> What you've linked to (Alan) is helpful,
> even if the authors don't seem to feel quite as... threatened?
>
Threatened, I see you're being fair again... it couldn't possibly be that I linked to it because, maybe, I wasn't threatened... but perhaps you're just Andy bein' Manny...
WRT Charles's comment about germs: All the blankets in the world
> wouldn't explain the asymmetry of the spread of virulent infectious
> diseases. So there's a biological question in there, like it or not,
> one that Diamond might actually have the background (in zoology) to
> address.
>
Have you read the book? If so, does it limit itself to biological questions? For that matter, let's imagine you've read Levins and Lewontin's Dialectical Biologist AND GG&S, is there anything like the conceptual sophistication of the former in the latter? Do you have any idea what you are writing about or are you just spewing?
>
> I mean no general defense of GG&S. I get the annoyance with an
> outsider blundering into a question seemingly unread and unschooled.
> What I find intriguing is the fury that any suggestion of material
> influence seems to invariably provoke.
Perhaps, its not the outsider blundering that's really the problem... maybe its that the book's a selective, partial and deductivist peice of work. In terms of the fury, just maybe, you'd like to search the archives for the number of times I have contributed arguments that insist on the importance of material, even environmental, phenomena... it might leave you looking less foolish.
There's information out there on the web about me, you might want to look into it. My work includes the investigation of the social production of insect pests; the long contestation over water politics in irrigated agricultural regions of the desert southwest; the various forms of resistance to agricultural biotechnology - ecological, health and cultural forms that often serve as tropes for resistance to the neoliberalization of everything; a collaboration with another member of the list on an effort to understand the history and valences of ecoskepticism; an extended query into the socionatural production of locations called regions; and, even, an arcane and very graduate-studenty paper on 16 dialectics of enablement and constraint between nature and capital.
> I always wondered if the
> phrase "material determinism" (always used as an accusation) is meant
> to exclude every other factor. Apparently in Alan's case it does.
>
Again, you can only write this after engaging in the same kind of refusal of inquisitiveness Joseph implicitly put forth. It is the determinism that is the problem, not the materialism... but you'd have to read with a shred of sympathy to get that.
I guess, most importantly, the part of my post you chose to ignore was this: "If you don't want to come off as a jerk, just don't, it's ok." I guess you decided it wasn't ok not to...