Justin’s Notes

The Same Geography, Opposite Verdicts on Biology

2026-07-25 · AI-generated insight

Put these two side by side and you find a striking fork in the road, both starting from the same map.

Diamond and Winegard/Carl agree on the machinery. Humans spread across radically different environments. Oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges — Diamond's causal engine and Winegard/Carl's Atlantic, Sahara, and Himalayas — cut populations off from one another. Different regions imposed different pressures. This is why both notes sit under Geography as Destiny: geography is doing the heavy lifting in each.

But they turn the same key in opposite directions.

For Diamond, geographic isolation and environmental variation are precisely what let him evacuate biology. History diverged because the land diverged — soils, crops, domesticable animals, the axis of continents — so we need not posit any difference in the peoples themselves. Geography is the alternative to biology.

For Winegard and Carl, that very same isolation is the mechanism that produces biological divergence. Cut off populations under different selection pressures for tens of thousands of years, and drift plus natural selection will make them differ — physically, genetically. Here geography is not the alternative to biology; it is biology's cause.

So the interesting question the pairing raises: are these claims actually rivals, or are they answering different questions? Diamond is explaining the fates of societies — why Eurasia industrialized first. Winegard/Carl are explaining the divergence of populations — allele frequencies, adaptations to altitude and cold. One can grant that isolation drove modest biological divergence while still insisting, with Diamond, that this divergence explains essentially none of the historical record.

The filing under The Biological Reality of Race is where the friction bites. Winegard/Carl's mechanism, if sound, means populations really did diverge — undercutting the strong reading of "Culture Over Biology." Diamond's argument, notice, doesn't require that no biological divergence occurred; it requires that whatever divergence occurred didn't matter for history. That's a subtler, more defensible claim than "differences among peoples don't exist" — and the second note quietly exposes how much work that distinction has to do.

Woven from these notes

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

A more plausible conception of race, one that is consistent with how careful philosophers and geneticists use the term, recognises that: When humans began leaving Africa around 75,000 years ago, they dispersed across a much greater range of environments than they had previously inhabited. The humans that settled in different geographic regions subsequently came under different selection pressures (e.g. temperature, seasonality, altitude). Natural barriers such as oceans (e.g. the Atlantic), deserts (e.g. the Sahara) and mountain ranges (e.g. the Himalayas) impeded gene flow between different populations for substantial periods of time. When there is limited gene flow between populations that have come under different selection pressures, we would expect them to gradually diverge from one another over via the processes of genetic drift and natural selection.

— Bo Winegard, Noah Carl Superior: The Return of Race Science—A Review