Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, Jonathan Cape, 拢18.99, ISBN 0224038095 Reviewed by Laurence Hurst
CHARLES Darwin was once asked whether he thought that natural historians should go out and collect data without the prejudice of a preformed hypothesis, or whether they should be observing nature with a particular theory in mind. Darwin was unusually emphatic in his reply. If they did not have a hypothesis, he wrote to his friend the economist Henry Fawcett, they may as well 鈥済o into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours鈥�.
Jared Diamond, I am sure, would agree. But he goes further than Darwin. In Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond suggests that historians of humans, as well as of nature, should be scientific hypothesis testers.
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At first sight this might seem an impossible pursuit. History is affected by chance events and may be as unpredictable as the weather, if not more so. Over a broader timescale, however, there may be patterns. If, like evolution, history has repeatable patterns, then the sort of analyses that evolutionary biologists do to winkle out regularities should be applicable to human history as well, Diamond argues.
The best defence for this position is an illustration that a science of human history is possible. Guns, Germs and Steel is just that. The question Diamond asks is: why are modern cultures so different from each other? Why is it that until very recently Papuans were using stone tools, while Americans were going to the Moon? contends that the differences between cultures arise from very early environmental differences. Specifically, those cultures whose environments contained animals which could be domesticated and wild plants that could usefully be cultivated, developed farming. These cultures grew rapidly. This growth can lead to the establishment of political systems and written language, both aiding the development of new technologies, including the guns of the title. This allowed these cultures to dominate others 鈥� as did the germs they brought with them, germs which came from the animals they lived with and which spread easily due to high population densities.
Diamond supports his hypothesis by what is known in evolutionary biology as the comparative method. Diamond looks at practices such as domesticating animals. He first identifies each independent occurrence of the practice. Then he asks why these cultures developed it while others did not. The different hypotheses lead to different predictions about which cultures should have domesticated animals. Each independent occurrence of domestication, or its absence, is treated as if it was a repetition of the same experiment.
The result is a work of immense scholarship, not necessarily an easy read, but an enthralling one and by any standards a great achievement. But the book is spoilt for me by the fact that, although Diamond tests the idea that some of the early differences could be environmental, he never seems to seriously consider the idea that some were genetic.
