If you were to use Guns, Germs, and Steel in your worldbuilding, or you do, how would/how do you use it?

To anyone that doesn't know that GGS is: it's basically a paper suggesting that geography and climate, not innate ability, affects the development of human civilization. The Native Americans weren't inferior because they couldn't build a civilization with iron working, gunpowder, and astronomy, they just had bad geography and little to no domesticable animals. If you put the whitest people in Pre-Columbian America, they would face the same problems. In Diamond's view, whether you can achieve Eurasian levels of civilization by the 11,500th year after developing agriculture  (10,000 BCE + 11,500 = 1500 CE) depends on

- if your continent is longer than it is tall
- if you have anything to domesticate
- if your crops have good yield and are easy to grow


Of note is the explanation for Europe's division- the fractured land theory. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Fractured_Land.pdf which has been supported by a simulation.

I'd say it's a pretty good way of explaining how a given world's cultures and civilizations are the way they are, without having to rely on racism.

There's a fair amount of environmental determinism built into GGS's arguments, which definitely are fair to critique. Though Diamond does spend a lot of time addressing those criticisms (at least in the edition of the book I have).

As a model for very deep worldbuilding, it's got the benefit of being fairly coherent and directly applicable. Your players wouldn't notice it either way. It is a good place to start for verisimilitude.

Edit: How I would use the book and the theory: I think I'd use it after the fact, once my factions are in place, and once my world's environment and geography is more or less defined. Why are the hunter-gatherer swamp people technologically less developed than the people who live on the plains and have farming and cities? Geography! 

Quote from: MeganovaStella on October 07, 2023, 07:31:24 PM
In Diamond's view, whether you can achieve Eurasian levels of civilization by the 11,500th year after developing agriculture  (10,000 BCE + 11,500 = 1500 CE) depends on

- if your continent is longer than it is tall
- if you have anything to domesticate
- if your crops have good yield and are easy to grow

It's tricky to summarize quickly. He has a bunch of micro-examples that are interesting. I think he has a solid argument that Europe, the Middle East, India, and China all had a huge leg up over peoples elsewhere like Australia or the Americas. Those civilizations all shared with each other along similar latitudes -- driven by detailed properties their crops (wheat, rice) and livestock (horses, cows, pigs). They then proceeded to share a ton more advancements along that same latitude. A ton of advancements like writing, metallurgy, and gunpowder were all invented far away from where they later advanced.

I think it's potentially useful if you have an Earth-like world that works by scientific principles, and you want to develop some interesting alternate timelines.

That said, I don't think most RPG world designers know or care what the yield on their crops are. They're designing at a different level. But it is a case study in looking at how specific influences like crops and livestock have a huge influence on social development. So would things like magic and monsters. But again, I don't think RPG world designers generally work from first principles to consequences. They have something they want, and then want to make it less hugely implausible that it would turn out that way.

The book Guns, Germs, and Steel has a few big flaws in that it omits some important historical context and some of the data presented is wrong.  Don't take it as The Big Truth for world building purposes.  This isn't the place to do a deep dive on the issue but a quick google search will get you started.

That said, if you're world building, looking at how mundane things shape culture and history is an excellent idea.  Another book one should read if you're doing world building is Salt, a History of the World.  It's all about the how the need and production of salt shaped history and culture around the world.

The end of the last glacial maximum of the current ice age probably led to agriculture as the temperatures and CO2 would have risen which would allow plant life to be more easily grown/harvested.

North America probably had a lot of set backs due to the melting of the glaciers that covered a large portion of it.

Diamond's best arguments IMO are in the conclusions, where he talks about interconnectivity between continents vs isolation etc. I'm not sure if i buy some of the arguments he spends more time on in the other chapters, such as "certain animals simply cannot be domesticated". Zebra is one example you hear a lot. If you ask me, if we saw a true wild horse before they had been domesticated we'd say the same.

But considering that smaller, isolated populations are likely to lag behind technologically makes sense in certain settings.

Interesting work but far from conclusive by any rational standard and parts are easily falsified and once falsified that means the theory is gone.    For instance.  Buffalo have been domesticated.  In a period of only 100 years.  In a thousand years they can easily be made smaller and even more docile.  Moose, wolves, et al.  All available. 

A weak form of Diamond's argument is probably correct, at least functionally. Agricultural plants and animals transmitted faster lattitudinally. Although Diamond is friendly to the pots-not-people assumption common to his time of publication, while genetic evidence since shows much more genetic replacement, more conquest than cultural transmission, this doesn't change his basic point.

Zebras probably aren't undomesticable. There are pictures of them being ridden and pulling carts. You can say that's taming not domestication, but taming over multiple generations would certainly result in culling the hard cases, and come to the same thing.

The best I can do for Diamond here is not to say that zebras were impossible, but that domesticating horses might not have been inevitable, or even likely.

Horses weren't an easy domestication. Genetic typing shows much greater variation in the mitochondrial line (mares were more docile), while Y dna from stallions (the harder case) suggests a strong bottleneck at domestication, maybe only a few individuals at a specific time and place. I.e. we only pulled it off once, and it was always easier after that to buy or steal domesticated horses, or round up "wild" domestic horses, than go after something like the Przewalski's horse.

So getting horses at all was still a major leg up. Especially for the first adapters, it at least partly explains the spread of the proto-Indo-Europeans (who took a while to conceive of conquer-tax-rule over total replacement).

Quote from: Scooter on October 08, 2023, 10:45:04 AM
Interesting work but far from conclusive by any rational standard and parts are easily falsified and once falsified that means the theory is gone.    For instance.  Buffalo have been domesticated.  In a period of only 100 years.  In a thousand years they can easily be made smaller and even more docile.  Moose, wolves, et al.  All available.

Here's an interesting case: reindeer. Sami people in Northern Europe have been using and herding reindeer for ages, but they never ride them. Because riding reindeer is crazy right? Except that in Central Asia other people do ride reindeer.

Similarly: Horses were driven extinct in America through overhunting (we think) and nobody thought about domesticating them, much less riding them because that would be crazy right? It actually is kinda crazy, but somehow someone did. The reason why people were later riding all over Eurasia was that one small population somewhere in Central Asia came up with this crazy idea (actually series of ideas), perhaps even partially accidentally (who knows), and it spread from there.

Quote from: Trond on October 08, 2023, 06:45:36 PM

Quote from: Scooter on October 08, 2023, 10:45:04 AM
Interesting work but far from conclusive by any rational standard and parts are easily falsified and once falsified that means the theory is gone.    For instance.  Buffalo have been domesticated.  In a period of only 100 years.  In a thousand years they can easily be made smaller and even more docile.  Moose, wolves, et al.  All available.

Here's an interesting case: reindeer. Sami people in Northern Europe have been using and herding reindeer for ages, but they never ride them. Because riding reindeer is crazy right? Except that in Central Asia other people do ride reindeer.

Similarly: Horses were driven extinct in America through overhunting (we think) and nobody thought about domesticating them, much less riding them because that would be crazy right? It actually is kinda crazy, but somehow someone did. The reason why people were later riding all over Eurasia was that one small population somewhere in Central Asia came up with this crazy idea (actually series of ideas), perhaps even partially accidentally (who knows), and it spread from there.

Correct.  More about the people than the geographic area.  Especially when the geographic area in question  has every climate imaginable in profusion.

To all the Diamond detractors:

You forget one very important thing, sure domesticating almost animal is possible, but you're also contending with other issues like climate, disease, etc.

Why was the colonization of Africa so late? Disease

Domestication goes well beyond from capturing a few beasts, it's selective breeding and selection, the Dogs came to be (most likely) because our ancestors killed the more independent agressive cubs, thus only the friendlier (to humans) ones got to reproduce. It was done at least two times that we know of.

Geography, why the Tibetans never had a navy? Why the precolumbine cultures didn't have carts? They knew the wheel as proven by some toys. The terrain didn't allow them to take advantage of the wheel.

For whatever reason they didn't domesticate many of the animlas around them, but animal husbandry (besides dogs) comes after agriculture, if you're not practicing agriculture you have little use for beasts of burden, if you can't use carts more of the same. It's all tied together.

Getting back to RPGs, the book is a good source for worldbuilding if you know what to look for and can sintetize it, so a culture that lives in high mountains with no big and placid bodies of water won't develop sailing. One that lives at sea level in the plains will have dificulty breathing at high altitudes...

It all depends on how realistic you want your world to be.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 08, 2023, 07:35:50 PM
To all the Diamond detractors:

You forget one very important thing, sure domesticating almost animal is possible, but you're also contending with other issues like climate, disease, etc.

Portions of the theory presented have been falsified.  Other points are untestable thus don't qualify for being included in a scientific theory at all.  Thus the theory itself is no longer valid.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 08, 2023, 07:35:50 PM
To all the Diamond detractors:

I read the book many moons ago.  I found it interesting.  It was later that I found out that he had put in bad information (the correct information was known by the academic community while he was writing the book) and omitted important facts pertinent to his subject matter.  I found this disappointing.  Unfortunately, this leaves everything in the book subject to doubt.

This aside, the over all idea of examining the mundane and it's impact on the growth of culture is excellent.  The question of why one culture succeeded over another by looking at all the little pieces is perfectly valid.  I mentioned the book Salt earlier and it's excellent material to look at for how a mundane but crucial resource shaped history and culture.

There are so many things that you can use to shape your world during world building.  I actually used the concept in my own world building, both in my fantasy world and in my scifi setting.  I love making a functioning world for players to interact with.

I would caution any GM or game designer that world building can be a bit of a trap.  The better you do your world building, the more you want to show it off.  Sadly, good world building is like good animatronics, the working parts should make it look alive but be hidden from the ones it's mean to entertain.   

Quote from: BadApple on October 08, 2023, 10:32:28 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 08, 2023, 07:35:50 PM
To all the Diamond detractors:

I read the book many moons ago.  I found it interesting.  It was later that I found out that he had put in bad information (the correct information was known by the academic community while he was writing the book) and omitted important facts pertinent to his subject matter.  I found this disappointing.  Unfortunately, this leaves everything in the book subject to doubt.

This aside, the over all idea of examining the mundane and it's impact on the growth of culture is excellent.  The question of why one culture succeeded over another by looking at all the little pieces is perfectly valid.  I mentioned the book Salt earlier and it's excellent material to look at for how a mundane but crucial resource shaped history and culture.

There are so many things that you can use to shape your world during world building.  I actually used the concept in my own world building, both in my fantasy world and in my scifi setting.  I love making a functioning world for players to interact with.

I would caution any GM or game designer that world building can be a bit of a trap.  The better you do your world building, the more you want to show it off.  Sadly, good world building is like good animatronics, the working parts should make it look alive but be hidden from the ones it's mean to entertain.   

Who are the scientific sources against him?

Quote from: Scooter on October 08, 2023, 07:41:57 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 08, 2023, 07:35:50 PM
To all the Diamond detractors:

You forget one very important thing, sure domesticating almost animal is possible, but you're also contending with other issues like climate, disease, etc.

Portions of the theory presented have been falsified.  Other points are untestable thus don't qualify for being included in a scientific theory at all.  Thus the theory itself is no longer valid.

Falsified by whom?