(2005-01-16) Diamond Collapse Reviews

Reviews of Jared Diamond's Collapse by David Brin and Malcolm Gladwell.

Brin writes: Long ago, Arnold Toynbee wrote that Creativity and will to overcome are critical to a civilization's success. And while Toynbee is fusty and dated, I find it odd that Jared Diamond never lists these two factors. Instead he proceeds, in five paragraphs, to shrug away technological innovation in general! This is especially troubling because he knows that pastoral-like prescriptions will not work on Planet Earth... Chastened by a century of lessons, modernists aren't asking us to buy new, ingenious solutions on faith. Skeptical criticism and accountability are pivotal success factors that both Toynbee and Diamond neglect to mention - traits that were lacking in every culture that failed. So by all means, let us argue and take care.

Gladwell writes: There are no fish bones in Norse archeological remains, Diamond concludes, for the simple reason that the Norse didn't eat fish. For one reason or another, they had a cultural taboo against it.... Why did the Norse choose not to eat fish? Because they weren't thinking about their biological survival. They were thinking about their cultural survival.... Diamond's distinction between social and biological survival is a critical one, because too often we blur the two, or assume that biological survival is contingent on the strength of our civilizational values. That was the lesson taken from the two world wars and the nuclear age that followed: we would survive as a species only if we learned to get along and resolve our disputes peacefully. The fact is, though, that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave in ways that are biologically suicidal. The two kinds of survival are separate.

Note this Mar'2003 EdgeOrg piece where Diamond critiques Joseph Tainter's Collapse Of Complex Societies: Joseph Tainter concluded that the collapses of all these ancient societies couldn't possibly be due to environmental mismanagement, because they would never make these bad mistakes. Yet it's now clear that they did make these bad mistakes. Separately, he summarizes: * What I'm going to suggest is a road map of factors in failures of group Decision Making. I'll divide the answers into a sequence of four somewhat fuzzily delineated categories. First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Secondly, when the problem arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem. Then, after they perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the problem. Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts to do so. While all this talking about reasons for failure and collapses of society may seem pessimistic, the flip side is optimistic: namely, successful decision-making (Collaboration). Perhaps if we understand the reasons why groups make bad decisions, we can use that knowledge as a check list to help groups make good decisions.*

Sept'2005 - Ronald Bailey puts Diamond in the Thomas Malthus/Paul Ehrlich camp.

Feb'2010: Fabius Maximus notes the research contradicting Diamond's claim that deforestation was the prime driver of the collapse of Easter Island. Newly introduced diseases, conflict with European invaders and enslavement followed over the next century and a half, and these were the chief causes of the collapse. In the early 1860s, more than a thousand Rapanui were taken from the island as slaves, and by the late 1870s the number of native islanders numbered only around 100.