What is Sup Forums's honest opinion of this book?

What is Sup Forums's honest opinion of this book?

Please try to answer without pictures people riding zebras for novelty.

Other urls found in this thread:

huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/people-getting-dumber-human-intelligence-victoria-era_n_3293846.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

It's shit

Not that I agree with the book, but for some reason ever retard on here thinks that taming is the same thing as domestication

not this fucking shit again

The silver lining is that even a progressive anti-white jew like Jared Diamond was forced to admit that whites are superior.

A book no one would take seriously

He literally says he is writing it to disprove racism and that he won't accept extremely likely biological explanations for differences in brain development

Bizarrely enough, he makes an exception to claim that cannibals from Papua are mentally superior to Europeans lol

>determinism: the book
it's shit and all of Jared's points have been debunked a trillion times by real historians

Domestication is a by-product of taming

reminder that liberals now think this book is racist

do they?

last time I checked they still believe it is some sort of Bible

I find it really odd that people are so invested in the idea that white people are just naturally good at everything. Is your ego really so fragile, you can't accept or even just entertain the idea that having better resources helps build a better civilization? Kinda pathetic.

I don't dislike the book on the whole, but you would think given the much greater populations and clearer geography for travel in eurasia, that there inherently would be more selection for different traits in eurasia. It's like he made no effort to preempt the genetic critique in the 10,000 year explosion.

0tl;dr
>geographical determinism
>lol smallpox blankets

It sucks

???

Every one in the Alternative Right recognizes that East Asians are smarter and way less degenerate

it is not about superiority, it is about Liberals believing in the Dogma that nature and evolution give a fuck about equality and Nature would somehow say the human brain was "good enough" and didn't need any further changes ever again after moving from the jungle to the african savannah

pseudo-science

Technically they're not riding the zebra.

This book is a "white people are nothing special they were just lucky history is deterministic but I'm not a jewish marxist I pinky swear" episode.

Muh beast o burden

It is very clear the author has an agenda, he focuses on every fact which would even remotely be in favor of his theory, while dismissing/ignoring counter-examples and opposite facts.

Alrso requesting that one i screencap that always gets posted in "guns germs and steel" threads.

Apefrica is literally the most resource rich continent in the world.

Domestication is what happens when you tame and breed wild animals over many generations. You select for and encourage traits such as docility that only a small percentage of wild animals have.

Took Russians all of 50 years to domesticate red foxes, for example.

> "I'm not a jewish marxist I pinky swear"

He does not try to deny it tho

>implying africa doesn't have a shitton of resources

>M-muh race have nothing to do with success
>W-white had better environment

But when whites enter Zambia, suddenly the crops magicaly break records.

See, no zebra

>Every one in the Alternative Right recognizes that East Asians are smarter and way less degenerate
Don't they try to claim that whites are somehow more creative than Asians, even though Western culture in the past half-century has been completely dogshit?

Africa has much better climate and far more resources than Europe does though

another day, another idiot american

Yes, but it's generally not a genetic argument.

I didn't read much of it. misses the forest for the trees

The neo-reactionary theory is that Whites were WAY AHEAD of asians during the renaissance and the industrial revolution, but the advantage collapse in the 1900s because of the dysgenetic social changes brought about by leftism

There is evidence of that, even a leftist newspapers published, Westerns were 14 IQ ahead one century and a half ago

huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/people-getting-dumber-human-intelligence-victoria-era_n_3293846.html

Diamond's book is a classic example of knowing the answer you want and tailoring the research to get that answer.

I think Hanson's "Carnage and Culture" probably provide a better and more realistic approach to grand theories of history and development.

Literally the only arguments I've seen that Asians are more creative than Westerners is side-by-side comparisons of anime and Tumblr fan fiction drawings.

what do you expect from a nation under the new media

Ecological imperialism is way better book

It's shit.

That's a fair claim, but it's not like he was pretending, he set out to challenge the traditional claim that whites are simply superior by proposing a new idea and having sources to back it up.

People do that all the time, what's wrong with it? It's just basic debunking.

I don't understand the controversy. It just describes how humans adapted to their enviroment, and how those differences affected us.

It doesn't "disprove" racism at all, so it's not a win for leftists. We think of Africans as stupid, but they're pretty well adapted to their enviroment. Day-to-day living in Africa doesn't require much planning or long-term thinking, and the conditions have been that way for probably 50k years. Yes there's natural disasters and war but that's why they have so many children.

Think of it this way; had Europeans not ever come to North/South America, Native American tribes would live relatively the same way. Some more advanced than others.

It also isn't a win for whites, it just explains why we're on top globally. We didn't just suddenly pop up in Europe, life spread and different civilizations advanced, while others stayed the same. Through thousands of years of years of war and harsh conditions white people kept advancing. The conditions were just right.

Then we took over North America for the most part, and used it's wealth of resources and advantageous global position to pretty much take over the world. I feel no shame in this, that's just evolution for you. Sooner or later one of the races will exterminate the others, maybe it will be whites, maybe jews, maybe asians. Eventually that race will split into branches and they'll fight each other again.

...

i just reported this, have fun in the pokey, faggot.

Consensus is the book is shit. I think a better question is how do I get educated in three books? Sup Forums please oblige

>the traditional claim that whites are simply superior
That wasn't the default intellectual position and hadn't been for decades. Diamond first formed his conclusion, or rather adopted the same conclusion that's formed the very foundation of cultural anthropology for the last 50 years, then culled and manipulated the data until he got his result. It's ridiculous and you should be strangled.

Historian here, its a fucking joke with us

If this book is taken as fact can we then claim that whites aren't any more evil than other races but rather whites took advantage of their position(s) of superioty they were given/earned? I mean, if blacks had the guns and the germs they'd have gone north and wrecked shit easily.

A book, written by a physiologist and professor of geology, that preaches geographical determinism.

Basically, don't bother reading it.

I don't agree with his biodiversity crap but I do agree that the environment in Europe was essential for white people to dominate from middle ages to present. Civilizations prior thrived in river basins. Europe as a continent has the best access to water. The Atlantic is a shorter trip than the Pacific to the Americas. I really believe that the development of sea travel was what made Europeans to think more mathematically. The enlightenment really began after sea travel exploded in the age of exploration.

>White people hate him!
>See how Jarod Diamond disproved White Supremacy with one easy trick.

This is wise. So much butthurt here. Diamond's book is reductive, but he does show well how much advantage a technological edge can give a specific society at a certain point in time. He's no Spengler and won't give a story about the phrenological desirability of white skulls, so Sup Forums is going to rage.

Well, African kingdoms had contact with Europe from about the mid 15th century so they had access to guns, domesticated animals from Europe, the entirety of European learning, The Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish were all down there as mercenaries, traders, missionaries and Africans went to Europe on European ships.

So up until the mid-15th century, fine, but after that they could have traded for everything Europe had and then they should have reached some sort of parity with Europe but that never happened.

>ahhh europeans were evil colonizers
>libtard realizes this would make whites superior
>BUT THE NATIVE WERE MORE ADVANCED.... in some way

Since Rome fell Europeans were being raped by the Muslims tot he south and the Mongols to the east. If the land had some special magic that would propel the Europeans to be #1 they would've conquered the world millenniums ago. In fact one of the prime drivers for colonization was that other places had better resources than Europe.

>Diamond

Dropped.

It uses overly simplistic, borderline pseudo-science to make it's argument that the world is basically Civ and Europe got a good start.

He teaches at my school, and I think he is a cuck.

I read this book 10-odd years ago and I could've sworn it had a Darwinist bent to it; by having lived and evolved in a "simple" environment, african intelligence was not genetically selected for, rendering their kind simple-minded compared to populations living in more complicated environments.

Coming back these days and finding out its apparently a pile of leftist "it's not their fault they farm dirt" love letter to sub-saharan africa confuses the fuck out of me, was I reading it upside down?

How did environmental factors spawn the Greek philosophers?

general narrative for overhyped books

>hear about a new thing
>all over the news
>new thing gets awards
>taught in schools
>look into new thing
>oh you don't say.jpg -- it's nothing but liberal schlock

Like anything undertaken at this scale it provides, perhaps, some useful analysis but falls apart when scrutinized and is ultimately over-simplistic. Geographic factors certainly played a role in the differing development of civilizations, but there are also many other factors that impacted this. For example, the baseline philosophies developed by each civilization would go on to influence future development immensely. See Greek philosophy and philosophy born out of the hundred schools period in ancient China; the kinds of thought born out of these eras of ancient history would go on to change Western and Eastern civilization forever.

Then there's the prevalence of great minds who were born into the right time and right place to flourish and change the world, and then there's the outcomes of tremendous historical events that would change the course of the world forever (the Opium wars, the conquests of the Huns, World War II, etc...)

There are so many factors that go into why civilzations succeed and fail that it becomes impossible to provide some kind of succinct, tell-all about it. There's so much to go over, so many variables, so much just left to dumb chance, that you can't just explain it all in 500 pages.

We only have one existence on this planet, and civilization has only existed for a fraction of it. All these thousands of variables have aligned so that right now it's the West who rules supreme, but at various times of history other cultures were greater, and in the future other civilizations will rise and fall. This end of history, deterministic viewpoint is too narrow, and this is ultimately the failing of this book.

Anyone read collapse?

I think adapting to an environment with hot summers and cold winters helped us with developing agriculture / architecture / societies.

The growing season is short so food has to be made efficiently and stockpiled for the winter and you need a good home to survive the winter.

If it's too cold, you're not really farming and if it's too hot you have no incentive to figure out better ways to acquire food because you can just roam around when you're hungry and find something.

Too much heat makes you lazy and too much cold does not offer enough readily available resources to thrive.

Link please? I need to see it debunked. I read it years ago and the only thing I remember about it now is that you need agriculture to sustain yourself and surplus leads to markets.

Garbage. He relies on counter-factual history to support his argument for much of it. It's not taken seriously in academia and is instead shit all over.

>mental gymnastics to try and explain why non-whites are so shit at literally everything: the book

>UCLA

God I feel bad for you user.

They must love you in Canada.

>Muslims to the south and the Mongols to the east
And where are they now?

The entire book is just nonsense, its the exact opposite reasons that caused Europeans (and Asians) to excel. Winters were hard, you had to be smart and have planning skills to store enough food for the winter, you also had to be able to farm it in the first place. Many parts of Africa have food growing wild year round, and it doesn't get cold, there is no selective pressure at all for intelligence.

Of course what they're not telling you is that these nations have become more "diverse" in that time...

It's utter shit. It dances around reality and provides easily-refutable assumptions. Liberals eat it up because it supports their bias.

Niggers have retard-level IQs. This is why they didn't domesticate animals. This has always been why. Attempting to warp reality to somehow fit a liberal assumption is absolutely intellectually dishonest.

Jared Diamond is an absolute fucking hack.

Here's your (you) buddy. Enjoy it.

I thought it was not bad.
Of course Sup Forums will rage about it because there's a bunch of big babies on here that are triggered by anything that doesn't confirm to their tiny little perception of reality.
Yea, had a fair few critiques of it at the time but can't remember them now. Worth a read though.

Reminder that well adjusted adults read a wide variety of view-points and form their own world view based upon those arguments that most resonate with them, while sad little basement dwellers form their world view entirely upon the arguments that correspond with the memes of a certain website for sharing pictures of mongolian cave paintings.

>North Korea
>105+ IQ

KEK......?

The person who made this chart basically bucket filled nearby countries with similar colors. Put more effort in next time.

>I really believe that the development of sea travel was what made Europeans to think more mathematically.

Yep. As early as the 15th century, Europe's naval capability absolutely shit on the rest of the world's. No country outside of Europe could have projected power like Portugal did with its trade empire. Europe's success comes from its unmatched naval traditions. It's what led to Europe discovering the new world and all the riches it brought with it.

Which of course brings up the question, why? That's a bit more complex.

Portugal couldn't even project power into Africa or India in the 15th century. They didn't gain any semblance of control until the cartazes of the 16th century and even then the Africans and Indians told them to fuck off.

He ignores lots of otherwise intellectually honest answers in his book, like differences in culture, and yes IQ differences in population groups.

His explanations aren't wrong, just probably not sufficient explanation for the differences.

His best point is the Germs one. Huge swaths of the native population in America was wiped out by diseases that came across the ocean. Many people were lost likely without having ever seen a white person.

You mean >Guns, Germs and New Guinea
Ithe was ok except for the vast swaths of the book where the author jerked himself off about all the time he spent with the abos.

>His explanations aren't wrong
Some of his explanations are outright wrong, particularly his explanation of Qing China. When someone says that Qing China lacked dissidence movements or that they didn't even TRY to technologically adjust, you know he's full of shit and has no idea what he's talking about.

You thought that nations were becoming more diverse by the fucking 1900s?

Are you fucking retarded?

Threadly reminder:
>American education

Not an argument.

North Korea does remarkably well despite being under a highly unstable post-revolutionary communist totalitarian regime.

How many countries have even half the space program that NK does?

Not him, but they were. Colonial expansion during the 19th century meant a huge influx of non-native populations into Europe. The United States imported loads of Chinks and Japs to build railroads in the west, plus the expansion into Mexico in the mid 19th century. Nearly every nation in the 19th century became more diverse than their 18th and 17th-century counterparts. I can understand your confusion if you're comparing it to the "diversity" of today, but you're delegating history from the present. A pretty good reminder is that American servicemen from the South were particularly shocked during both WWI and WWII that niggers and Indians in the service could go where they pleased instead of being kept out of white areas.

Right.

I've never really understood why, but both commies and right-wingers alike seem to hold the idea that Diamond's ideas are mutually exclusive to Human Bio-diversity, when it seems obvious that they are in fact perfectly compatible with each other.

I think you could even make a compelling argument that they support one another, in the sense that technological progress is endogenous with respect to growth of genetic intelligence.

Oh yeah, ID system means that you don't need to identify yourself, I can tell who's who.

>40,000 poo in loos in Britain in 1850
>Not more diverse than Britain before the 17 years war
Lad... On top of that, India gained independence before 1851 and thus most of their poo in loo population returned to India. Cherry picking at it's finest.

>1851
1951.

And how many British Indians do you think were in the UK in say 1700?

The point is that it's an extremely small number compared to the 50 million that lived in the UK at the time. To attribute the rise of leftism to their arrival is bullshit and you know it.

See here:

Whoops, meant here:

Not only that, but to attribute the loss of white IQ to them is beyond ridiculous.

>The point is that it's an extremely small number compared to the 50 million that lived in the UK at the time
Irrelevant to the argument at hand, that is whether Britain became more diverse before the 20th century which is something you proved yourself, and it also doesn't include niggers, egyptians and other colonial subjects that ended up in Britain. You said the world didn't become more diverse before 1900. You BTFO yourself with your own argument.

>white IQ
National IQ over time and it isn't.

>Not only that, but to attribute the loss of white IQ to them is beyond ridiculous.
I don't believe anybody did this.

>To attribute the rise of leftism to their arrival is bullshit and you know it.

well, it's conflating cause and effect at any rate

But in the long run, immigrants really do vote communist.

The problem with you Singaporeans is that your country is run like a family owned business, with EXTREMELY selective immigration, and a very harsh penal code to back it up. Which works marvelously frankly, props to your first monarch lee yua kuan for making multiculturalism work.

But what you don't understand, is that in western sclerotic dysfunction democracies we let ourselves be colonized by third world savages, with predictably devastating effects. The western model of multiculturalism is NOTHING like the Singaporean model; if you don't understand the difference, you can't possibly understand why we take the issue so severely.

They did. See the latter of those two, and the former for context.

>westerners aren't creative
>literally won the Cold War and is secure as the number 1 civ in the world due to services, arts, and humanities

Viper...

A group of forty to eighty thousand people aren't going to dent the figures that heavily, especially considering that the nature of immigration from India is that only the best and brightest get out of the country. A crab bucket, as Terry Pratchett would refer to it.

>using the cold war as an example
>a standoff between two western nations

>civ

Buddy...

Yeah no, red foxxes still aren't comparable with dogs and cats.

Over a hundred and fifty years between 1860 and the present? Yes, that will bring it down considerably. He wasn't implying that 14 point drop was solely between 1860 and 1900, you illiterate mongoloid.