Accidental Blogger

I’ve been reading the Origin of Species this week, because I’ve often found pre-20th Century physics unreadable (notationally), and it’s enjoyable to engage with great science in the original from time to time. Just finished the first chapter, where Darwin makes his famous case for the analogy between artificial and natural selection. This bit caught my eye:

If it has taken centuries or thousands of years to improve or modify most of our plants up to their present standard of usefulness to man, we can understand how it is that neither Australia, the Cape of Good Hope, nor any other region inhabited by quite uncivilised man, has afforded us a single plant worth culture. It is not that these countries, so rich in species, do not by a strange chance possess the aboriginal stocks of any useful plants, but that the native plants have not been improved by continued selection up to a standard of perfection comparable with that acquired by the plants in countries anciently civilised.

This brought immediately to mind Jared Diamond’s opposite view in Guns, Germs and Steel, that the usable plant and animal species had geographical distributions that directly affected the trajectory of (pre)history. It seems like that particular set of arguments from Diamond was the weakest portion of his book, substituting a ‘straightforward’ explanation with a rather ad-hoc and mysterious one, with somewhat flimsy justificatory argumentation.