I need help trying to disprove Jared Diamond's theory about Guns, Germs, and Steel...Please???

Question

I am 'trying' to write an essay and i cannot find useful or credible information

Thanks!

Answer 1

Historians have questioned some of the specific examples Diamond marshals to prove his case on grounds of fact and/or plausibility. For example:

Professor Joel Mokyr asks whether Northeast American Sumpweed is not a counter-example to Diamond's claim that Eurasia was endowed with the best of the world’s domesticatable crops. The book argues that although the flower is "a nutritionist's ultimate dream" it was not possible to use it in farming because it has tiny seeds as well as causing hay fever, skin irritation, and smelling bad.

Professor Victor Davis Hanson, a historian, argues that certain fundamental aspects of Western culture are responsible, specifically political freedom, capitalism, individualism, republicanism, rationalism, and open debate. Hanson has written that Diamond seems "terribly confused" about history, and that environment was "almost irrelevant" to Western success.

Guns, Germs, and Steel contains a 2-page section which partially anticipates this objection by arguing that Europe's geography favoured the rise of competing nation-states rather than monolithic, isolated empires.
Diamond cites modern zoologists' inability to domesticate the zebra as evidence that it could not have been domesticated over the past forty millennia in Africa. Again; this has been challenged as not in-itself a persuasive argument. It appears to these critics that modern failures to domesticate elephants and zebras are provided only as a fallbacks to Diamond's main point that since these animals have not been domesticated they could not be. (I.e. denying the antecedent, or as the Science & Society editorial puts it: "tautological reading-backwards from the present"). Surely the native peoples who tamed elephants for use in war would have tried to breed them in captivity. If native peoples were clever enough to selectively breed modern forms of corn from the vastly different variety that grew in the wild, surely they could have found a way to domesticate elephants. Because of its long life span, native peoples found it less work with equivalent profit to capture from the wild and tame elephants, without breeding them.
Many historians dispute Diamond’s “law of history” regarding the dominance of agricultural societies over their non-agricultural neighbors. There are numerous cases of nomadic societies conquering agricultural ones: the Hittites conquest of the ancient Middle East, the successive movements of Germanic people (such as Franks, Goths and Huns) across Europe, the Aryan migration into India, the Seljuk Turks conquest of much of the Muslim world that began in the 11th century, and the vast Mongolian conquests of the 13th and 14th centuries. In Diamond's earlier book "The Third Chimpanzee", he uses the case study of the Hittites to prove that pastoral societies with horses have an advantage over impoverished, weakened, or early agricultural societies, particularly if the agricultural society lacks horses.
Diamond's approach ignores "much of the current literature on cultural interactions in modern history" and omits "almost all of the standard literature on the history of imperialism and post-colonialism, world-systems, underdevelopment or socio-economic change over the last five hundred years." Though Diamond's book is a popular history that is not primarily interested in engaging academic debates, this omission exposes a failure of the book to deal sufficiently with competing hypotheses that is especially problematic in light of Diamond's calls for history to be written as a science.