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

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Summary: Spotlight Reviews are decidedly wrong
Review: Christopher Smith is incorrect in his description of Diamond's work. First, Diamond does NOT reject the influence of culture and human decisions on the fates of societies. This is discussed at length in the Epilogue.

Second, and worse, is that clearly Smith either did not read the book carefully, or perhaps is overlaying his own preconceived notions on Diamond's theses. To wit, the example quoted regarding Sowell's work misses Diamond's point completely: trying to determine ultimate causes, not proximate ones. Why did the Europeans have interesting technology and ideas to exchange with each other in the first place? Simply put, you need an agrarian society with sufficient food surplus to promote specialization. Without that the mere presence of rivers is not magically going to result in technological innovation - and there are enough river systems in the Americas, for example, to counter such a hypothesis.

Diamond's thesis might seem simplistic to some - to this reader, a scientist by persuasion, on the contrary it is a relief to finally see Occam's Razor being wielded with such precision on a topic much muddied by the social "scientists". The objections raised regarding "other factors" sound similar to those always raised whenever a clean, self-contained and coherent scientific theory has been presented - and not surprisingly it is usually the non-scientists who tend to disagree with such theories, pecking away at them with irrelevant "counter-examples". (Witness the whole evolution "controversy".)

What is perhaps most surprising about the negative reviews is the claim that Diamond's book is discounting the achievements of European civilisations - this misses the whole raison d'etre for the book: Why did European societies become and achieve what they did? What was the ULTIMATE cause since at one point in time clearly no particular group had much of an intrinsic advantage over the other? One explanation of course is genetics which seems to becoming more and more laughable as most of the West's universities, research institutes, and tech companies are being more and more manned by non-whites. (Maybe all the Chinese, Indians and other groups mutated in the last 30 years?)

My suggestion to readers reading these reviews is simple: keep asking WHY? For each of the putative refutations of Diamond's book, the question "but why?" can be rather illuminating. That is precisely what this book does.

Rating:
Summary: Stimulating & thought-provoking.
Review: Try not to be put off by the title; yes, they do feature prominently in the book, but that is not the basic thrust of Mr. Diamond's excellent book.
This is more about how equally intelligent 'tribes' of the same species came to differ so greatly in their development, and ultimately why one faction now pulls the strings of the world.
To examine this in the correct perspective, Mr Diamond goes to the dawn of pre-history, asks the questions a child might ask, then attempts to answer them as convincingly as possible by drawing on the vast resources of available data and his own formidable intellect. Strangely, this doesn't result in a dry-as-dust treatise you might find in Nature journal, but in a highly enjoyable, thought-provoking read, illustrated by many little-known factual historical events. Many of the chapters did appear in Nature, as it happens, but the reasoned logic and step-by-step arguments make this as accessible and readable for the lay reader as the academic. The chapters on how and why our food came to be domesticated are particularly llluminating.
Naturally, in a book of such scope, there remain many unanswered questions, but surely this will stimulate much more debate and research - at the same time correcting some long-held racist dogma.
An excellent read. *****

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Summary: Comprehensive History of the origin of everybody
Review: Mr. Diamond is a very entertaining writer, and he is pretty smart to boot. This book is pretty ambitious - it attempts to explain why different populations turned out differently. I think he does a great job of outlining factors that contribute to the rise of major civilizations.

No granted, his analysis is not 100% accurate - it really couldn't be, given the breadth he is trying to tackle, but each chapter really gives you some stuff to chew on. Particularly interesting is the way different science fields all contribute to the understanding of how things started (e.g. how grains developed, animals and exinction, etc.).

Worth a read for anyone interesting in ultimate questions.

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Summary: Challenging but fascinating
Review: Jared Diamond has given an impressive account of why complex civilizations and technology emerged on the Eurasian continent rather than other locations. Noting that many earlier writers have suggested an innate superiority of the population, he argues persuasively that it was in fact an accident of geography. In essence, as Diamond shows with solid evidence, the earliest civilizations in the Fertile Crescent area (roughly Iraq and parts of Syria) enjoyed unique advantages due to a large number of easily domesticable plants and animals. Domestication of plants and animals spread out from Iraq to other areas both East and West, giving Eurasia a jump start in technology. Technology, population growth, and urbanization interacted and reinforced each other to produce the combination of guns, germs, and steel that ultimately resulted, about 9,000 years later, in Europeans conquering the rest of the world. Along the way, he offers provocative answers to questions such as why European diseases devastated the native populations of the Americas, Polynesia, and Australia, but no diseases from those regions did real damage to European settlers.

I should also note what this book is not, since negative reviewers here and elsewhere seem not to understand it. First, it isn't an explanation of why specifically Western European countries rose to global dominance. This topic is discussed only for a few pages, and only in the epilogue. And even then, the discussion is entirely a contrast of Western Europe vs China. Other outcomes that were at least hypothetically possible, such as global empires arising from India, Japan, or Korea, aren't even discussed, nor is the question of why England thrived for centuries as an imperial power while Spain, with wealthier conquests, rapidly became a hollow shell that merely looked like a powerful empire on the map.

It also isn't an argument that geography is destiny and culture is meaningless. Consider this passage from page 252: "Traditional New Guinea has conservative societies that resist new ways, living side by side with innovative societies that selectively adopt new ways. The result, with the arrival of Western technology, is that the most entreprenuerial societies are now exploiting Western technology to overwhelm their conservative neighbors.... The Chimbu tribe proved especially aggressive in adopting Western technology. When Chimbus saw white settlers planting coffee, they began growing coffee themselves as a cash crop.... In contrast, the Daribi, a neighboring highland people with whom I worked for eight years, are especially conservative and uninterested in new technology. When the first helicopter landed in the Daribi area, they just looked at it and went back to what they had been doing; the Chimbus would have been bargaining to charter it. As a result, Chimbus are now moving into the Daribi area, taking it over for plantations, and reducing the Daribi to working for them."

The above passage illustrates a point with an example from New Guinea. Diamond has lived for many years in New Guinea, performing research largely into bird populations, and has a clear fascination with the place. He starts the book with a question asked by a native New Guinean and a dedication to numerous Guinean friends; he returns there for discussion or examples in almost every chapter. Generally history on this global scale is written from a heavily Eurocentric or perhaps American perspective; Diamond's unique 'New Guineacentric' perspective adds to the appeal of the book.

"Guns, Germs, and Steel" is skillfully written. Certainly it isn't light reading, but it is hard to imagine how a study covering such a broad subject matter, and analyzing in comparable depth, could have been more readable. I strongly recommend this book.

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Summary: Answers to Yali
Review: Q:Yali:"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?"

A:Diamond:"The striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the peoples themselves but to differences in their environments."

That is a politically correct answer, yet if you read all of the evidence and arguments between the prologue and the epilogue where the question and answer are posed you'll be convinced by Professor Diamond's thesis. This 1997 book won several awards, most notably the Pulitzer in 1998. I was given this book by a grad student acquaintance in the Boston area, read it a half a dozen years ago. At the time, I was also studying the book of Daniel reading about how the world's first empires came to be so by conquest, in Daniel's case, conquering the tribes of Israel and deporting some of the vanquished to Babylon. This secular book added another dimension to my understanding of world history's dynamics in addition to a spiritual/prophetic one. I loved this book because it helped explain a lot of things, made me think.

I've always loved anthropology and this book builds on one of its tenets that societies' key to becoming complex ones was the development of agriculture. With a permanent food supply, population numbers increased, societies increasingly diversified their occupations one of which was waging war. In societies like Papua New Guinea, a small island near Australia, where Yali was a tribal chieftain, most of the inhabitants subsisted as hunter-gatherers not advancing to the next stage of developing agriculture. So knowing that already, I was given a grander view of the advancement of societies by reading this book. Although it's been years since I've read it, I still have the book, and learned many new things from Diamond's creative thinking. As to where he got all of his intellectual cargo, he was born in Boston, probably the most book-buying state of the Union, to a physician father, linguistics teacher mother, and went to school at Harvard and Cambridge. He now teaches Geography in addition to Physiology in California at UCLA.

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Summary: PC propaganda ad nauseum
Review: Had this garbage been written by Jesse Jackson himself, it could not contain more easily disproven racist propaganda. Diamond's primary contention is that white people and western society have gained cultural and social dominance not as a result of any will or abilities of their own, but as a by product of how many domesticable animals and the variety of plant life that make up their environment. While other less fortunate societies didn't have these "luxuries" to take advantage of. Uh, excuse me, it doesn't take a genius to realize the botanical and zoological superiority of Africa for example. Off the top of my head, I can list several potentially demosticle species of large animals in Africa, Asia and Australia. How many can you think of in Europe? The really sad thing is, judging by its popularity and years on the bestseller lists, people are eating this stuff up. This guy obviously hates himself or has spent a little too much time in that New Guinea sun. This type of, I hate to say it, liberal drivel is sickening. There are explanations out there for why western society dominates that actually make sense. Guns, Germs, and Steel isn't one of them.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Mr. Diamond seems to have written this book as a means of refuting the old theories about non-Europeans being backward, and in a classic case of political correctness, he actually argues that the inhabitants of New Guinea are more intelligent than their European counterparts. (Yes, New Guinea--the same country in which cannibalism is believed to still go on in some areas.) Here's the gist of the author's argument: Europe's dominance of the world was almost solely an accident of geography; Europe had more natural resources (both plant and animal) than any other continent, and even people stupider than New Guineans couldn't have screwed it up.

While there is no doubt that Europe has been blessed with a favorable climate, good soils and plentiful wildlife, the same can be said for many other regions (such as North America, Australia and even West Africa), and Diamond's attempt to explain the difference between them left me unconvinced. Diamond's theory also completely fails to explain the success of Japan--a country that possesses few natural resources. In short, this is a classic case of a guy using selective data to prove a questionable point. Probably not worth your money.

Rating:
Summary: Solid writing, solid logic.
Review: This is a great read, so long as you don't get bored by detail (I don't!). The author is very capable of taking a seemingly boring topic, and creating an entire book around it.
To any person who thinks human variables trump geography and other environmental variables, it important to remember that without the geography to creates the environment that people operate in. I know it sounds stupidly simple, but think about it. One person could not dominate Europe for a great period of time, because of Europe's geography. One person could, however, control all of China, because of China's geography. Thus, without the geography to create the environment, there is no way for any one person to affect the future of the continent.

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Summary: I prefer Diamond's new book, Collapse.
Review: I prefer Diamond's sweeping new book, Collapse. It's much less "academic" yet it conveys many of the same ideas. In Collapse, Diamond sketches out the path of cataclysm. Environmental harm, climate alteration, fast population growth, and imprudent political choices were all factors in the ruin of some societies, but other societies found solutions and are surviving. Similar troubles face us today and have already brought calamity to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to muddle through in ground-breaking ways. Despite our own society's apparently limitless possessions and unequaled political power, portentous warning signs have begun to come into sight even in ecologically strong areas like Montana. This is an important book that raises many important questions. Every concerned person should read it.