Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Rating:
Summary: Very Good Liberal B.S
Review: Good premise but it glaringly fails to notice or mention the fact that all these poor countries of the modern world have inhabitants that have a lower genetic I.Q. All black nations in the world are economic basketcases. All per capita for these black citizens in these countries is below $800 a year and some are as low as $300. It is good in that it makes you think how nature and geography allow certain things. My premise is that all these wonderful inventions, seeds, and domesticated animals are due to a higher average I.Q. And that lower intelligenced people fail to develpoe these things. I mean potatoes came from the New World and allowed Ireland to have a vast population explosion. Potatoes are a great crop and the New World had these not the Europeans. The Incas failed to develope the wheel! Now unless there is a wheel tree in Europe that drops down fully made wheels this author is streching things a whole bunch. This book allows Liberals to not delve into the subject to much except for his slanted book and then convince themselves the liberal Paradigm still works. Bell curve read it before this.

Rating:
Summary: just a short word on guns, germs and steel
Review: The other reviews thoroughly explain the premises of this book and expand on them quite well. I would just like to mention that they forget the central theme and question jared diamond puts forth in the beginning of his argument.

The crux of his argument is this: what are the ultimate causes that have led to the proximate causes of european dominance of the last 500 years? First, a definition and derivation of proximate and ultimate causes: proximate questions ask how does it work and ultimate questions ask why does it work. Ethologists and animal behaviorists ask themselves these same questions in order to explain behavior displayed by animals in the wild. This scientific approach is applicable to humans as well, since this subject at its very core is a question about human behavior.

With regards to world history, jared diamond summarises the proximate causes as guns, germs and steel and suggests they are the mechanisms responsible for why europeans were able to conquer numerous peoples around the world with such apparent ease. However, in his book he also sets out to find the ultimate causes as to why europeans were able to attain these mechanisms responsible for their conquests and why other peoples did not. In order to explain these events without using unreliable social theories, he develops his hypothesis using irrefutable scientific evidence gathered from the fields of geography, biogeography, etc. to concisely explain the events of the past 10,000 years leading up to the european conquest and colonization of the world. This approach offers a logical step-by-step explanation to help explain these momentous events in world history. He does not say it is the be-all, end-all of explanations for the current outcome of world history. He even admits the validity of other ideas and theories, including the idea that great people are major determinants of world history. However, in response he says this: there were perhaps other napoleans, julius caesars, charlemagnes, etc in other parts of the world in history, but without domesticatable plants and animals, tempramental climates, and favourable continental axis alignments to support beurocrats, standing armies, religious servants, merchants, tradesmen, artisans, et al. these people were too busy with day-to-day activites, such as procuring food, to conquer other nations. Throughout the book he refutes or includes other arguments into his own and this is just an example of how he does it. I know I'm missing a lot of points in between these ideas, but that's why you'll just have to read the book to decide for yourself.

Rating:
Summary: Good thought provoking book
Review: Diamond explores the reasons behind human societies developing the way they did. His prose is lucid and readable. He applies different facets of evolutionary biological theory to explain subjects as diverse as the spread of ancient crops to why the Spanish conquered the Incas instead of vice versa. A good book to pick up and read a chapter at random.

Rating:
Summary: "A History of the Last 13,000 Years"
Review: For what it boasts, this book falls terribly short. Unfortunately, 13,000 years of history cannot be condensed into one book, nor is Diamond's approach to history the only available approach. Historical methodology is plural and manifold, and Diamond has limited himself to a particular perspective. That said, it is a provocative perspective, and for those of you who are interested in gaining a better understanding of how Geography limits and directs cultural development, there is perhaps no better place to start. Diamond compleley opens up the nature-nurture, materialist-spiritualist argument as it has never been opened before. His arguments are compelling and controvertial. There is a lot to be had in this book. Much food for thought, as well as a lot of interesting facts and anecdotes. My only complaint was that he completely downplayed the roll of cultural genocide in the European invasion of the Americas...

Rating:
Summary: A remarkable book and an education
Review: If you haven't read this book, you are in for a treat. This is the kind of book about which it can truly be said, I have only one regret, and that's that I've already read it! Or--even though the narrative runs to 426 pages--when one gets to the end, one wishes there were more. I'm trying to think if I've ever read anything comparable. In terms of scope, pure readability, interesting information, delicious ideas, a compelling thesis, worldly wisdom, etc., I can think of nothing. The closest would be something by Marvin Harris.

Professor Diamond begins by rephrasing a question asked of him by a New Guinea man in 1972, "Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way? For instance, why weren't Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians?" (p. 15) A stunning question really. And Diamond answers it fully and in such a manner that there can be little doubt that he is substantially right. The answer of course is presented in the title, "Guns, Germs, and Steel." How did the Conquistadors conquer the Aztecs and the Incas with a few score of soldiers against masses of resistence numbered in the tens of thousands? And how did the Europeans follow that up with the subjagation of the entire New World? In the first case, the answer is guns, horses and steel, and in the second case mostly germs, and mostly smallpox, a disease to which the Europeans had immunity because of their long association with cattle from which the disease evolved, while the Native peoples of North and South America had no such experience and no immunity. The fact that the first domesticated herd animals were from the old world and not the new is from the purely human point of view an "accident" of history and geography. Consequently, we can see that it was not the "superior" European culture that made the difference, but the factors named above and, I must say, pure chance.

For those critical of this book I think it should be appreciated that this is not a history as such. It is a work more akin to anthropology or ethnology. Jared Diamond is a physiologist, so it should also be appreciated that none of this has any pretense to be original research. What Diamond set out to do, and did remarkably well in my opinion, is to explain for a general, educated readership in detail just why the cultural history of the world developed the way it did. This is emphatically not a work for scholars or scientists (although many have read the book with pleasure and have learned from it).

And it is not a perfect book. The narrative is indeed uneven in parts, but this is a long, ambitious book, covering a lot of ground, so Professor Diamond may be forgiven for the occasional nod. His much contended statement that New Guineans are smarter than Europeans is a miss statement, of course. He should have simply said "as smart" (or as dumb, depending on your point of view), and left it at that. By the way, on page 408 he admits the statement is a "subjective impression" and can be contested. And yes, the book tends to the political correct, but I suspect that Diamond wrote it that way to anticipate and put aside such questions so that his main arguments might be appreciated without distraction. If you write anything politically incorrect in this day and age, there is the very real chance that the politically incorrect statement will attract all the attention and the rest of your book be ignored.

And it is true that some of his substantive arguments--for example, the north-south axis of the American continents working against the spread of plants and knowledge--may be in error. (I sure don't know.) Or the idea that the indented coastline and connectness of Europe and China led to cultural advantage may be wrong. However, even if Diamond is somewhat awry the mark here, his arguments are interesting and stimulating; and for those who want to know more he gives suggestions for further reading near the back of the book. The fact that Diamond brought these ideas and others to a large readership is a positive thing in itself. Whether they are correct or not is not proven, of course, and indeed we can be sure that some of the ideas are wrong. But this is to be expected. Our knowledge of the world and how we came to be the way we are is an ever changing, every growing phenomenon. Diamond's book cannot be properly judged yet, but will stand naked after, say, another generation of scientific and scholarly progress has passed. At that time it will be interesting to compare his arguments with what is known and see where he was substantially correct and where he wasn't. For now I think the bottom line on this remarkable work is to just enjoy it, learn from it, and let it stimulate your mind, and take it from there.

Rating:
Summary: Ignore the quibblers and naysayers
Review: As all scientific inquiries do, this one began with a question. Jared Diamond, a physiology professor at UCLA and an evolutionary biologist working for many years in Papua New Guinea, was asked the question that launched this book by a native friend, Yali. To paraphrase, both the question and the thesis of Guns, Germs, and Steel (GGS), "How come Western societies developed the means to conquer and exploit non-Western societies?" And why wasn't it the reverse -- why didn't the Americas conquer Europe, for instance?

Thus begins what Diamond calls "13,000 years of history on all continents [compressed] into a 400-page book." The breadth of what GGS covers is breathtaking, and the conclusions, surprisingly, not at all counterintuitive. In fact, every time Diamond pointed out a conclusion based on his researches, it wasn't so much a door opened on a new room as a door opened on an old room I couldn't quite construct in my mind until I was shown how. I think that's how teachers teach best: not by showing you something entirely new, but by showing you how to fit together the jagged edges of pieces of the old you already know.

To risk even further compression, here is what Diamond proposes. The necessary conditions for cultural triumph, in no particular order, are: population density, large animal domestication, food production (agriculture), resistance to diseases passed from animals and plants to humans, technological inventiveness and acceptance of change and improvement, literacy (at least among the elites), and centralized government. Add to that mix of accident and planning the good fortune of an east-west continental orientation -- and the consequent east-west spread of population, domestic animals, disease, technology, writing and government -- and you have the necessary conditions for a dominant society.

However, as Diamond takes pains to point out, these are not sufficient conditions for success. A lot depends on chance, some of it on inventiveness in individual societies, some to forward-looking government, and some even to individual vision and initiative. It's as if, as I paraphrase from what he says at the beginning of chapter nine, which is Diamond's own paraphrase of Anna Karenina, "successful societies are all alike; every unsuccessful society is unsuccessful in its own way":

<> If a society's population is not sufficiently dense, or has an unfavorable climate, or poor raw materials, it will never graduate from the hunter-gatherer stage;
<> If a society has no crops at hand that are suitable for domestication, they will never develop sufficient population density to overcome weaker societies;
<> If a society has no large animals at hand that are suitable for domestication, they will never develop sources of meat, transportation, beasts of burden and so forth;
<> If a society fails to develop dense populations of crops, animals and humans, they will never develop the germs, and resistance to those germs, that allow them to kill off (usually unintentionally) less dense, less resistant populations;
<> If a society fails to develop a population sufficiently dense to support specialist classes and a strong central government, it will never become organized enough to overcome or absorb its enemies in war.

And so on. Diamond appears to agree with Hobbes that war is the natural state of humankind, and his examples demonstrate that depressing assertion. Likewise, he asserts that all centralized governments evolve into a "kleptocracy," which justifies feeding the rich off of the labor of the poor, either through fear of its power or through religion (which is another form of fear). In writing this book, Diamond at once provides a convincing explanation for the differing developments of human societies on different continents throughout human history, and explodes myths of innate racial superiority. The recurring theme that I glean from GGS is that the success of a society rests in equal parts on accident and on human intervention -- and not all of that human intervention is entirely conscious.

Some of the author's detractors may say that his assertion that the east-west continental orientation of the Old World, versus the north-south orientation of the New World, is a strained explanation of societal success -- a geographical determinism -- but I must point out that Diamond stresses that there are no single causes: there are many causes of failure to develop "cargo," as the Guinean Yali put it. And there are many causes for societies who once had cargo -- like the medieval Islamic and the ancient Chinese, not to mention the ancient Mediterranean -- to lose their cargo and their superiority. But, as Diamond so excellently points out in Guns, Germs, and Steel, one of the causes was not race.

Rating:
Summary: An Interesting Story , But Not A Scientific Study of History
Review: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Norton 1997), winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, is written by Jared Diamond, a professor of Physiology at UCLA School of Medicine, who also writes about ecology and evolutionary biology. Diamond supposedly wrote this book in response to a question posed by a New Guinea politician:

"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?"

Or, put in another way, "why did Europe colonize New Guinea, and elsewhere, instead of the other way around?"

Diamond's theory is that the reasons have little, if anything, to do with biological differences, cultural systems or human effort; it has to do with the location of superior agriculture and domesticable animals. He attempts to prove his theory by examining the world, as it must have looked 13,000 years ago.
Diamond examines three paramount factors:

A. The shape of the continent;
B. The distribution of domesticable wild plants and animals; and
C. The geographical barriers inhibiting diffusion of domesticated plants and animals.

The location that incorporated those three factors led to the earlier decline of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and encouraged farming. This, in turn, led to social stability, government, learning, and, eventually, armies and explorers.
Diamond identifies Eurasia, which had the good fortune to be situated in an east-west orientation ("axis"), to be the perfect highway for agriculture to spread. The mid-latitude region of Eurasia, had the largest continuous zone of temperate climates and, therefore, was more conducive to the origination of superior and plentiful plants and animals. Thus, Eurasia was "fated" to be the center of farming and, indeed, became the birthplace of civilization.

According to Diamond, continents with a north-south axis (e.g., Africa, the Americas), was not conducive to the spread of agriculture as plants had to move through different climate zones. There is no discussion of the adaptability of plants, even though that is an essential element of domesticability. The ubiquitous potato now thrives in many areas foreign to its place of origination.

Diamond's theory based on the domestication of wild animals is a little stronger. The early domestication of animals in Eurasia eventually led to human resistance to certain diseases acquired from animals. European explorers had developed significant immunities to diseases to which the people in the New World had no resistance. Thus, smallpox wiped out an entire civilization, or at least rendered the people defenseless to invaders.

Diamond argues that the contiguous nature of the countries in the east-west axis, as well as their temperate environments, led to rapid dispersion of plants and the domestication of animals. Actually, there are many inhospitable barriers within Eurasia, which, under Diamond's theory would block diffusion. However, Diamond does not address this factor.

Diamond also fails to explain, adequately, why Australia, which has a climate similar to the mid-lateral region of Eurasia did not begin farming until much later.

Diamond concludes that Eurasia was fated to be the winner in the worldwide historical competition because of geographical and environmental advantages. Then approximately 500 years ago, Europe pulled ahead of China and assumed sole dominance. The lack of competition within homogeneous China was given as the reason Europe became sole victor in the end.

There are several major problems with Diamond's theory. The first is the absence of any provable, corroborating evidence. Under his theory if the New Guinean man and his descendants had switched places with the Europeans 10,000 years ago, those people would have become the colonizers, instead of the colonized.

The book also is heavily biased by the author's "reverse" racism views. In response to the question of whether there are any biological differences today between Aboriginal Australians and Europeans, Diamond states:

"The objection to such racist explanations is not just that they are loathsome, but also that they are wrong. Sound evidence for the existence of human differences in intelligence that parallel human differences in technology is lacking. In fact ... modern "Stone Age" peoples are on the average probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples."

The author's choice of the word "loathsome," an emotionally loaded word, to describe racism sets the tone for this very politically correct book.

This reviewer's impression is that Diamond has a pre-determined conclusion, and he relies on certain theories to support it, but ignores those same theories when they don't support his conclusion. In the end, Diamond does not establish a credible response to the New Guinea man's questions. To the extent the book purports to be a scientific study of history, the author has made a very basic error: he attempts to explain a "fact" - that there are no biological differences among different groups of people - without first establishing that that indeed is a fact.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is an interesting, politically correct story of the evolution of civilization, but I would not recommend it as a scientific study of history. Though fairly easy to read, the book is very repetitive and unnecessarily long to make the author's point. One hundred or more pages easily could have been cut.

Rating:
Summary: Informative But...
Review: This book is highly informative and interesting. Nevertheless, Diamond reiterates the secular position on religion. To the so-called secular intellectuals, religion is a secondary, strange, difficult-to-understand phenomenon. Religion evolved to unify the masses and justify the invasion of others. This point of view is extremely reductionist as religion is very fundamental to humans. Despite the secular anticipation that religion will decline steadily, the World nowadays is as religious as in the past if not more. There are several reasons for this:
1. Secularism undermines the always taken-for-granted certainties. Darwinism (one of the scientific wings of secularism) is said to have shattered human vanity by revealing that we humans are just the unintentional byproduct of the alleged evolutionary processes. In this sense, our existence, our free will and our consiousness all evolved my chance!!! The majority of people detest being in a state of uncertainty.
2. On the other hand religion presents answers to the fundamental questions of our existence. Some religions look very irrational but some of them appeal to the intellect and provide a self-consistent framework for our existence. These religions spread enormously in the World today.
3. Secular arrogance tries to present religious people as ignorant, gullible, and marginalized. On the contrary, many religious people are highly educated professionals who pondered hard over the deepest philosophical questions and reached belief through a long process of rationalization.
In short, the book depends on evolution theory too much to study history, belittles religion, and turns history into a mere deterministic process.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing ideas, mostly entertaining, uneven writing.
Review: Don't read this book for the lyricism of Diamond's writing. Parts of the book, especially the late-middle portion, sound like an over-worked graduate student stayed up for a week in order to finish the text. A smoother delivery style would have made the ideas in this book easier to digest. (I found the writing style in "The Third Chimpanzee" to be more "readable.")

However, what ideas! I feel my knowledge and understanding of world history -- geology, physiology, human history, and human behavior -- was greatly enhanced by this book. I have been thinking about human history much differently after reading the book, and you will, too.

I don't usually read non-fiction or natural history, but I really enjoyed this book. Recommended for curious and open-minded readers, because your understanding will be challanged and expanded.

Rating:
Summary: Liberal Revisionist Lunacy
Review: This book is an entertaining read: buy it for laughs. If you want a realistic treatment of the subject however, buy Victor Davis Hanson's _Carnage and Culture_.

Quoth Jared Diamond:
"That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westeners..." Really??? And this book won the Pulitzer Prize???

Quoth Jared Diamond:
"In fact, as I shall explain in a moment, modern Stone Age peoples are on the average probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples." Perhaps this statement can qualify him for the Oprah Winfrey Book Club?

So, the reason why Africa is such a hopeless morass, and why the Aborigines are still in the Stone Age, and why Arab countries are all suicide-bomb-promoting dictatorships, is because they are much more intelligent than Westerners? Didn't I tell you this book was entertaining?