Justin’s Notes

Boas Cleared the Ground; Diamond Built on It

2026-08-18 · AI-generated insight

Degler's account of Boas and Diamond's thesis in Guns, Germs, and Steel look like the same claim — culture over biology — but they actually occupy different logical positions, and reading them together reveals how one completes the other.

Boas's contribution was fundamentally negative: he denied that innate biological differences explained the observable gaps between peoples. As Degler puts it, the differences were "the product of different histories, not different biological experiences." But notice what this leaves unanswered. If histories explain the differences, what explains the different histories? Without an answer, the culture concept risks circularity — peoples differ because their cultures differ, and their cultures differ because... they do. A determined hereditarian could always reply that the histories themselves diverged because of innate capacities.

Diamond supplies the missing term. Histories followed different courses "because of differences among peoples' environments" — domesticable animals, cultivable grains, the orientation of continental axes. Geography breaks the circle. It gives the Boasian position a positive causal story that terminates in something undeniably external to human biology.

There's an irony worth sitting with, though: Diamond rescues anti-racist social science by reintroducing a form of determinism. Boas fought biological determinism partly by insisting on the plasticity and contingency of culture; Diamond answers the racists by making culture itself the product of environmental forces largely beyond human agency. One determinism is swapped for another — a more benign one, since geography implies nothing about individuals, but a determinism nonetheless.

Degler's detail about Boas's own vocabulary sharpens the point. Until the 1890s, Boas used "culture" to mean civilization — a single ladder peoples climbed at different rates. His innovation was pluralizing it. Diamond, interestingly, half-reverses this: his framework quietly reinstates a single trajectory (toward agriculture, states, guns and steel) on which environments, not races, determine position. The Boasian revolution said there is no ladder; Diamond says there is one, but geography decides who climbs first. That the two are shelved together as allies obscures a real disagreement about whether human societies are running the same race at all.

Woven from these notes

Boas’s influence upon American social scientists in matters of race can hardly be exaggerated. At the same time that racial segregation was being imposed by law in the states of the American South, and eugenics was emerging as a hereditarian solution to social problems. Boas was embarking upon a life-long assault on the idea that race was a primary source of the differences to be found in the mental or social capabilities of human groups. He accomplished his mission largely through his ceaseless, almost relentless articulation of the concept of culture.
— Carl Degler In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought
Until the 1890s Boas used the term as his fellow anthropologists did: as another word for civilization or “high culture.” Franz Boas’s exposition of the concept of culture as an alternative to race in accounting for differences among human groups was a genuine seminal contribution. The idea not only conquered his own field of anthropolgy but spread as well to other social science disciplines. The diffusion was remarkably rapid. Again and again in the early years of the new century American social scientists outside of anthropology testified to the influence of his writings on their conception of human nature and the place of biology or race within it.
— Carl Degler In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought
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
Boas’s rejection of the traditional view was truly radical; it simply denied the existence of any significant innate differences between savage, colored people and civilized, white people. The differences in physical appearance, in short, did not lead to any significant difference in mental or social function. That there were observable social differences was undeniable, but the explanation for those differences. Boas maintained, was that they were the product of different histories, not different biological experiences.
— Carl Degler In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought