/lit/ - Literature

>>16651424
The entire thing has pretty much been debunked at this point

>>16651424
This is an extremist work of Papua New Guinean Supremacy and you should be cautious about just bandying it about OP

>>16651424
It could be based on sociological structures instead of materialism

>>16651470
It's basic underlying argument, that geography is destiny, has not been debunked

>>16651862
the Mad Arab of the Med wrote a little essay about this book that utterly wrecks his arguments

>>16651475
This anon is correct. Peddling such extremism could lead to a Papua New Guinea Nazi Party, dedicated to reclaiming the rightful soil of all their diaspora, that is the entire planet, if the Papua New Guinean's weren't so smart as to know such an action would lead to their destruction by the demiurge

Only /pol/ fags hate this. Geographic determinism is quite compelling

>>16651862
>>16651892
Geographic determinism is absolutely not compelling, at least as the sole explanation for anything.

>>16651892
no even the prog-controlled history academia think this book is complete trash

>>16651904
He never said it was the sole explanation he said it was the best. Give me your best explanation...

>>16651892
retard alert

>>16651924
Specific historical explanations for more specific events, rather than macro-geographical ones. If you want a big retarded macro theory then, firstly, why would you, and secondly, a combination of geographic, demographic and genetic determinism would be best.

>>16651892
It has been as thoroughly debunked as your pozzed asshole

>>16651964
>a combination of geographic, demographic and genetic determinism would be best.

Darwin already showed that environment influences demographics/genes
>>16651973
Whole bunch of misrepresentations yet
Still does not debunk the main argument.

>>16652098
Charles 'the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life' Darwin, that guy

>>16652098
But it does. His argument is that the Africans lacked something that didn't allow for civilization to prosper. And what was it they lacked? Domesticable animals? They absolutely had those. Jared Diamond, like a creationist, fundamentally doesn't understand evolution and human led domestication. If you take wild calves and raise them among humans, they are less skittish around humans. Repeat this process over 50 generations, each time breeding the most amiable of the adults, and eventually you have a domesticated species that is completely different from its wild ancestors. Aurochs were extremely violent and much more powerful than modern domestic cattle. Yet they were successfully domesticated. Africa had no shortage of wild goats and cattle to domesticate. And as for plant foods? The most fundamental aspect of domestic cereals and grains is that they don't release their seeds on their own. They wait for the harvester. This is a rare genetic mutation, but one that if you specifically wait until late into a season of a wild grass, there will be a few plants leftover that have no dropped or dispersed their seeds. You then replant these. Soon you have a higher ratio of plants waiting for the harvester vs naturally dropping their seeds. This allows you to time exactly when to harvest and makes the crop much more metered instead of it all exploding out at once and the majority of the crop going to waste. These mechanisms are universal. Yet only Sub-Saharan Africa failed to capitalize on these technologies

>>16651924
Philosophical determinism which defines mathematical determinism which defines technological determinism.

>>16651924
pic related would be my starting assumption for a model. Certain levels of luck/happenstance as well, e.g. the development of religions, inventions, philosophies etc, but that can all be bundled under culture, and then climate, flora and fauna, mineral wealth can go under environment. The point being, a hunter gatherer society has not evolved under the selection pressures of agriculture and then high population density towns etc. Diamond acknowledges this in regards to disease and immune systems, but he doesn't acknowledge it for cognitive ability, personality or physiology, all of which are heritable and vary between populations.

>>16652348
there is no reason to not have the double arrow between evo and env as well

>>16651973
>thorough debunking
>by some 4chan nobody
The intellectual rigor exhibited by this board is something.

>>16652370
I suppose the argument could be made, I was imagining most changes to the environment are due to economic/cultural changes. How does man change the environment just through changes to their body through evolution?

>>16652395
>appeal to authority
I don't even need to care who wrote it. I can see plain as day his theses are logically inconsistent with reality. It doesn't matter if its pointed out to me by a harvard professor or a basement dweller. The rebuttal stands soundly on its own merits.

>>16652438
selection for certain behaviors will alter the environment in turn, if you want to say all human behavior is mediated through culture before reaching environment maybe that is fair. But idk, human genetics interacts with eg. parasites and diseases quite quickly and fairly directly.

>>16652395
Says the guy whose concept of intellectual rigor isn't responding to what was said but criticizing the person who wrote it. lol

>>16651424
>Is this the most onions book ever written?
Is this your brain on /lit/? This book proffers a rightwing critique of western guilt.

>>16652456
>The rebuttal stands soundly on its own merits.
It doesn't. You prefer it entirely because of who wrote it, a nobody on a website you think produces sound, independent argument. You're merely appealing to a different rubric of authority.

>>16652500
>you prefer it because its written by an absolute nobody
I have never seen such delusional cope. Did you even read what you wrote? This website is filled with retards. No one should take anything here for gospel. And yet every once in a while someone writes something worthwhile. The image being one of those times.

>>16652500
Appealing to a different rubric of authority would be saying 'a 4chan anon said it therefore it's true', not posting what the guy's argument was.

>>16651424
Wasn't this the book that CGP Grey shilled on his channel?

>>16652461
Absolutely if you want to include humans interacting with the microbiome. I guess I was thinking on a macro scale, deforestation, irrigation, urbanisation, species extinction, but of course disease is part of the environment and that's bidirectional.

>>16652348
>>16652461
Yeah, but you aren’t going to get completely independent constructs at this level. Genetics, culture, and environment all basically overlap. I would actually say that the most valid arrangement would be:
Tier 0: Genetics and Environment basal and with interplay.
Tier 1: Culture in the broad sense (nomad/sedentary, main crops, reproductive patterns, lifestyle, general societal organization (man hunts/ woman cooks type stuff)).
Tier 2: Broad Demographics, Mid-Specificity culture: Governmental Org, Religion, Taboos and Virtues
Tier 3: Historical Data. Influential past conflicts, origins.

So “Why did the Europeans discover the Americas?”
Tier 0: European genes (openness to experience, IQ), geography, climate
Tier 1: Culture that encourages ocean travel (caused by Tier 0 factors). General agriculturalist urban society that allows for the third estate to develop.
Tier 2: The Iberian Monarchies, Catholicism, specifics of Iberian society (all influenced by previous tiers)
Tier 3: The conflict with the Turks.

>>16651873
We must shut down this books distribution for the sake of our democracy.

>>16652255
Embarrassingly ignorant.
Arable land in Africa had to be farmed by hand because the conditions which make it arable also give rise to the tsetse fly, which makes it impossible to use livestock for agricultural labor. Please stop pretending to be retarded

>>16652543
In before
>genes are a product of environment
Yes there is interplay, but the most accurate model would be the two factor model where both are considered somewhat independently (i.e reducing them to a single factor is unwarranted)
>but X isn’t strictly inductively explained by previous tiers
The purpose of the structure is to allow for loose causality and emergent complexity while being somewhat simple.

>>16652543
Nah because that doesn't explain Germans not being colonizers and Dutch being so. Genetics isn't a good explanation

>>16652562
South Africa exists

>>16652562
>Europe didn't have flies
Alright I am done arguing. Clearly you retards will use any excuse possible to not admit the obvious. That the reason they failed is solely because of their IQ. If you want to live in the cave looking at shadows the rest of your life, you're free to. Don't blame me for giving you hand and trying to pull you out.

>>16651424
I thought it was the most garlic book ever written?

>>16652563
>loose causality model
Why? What's the point at all? That doesn't work in any field

>>16652568
See Tier 2: broad demographics, governmental org, Tier 3: immediate historical factors.
The germans were colonizers, until it got taken away in 1918. The dutch were more prolific colonizers because they were a small country situated by the sea with the closest thing to a capitalist economy at the time. But, just like if the dutch were landlocked, they wouldn’t have colonized, if you took the entire dutch population and replaced them with Bantus, you wouldn’t have gotten a colonial empire either. Why? Bantu culture? Why? Bantu geography and genes.

>>16652582
Listen I won't say it's not, even though I think that's a terrible argument in iq, but euros had shit iq for forever. There's 100% a better model than genetic determinism.

>>16651862
true, it has never been proven so it can’t be debunked. if you boil all of history down to location you might as well wear a butt plug and get a Biden 2020 bumper sticker

>>16652587
Because you, or at least I, can’t make a macro historical theory that will give you empirical predictions. What do you want, a formula that will give you X society Y percent of the time?

>>16652098
did you ever ask yourself the question of what environment means for a human, you fucking dumb cuck? you are so dumb all you can do is parrot arguments you don’t even understand xD

>>16652593
Idk if you said iq mattered or not but Japanese were turbo colonizers but Chinese mostly weren't. Germans weren't ever really until late 19th c. and it was done begrudgingly. I'm saying starting tier 0 at genetics is terrible especially considering the Micronesia islands were got about by colonization.

>>16652603
Something where I'd we know the degree of x happening then the range allows for set y to happen works. This doesn't even do that.

>>16652582
The thing is, there absolutely were urban societies in both sub Saharan Africa and the americas, many of them had collapsed well before any foreigners from a distant continent turned up to conquer them. Obviously what is now north america was able to host a successful urban civilisation because it fucking did its right there in Illinois so this whole drive to say "well obviously it was impossible" is inane.
Its just an attempt to make the history of conquest more palatable to people uncomfortable with the fact that European societies were able to dominate the world. People on one end of the spectrum get to claim "well obviously they were just superior beings" while people at the other end go "well they just had the overpowered starting position", while sane people realise that societies with different economics, cultures, genetics, and geographies interacting over periods of centuries are too fucking complex to reduce like that.
But no, people need a nice simple argument to explain the things that definitively did happen and can't be denied, and they are allergic to complexity because complexity might contain shades of an argument they don't like.

>>16652610
All of this is because of the structure of those societies. The chinese did have tributaries too. So we have to go back to the founding of these states. Why did the japs and chinese found their states in such a way? Well there were countless peoples back in stone age china (in similar geography) but the Han survived because genes.

>>16651424
Are there any books that do a better, or at least more compelling job of summarising world history? Previously started reading this and got bored around 150 pages in. Was going to pick it up again, but if anyone has any recs foran alternative they would be much appreciated.

>>16651924
The immortal science of dialectical materialism

>>16652615
Give an example.

>>16651424
dude literally measured Africa on a map to support his argument that Africa was too small East to West to form civilizations. That's how dumb this book is

>>16652648
The Songhai literally collapsed because of a Portugese person...literally what are you talking about?

>>16652692
>collapsed because of a Portugese person
he must have been very tall

>>16652700
Extremely

>did you ever ask yourself the question of what environment means for a human, you fucking dumb cuck? you are so dumb all you can do is parrot arguments you don’t even understand xD

>>16652668
That doesn't explain why han survived it takes it as an axiom.

>>16652672
Sure my unformalized philosophical historicism.
When you get a strong enough platonist (or confuscian or indian version) it opens the ability for a strong aristotelian (legalism didn't meet this). Those could be based on necessity of the culture. Legalists didn't need an overarching materialism just one based stronger on the function of the state (where Aristotle was weaker). Indians have a similar development but idk it.
With what Aristotle opens we get math's range to open (a stronger mathematical platonism would have opened this as well). With this you get an archimedes etc.
The benefit of this is it accounts for the dark ages where geographic and genetic determinism can't explain it.

>>16652606
No, I really don't think you understand. Do I need to explain it to you in 4th grader language?

>>16652692
The songhai were in decline and a neighbouring power seized the opportunity. And my point is that so many people read some sort of tl:dr or watch some shitty youtube summary of guns germs steel and come to silly conclusions that discount the fact that successful urban societies have existed outside of eurasia.

>>16651973
The image you posted is completely wrong. WTf is the silk road?

>>16652722
>why han survived as an axiom
No, that’s precisely were genetic factors come in.
>philosophical historicism
Ok so what is the X that happens that allows for set Y to happen, as per your phrasing? If anything, doesn’t the fact that analogues arise in other civs means your theory has little predicitve validity for civ outcomes?

>>16652875
Genetic factors didn't account for why Han survived. I'm sure many tribes broke away. I doubt they were genetically different enough for it to make a huge difference.
Some deep enough metaphysics (x) allowed a deep enough math (y) that allowed a technology (z).

>>16652792
>wtf is the silk road?
Is this the almighty power of American Education System(TM)?

>>16652898
Yes, genetic factors certainly play a role in why the Han survived. Overall, the survival of tribes in localized areas very much depends on genes, adaptation.

Ok, but do you see how this doesn’t have a strict causal link with every event in history. The Plato/ Aristotle debate did not decide who won WW1, did it, because it was the differential adoption of technology that plyed a role, not technology in the abstract. Clearly, a historical explanation is more appropriate, and the historical explanation is more consistent with my structure. Both are not strictly causal, but I can argue with you as to why my structure is a better predictor.

>>16653242
What genetic aspect caused ww1? A philosophical historicism which would account for mathematical then technological would account for the technology. Differences, or doubling down, on metaphysical interpretations would describe the rise of conflict. Even saying different genes caused war between them wouldn't explain the internationalism we see today.