Demolition Requires a Replacement Tenant

Gould and Diamond are performing two halves of a single argumentative maneuver, and neither half stands well alone.

Gould's contribution is demolition: the biological concept of race can't bear explanatory weight because human races are too recent and too genetically shallow. Skin-deep, he notes, turns out to be literal. But demolition leaves a vacuum, and vacuums are dangerous. If someone genuinely believes that biological differences explain why some societies conquered and others were conquered, telling them the genetics don't support it doesn't dissolve the question — why did history unfold so unevenly? — it just leaves the question unanswered. And unanswered questions tend to get re-answered by the old bad theory, because a wrong explanation beats no explanation in most people's mental economy.

Diamond supplies the replacement tenant: environments, not peoples. Continental axes, domesticable species, germ exposure. His argument is persuasive not merely because the evidence is good but because it fully occupies the explanatory space that racial theories once claimed. This is why Guns, Germs, and Steel did more practical anti-racist work than many direct refutations of racism — it made the racist explanation unnecessary rather than merely unfashionable.

But there's a cost worth naming: Diamond doesn't abolish destiny, he relocates it. Geography-as-destiny is still determinism — it just moves the fixed variable from bodies to landscapes. Gould, the great critic of biological determinism, might have raised an eyebrow at the swap. The pairing suggests a question neither note answers: is some determinism rhetorically necessary to displace a worse one, and what do we owe the truth once the worse one is dead?