Justin’s Notes

Guns, Germs, and Steel as a Peace Treaty Between Worldviews

2026-07-20 · AI-generated insight

Derbyshire's taxonomy — Religionists, Culturists, Biologians — presents itself as exhaustive, but Diamond's famous one-sentence thesis slips between the categories in a revealing way. Diamond is, by method, exactly what Derbyshire calls a Biologian: a physiologist-turned-geographer applying "ordinary scientific method to humanity," tracing causation through crops, latitude, and pathogens. Yet his conclusion — that history's divergences owe nothing to "biological differences among peoples themselves" — is the core Culturist commitment: a human nature uniform across populations, with all variation pushed out into the environment.

This is why Guns, Germs, and Steel landed the way it did. It offered a peace treaty between the two secular camps. You could keep the Biologian's materialism — no blank slates, no transcendent moral sense, just soil and germs — while retaining the Culturist's moral payload, the "psychic unity of mankind" that Boas built American anthropology around. Diamond's environmental determinism does the equality-guaranteeing work that Derbyshire says Religionists assign to God-given attributes and Culturists assign to infinite plasticity. Geography becomes the third mechanism for the same reassurance.

But notice what the treaty requires: Derbyshire's Biologian holds that evolution "continued to the present day" and that a widely distributed species "exhibits regional differences." Diamond's thesis quietly requires the opposite — that ten-thousand-plus years of radically different selective environments (the very environments Diamond says drove everything else) somehow left the peoples themselves untouched. The environments were powerful enough to determine the fates of societies but not powerful enough to act as selection pressures on the humans living in them. That's an odd asymmetry for an evolutionist to hold, and it suggests Diamond's position is less a fourth theory than a Culturist conclusion defended with Biologian tools.

The deeper lesson may be about what all three (or four) theories are actually for. Each one, Derbyshire notes, is anchored to a story about "our essential equality." The taxonomy isn't really classifying theories of human nature — it's classifying the different places people are willing to hide the premise they refuse to give up.

Woven from these notes

There are three theories of human nature enjoying widespread support at present. For convenience, I’ll tag each one of them with a single adjective. Religious. Our species Homo sapiens is the special creation of God, either as a one-off miracle or by God-guided evolution. Human nature is a mix of attributes, some natural ones arising from plain biology, some supernatural ones inserted by God. We are the Chosen Species. The God-given attributes are unique to our species. They are the same in all human populations, forming the foundation of our essential equality. Their existence is independent of our biological nature, even to the degree that they can continue to exist after our deaths. Being nonbiological, they don’t evolve, even if other features of the living world do, so that our evolution, if it ever took place, ended (except perhaps for some incidental biological features) when God decreed we have these supernatural attributes. These God-given attributes include the moral sense, which accesses transcendent truths—i.e., truths that do not dwell in the world of matter. God rules! Cultural. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution. However, these processes ceased in the early history of the species, leaving us with a human nature uniform across all populations and unchanging over time, forming the foundation of our essential equality. This human nature has very little innate structure and is extremely plastic. By placing it in a suitable environment, or applying suitable pressures, the mind (and therefore the behavior, which issues from the mind) can be shaped in any way at all. “Human nature” does not really exist independent of the environment an individual happens to be in, especially that part of the environment made up of other human beings—“the culture.” Moral standards are arbitrary, and are taken in by the individual from the culture. Culture rules! Biological. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution, which have continued to the present day. Human nature is a collection of characteristics all susceptible to biological explanation. Some characteristics of a person’s nature can be shaped to some degree by “cultural” (i.e., social or environmental) forces; some cannot. Human beings are a part of the living world, and nothing more. Our equality consists in being members of a single species; though our species, like any other with very wide distribution, exhibits regional differences. The characteristics of an individual human being are templated in his genome. They may be somewhat modified by womb events or life experiences; or they may need to be “instantiated” by postpartum environment. (An individual’s genome may, for example, predispose him to be eloquent or tongue-tied when using language; but which language he uses will depend on his childhood environment.) The repertoire of human behaviors, and of ideas, including moral ideas, about behavior, are innate, the result of evolutionary processes acting on our social lives across many generations. Biology rules! For convenience in what follows, I’ll label adherents of these three views with the more or less made-up words “Religionists,” “Culturists,” and “Biologians.” Each point of view has a history. Religionism emerges from core features of human thinking, as described by cognitive scientists like Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained, 2001), Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust, 2002), and Bruce Hood (Supersense, 2009). Culturism has roots in the tabula rasa (“blank slate”) theories of Aristotle and Locke. It was put into its modern form by German anthropologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905). Bastian coined the phrase “the psychic unity of mankind.” His student Franz Boas brought these ideas to the United States, becoming the most influential American anthropologist of the early twentieth century. Biologism is just ordinary scientific method applied to humanity.
— John Derbyshite We Are Doomed
History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.
— Jared Diamon Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies