I think a basic point that I haven't seen represented yet (unless I missed it skipping through) is that war is a response to pressure developed by increasing population, therefore it can be considered a natural result of increasing population pressure, as is famine in times of drought, and rapid spread of disease in times of flood.

So without a controlled population, or a more successful species to drive us out, expansion is naturally checked only by war/famine/disease. Anyone have another to add?

Agriculture is a coping mechanism, a means to feed a population that has outgrown the local collectable resources as an alternative to spreading out.

The alternative to a high risk of an ugly death through the natural control processes mentioned, including war, is to control the population voluntarily. Anything less than that will ultimately lead to increasing pressure outstripping the coping mechanisms again, with predictable results, ie war/famine/disease.

It is a simple logic process, a leap of mind-set that hasn't happened yet for various reasons, mainly because of lack of education and religious beliefs making it political suicide to propose as a policy. People just don't want to think about it.

A voluntarily shrinking global population would make everything better. Growth, like faith, is not the virtue it is made out to be.

Spearthrower wrote:

Galaxian wrote:

Tyrannical wrote:Ah yes, he is the writer of that overly simplistic Guns, Germs, and Steal.

Yes, so long as Jared is not a member of RatSkep, he's a hypocritical fuckwit in my eyes!

It's interesting that you agree with Tyrannical.
Personally, as a student of ancient history and anthropology, I found the book provocative and thought-inspiring.
It's easy though to make such simplistic statements as Tyrannical is wont to do, perhaps you can expand on what precisely makes Diamond a 'hypocritical fuckwit' with respect to Guns, Germs, and Steel?

Thank you Spearthrower. I am not a natural bedfellow of Tyrannical, but where there's truth, there I am also. And as Sadi says; "Accept truth & wisdom, even if it be written on a wall. (graffiti)"
Now, people have agendas. These often spring up from religious intent, or from ignorance & stupidity, such as Zionism, which is a form of racism & bigotry. That itself has its roots in a sense of infinite influence & power, or more accurately, not realizing that EVERYTHING that is, really is not.
Jared Diamond thinks that Zionism is great, due to the fact that he cannot fathom that it is a terminal disease, like any other xenophobia; it is self centered & inward looking. In this journal article "Who are the Jews?" (Natural History. 11, 1993) he lays out his intense interest in identifying & selecting "Jewishness" so that immigration to Israel can be confined to real Jews:
http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&sourc ... Ug&cad=rja

Here is a fair summary of the above: http://www.fathersmanifesto.net/jewsdna.htm
"Diamond argues that Ashkenazic Jews are connected to "their ancient Arab and Egyptian neighbors." (p. 18). Yet he admits: "Although the Jews have been scattered for only a few thousand years, their faces often reflect their scattered homelands." (p. 12). Diamond's explanations are somewhat bizarre. While he is willing to consider Indian Jews, Yemenite Jews, and Ethiopian Jews descendants of converts and mixed marriages (p. 18), he seems to think Ashkenazic Jews are more purely Israelite than other Jewish groups. He suggests that natural selection, rather than intermarriage and conversion, explains how Jews resemble their non-Jewish neighbors (p. 16). In other words, Jews move to Europe, speed up the process of evolution that usually is slower among other human groups, and somehow magically start to look like Russians, Poles, Italians, and Germans, without any genetic contact with them. Skin color and ABO blood group studies contradict the notion that Jews are all homogeneous Middle Easterners (Diamond p. 14, 16) and "G6PD deficiency" genetics is common to Ashkenazim, Russians, and Germans (p. 16-17). But Diamond keeps insisting that this was not due to mixing. "In their fingerprints, Rhesus blood group frequencies, haptoglobins, and several enzyme markers, Ashkenazic Jews resemble Sephardic and Yemenite Jews and differ from Eastern European Gentiles. Furthermore, in these respects Jews resemble many Gentile peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, such as Samaritans, Armenians, Egyptian Cops, and Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian Arabs." (p. 16) "Thus, judging by neutral markers, the non-Jewish contribution to the Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish gene pool has been low. These groups of Jews may really be transplanted Semites, not converted Khazars or products of massive intermarriage." (p. 18). But this does nothing to explain the magical way in which Jews come to resemble their neighbors. It is as if a Dutchman moving to South Africa would have descendants who would at least be beginning to look more like native Africans, or descendants of the Mayflower starting to adopt American Indian facial characteristics, or Englishmen in Australian turning Aboriginal. Are such things happening absent intermarriage? Obviously not. And how and why would a minority group drastically change its physical appearance (e.g. lightening skin) in order to blend in with the majority? Is this idle speculation? His article contains the typical Koestler-bashing, which shows that one of his intentions was to use genetics research to "disprove" any sort of connection between Khazars and Russian Jews. While he provided a valuable service in summarizing some scientific studies for the general public, his overall explanation is not credible. (In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel he indicated that he believes that geography determined historical patterns much more than human action.)"

I must say, for someone who professes there's no such thing as 'race', Diamond is mightily interested in defining that Jews are a race apart, & super smart. Then uses gobbledygook rationalizations, befitting a Creationist Lysenkoist, to explain how most Jews quickly 'evolved' (in a few hundred years!) to be European looking.

Galaxian and Tyrannical denouncing a book - what better recommendation can it get?