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In the sports-page parlance of football's days of yore, a "triple threat" was a player who excelled at running, passing, and kicking the ball. Jared Diamond is a triple threat in his own right. A longtime professor of physiology at UCLA, he is a respected scholar in his field. At the same time, he has been a prolific contributor to several popular science magazines, and he has written three widely acclaimed books for a general audience: The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1992), Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997), and Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. (For a review of this most recent book, see p. 36 in this issue.) Karl Giberson and Donald Yerxa interviewed Diamond by phone in February of this year.
DONALD YERXA: What were you trying to accomplish with Guns, Germs, and Steel?
I was trying to answer some of my own questions about history. Every time I go to New Guinea, where I have done much of my fieldwork, a bunch of very bright people lead me around in the jungle. I am the stupid one. They are very kind to me. They don't rub it in that I've been spending time there off and on for 35 years, and I still can't follow a trail or put up a hut. It would be ridiculous to say I'm smarter than they are. I'm not smarter! In that context, they're smarter than I am. How is it, then, that I, the dope, come to New Guinea representing the society that brought steel, tools, matches, and umbrellas to their world, while they were the ones using stone tools? That question hit me, literally within a few days of first arriving in New Guinea.
YERXA:
Guns, Germs, and Steel has generally been very favorably reviewed, but there are some recurring criticisms. I wonder if I could ask you to respond briefly to several of these.
Of course.
YERXA:
Diamond is an environmental determinist.
Yes, that's a common one-liner. There are criticisms that have substance. That's not one of them. What does "environmental determinist" mean? It conjures up images of humans, zombielike, being programmed by the environment, of human creativity meaning nothing, of there being no role for culture or anything other than the environment. And naturally, that's absurd.
The reality is that, of course, the environment has had big effects on human history. If you are living on a continent that has no domesticable wild plants and animals, like Australia, there is no way that you can end up as a farmer or herder because there is nothing for you to farm and herd. That's just a simple example. There are many examples of geography and biogeography playing a big role in human history. And if you don't understand those environmental constraints you can't possibly come to grips with the cultural constraints that remain afterward.
YERXA:
Diamond dismisses far too many important developments: the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, that sort of thing.
All right. There we are getting to a very interesting, substantive issue. Important developments that I "dismiss," the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution: these are late phenomena. By the year 3000 b.c., Eurasia already had widespread farming, metal tools, the first writing systems, empires. Aboriginal Australia had none of those things and would never acquire any, and the New World did not yet have any of those things and would acquire them later. I think this makes clear that in the broad pattern of history, Eurasia's dominance was already set thousands of years before the beginnings of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.
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