Under the spell of Malthus: biology doesn't explain why societies collapse.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Book Review

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, New York: Viking, 592 pages, $29.95

JARED DIAMOND'S new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, is neither "superb" (The New Statesman), "incisive" (The Washington Post), "magisterial" (BusinessWeek), nor "insightful and very important" (Boston Herald). It is, instead, a telling example of how a smart man can be terribly misled by a fixation on one big idea. In this case, Diamond, a biologist, is trying to apply biology's master narrative to human societies.

In 1838 the founding father of modern biology, Charles Darwin, read the 1798 edition of the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus famously concluded that human population increased at an exponential rate, while food supplies grew at "arithmetic" rates. Thus population would always outstrip food supplies, dooming some portion of humanity to perpetual famine. As a description of human behavior, it was, as we shall see, a wildly inaccurate argument. But it sparked a genuine revolution in the life sciences.

Reading Malthus was a "eureka" moment for Darwin, who declared in his autobiography, "I had at last got a theory by which to work." Darwin realized that Malthus' thesis applied to the natural world, since plants and animals produce far more offspring than there is food, nutrients, and space to support them. Consequently, Darwin noted, "It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species." This insight launched one of the most important modern scientific theories, the theory of biological evolution by means of natural selection.

Ever since, biologists have been entranced by the idea that if Malthusianism can explain the operation of the natural world, it should also explain human societies. Are we not just complicated animals? Shouldn't this biological insight apply to us too? In Collapse, Diamond proves himself an enthusiastic apostle of Malthusianism.

"Our world society is presently on a non-sustainable course," Diamond warns. "The world's environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies."

As prophets go, Diamond certainly has impressive credentials. He is a polymath who speaks 12 languages, won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel, and received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. He trained as a physiologist, is an expert ornithologist specializing in the birds of New Guinea, and is now a professor of physiology and geography at the University of California at Los Angeles.

In Collapse, Diamond argues that the decline and fall of several relatively small-scale premodern communities are pertinent to our current situation. These include the medieval Norse colony in Greenland, the Polynesian settlers of Easter Island, and the Mayan civilization of Central America. "It is not a question open for debate whether the collapses of past societies have modern parallels and offer any lessons to us," he declares. "That question is settled, because such collapses have actually been happening recently, and others appear to be imminent." By collapse, Diamond means "a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time." Based on his case studies...