Humanity "is completely and irrevocably divided" into three distinct, unequal races, says Gobineau, (Essai Sur L’Inegalit¾ Des Races Humaines,1853, my translation). The uneven rate of social development on different continents, for Gobineau, is a consequence of these "intrinsic differences between the human races" (Essai).

African Negroes, native Americans and Australians are quite incapable of crossing the threshold of civilisation unaided, in his opinion.

Gobineau disputes the idea that racial differences are only superficial, the adaptations of a unitary species to climatic differences (monogenesis). As for the theory that the geographical environment which a people inhabit, not their putative racial characteristics, determines how much progress they achieve, this implies that the greatness of a people "exists…outside of itself", he protests (Gobineau, ibid.).

Henry Thomas Buckle was one exponent of this environmental theory, derided by Gobineau. In his History Of Civilisation In England (1857-1861), Buckle described the notion of "original distinctions of race", as "altogether hypothetical". He was convinced that climate, food and soil were responsible for "…many of those large and conspicuous differences between nations which are often ascribed to some fundamental difference in the various races into which mankind is divided".

Buckle had noticed that all of the historic civilisations outside of Europe seemed to have been located where rich soil and heat gave an ample return to labour. From the resulting food surplus, economically non-productive strata (soldiers, priests and rulers) could be maintained. But a fertile soil also makes for cheap and plentiful food, since produced by relatively little effort. The early civilisations such as ancient Egypt experienced rapid growth of population, which permanently depressed wages. A submissive majority was condemned to toil in poverty and ignorance.

The absence of indigenous civilisation throughout much of Africa, for Buckle, was a consequence of the infertility of the soil. He also suggested that the perennial threat posed to man by earthquakes, hurricanes and disease in the tropics encouraged superstition. The temperate zones of Europe and North America, in contrast, benefited from a stimulating climate which encourages hard work. There, nature does not overawe its inhabitants. And, since food is relatively expensive to produce, rapid growth of population is precluded and wages will remain buoyant.

Modern Europe, for Buckle, was the first civilisation in which all classes enjoyed material benefits and civic rights. The talents of all its people were tapped, hence the unprecedented rate of progress.

It was social Darwinism which transcended this dichotomy between either race or environment as the key factor in history. For social Darwinism contained both a theory of race and involved a type of environmental determinism. Consider, for example, Social Evolution (1894), written by the autodidact Benjamin Kidd. Kidd subsumes the 19th century colonisation of the temperate regions of Asia, America and Australasia to the perennial struggle between races. It was this struggle Galton had in mind, when, in Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883), he observed that there are few places on the earth that have not been tenanted by very different races within the last few thousand years.

Kidd entertained no doubts about the cause of Europe’s ascendancy over other continents. In his opinion, the Anglo-Saxon (Teutonic) branch of the European family stemmed from a manifestly more "vigorous and virile race" than the indigenous peoples of North America and Australasia, whose territories it had recently conquered. Its expansion was no accident, but the climactic phase of a transfer of power "…to the north into those stern regions where men have been trained for the rivalry of life in the strenuous conflict with nature…’ (Social Evolution,

1894). The Latin peoples, however, were played out, notably the French, with their falling birthrate.

For Kidd, a disciple of the neo-Darwinian biologist August Weismann, there can be no development without selection. The more intense the selection, the higher the

development. It followed that the leading types of men could never have appeared in the tropics where the conditions of life are easiest. The predominance of the Eurasian peoples was the effect of climate, then, acting in conjunction with natural selection.

Kidd’s idea of an optimal climate at any given level of social evolution was developed by the American geographer Ellsworth Huntington. In Civilisation and Climate (1915), he posits a shift of civilisation from its origin in the Afro-Asian riverine environments to north west Europe. There was a "manifest movement of civilisation from south to north", says Huntington, echoing Kidd.

The location of current high civilisation is strongly correlated with the distribution of optimal climates for human efficiency, in Huntington’s judgement. He furnished two examples of progressive countries blessed with particularly invigorating climates, the United States and Japan.

Inheritance, for Huntington as for Kidd, is the accumulated result of past training in a particular environment. Racial character is an adaptation.

In A Study of History (1934-1954), Arnold J. Toynbee agrees that there are optimal climates. Ease, for Toynbee, is inimical to civilisation, which requires a testing milieu (see his description of the native inhabitants of Nyasaland, the "doasyoulikes"). He considered the climatic stimulus insufficient in the tropics. And he shared Huntington suspicion that tropical civilisations, such as those of the Mayas and Incas, had been founded by migrants from higher latitudes.

More recently still, the notion of the stimulating effect of hard environments has been taken up by Richard Lynn and J.Phillipe Rushton (see Marek Kohn, The Race Gallery, 1996, chapter 6, The Higher Latitudes).

Guns, Germs And Steel (the book under review) is something of a throwback. As an exercise in environmental determinism, it invites comparison with Buckle’s sketch of universal history. Its author, Jared Diamond, seeks to debunk the "myth" that "…history’s pattern reflects innate differences among people themselves" (page 25).

Not that Professor Diamond denies that people with the most advanced technology (the guns and steel of his title) are more powerful than those still using stone tools/weapons. But the suggestion that the different technological levels of Aboriginal Australian and European societies are rooted in racial differences is for him not only false but also "loathsome" (as if a scientific hypothesis could have an ethical status!).

Diamond is an evolutionary biologist and an ecologist. He is a Professor of Physiology at California Medical school. Yet, strangely, he disdains all attempts to unravel human history by reference to evolutionary biology or genetics (with one notable exception, to be discussed below). The psychometric evidence of ethnic differences in cognitive ability is magisterially dismissed, in one perfunctory paragraph. His "white" colleagues in the psychology faculties are even accused of "trying for decades to demonstrate that black Americans…are innately less intelligent…"(page 20). This classic instance of shooting the messenger violates Diamond’s own rule that we should never confuse "an explanation of causes with a justification or acceptance of results" (page 17).

Observation has persuaded Jared Diamond that peoples often called "primitive", such as the hunter gatherers of New Guinea, are really "more intelligent, more alert…than the average European or American", since they are kept up to the mark by the rigors of selection. One form of racism is acceptable to the writer, then, the inverted variety. His one regret must be the bad luck to be born amongst such genetically inferior specimens as his fellow Americans. Ironically, Diamond himself employs a hereditarian paradigm of human evolution (in the best traditions of social Darwinism) when it suits his argument but only then.

Diamond’s account of the rise of the first civilisations in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys adds nothing to that of Buckle. The development of agriculture is the sine qua non of all subsequent social progress. Food production, of itself, permits a more rapid growth of population. Larger collectivities are necessarily more powerful than their smaller competitors, which are therefore displaced. There are also echoes here of Herbert Spencer.

Diamond gives an impressively detailed exegesis of those precise aspects of the bio-geography of the Fertile Crescent which made possible the early and independent emergence of agriculture and an extensive development of political organisation and technology.

He thinks that the first decisive shift from hunter-gathering to food production necessarily occurred in the Fertile Crescent because of the climate, topography and wild plants and animals of the region. This shift therefore requires no reference to the biological character of its people.

Present Eurasian dominance has its origin in the precedence of civilisation in the Near East, according to this interpretation, since agriculture, writing, statecraft etc spread from the Fertile Crescent to the rest of Europe.

Are the actions of men "…and therefore of societies, governed by fixed laws, or are they the result …of chance…?" (Buckle op. cit.) One otherwise uncritical reviewer of Guns, Germs And Steel, Mark Ridley, considers that "the European, or Eurasian, dominance of the modern globe" is "a complete fluke" ("The Uselessness of Zebras", TLS, November 1997). If he is right, then history is governed by chance. There can be no science of history. It also follows that the ascendancy of Eurasia, since it has no cause, requires no explanation.

To refute Gobineau, Diamond needs an alternative explanation for the markedly different rates of technological development on different continents. Why, he wonders, did civilisation develop relatively late in central America, making it so vulnerable to conquest by the Spaniards, with their horses, steel swords and armour?

And why did agriculture/civilisation fail to appear independently at all in certain seemingly favourable locations, notably California, sub-Equatorial Africa and Australia. Gobineau, for one, believed that this failure clinched the argument for superior European intelligence and inventiveness. It was inconceivable, to him, that monuments such as those at Great Zimbabwe could have been produced by native peoples.

Diamond deals convincingly enough with the stock criticisms of geographical determinism. These pay insufficient attention to ecological factors, in his opinion. He stresses the lack of suitable native plants and animals for domestication in California, sub-equatorial Africa and Australia. He also suggests that the late development of civilisation in Central America was due to a shortage of domesticable animal species and the difficulty of producing a staple grain.

Thomas Sowell, in Race and Culture (1995), emphasises the significance of rivers for cultural exchange. The relative lack of rivers retarded social progress in Africa, he concludes. Diamond, in similar vein, contrasts Africa and the Americas, (on the one hand) main axis north-south, with Europe, main axis west-east. Some historians have underestimated the extent to which geography has hindered the spread of crops and livestock in Africa and the Americas, he complains. Both continents have tropical zones and topographical barriers which delayed the spread of livestock and crops from the foci in which agriculture was independently developed (in the case of Africa, it could spread relatively easily from the Near East to Ethiopia but not from the latter to southern Africa).

Diamond’s thesis is that the relatively recent efflorescence of technology in Eurasia is not due to any innate superiority of its peoples. It is due to the inherent environmental advantages of a continental land mass which has no major geographic barriers to the spread of agriculture and which enjoys sufficient rainfall to support long-tem, intensive farming. Almost all domesticable big wild animal species, he points out, are native to Eurasia. There are extensive west-east zones with similar climatic conditions in Eurasia, he reminds us. This facilitated the spread of crops and animals which are always adapted to particular climatic regimes. And so on, tous azimuts (all arguments leading in the same direction).

What Chris Brand once called scientific racism will continue to win adherents, nevertheless, while the suspicion remains that the environmental influences that Diamond (and others) adduce will not bear the weight of historical explanation placed upon them.

Credence is given to this reinvigorated science of race, expounded by neo-Darwinians such as R. Lynn and J. Phillipe Rushton, by empirical evidence of ethnic differences in intelligence. As Marek Kohn remarks in The Race Gallery, this evidence will not be refuted by ignoring it. Nor by insulting those who gather it. Le Comte de Gobineau has the courtesy to address the arguments of his opponents. Professor Diamond, when confronted with "racist explanations", makes do with name calling.

The Origin of Species begins with Darwin’s tribute to earlier evolutionists. But generosity towards his predecessors (Buckle, Spencer etc) is not amongst the obvious attributes of Jared Diamond. The claims of originality and significance which he makes are consequently not modest (his final chapter, indicatively, is entitled "The Future of Human History As A Science"). We were reminded of similar claims by previous scholars. And of their claimants’ fates.

Leslie Jones