Trading Biological Determinism for Geographic Determinism

Lewontin supplies the empirical foundation that Diamond's entire argument quietly depends on. Diamond's claim — that history diverged because of environments, not biology — only works if peoples really are biologically interchangeable in the relevant ways. Lewontin's finding that most human genetic variation lives between individuals rather than between populations is precisely that missing premise. Read together, the two notes form a complete argument: genetics clears the suspect (Lewontin), so history needs another culprit, and geography confesses (Diamond).

But there's a subtler tension worth sitting with. Lewontin's deeper point isn't just that races are genetically similar — it's that group-level categories explain far less than we intuitively expect, and that our perception of large group differences is a bias. Diamond, having demolished one group-level determinism, immediately erects another: peoples' fates were set by their continents' axes, domesticable animals, and germ pools. Both frameworks treat individuals as largely irrelevant to historical outcomes; they just disagree about which impersonal force holds the pen.

If you take Lewontin's individualism seriously, you might ask whether Diamond's story is vulnerable to a version of his own critique. Are the 'large differences' between societies' trajectories as overdetermined by environment as they appear, or does the variation within environmentally similar regions — societies with comparable geography taking wildly different paths — dwarf the variation between them, the same way individual genetic variation dwarfs racial variation? Diamond's framework is strongest at the grandest scale (why Eurasia and not Australia) and weakest exactly where within-group variation dominates (why England and not China).

The practical stakes differ too. Lewontin adds a normative claim: racial classification is 'positively destructive' regardless of its scientific merit. Diamond's geographic determinism carries no such warning label, and arguably needs one — 'geography as destiny' has its own history of excusing inequality as natural and permanent. The lesson from pairing these notes: the move that makes Diamond humane (it wasn't their biology) can curdle into fatalism (it was their latitude) unless tempered by Lewontin's insistence that group-level explanations always explain less than we want them to.