ABSTRACT
In Guns, Steel and Germs, Jared Diamond, the distinguished physiologist and geographer, chastises historians for their failure to think of their profession as a science, the consequence of which is that they "receive little training in acknowledged sciences and their methodologies." Scientific history is the search for "ultimate explanation," in the instance of Guns, Steel and Germs, of why certain societies triumphed at the expense of others (European at the expense of African and Asian). The secret of success is food production, which frees people for a variety of other activities, for example the crafts. In speaking of non-scientific history as bunk, Diamond brings to mind those who are surely his adversaries, the radical skeptics who will settle for nothing less than absolute truth. The discovery of a chain of causation leading up to, say, the American War for Independence or the French Revolution may lead to claims that what unfolded was "inevitable.".
