Jared Diamond may be a celebrated author, but he's a terrible scientist. His "Guns, Germs, and Steel" carefully selects evidence supporting his geo-determinism theory. He was partially right—a civilization's resources have immense impact on the future—but the effects he's talking of are far, far too large to be supported in any serious way by archaeological and historical evidence. It's like pretending to teach macro-economics, but really teaching Marx.

He seems to have drawn very far fetched conclusions from vague anthropological and archeological signals. I fear greatly for those who listen to his hypotheses about the present.

I have many mixed feelings about Diamond. GG&S basically inspired me to study what I do (history of globalization), but the more I do original research and talk to experts in the field, the less I think he actually got it right. Relatedly, I found this to be one of the better articles on the topic of what evidence Diamond's super big picture vantage point tends to miss, although it comes at it from the perspective of an anthropologist rather than an historian:

http://theappendix.net/issues/2013/4/anthropology-footnoted-...

"fear greatly"? A little hyperbole maybe? Wiser to at least listen, and then perhaps dismiss, or improve on ideas, no?

Well, his hypotheses about the present are pretty banal: if we continue on present trends, we're in for some tough times. He cites over-fishing as an example.

But of course we aren't strictly following those trends (interview is from mid-2013) particularly with respect to oil. Anybody remember "Peak Oil" and how we were supposed to be on a straight downward slope for supplies? Now the received wisdom is that we'll have a glut of supply stretching into the far future.

This isn't meant as a knock on either Dr. Diamond or on duaneb, just that his conclusions are pretty general and roundish. I find them provocative and appreciate the perspective.

> Now the received wisdom is that we'll have a glut of supply stretching into the far future.

Uh, source? We have a short term glut caused by production picking up, but our long term reserves haven't changed tangibly. There's about 1,324bil barrels in proven reserves (among the largest 17 reserves, ending with brazil at 13bil); global use is 95mb/d -- which is about 38 years of use. That's not 'stretching in to the far future'.

(numbers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves#Estimated_reserve...)

He didn't actually mention oil. It was only the following (at 3:26 in the video):

- Fresh water

- Fisheries

- Forests

- Top soil

Top soil is certainly one I rarely hear mentioned. Beyond that the other three though banal are the most important so what else is he supposed to say?

There's a lot of news and Elon Musk / Solar is doing very well at trying to get people to move off oil. But I don't hear of anyone near the same scale doing things to to solve the Fisheries / Forests / Water problems.

Fisheries - looking at Norway coast i think we'll be able to scale fish farming to feed even 50B Earth population.

Forests - well, too bad for them (and for us)

Water - once it priced more correctly, like with oil/gas (we still have many socialized externalities even there of course), market machinery will start to pickup bringing up more efficient use as well as various projects to efficiently produce and geographically redistribute water (like moving the record snow from Boston to the record drought striken CA :)

On fish, is part of the problem the success of marketing labels like "wild caught" and "ocean fresh", or John West's taglines implying quality but serious wastage? The first two imply that farm/factory-raised are inferior.

My understanding is the peak oil predictions were at least vaguely correct for conventional oil, but the gap has been made up by tar sands and fracking.

"Jared Diamond....a terrible scientist".

What? No. I completely disagree, as would many others, and I've frankly never read a more balanced work than GGS.

But perhaps you could go ahead and educate us scientifically on what is more important than access to resources in determining the histories of peoples.

He is the author of multiple, well-reviewed scholarly books, and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers published in journals like PNAS, Nature, and Science[1]. Other scholars have cited him thousands of times[4]. He is completely well-respected within the scientific fields he works in.

National Geographic[2] notes: "Jared Diamond is professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and the widely acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which won him a Pulitzer Prize as well as Britain's 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize.

Diamond is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (Genius Award); research prizes and grants from the American Physiological Society, National Geographic Society, and Zoological Society of San Diego; and many teaching awards and endowed public lectureships. In addition, he has been elected a member of all three of the leading national scientific/academic honorary societies—National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Philosophical Society.

Diamond's field experience includes 22 expeditions to New Guinea and neighboring islands to study ecology and evolution of birds; the rediscovery of New Guinea's long-lost golden fronted bowerbird; and other field projects in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. As a conservationist, he devised a comprehensive plan, almost all of which was implemented, for Indonesian New Guinea's national park system. He has also taken part in numerous field projects for the Indonesian government and World Wildlife Fund. He is a founding member of the board of the Society of Conservation Biology and a member of the board of directors of World Wildlife Fund/USA and Conservation International."

Awards and honors [3]

1975 Distinguished Achievement Award, American Gastroenterological Association

1985 MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant

1989 Archie F. Carr Medal

1992 Tanner Lecturer, University of Utah

1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books for The Third Chimpanzee

1992 Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize

1993 Zoological Society of San Diego Conservation Medal

1997 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel

1998 Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel

1998 California Book Awards, Gold Medal in nonfiction for Guns, Germs and Steel

1998 Aventis Prize for Science Books for Guns, Germs and Steel

1998 International Cosmos Prize

1998 Elliott Coues Award, American Ornithologists Union

1999 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction

1999 National Medal of Science

2001 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement

2002 Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science

2005 Elected Honorary Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge, England

2006 Royal Society Prize for Science Books for Collapse (shortlisted]

2006 Dickson Prize in Science

2008 PhD Honoris Causa at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

2013 Wolf Prize in Agriculture

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond_bibliography

[2] http://www.nationalgeographic.com/explorers/bios/jared-diamo...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond#Awards_and_honor...

[4] http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/2759556

It's quite possible to be a prestigious bad scientist. Small-s science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

I'd mostly pick Diamond over his critics, FWIW, but I'm pretty ignorant myself.

He may be a good geographer, but he is known for his work in anthropology and history that is not peer reviewed and is nearly universally seen as a rhetorical success but analytic failure.

> He seems to have drawn very far fetched conclusions from vague anthropological and archeological signals.

That's what Darwin had to do too.

Somebody who makes a few hundred thousand people think differently about history is a great scientist.

For an extreme counter: Piltdown man?

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/science-of-natural-histor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man

Science ≠ pop literature. A great man, perhaps, a great scientist? hardly.

Warning: only the questions are transcribed. The answers are apparently in an embedded video.

Here's the URL for the video itself

https://vimeo.com/72741207

Thanks. We changed the URL to that from http://nautil.us/issue/4/the-unlikely/what-ive-learned-about....

At the present I can't even see the embedded video.

What's the HN consensus on nautil.us - does it have good content or is it just buzzfeed for nerds?

I think many publications are "BuzzFeed for (x)". For example, here are two articles about sandwiches:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/14/dining/field-g...

http://www.buzzfeed.com/kaylayandoli/all-anyone-really-wants...

I like 'em a lot, they're generally fairly high quality and well presented.