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www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 327 22 JANUARY 2010 413

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Questioning Collapse: Human Resil-

ience, Ecological Vulnerability, and

the Aftermath of Empire began as

a conference session at the 2006

annual meetings of the

American Anthropological

Association, where schol-

ars came together to discuss

the massive popular appeal

of Jared Diamond’s Guns,

Germs, and Steel and Col-

lapse ( 1, 2). Their discussion

ex panded and developed

into a volume that brings

together archaeologists, cul-

tural anthropologists, and

historians to reanalyze and

reinterpret Diamond’s case

studies and conclusions.

In many cases the authors, all prominent

scholars in the time periods, areas, and top-

ics they write about, are able to identify and

correct an array of errors in Diamond’s data.

Questioning Collapse, however, is not a col-

lection of indignant scholars dwelling on fac-

tual inaccuracies or “Diamond-bashing.” The

volume presents lively debate, critique, and

engagement not only with Diamond’s the-

ses but, more importantly, directly with the

serious issues he raises and the roles serious

scholars should take. The authors contribute

positively to critical public discussions about

understanding what the past has to offer us as

we move toward an increasingly global, envi-

ronmentally fragile future. Their chapters

were written for the wider public rather than

being narrowly focused at specialists and yet

also have much of value for professionals in

the authors’ disciplines.

The studies in Questioning Collapse

make clear that environment is not the only

issue that societies must deal with in order to

make “civilizations” sustainable. None of the

authors disagree with Diamond’s claim that

understanding past human-environment inter-

actions is important to our future. But they

do caution that we need to make certain that

studies and arguments are very carefully con-

structed, methodologically rigorous, and con-

scious of all possible nuances and facets of

the issue. The contributors show how this can

be done for the societies they study, and they

explain the implications of Diamond’s trou-

bling propensity to overlook the real and pow-

erful infl uences of cultural ideologies on the

paths that civilizations take.

Diamond conjures a sense

of crisis, defi ning collapse in

dramatic ways that ignore how

societies also choose to be

resilient, to adapt and change

in ways that can even include

abandoning places in favor

of new settlements or strate-

gies that better fi t their envi-

ronmental, economic, reli-

gious, or other cultural needs.

Who is to say that a society

such as Norse Greenland,

which existed for 450 years,

was a failure because its inhabitants eventu-

ally decided for a variety of reasons that life

could be better elsewhere? Or that the Maya

abandoning their monumen-

tal Classic period religious

centers was a collapse rather

than a political and social

shift that was a good decision

at the time?

Notably, the authors pay

attention to the living descen-

dents of the supposedly

failed, collapsed societies that

Diamond profiles. The vol-

ume does something largely

long missing (at least in lit-

erature easily accessible to

the public), which is to reject

historical amnesia by bridg-

ing the gap between ancient

“lost” societies and the cul-

tural inheritors of these tradi-

tions who are still among us.

Several chapters highlight the

continued existence of com-

munities such as native Eas-

ter Islanders, the Maya of Central America,

Native North Americans, and Aboriginal

Australians and what they have to say about

their supposed disappearances. These peo-

ple have not in fact vanished, but what have

been obscured by narratives such as Dia-

mond’s (and, admittedly, by archaeological

and popular romanticism) are their cultural

histories and perspectives. One nice feature

of the book is the inclusion of short profi les of

living individuals from the areas in question,

whose words and faces represent the human

reality of their diverse perspectives.

Diamond intended Collapse as an envi-

ronmental wake-up call but missed the crucial

fact, clearly argued in this volume, that pro-

posed solutions to our global environmental

problems cannot succeed without grappling

with the complex issues of history, coloniza-

tion, and social injustice that have brought

us to our current state of fragility and cri-

ses. Several chapters raise the bitter truth that

many societies do not have the entirely free

choice about how they deal with their envi-

ronment that Diamond assumes. Especially

today, societies are increasingly constrained

by being interlaced into complex global

social and economic networks. Who are we,

from our positions of power and infl uence, to

suggest that the people of Papua New Guinea,

for example, should forbid logging or mining

on their land when the alternatives available

to them also will not sustain or improve their

lives and those of their children?

We cannot ease our current global envi-

ronmental crises without understanding their

complex histories and equitably address-

ing the socioeconomic problems that create

and sustain them, and that cannot be done

without many diffi cult shifts in perspective,

including about how we defi ne and assign

blame for societal collapse. Stepping into

someone else’s shoes is easy to recommend,

but the actual shedding of subconscious cul-

tural ideas about what constitutes “common

sense” and practicality in order to do so is

much more diffi cult. Even more challeng-

ing may be the creation and maintenance

Did They Fail? Could They Choose?

ANTHROPOLOGY

Krista Lewis

The reviewer is at the Department of Sociology and Anthro-pology, University of Arkansas, Little Rock, AR 72204, USA. E-mail: kxlewis@ualr.edu

Questioning Collapse

Human Resilience,

Ecological Vulnerability,

and the Aftermath of Empire

Patricia A. McAnany and

Norman Yoffee, Eds.

Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge, 2010. 390 pp. $90,

£55. ISBN 9780521515726.

Paper, $29.99, £17.99.

ISBN 9780521733663.

Icons of collapse. Moai left standing close to the quarry at Rano Raraku, Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

Published by AAAS

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BOOKS ET AL.

22 JANUARY 2010 VOL 327 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org 414

of socioeconomic systems that value those

diverse perspectives, share control and inter-

pretation of heritage, and (most important of

all) alleviate problems of social justice. How-

ever, such actions are not entirely impossible,

and the suggestions the authors of Question-

ing Collapse make about how we can move

in those directions are valuable contributions

to the effort.

References

1. J. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human

Societies (Norton, New York, 1987).

2. J. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or

Succeed (Viking, New York, 2005); reviewed in ( 3).

3. T. Flannery, Science 307, 45 (2005).

Does the brain have a sex? Until

recently, most investigators consid-

ered this question a silly one—the

answer was no. But advances in neurosci-

ence, behavioral genetics, and technology—

especially magnetic resonance imaging and

positron emission tomography—have cast

this query in a different light. With increas-

ing confi dence, scholars and commentators

have cataloged putative differences between

male and female brains. These presumed

differences have panicked

gender-conscious par-

ents, prompted redesigned

schools, and provided

entrepreneurs with sub-

stantial profi ts.

Amid a rising din of

claims and counterclaims

concerning this topic,

Lise Eliot offers a work of

serious and highly persua-

sive scholarship. A neuro-

scientist at the Rosalind

Franklin University of Medicine and Sci-

ence, Eliot focuses on a question that lies at

the heart of the male-female brain debate:

Why do boys and girls perform differently

on certain cognitive tasks? Arguing that

environmental factors are more infl uential

than intrinsic ones, she repudiates claims

made by several popularizers of sex differ-

Unsexing the Brain

PSYCHOLOGY

A. Scott Henderson

The reviewer is in the Department of Education, Furman University, 3300 Poinsett Highway, Greenville, SC 29613–1134, USA. E-mail: Scott.Henderson@Furman.edu

10.1126/science.1184327

ences, including Leon-

ard Sax (the physician-

psychologist founder

of the National Asso-

ciation for Single Sex

Public Education)

and Michael Gurian

(the family therapist

turned social philoso-

pher who coined the

phrase “boy crisis”).

Summarizing an

exhaustive survey

of existing research,

Eliot concludes that

the brains of boys and girls are

extremely similar, differing signifi cantly only

in their size and maturation rate, neither of

which has a demonstrable impact on cognitive

functions. In evaluating a range of other traits,

she emphasizes their difference value (d), a

statistic that measures the gap between male

and female performance ( 1). For most cogni-

tive and behavioral traits, d is small (around

0.2), which means that males and females

perform almost equally as well (or as poorly).

This makes generalizing about certain char-

acteristics diffi cult unless one concentrates

on the extremes of a distribution curve, where

even small differences can add up—for exam-

ple, the disproportionate number of boys who

have dyslexia or girls who suffer from anxi-

ety disorders. Eliot astutely notes that it is this

headline-grabbing focus on extremes that typ-

ifi es claims made by Sax, Gurian, and others.

If, as Eliot maintains, there are so few

hard-wired differences

between male and female

brains, why do the cogni-

tive abilities and interests

of boys and girls diverge by

mid-to-late adolescence?

Why, for instance, do boys

typically outperform girls

by 35 to 40 points on the

math section of the Scho-

lastic Aptitude Test (SAT)?

According to Eliot, this can

be partially explained by

demographic factors. Signifi cantly more girls

than boys who take the SAT come from low

socioeconomic backgrounds, the variable

that has the greatest infl uence on standardized

test results. Eliot also discusses how test tak-

ers can be affected by stereotype threat—the

tendency for individuals who are negatively

stereotyped to underperform on various tests.

Thus, at least some of the performance dif-

ferences identifi ed by researchers are more

apparent than real.

Nevertheless, Eliot acknowledges that

bona f ide cogni-

tive “gaps” do exist

between boys and

girls. These gaps are

initially quite small—

girls begin talking a

couple of months ear-

lier, for example; boys

tend to have better spa-

tial reasoning skills by

age five. These differ-

ences quickly lead to

positive feedback loops:

Children enjoy, and

therefore practice, skills

and activities they are

good at, and this practice

results in improved performance. As Eliot

phrases it, the brain wires itself “in large mea-

sure according to the experiences in which it

is immersed from prenatal life through ado-

lescence.” Parents and teachers, however,

are frequently ignorant of these dynamics,

misinterpreting the ever-widening boy-girl

achievement gaps as the basis for self-fulfi ll-

ing prophecies and stereotypes.

Only two weaknesses detract from the

book’s many strengths. The title—perhaps

chosen for marketing appeal—misleadingly

suggests the opposite of Eliot’s thesis. More

problematic, Eliot mentions her own children

throughout the book, sometimes to illustrate

substantive points. This kind of anecdotal evi-

dence is at odds with her otherwise scrupu-

lous marshalling of experimental data, and it

also raises the ethical issue of whether chil-

dren are truly able to give permission for hav-

ing their lives revealed in a book written by

one of their parents.

Eliot’s pedagogical prescriptions are

straightforward and logical. She sees few

merits and several disadvantages to single-

gender classrooms and schools. Instead—

given her contention that virtually all skills

can be learned—she urges parents and edu-

cators to take advantage of the brain’s plas-

ticity by providing children with a wealth of

experiences, especially ones that will stretch

them beyond their natural aptitudes. Consid-

ering the nonsense already in print (much of it

erroneously presented as scientifi c fact), Pink

Brain, Blue Brain should be required reading

for anyone who wants a more thoughtful con-

sideration of how the brains of boys and girls

do—but mostly do not—differ.

References and Notes

1. The difference value is given by the mean score of males

less the mean score of females divided by the standard

deviation of both groups.

Pink Brain, Blue Brain

How Small Differences Grow

into Troublesome Gaps—and

What We Can Do About It

by Lise Eliot

Houghton Miffl in Harcourt,

Boston, 2009. 432 pp. $25.

ISBN 9780618393114.C

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10.1126/science.1185957

Published by AAAS