These books often seem to have a life cycle: sensation, canon, “but wait a minute,” and then lastly forgotten.
I figure the initial splash might mean the author just knows the right people in New York. They seem like the nonfiction equivalent of what someone I know once called a “tobadny” which stands for “trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional New Yorkers.” These are the occasional literary fiction sensations about… well… dysfunctional New Yorkers that arrive with gushing reviews in The New Yorker.
A merely very talented author outside the New York scene usually has to wait until they are dead to be noticed.
In our scene the equivalent would be an overhyped overfunded startup run by someone who knows the right people in the Valley that is the hot thing for five minutes. Meanwhile someone in Nebraska who invented a working Alcubierre Drive will never get funding.
This seems more like moralizing on the public being idiots, and so if a book is popular it must be wrong.
But Diamond’s work, and other authors that are in this middle-brow reviewed-in-The New Yorker mold, deals with really complex sociology and psychology, which aren’t reducible to equations. (There’s no Lorentz transformation for colonialism.) Malcom Gladwell really comes right to mind here—lot of pop-sci stuff which gets in all the right publications and then ends up being just wrong in all the ways.
Good thing we don’t do that, because calculus, gravity, and optics are extremely valuable.
[EDIT: Note the title is "Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics". While the substance of the post is about GGS, the title is about Diamond. I think his other 'work' is fit for discussion under this title.]
So is his book Collapse forcing an environmental theory, or are you so against any theory of 'human caused environmental problems', that you can't see past your own bias. It is hard to tell online. I mean, his book was totally about environmental problems, so to criticize it for outlining environmental problems is bit much.
It has been awhile but think the Vikings had more variables, like weather that prevented fishing. And, don't think slave raids negates there were other variables, why can't slave trade and environment both have contributed. So he didn't highlight what you wanted to hear about enough, isn't an argument that slave raids contributed more.
This was categorically refuted by bone analysis showing that Vikings did eat seaborne food[0]. The current hypothesis is that the fish bones were used to feed animals or burnt.
The more important point that the thesis was absurd in the first place. The Vikings were seafarers, and we have no record of any such taboos. You can't invent a food taboo completely against their way of life and with absolutely no written evidence out of thin air. At the very least, there was an extremely high level of proof needed, and Diamond doesn't even try to get near.
Moreover, We have a 5000 years history of human food taboos, and as a rule when people face starvation or just illness, the taboos get shunted aside. Even the fanatically devoted Ghandi compromised and drunk milk. The one exception I can think of in all of human history is Nongqawuse, and even that was: not a food taboo but based on existing faith, encouraged by a foreign power and disobeyed by a non-trivial faction. You didn't get complete extinction even there.
[0] https://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/abs/2002/03/epn...
As for Easter Islands, there are serious arguments that there wasn't any environmental problem and the population survived well enough (e.g. [1]). More importantly, the Europe slave raids are documented to have carried off a third-to-half of the population, the more educated part. In other contexts of similar casualty levels, downplaying that would be called way worse.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/12/09/249728994/w...
The settlements did fail though, right? So something happened. Doesn't he also outline poor soil and over-grazing, and the climate change when warm period ended. It is possible that there were enough negative variables that fishing alone couldn't save it. And it is a 26 year old book, so maybe he was speculating on what was known at the time. Like if it did fail, and they were great fishers, what could explain why fishing didn't save them. But, I don't have a citation.
Sorry also, since you have citations and I'm being lazy. But pretty sure there was a counter-counter addendum to the book on Easter Island. He published on his web site a new chapter re-discussing the latest theories on Easter Island. But I read it years ago, so not adding anything of value here. But to defend him, old history books do get revised.
The area was already very marginally habitable for humans. In the same general area, the Dorset Eskimos also died off (in their case, we aren't entirely sure which century that happened), so even specially adapted cultures had serious trouble. Maybe it always had little slack.
If I had to take a very wild guess: What changed was the Little Ice Age making conditions even worse. Maybe plague played a part too (though I can't substantiate that). Eventually enough people died to make the society not work (you need a certain number to maintain a complex society). Perhaps the reminder decided to leave, but with no food stocks the sea journey failed... Or perhaps they died in place, having nowhere to go. Grim either way.
> pretty sure there was a counter-counter addendum to the book on Easter Island. He published on his web site a new chapter re-discussing the latest theories on Easter Island.
Can't find anything on his current website. I'll try more thoroughly later.
From web site, just overview of the updates.
But while searching for this. Found another popular book that had theory that it was rats, and the rats had no natural predator's and ate all the palm tree roots.
EXTENSIONS
Since my book’s initial publication in 2005, information has continued to accumulate about collapses, and about avoidances of collapses. I shall mention here three of these recent extensions, to our understanding of Easter Island, the Maya, and Angkor.
First, I summarize below the striking new evidence that Andreas Mieth and Hans-Rudolf Bork have published concerning the widespread Polynesian felling and burning of trees on Easter Island long before European arrival.
Second, measurements of markers that reflect paleoclimate have provided increasing evidence for severe droughts that contributed to the decline of Classic Maya cities in the Southern Maya lowlands.
Finally, the biggest recent advance (summarized in a new chapter included in my book’s 2011 edition) has been in our understanding of the decline of the Khmer Empire based at Angkor