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

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Summary: Excellent, probably one of the best books I've read in 2003
Review: I believe Jared Diamond has made an excellent job explaining the rise of human civilizations, conquests, and diasporas. Although many of his point had previously been made, and accepted, by different authorities, nobody (at least as far as I'm concern) had ever integrated all that knowledge in one fine book. I've heard all kinds of opinions on this book, I believe the people that didn't like it are the ones that are not used to read science or philosophy, they are more used to novels and other styles of writing that are more light reading. This book certainly forces you to reflect a lot, and also to keep concentration throughout all of it. I recommend it if you are used to read science literature and want to reflect on human actual distribution and cultures.

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Summary: everyone must read this book
Review: compelling (and sometimes dense), an overall well structured argument and a very worthwhile read.

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Summary: Was the Rise of the West Inevitable?
Review: Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, but in Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond makes a compelling case for why it was the Europeans who conquered the world and not the Native Americans, Africans or Australians.

Diamond, in attempting to explain this fundamental question gives a broad overview of the history of human civilization, starting from our hunter-gatherer beginnings approximately 40,000 years ago. In this outline, Diamond points out certain natural advantages that Eurasia started out with, which, with the power of compounding statistics, made it a virtual certainty that Eurasians would eventually dominate the globe (baring some outside event like an asteroid collision.)

Some of these are advantages one would not necessarily think of, such as the fact that the Eurasian continent has primarily an east-west axis, while in the Americas and Africa, movement of populations has to go north-south. The east-west axis means that crops domesticated in one area (the fertile crescent or China) can easily be transplanted in other areas since they have similar latitudes and climates. Therefore, food production technology can spread faster. Whereas just going 1,000 miles north or south changes the type of crops that can be domesticated and farmed, thus retarding the spread of food production.

Diamond also points out that another big advantage of the Eurasians was their accidental benefit of having a large number of big mammals survive the late Pleistocene extinctions. This allowed the Eurasians to domesticate a wide range of animals. The Americas were left with one, the llama. Australia, none. Africa still contains large mammals, but all are not easily domesticated. Diamond points out that animal domestication also had an important advantage besides the obvious uses of labor, transport and food. All of our major epidemic diseases come from our domesticated animals. For example, influenza epidemics spread outward from China every year, started by people living in close proximity to pigs. As such, Eurasians developed key immunities from these diseases. But the Native Americans, Australians and Africans had very little experience with these microbes. More important to the conquest of the New World by Eurasians than guns or ships, was the presence of smallpox and other diseases that depopulated up to 90% of North America and Mesoamerica (Somewhat less catastrophically but still potent 30% in South America.)

Diamond deals with very large macro-trends in history. Some people have criticized the book as not being able to explain specific historical elements, but Diamond readily acknowledges this. In Guns, Germs and Steel he is seeking to explain why it was virtually certain Eurasians would displace other peoples and cultures over the long term.

As he notes, this type of macro-history could tell you why Eurasians would populate North America and not vice-versa, but it can't give you insight into why Kennedy won the 1960 Presidential election.

Diamond has been accused of determinism (I am unsure why this is a dirty word.) But Guns, Germs and Steel is an important book because it can, I feel, compellingly demonstrate that history is not random. There are larger trends that lend a certain directionality to history. That directionality may arise from advantages/disadvantages randomly assigned, but once the machinery is in place, the power of probability takes over. In short, it was extremely likely, given the basic factors that Diamond lists, that Eurasians would dominate the rest of the planet. Another outcome, while possible, was extremely unlikely.

Of real interest, and one deserving of book length treatment, is why did the Western Europeans, of the various Eurasian peoples (specifically fertile crescent peoples and the Chinese), come to be the ones who dominated the world? Although only touched on in the epilogue, Diamond posits that the answer for the fertile crescent peoples is obvious, the natural resources of the area were severely strained by the civilizations in the area. The fertile crescent went from being a net food exporter to and importer and populations fell. The question of the Chinese is harder, but Diamond's theory is compelling.

China, even until 500 years ago was by far the technological superior of Western Europe, but their problem is that they were too unified. Essentially, Diamond postulates that China's centralization...cultural and technological progress. A prime example was the Chinese abandonment of oceangoing sailing ships in the 1500's. Although China's seafaring technology was quite advanced, a change in politics in the Chinese court led to a ban on overseas trade. Riding on a multi-masted ship could merit the death sentence by 1525.

This could never have happened in Western Europe where the political culture was highly fragmented. If one nation renounced oceangoing ships, others would continue - and reap the rewards for their initiative, thus putting pressure on the original country to change its policies. When there is fragmentation and competition, selection pressure forces recalcitrant actors to adopt new ways and innovate themselves - or go extinct.

Competition breeds strength.

All in all Guns, Germs and Steel is a compelling work detailing exactly why things have turned out the way they have in terms of global cultures. Even if one is not interested in it for its political aspects, it is a fascinating overview of the last 40,000 of human history and will tell you interesting tidbits like how plants came to be domesticated.

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Summary: An interesting discussion on a controversial topic
Review: Guns, Germs, and Steel is a wonderful book. It tackles a lot of controversial topics. The main focus of this book is to answer the question, "What made Europeans technologically superior to Africans?" What the book discusses is very interesting but sometimes a little disorganized. Diamond writes as if he were talking to you, acknowledging the reader as an equal in intelligence rather than dumbing down the material. Diamond does lose the reader in some passages, but a large majority of what he has to say is very interesting and keeps the reader turning the pages until the end.

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Summary: Geography guides guns, germs, groups to greatness or grave
Review: Which civilization will be more productive, technologically advanced and ultimately politically dominant: a hundred ethnicities lined up East to West; or a hundred ethnicities arrayed North to South? This, in essence, is the compelling and original question that Jared Diamond asks, and answers, in this absolutely required-reading 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner.

On page 87, the chart entitled "Factors Underlying the Broadest Pattern of History" outlines Diamond's entire case. Due to weather patterns, continental shape, and topographical variation, the band of cultures arranged along the Eastwest axis from Portugal to Vietnam had a superior starting point compared to those cultures stretching Northsouth from Alaska to Chile or from the Sudan to South Africa.

As humans evolved from hunter-gatherers to farmers, food surpluses enabled for the first time a segment of society to do something other than scrounge for their next protein hit. Increases in food storage and food production enabled ever greater specialization: "stored food can also feed priests, who provide religious justification for wars of conquest; artisans such as metal workers, who develop swords, guns and other technologies and scribes, who preserve far more information than can be remembered accurately." New technologies are produced by this thinking-inventing class; both by trial and error and by sustained experimentation, new methods, inventions, processes, weapons, and philosophies are brought forth into the world.

By showing that innovations occur, independently, in every race and culture -- "the myriad factors affecting innovativeness make the historian's task paradoxically easier, by converting societal variation in innovativeness into essentially a random variable" - Diamond is able to sidestep charges, should one be so inclined (and many ones are inclined so) of racial determinism.

So in each of these areas, as societies independently produce innovations in guns, germs or steel, they share or trade them with their neighbors. For the Eastwesters, this is easy because the climate from Portugal to Vietnam is rather similar, broadly speaking. For the Northsoutherners, however, the crops and mammals that thrive in the American plains or the Andes wither in the Guatemalan heat and vice versa. Therefore, trade and the exchange of ideas are hampered.

And thus, geography is destiny.

The wheel, invented by the Eastwest crew in 3,000 BC diffuses rapidly within a few centuries. Invented independently in prehistoric Mexico, it never makes it to the Andes (Diamond cites the throttling power of the narrow Panama isthmus, though I wonder why does a narrow landmass throttle diffusion and not accelerate it?) In another example, writing zips rapidly across Eurasia while it languishes with the Mayas in the Americas.

Similarly, with food: "of the world's 148 big wild terrestrial herbivore mammals - the candidates for domestication - only 14 passed the test. Why did the other 134 species fail?" Eurasia ends up with 13 of them, the Americas 1, sub-Saharan Africa and Australia - zero

And as a result of food - disease. Eurasian crowd diseases evolved out of the diseases of Eurasian herd animals. And a lack of these mammals in the New World led to a paucity of disease (the author includes an interesting sidenote on why llamas are not a source of human disease). Most wars prior to World War II were won by the side spreading nastier germs (a novel and not entirely convincing argument - were the Mongols, with their small core of Mongolians surrounding by an ever-expanding army of conscripts, really able to direct their germs at the enemy and not their own troops?) And European diseases eliminated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas within two centuries of arrival.

So geography is destiny and in the area of invention, food, and disease, Eastwest orientation is superior to Northsouth.

Even within Eastwest, we find geography has implications:

"Europe has a highly indented coastline with five large peninsulas that approach islands in their isolation [and thus] Europe is carved up into independent linguistic, ethnic and political units by high mountains"

While "China's coastline is much smoother" with no bifurcating ranges separating tribes and generating animosities, dialects, separate ethnic identities, or, importantly, sharable innovation.

Call this Diamond's Contiguous China theory: Europe's disunity leads to experimentation (Columbus asks five different regents to support his voyages before one will support him) while the Chinese monolith ends its voyages of discovery in 1421 due to court intrigue.

Perhaps Diamond's Contiguous China theory has implications for writing systems as well. Writing always starts as pictographs. In the Mediterranean, these symbols, forced into contact with many different pronunciations, syllables, diphthong and accents lost all but their most basic phonemic essence. "Alphabets apparently arose only once" in Syria and were then borrowed, copied, co-opted and diffused throughout the Eastwest axis. While Chinese characters, which gradually expanded along with the monolithic linguistic-political area (even though ultimately that monolith sprouts wholly different languages, the process is gradual enough to not rupture the writing system in the interim) had no such stripping away. And thus Chinese has several thousand characters, each idiosyncratically replete with meaning; while the few dozen Western characters are meaningless of themselves and merely phonemic.

Perhaps the best evidence of Diamond's deftness of touch is the complete absence of opprobrium for the author since publication of what is after all, an explanation of why Europeans and Asians succeeded and Africans and Native Americans didn't. Even rational, dispassionate treatises on topics tangentially touching race tend to produce a singular level of venom and vitriol from the shouting classes. Diamond so smoothly handles these sensitive issues, head on, that there is simply no race-baiting angle from which to attack him.

Indeed, the differences in outcome are attributed not to race, ethnicity, genes, culture or any other factor inherent to these groups at all, but rather surprisingly and benignly, to the geographical orientation of one's neighbors! A more arbitrary, non-threatening explanation for observed differences in national success would be difficult to conceive. And for that, the modern, liberally minded student, the originality, rigor, scope and truth of Diamond's thesis is all the sweeter.

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Summary: fascinating but ultimately not convincing
Review: It is easy to understand why this book won a Pulitzer Prize. Jared Diamond is a good storyteller, and in this case the story he is trying to tell is an important one indeed: Why are some nations or regions of the world so rich and others so poor? It isn't, he assures us, because of intelligence, since people in poorer regions are just as intelligent as people in richer regions. Nor is it because of cultural differences, contrary to the thesis of David Landes in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. Rather, the key is geography, and Diamond takes us on a fascinating anthropological romp through history to support this thesis.

Harry Potter, step aside - This book is hard to put down. When I finally did put the book down, however, and reflected more on the argument, I was not completely convinced. Surely geography plays a role, but does it play the dominant role in human history? Not likely. In any case, in addition to Landes's book cited above, readers interested in the question of why some nations are so rich and others so poor should also look at the new book by Glenn Firebaugh, The New Geography of Global Income Inequality, for a more balanced perspective on the multiple causes of global income inequality.

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Summary: A Brilliant History of Human Culture
Review: Ever wonder why European cultures became the dominant conquering forces in the world?
Certainly there are many reasons, but Jared Diamond has written a brilliant synthesis of the development of mankind and cultures that has led up to the world as we know it. He outlines the fascinating impact that geography, agriculture (the germs), and technology (the guns and steel) have on human cultures. It seems that many times we are a product of our environment. That is the locally available plants and animals that had the potential to be domesticated varied greatly around the world. And these had profound impacts on how societies developed. This book is a must reading for everyone!!

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Summary: old ideas published for the first time
Review: While accurate, the theories presented in this book is nothing new. Perhaps the first time published, though.

Nevertheless, it is still factual and a recommended read.

If you want something that will really knock your socks off go online and search for William James Sidis' "The Tribes and States" (unpublished). You'll get a lot of the same as in GG&S, along with political and historical content.

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Summary: well written, not conclusive
Review: This book is very well written and presents quite a few interesting facts about different cultures around the world. It also presents some very good arguments as to how technology and society developed in different regions of the globe. However, the author did not completely convince me of his viewpoints. In any case it is an interesting book and well worth the time I took to read it.

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Summary: Very insightful read
Review: This book was a very interesting read; it attempts to explain what basic factors lead to the various ultimate factors which caused Western civilization to dominate the world. Much of what he said are things that is pretty much common knowledge, such as the role of disease in the destruction of Native American cultures. Diamond also takes it further, and further explains things that I didn't know, like the specific causes for the buildup of the Eurasian disease pools, and also things that I've never thought about, like which animals lent themselves to domestication (as an example, why Zebras were never turned into pack animals in Africa).

The book has flaws though; while it does explain why the Aztecs did not have huge diseases for the Spaniards, and why New Guinea never developed large stratified societies, it doesn't solve the full problem. His explaination of why specifically Western Europe seemed to triumph (and not, say China) was not fully convincing, and almost seems like an afterthought.

This book also seems preoccupied by trying to convince the reader that people around the world, say New Guineans, are no less smarter or naturally inventive than Westerners. That particular battle has been won decades ago; being born in the latter half of the 20th century, it simply wouldn't occur to me to think otherwise. As such, his constant reiteration of the obvious grew tiresome after a while.