Guns, Germs and Steel

Thesis: accidents of geography and biogeography shaped societies. Easily domesticable plants and animals, directional axes, and randomness determined outcomes.

Likes:

- Whether or not you agree with Diamond, there’s plenty to gain from reading—so many fields are covered that you’re bound to learn from the histories of civilizations, plants, animals, inventions, etc.

- The chapter on language and writing. The possible impact on Chinese language and literacy due to their many homophones was interesting.

- The diffusion of technology, with Europe and China as an example. "China’s connectedness eventually became a disadvantage, because a decision by one despot could, and repeatedly did, halt innovation. Europe’s barriers were sufficient to prevent political unification, but insufficient to halt the spread of technology and ideas.” The many attempts of Christopher Columbus was another example.

- Some of his long tangents: purposefully inefficient keyboard design and Japanese pride of their kanji showed why different societies aren’t equally receptive to all change/progress.

Dislikes:

- In the introduction Diamond assures us that he’s the only one who could have written this book, and that additional authors would make the book “doomed from the outset”. Why Nations Fail, the book I read for comparison, benefits greatly from the combined perspectives of an economist and a political scientist. This book could benefit in many ways from additional input.

- Everything can and will be compared to New Guinea, where Diamond worked for many years. Wealth distribution, understanding risk, languages—it’s all done better in New Guinea. Never does Diamond mention their gender-based violence, child marriage, cannibalism, poverty, corruption, etc. Many of his views seemed transparently biased despite his capacity for research. That creates skeptical readers.

- Sometimes tedious for a casual reader like me—recessive genes in cultivated peas, the difference between a band and a tribe, ancestral dialects, etc.

“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”. Yali's question serves the basis for a worldwide survey of the many factors influencing history and that determined the fates of world's power balance.

Through this amazingly thorough journey throughout history, we learn that most of what happened happened by chance, by subjecting different peoples in different continents to different conditions, conditions which were ultimately responsible for a particular set of peoples having reached the stage of dominating guns, steel and having greater immunity to certain (and very deadly germs).

This is probably one of the best books to make you rethink history under a much more naturalistic perspective, taking the thunder out of those that naively think that the real reasons for the present day status quo lie somewhere on human personality or will [to power?].

From geography to weather to food production to plant and animal domestication to greater demography to wider spread of technology and diseases, all that contributing to make some peoples more apt to conquer others, resulting in the human world we witness today.

If you really want to know how we got from point A (being hunter-gatherers) to point B (present day world structure), this is one of the best books that will present an easy to follow, sufficiently rich in examples, and concise enough to save you from being overburdened with information (for any conversation trying to tie up all of human history necessarily covers too many topics, peoples and their histories, and thus covering too much raw information, which can be way too difficult to absorb and digest). If, by chance, you happen to be one of those who vow for the supremacy of any particular group of people, you probably should avoid this volume — for claiming superiority when you happen to be at the end of a long string of random events does not make you particularly special. In any case, whatever your starting position, you will be much more illuminated on world's history by the time you end up reading this book.

Geography.

That in essence is Dr Diamond's ultimate answer for why we see such disparity in human populations today and throughout history. Europeans were able to conquer the New World and not the other way around because of geographical factors giving them numerous advantages beginning with food production and leading to technology and immunity to disease. It was not because of some innate superiority of the European people, which is often the sort of argument put forward, and in the most extreme cases, used to justify exploitation or genocide.

This is an excellent book, thoroughly researched, logically and soberly argued, and including fascinating insights gathered by the author himself in New Guinea, a microcosm of human societies. What does the future hold for human societies? While geography perhaps plays a smaller role in modern times, lessons about human societal structures produced by geography may prove invaluable for the future success of humanity.

1) ''The most dramatic moment in subsequent European-North American relations was the first encounter between the Inca emperor Atahuallpa and the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro at the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca on November 16, 1532. Atahuallpa was absolute monarch of the largest and most advanced state in the New World, while Pizarro represented the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (also known as King Charles I of Spain), monarch of the most powerful state in Europe. Pizarro, leading a ragtag group of 168 Spanish soldiers, was in unfamiliar terrain, ignorant of the local inhabitants, completely out of touch with the nearest Spaniards (1,000 miles to the north in Panama) and far beyond the reach of timely reinforcements. Atahuallpa was in the middle of his own empire of millions of subjects and immediately surrounded by his army of 80,000 soldiers, recently victorious in a war with other Indians. Nevertheless, Pizarro captured Atahuallpa within a few minutes after the two learders first set eyes on each other. Pizarro proceeded to hold his prisoner for eight months, while extracting history's largest ransom in return for a promise to free him. After the ransom---enough gold to fill a room 22 feet long by 17 feet wide to a height of over 8 feet---was delivered, Pizarro reneged on his promise and executed Atahuallpa.''

2) ''To bring up all those differences isn't to claim that widely distributed crops are admirable, or that they testify to the superior ingenuity of early Eurasian farmers. They reflect, instead, the orientation of Eurasia's axis compared with that of the Americas or Africa. Around those axes turned the fortunes of history.''

This book takes a hard question and looks it straight in the eye, and patiently and dispassionately exorcises it of demons. The question Mr. Diamond addresses is: why is it that some cultures, races, and nations conquered others? This is the type of question that most people avoid even contemplating, due to its seemingly underlying racist assumptions. But the answers that are brought forth completely eliminate any possible basis for racism, and instead establish the factors of simple chance based on evolution due to geography and environment. A lot of the other reviewers on this site seemed to be off-put or mortified by Mr. Diamond's research, and I don't really understand them. This book is powerful in it's insistence on historical truth and scientific understanding, and its multidisciplinary integration is truly groundbreaking. I think this is a great companion book to philosophical treatises like [book: The Life Divine] or [book:Sex, Ecology, Spirituality], in that it takes evolutionary findings and puts them together into a cohesive vision of mankind's fumbling progression into the future.
The book admittedly gets dry and the author browbeats his points, just to make sure he's being completely clear. But I also think that this is a necessary diligence on his part, in that he recognizes that his subject will draw controversy. I would call this book a must-read to anyone wanting to gain a clearer understanding of the underlying forces of history.