006/08/guns-germs-and-steel-review.html/comment-page-1#comment-206 Anonymous Tue, 17 Mar 2009 05:20:00 +0000 http://www.defeatpoverty.com/2006/08/guns-germs-and-steel-review.html#comment-206 Diamond, surprisingly given he's an evolutionary biologist, overlooks the genetic changes over the past 50,000 years (see the recent paper by Robert Moyzis). Agriculture & population growth lead to increased genetic change. A more recent book, 'The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution' addresses this point omitted by Diamond.<br/><br/>"From that platform the authors undertake discussions of everything from the origins of the Arthurian romances in Britain to the Spanish conquest of the New World. Much of this was attempted before, in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book whose influence is clear in The 10,000 Year Explosion. But Cochran and Harpending do one better than Diamond. Where he was content with environmental determinism and sought to write around and even against human biology, Cochran and Harpending embrace it. That discussion of gene flow becomes the lynchpin in the argument for biology as central to history, and the backdrop for the book’s two biggest set pieces.<br/><br/>Even with its flaws, Cochran and Harpending’s book has provided the best example to date of what E.O. Wilson would recognize as consilient history: not history done just with science in mind or even done scientifically, but history done with human biology treated as an essential cause and effect of the stories that history tells, and as a key without which history cannot make sense."<br/><br/>http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/be_fruitful_and_multiply/ Diamond, surprisingly given he's an evolutionary biologist, overlooks the genetic changes over the past 50,000 years (see the recent paper by Robert Moyzis). Agriculture & population growth lead to increased genetic change. A more recent book, 'The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution' addresses this point omitted by Diamond.

"From that platform the authors undertake discussions of everything from the origins of the Arthurian romances in Britain to the Spanish conquest of the New World. Much of this was attempted before, in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book whose influence is clear in The 10,000 Year Explosion. But Cochran and Harpending do one better than Diamond. Where he was content with environmental determinism and sought to write around and even against human biology, Cochran and Harpending embrace it. That discussion of gene flow becomes the lynchpin in the argument for biology as central to history, and the backdrop for the book’s two biggest set pieces.

Even with its flaws, Cochran and Harpending’s book has provided the best example to date of what E.O. Wilson would recognize as consilient history: not history done just with science in mind or even done scientifically, but history done with human biology treated as an essential cause and effect of the stories that history tells, and as a key without which history cannot make sense."

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/be_fruitful_and_multiply/

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