Diamond Talks History

“The hand of geography is a very heavy hand,” University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) geography professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared M. Diamond ‘58 told an overflow crowd in Science Center B last night.

The former Winthrop House resident delivered a lecture entitled “Continental Differences in Human History” to an appreciative audience that filled several lecture halls and numbered at least 800, according to a Harvard University Police Department officer’s estimate. This talk was the first in a series of three that Diamond will deliver this week as the 2006 Prather Lectures in Biology.

Diamond opened his remarks by joking that his topic seemed too historically-oriented for a lecture series concerned with biology.

He quickly moved to ask his audience—rhetorically—why the continents are so different in terms of the cultures that they have produced.

“Historians themselves have not offered us an explanation for this biggest question of history,” Diamond said.

Diamond argued that the historical fate of different cultures has been based not on biological disparities but rather on geographical factors.

Diamond’s popular books, “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” and “Collapse: How Civilizations Choose to Fail or Succeed,” have posited similar claims.

According to Diamond, the historical dominance of Eurasian and particularly European cultures has nothing to do with any questions of personality or intellectual capacity, as historians had once asserted. Instead, he proposes a model of human social evolution that sees European cultures as the winners of a geographical lottery that gave them the tools and environment to dominate other, less luckily-located, societies.

He said that one key factor determining a civilization’s success is the number of animal and plant species that can be easily domesticated. And he said that, of the 14 animals that are easiest to domesticate and that are most useful to humans, 12 resided in Eurasia. (Two useful types of llamas were only indigenous to the New World, he said.)

Diamond also said that Eurasia’s horizontal orientation was conducive to trade and the exchange of knowledge because agricultural innovations at one location could be transmitted to another point on the continent that had the same latitude and—accordingly—a similar climate.

However, in vertically-oriented continents such as Africa and the Americas, where longitude remains relatively constant but latitude varies dramatically, Diamond said, these sorts of exchanges are more difficult.

For instance, ancient people in Mexico invented the wheel, and their contemporaries in the Andes had domesticated llamas, but a lack of exchange between these two locations prevented the Americas from developing an animal-powered cart, Diamond said.

Diamond, observing that there were few undergraduates in the audience, quipped during a question-and-answer session that he should challenge himself to find a query from “someone under the age of 25.”

But Diamond’s audience wasn’t hardened with age. Those in attendance gave the lecturer rave reviews.

“I was humbled by the idea that it all came down to chance,” said Graduate School of Education student Christopher V. Roberti.

The Prather Lecture Series will continue with Diamond’s talk on “Problem Solving by Human Societies” today at noon in the Fairchild Lecture Hall at 7 Divinity Ave.