261116: popular anthropology/archaeology/geography with the grand narrative thesis going back 11 000 years, the central tenet being that all societies have developed according mostly to their environment, rather than biological characteristics of native population. easy to read, easy argument to follow, useful corrective to the usual great man idea of history, or the racist, ethnocentric, political, interpretation of history. somewhat a modernist theory- just different causal foci (environment rather than economics in marx, for example)- with a lot of collaborating info. but no soundtrack...

Germ Guns & Steel

It is a thesis,
His thesis being; that all animals are created equal… but not all animals sleep in a bed with sheets.
Why?
Because in addition to needing tree for wood to make looms, herders to shear sheep & weavers to make sheets, you also need (DHU) SHEEP.
Yep, if you are unlucky enough to be born on a continent or onto part of a continent with only anteaters, there is no fucking way you are going to get sheets, no matter how smart you are.
All well and good…but not so very readable...
We all believe that. Or want to believe it. Or pretend we want to believe it and it’s nice to have such a dry, logical explanation.
Oh some of his facts are interesting, (like the spread of animal to human diseases. In fact I ran right out and made my next store neighbor stop suckling her piglets!)
But generally his writing is like his name, Diamond, hard, cold & brilliant, but not particularly gripping.
Now Pollan (Botany of Desire,) not only has a more gripping style, but, to my mind at least a much more unique and interesting premise.
OK so the idea of Co evolution is not new... But the idea that we humans are involved, not just as manipulators but as part of the co in co evolution is an idea.. An idea that disturbs…
Some Physicists & chemists are not unlike religious folks, They believe man is the measure of all things.. All right, maybe not man, but chemists & physicists.
They believe that all is knowable & that we will eventually know it. (Or rather they will, they tell us the bits we need.)
So they can read Germs , Guns & Steel.. But they can’t even get through the prologue of Botany of Desire.
OK I’m talking about 2 of the 3 physicists I know… Not I grant you a large sample.
But I was reading the biography of Wilson the noble prize winning Harvard ant-omoglist (Myrmecologist) & even he talks about the great war between biologists & micro-biologists. They wouldn’t even talk to each other unless it was to say
“So where did you get your research from… Reader’s Digest”? Ugly, ugly, ugly.

So either there is co- evolution.. Which we sort of get, but can’t totally understand… or God is sitting in heaven designing flowers to look like bee genitalia


Jared Diamond, who has his own Pulitzer for Guns, Germs And Steel, described (Wilson) as "one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers."
I have my own issues with E.O. Wilson, not the charges of racism, misogyny & eugenics, which I believe were unfounded, but with his early scientific experiments.
He wanted to create a “living lab.” To investigate how far, fast & wide evolution would spread insect & crustacea life to islands.
So he took some tiny islets in the Everglades and doused them with Malathion, exterminating the entire insect & crustacean population. Crustacean…so it must have gotten into the water.
Now that’s what I call killing the horse before the cart

Çevremde gördüğüm kadarıyla peynir ekmek gibi satılan, alınıp kitaplığa süs olarak konulan ama pek de okunmayan kitaplardan birisi. Genelde video ya da fotoğraflarda arkadaki kitaplığa ön yüzü bakar şekilde konulma işlevi var. :) Tübitak baskısından okudum. Vakti zamanında Tübitak Yayınları bilimsel kitaplar için bulunmaz nimetti. Şimdi etliye sütlüye dokunmadan çocuk kitapları basan bir yayınevine dönüştü. Neyse konuya dönelim.
Kitabı tarım devrimi ve devletlerin ortaya çıkması üzerine yaptığım araştırma için tekrar hızlıca okudum. Özellikle hırsızkrasi ya da kleptokrasi olarak adlandırdığı merkezi devlet organizasyonunun anlatıldığı bölümden çok yararlandım. Yazmakta olduğum yeni kitabımda araştırdığım önemli bir konu da devletlerin ortaya çıkışıydı. Diamond özellikle “kalabalık-karmaşık toplumlarda alt tabakadan kaymak tabakaya bu kadar fazla refah aktarılmasına rağmen hırsızlar nasıl başarılı olabiliyorlar?” sorusunu sormuş. Bu soru bana çok tartışılan tüfek, mikrop ve çelik konusundan daha da ilginç geldi. Eğer televizyon gazete okuyup yahu niye insanlar bazı gerçekleri görmüyor diye kafa kırıyorsanız bu bölümü tekrar tekrar okumanızı tavsiye ederim. Televizyonu kapatıp pencerenizi açın, derin bir nefes alın ve zihinsel değişimlerin yıllar değil yüzlerce yılda meydana geldiğini hatırlayın. Kısacası bir şeyler değişecek ama muhtemelen biz görmeyeceğiz.

Not:
Jared Diamond ya da Yuval Noah Harari kitaplarını Türkiye’de yazabilir miydiler? Yazsalar da bastırabilir miydiler? Muhtemelen yazdıklarını yayınevlerine satılmayacağı düşüncesiyle kabul ettiremezlerdi.
Muhtemelen yayınevini arayan Jared Diamon’a editörler hocam kağıt fiyatları çok arttı basım maliyetleri arttı diye dert yanarlardı. Peki o kitabı yazanın emek ve birikiminin bir maliyeti yok mu. Yok malesef. Kimse bunun adını bile anmıyor.

I will say this: he makes some interesting points about geographical and geological determinism and the potential validity thereof. Everything else, however, is basically shit. The Pulitzer this book got must have been the world's biggest and most expensive A for effort.

Diamond writes in his introduction that a multi-discipline effort "would be doomed from the outset, because the essence of the problem is to develop a unified synthesis. That consideration dictates single authorship, despite all the difficulties it poses." He does go on to mention "guidance from many colleagues," but even so this makes no goddamn sense (p. 26). It is actually possible to find people across disciplines who agree on a single theory - like, say, gravity. I'm using theory in the scientific sense here, where the fact of gravity's existence is obvious but there needs to be a framework of mechanical explanation - and this framework has the potential to be proven wrong. That doesn't change the fact of gravity's existence, it just means that one person's (or several people's) proposed explanation of its mechanics was misconceived. You can see similar approaches in the field of history. What this boils down to is, Diamond is saying right in the bloody introduction to the whole book that he was the only one who could do this glorious project and he didn't want to bring other people in because they might not agree with every single thing he's saying. GOD FORBID.

This book would have benefited from multiple authorship, particularly a partnership with someone who had some actual experience with historical research and thinking, because the incessant lazy errors are impressively offensive - Diamond keeps predicating his argument on such and such historical facts, but the facts he's using are flawed and wrong. Take his chapter on the Spanish invasion of the Americas. First off, he calls the indigenous naive like the extinct megafauna of the previous chapter - I'm not kidding, he uses that exact word and that exact comparison to animals; for somebody who's so avowedly anti-racist that's a fucking awful rhetorical tactic - but the academic offense is that his primary sources for the capture of Inca leader Atahuallapa are, as far as I can tell, Spanish letters to the king and Spanish personal journals. That's it. (Nothing is properly cited in this book, which is another cringe point.) Even a high school student could tell you that you should use and cite primary sources from multiple sides of an event, cite your secondary sources, and use some goddamn critical thinking. If you look at the Inca sources, sure there's some conflicting accounts - same goes for the Spanish - but what's obvious is that they weren't naive. Diamond asserts that Atahuallpa had bad information and it was an obvious trap supported by the advantages of Spanish literacy, but if you look at all the sources the situation is more that he had the right information but chose to be diplomatic in the Incan tradition. Pizarro was just a dick. (Diamond is right about the significance of germs, but that part's a gimme.)

There are a lot of fundamentally flawed arguments like that - e.g. pre-invasion indigenous people on the coast of Australia being described as totally isolated even though the historical record shows them as being brilliant sailors and the numerous islands between Australia and the Asian mainland are reachable by walking in places, or talking about the easy dispersal of animals/crops across a continental "axis" of north/south or east/west despite huge mountain ranges and climate differences across the terrain like in Asia - and his broader assertions are also seriously problematic. Like when he's discussing the supposed advantages of the written word (completely dismissive of pictographs and no mention of signed languages, of course) he name-checks Chinese and Japanese but otherwise devotes his syllabic-complexity argument to Roman-alphabet languages. Which, no. Focusing on the languages that are easiest for you to understand is far from persuasive. (To say nothing of the historical errors in that chapter as well.) And then there's smaller things like the series of photographs of people, all not white and mostly wearing indigenous clothing and unsmiling expressions, which is totally unnecessary - if Diamond's "objection to such racist explanations [of sociocultural differences vis-a-vis a western capitalist definition of success] are is not just that they are loathsome, but also that they are wrong," then what the fuck are these pictures doing in here (p. 19)? Why does it matter what these oh so poor, less successful people look like? Jesus christ.

I could go on and discuss the further problem of his trying to fit history into a science framework, when the two have different approaches for a reason - which is, of course, not to say that the philosophies and conclusions of one can't support the other - but I think the point of Diamond's colossal hubris and scholarly failure has been sufficiently made for this review. (There are critical essays by people more professionally accomplished and generally articulate than myself out there.)

Is this the worst book ever? No. But it's still a fucking waste of space.

A refreshingly different approach to the theses on the evolutionary history of cultures.

Please note that I put the original German text at the end of this review. Just if you might be interested.

Those are revolutionary theories that open themselves up to the reader, and that wipe the floor with old, racist concepts about the emergence of advanced civilizations and states. Using indisputable geographical and biological facts, the author provides a viewpoint that would have opened up only to the most creative minds without such explanation.
Due to the size and the partial length of the work, I would recommend budding non-fiction fetishists to sharpen their view of the partly autobiographical colored inserts and dry statistical or very specialized remarks. In case of lack of time or discomfort, read them over and enjoy the fillets even better. It may, of course, be appreciated the entire menu, only the lengths will give my well-intentioned advice probably one or the other time right. Especially with such excellent literature as the present one, it would be a shame if the reading experience is diminished or in the worst case even prematurely ended.
In addition to the actual flora and fauna of the various described regions of the world, the West-East or North-South axis is the decisive factor for the rise and fall of the peoples as a primary geological fate. The luck or bad luck with well-domesticated animals or due to exceptional stubbornness for the livestock utterly unsuitable representatives of the herbivores or productive, resistant or little throwing off, sensitive plants plays another critical role.
Looking at the continents, only in Eurasia does the West-East axis lie at about the same latitude and in similar climates, which significantly facilitates the exchange of plants and animals via trade routes, since they find much better survival conditions in similar environments than if they would be transported across a north-south axis from Norway to South Africa or from Chile to Canada. This greatly facilitated the transition to agriculture and livestock farming and the associated opportunity to feed specialists such as artisans, warriors and scientists through surplus food and jump on the train to the big state.
In contrast to the natural conditions that exist on Earth, the effects on the environment are not negligible. In Latin America and other countries, these plants are relatively sensitive. Moreover, even if that were not so, an exchange which goes beyond the different climates, may work or not. In Africa are incredibly many areas as well as tropical jungle or dry savanna not so recommended for animal transport. It is similar in Latin America, though not so extreme.
This is also a military event, but not as good as it used to be in the past. As the author so genuinely quotes, only a more benevolent nature of bison or rhinos would have been enough to change the course of world history. If Huns and Mongols were able to build world empires on pure horses, compared to the potential and much more robust mounts of the South, the military possibility of up to nearly one ton of massive bison and over three tons of rhinos would have been far more resounding. Imagine these animals in their thousands and the style of a paladin horse armored with a hail of arrows whirling riders.
From the meticulous descriptions of various facts, there are still multiple ideas for alternative world history that could not be more beautiful, since they are based on verifiable basics, unlike far-fetched, improbable conjectures and doctrines.
The author rightly deserves the reputation of being a top-notch science writer, and not just because of his impressive work so far. However, also and primarily for the series of hammer blows, which he sends down on the incarnate anachronisms long ago to be sent by a paradigm shift in the intellectual nirvana, representative of his guild, which has little to counter to his revolutionary thinking approach. Besides anyone from the university, there are still many guts to hallucinate something of cultural superiority or other racial, verbal diarrhea.

Eine erfrischend andere Herangehensweise an die Thesenbildung über die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Kulturen.

Revolutionäre Theorien sind es, die sich dem Leser auftun und die mit alten, rassistischen Konzepten über die Entstehung von Hochkulturen und Staaten den Boden aufwischen. Anhand unabstreitbarer geografischer und biologischer Fakten ermöglicht der Autor eine Sichtweise, die sich nur den kreativsten Köpfen ohne derartige Erläuterung eröffnet hätte.
Aufgrund des Umfangs und der teilweisen Länge des Werks würde ich angehenden Sachbuchfetischisten empfehlen, den Blick für die teilweise autobiografisch gefärbten Einschübe und trockenen statistischen, beziehungsweise sehr fachbezogenen Ausführungen zu schärfen. Um diese bei Zeitmangel oder Unlust überlesen und die Filetstücke dafür noch umso besser genießen zu können. Es darf selbstverständlich auch das gesamte Menü genossen werden, nur die Längen werden meinem gutgemeinten Rat wohl das eine oder andere Mal Recht geben. Gerade bei so hervorragender Literatur wie der vorliegenden wäre es eine Schande, wenn das Leseerlebnis dadurch geschmälert oder im schlimmsten Fall gar vorzeitig beendet wird.
Neben der eigentlichen Flora und Fauna der verschiedenen beschriebenen Weltgegenden bildet als primäre geologische Schicksalsinstanz die West-Ost- beziehungsweise Nord- Südachse den entscheidenden Faktor über Aufstieg und Fall der Völker. Das Glück oder Pech mit gut domestizierbaren Tieren oder aufgrund großer Halsstarrigkeit zur Viehzucht absolut ungeeigneten Vertretern der Herbivoren beziehungsweise ertragreichen, widerstandsfähigen oder wenig abwerfenden, empfindlichen Pflanzen spielt eine weitere wichtige Rolle.
Betrachtet man sich die Kontinente, so ergibt sich einzig in Eurasien eine auf etwa den gleichen Breitengraden und ähnlichen Klimazonen gelegene West-Ostachse, die den Austausch von Pflanzen und Tieren über Handelsrouten wesentlich erleichtert, da diese in ähnlichen Umgebungen wesentlich bessere Überlebensbedingungen vorfinden, als wenn man sie über eine Nord- Südachse von Norwegen nach Südafrika oder von Chile nach Kanada transportieren würde. Dadurch wurde der Übergang zu Ackerbau und Viehzucht sowie die damit einhergehende Möglichkeit, durch Überschuss an Nahrung Spezialisten wie Handwerker, Krieger und Wissenschaftler zu ernähren und auf den Zug zum Großstaat aufzuspringen, wesentlich erleichtert.
Als wäre das nicht genug der von der Natur vorgegebenen Ungerechtigkeit, befinden sich auch noch die meisten der ertragreichsten Saatpflanzen und Nutztiere im eurasischen Raum, während selbige auf anderen Kontinenten rar gesät sind. In Lateinamerika sowie Afrika sind sowohl gut für den Hausgebrauch geeignete Großsäuger als auch ertragreiche Pflanzensorten relativ selten. Und selbst wenn dem nicht so gewesen wäre, hätte ein Austausch über die verschiedenen Klimazonen hinweg kaum funktionieren können.
So sind in Afrika sowohl extrem aride Gebiete als auch tropische Dschungel oder schlichte Savanne für keinen Tiertransport zu empfehlende Routenpunkte und auch den Pflanzen dürfte es übel bekommen. In Lateinamerika verhält es sich ähnlich, wenn auch nicht ganz so extrem. Dass sich das militärisch einst unersetzliche Pferd auch noch just der südlichen Hemisphäre entsagen musste war ein weiterer wesentlicher Nachteil.
Wie der Autor so treffend anführt, hätte nur ein gutmütigeres Wesen von Bisons oder Nashörnern vonnöten sein müssen, um den Lauf der gesamten Weltgeschichte zu verändern. Wenn Hunnenheere und Mongolen auf, im Vergleich zu den potentiellen und wesentlich robusteren Reittieren des Südens, schlichten Pferden Weltreiche errichten konnten, wäre das kriegerische Potential von bis zu fast einer Tonne schweren Bisons und bis zu über drei Tonnen schweren Nashörnern noch wesentlich durchschlagender gewesen. Man stelle sich diese Tiere zu Tausenden und im Stil eines Paladinpferds gepanzert mit Pfeilhagel schwirren lassenden Reitern vor.
Es erschließen sich anhand der minutiösen Schilderungen verschiedener Sachverhalte noch diverse Ideen für Uchronien, die schöner nicht sein könnten, da sie im Gegensatz zu weit hergeholten, unwahrscheinlichen Vermutungen und Lehrmeinungen auf nachweisbaren Grundlagen beruhen.
Dem Autor gebührt, nicht nur aufgrund seines beeindruckenden bisherigen Werks, zu Recht der Ruf eines Wissenschaftsautors der Spitzenklasse. Sondern auch und gerade für die Serie an Hammerschlägen, die er auf die, als fleischgewordene Anachronismen längst durch einen Paradigmenwechsel in das intellektuelle Nirwana zu schickenden, Vertreter seiner Zunft niederprasseln lässt, die seinen Denkansetzen wenig entgegenzusetzen haben. Außer irgendjemand aus dem Universitätsbetrieb entblödet sich wirklich noch, etwas von kultureller Überlegenheit oder anderer rassistischer, verbaler Diarrhöe zu halluzinieren.

In 1532, Francisco Pizarro and a band of 168 Spaniards punctured the heart of the Inca Empire and proceeded to capture its emperor, decimate its citizens, and plunder its gold. Why didn’t it happen the other way around? Why didn't the Incas sail to Europe, capture Charles V, kill his subjects, and loot his castles and cathedrals? Jared Diamond attempts to answer this question in Guns, Germs & Steel.

Why have Europeans tended to dominate other peoples on other continents? Does it have something to do with race? Were Europeans cleverer than other races? Diamond says no. It wasn't racial characteristics that tipped the scales of fortune for the Europeans; it was their geography. Their geography gave them access to the best domestic grains and animals, which led to specialization and advanced technologies like steel and guns. Their domestic animals also helped them develop potent germs, and the antibodies for those germs.

The importance Diamond lays at the hoofs and paws of domesticated animals is, in fact, one of the fascinating themes of the book. According to Diamond, our animals have played an uncanny role in our cultural and economic development, both in a negative sense (human contact with farm animals facilitated the germ-exchange that produced man’s deadliest diseases) and in a positive sense (men from the Russian steppes, riding their newly domesticated horses, spread the Indo-European language both westward into Europe and southeastward into Persia and India). Diamond's point is that people living in areas with more domesticable animals (sheep, cattle, pigs, horses, etc.) gained an important advantage over people without them.

For example, Native Americans had only three domesticated animals before 1492: llamas, turkeys, and dogs. Why only three? Weren’t there wild horses and cattle in America too? Actually, fossil records show huge populations of horses, oxen, and millions of other large mammals in the Americas until about 11,000 BC. What happened around 11,000 BC? You guessed it: man showed up via the Bering Strait. The American horses, oxen and other large mammals, having never experienced a human predator, approached the new arrivals like slobbering puppy dogs, and were consequently turned into steaks. In fact, it was steaks every night for a couple thousand years for the new immigrants, until most of the continents’ large mammals— and all but one suitable candidate for domestication— were wiped out.

Now this is fascinating enough, but then consider that because the Native Americans didn't have any horses, oxen, pigs, etc. left to exploit as beasts of burden and domesticated food sources, they also lost the civilizational benefits those animals would have brought (and did bring to Eurasians), not the least of which is germs. Yes, germs. Because the Native Americans didn't live in close proximity to a plethora of "farm animals" like their counterparts in Eurasia, they lacked the "petri dish" wherein deadly germs could grow and proliferate. They thus failed to develop the infectious diseases and (more importantly) the antibodies to those diseases that might have protected them from the germs of invading Europeans when Señor Columbus and his crew showed up.

It was for this reason that when the Conquistadores did finally show up, they were able to wipe out 80% of the indigenous population before ever unsheathing their swords— with germs— with small pox and influenza, both diseases generated by the passing back and forth of germs between domesticated animals and their human caretakers (small pox between cattle and humans, and influenza between pigs and ducks and humans). If that doesn't blow your mind, your mind is blowproof.

Then again, you may well ask: “What about moose and bison? Why didn’t Cortés and his boys float up to the Mexican shoreline and find a bloodthirsty cavalry of Aztecs on mooseback, energized by the milk and meat of their plentiful herds of bison?” Diamond surmises that by the time most the large mammals in America had been digested into extinction by their hungry human friends, there was only one suitable candidate left for domestication: the llama/alpaca. Every other large mammal that remained (including moose and bison) lacked the qualities that allow for domestication.

In all of human history only 14 large mammals have ever been domesticated: sheep, goat, cattle, pigs, horses, camels (Arabian and Bactrian), llamas, donkeys, reindeer, water buffalo, yaks, and two minor relatives of cattle in southeast Asia called Bali cattle and mithrans. Outside of these, no other large mammals have been transformed from wild animals into something useful to humans. Why? Why were Eurasia's horses domesticated and not Africa's zebras? Why were Eurasia's wild boar domesticated and not America's peccaries or Africa's wild pigs? Why were Eurasia's five species of wild cattle (aurochs, water buffalo, yaks, bantengs, and gaurs) domesticated and not Africa's water buffalo or America's bison? Why the Asian mouflon sheep (the ancestor of our sheep) and not the American bighorn sheep?

The answer is simple: we tried and it didn't work. Since 2500 BC not one new large mammal (out of the 148 worldwide candidates) has been domesticated, and not for lack of trying. In fact, in the last 200 years, at least six large mammals have been subject to well-organized domestication projects: the eland, elk, moose, musk ox, zebra, and American bison. All six failed. Why? Because of one or more of the following problems: diet, slow growth rate, nasty disposition, tendency to panic, captive breeding problems, and/or social structure.

Diet: Why don't we eat lion burgers? Because raising lions, or any other carnivore, is uneconomical. You need 10,000 lbs of feed to grow a 1,000 lb cow. You would likewise need 10,000 lbs of cow to grow 1,000 pounds of lion. That means you’d need 100,000 lbs of feed to produce 1,000 pounds of lion. Hence the lack of lion burgers on the Wendy’s drive-thru menu.

Growth rate: Why don't we eat rhino burgers? Simple, it takes 15-20 years for a rhino to reach adult size while it only takes cows a couple.

Nasty disposition: Here's where we eliminate zebra burgers, hippo burgers, grizzly burgers and bison burgers. These animals retain their nasty and dangerous tempers even after several generations of captive breeding. Did you know zebras injure more zookeepers per year than do lions and tigers?

Tendency to panic: No deer or gazelle burgers either. Why? Because they take flight at the first sign of danger and will literally kill themselves running into a fence over and over to escape the threat.

Captive breeding problems: Many animals have elaborate breeding rituals that can't happen in captivity.

Social structure: This may be the most important requirement for domesticates. The best candidates for domestication live in herds, maintain a clear herd hierarchy, and overlap ranges with other herds rather than having exclusive ranges. Here humans just take over the top of the hierarchy. They literally become the herd leader (think “Dog Whisperer”).

So the reason European explorers didn't find Native American ranchers with herds of bison and bighorn sheep is because these animals can’t be domesticated. Diamond contends that if there had been any horses left in the Americas, or any of the other 13 candidates for domestication, the Native Americans surely would have domesticated them, and reaped all the attendant benefits. But alas, their great-great-grandpas had already killed, grilled and digested them all.

Diamond's book is a great read. If you're a student of history, it’s a must read. The way I see it, the story of man (and the story of all things, for that matter) is the story of varied states of disequilibrium moving violently and inexorably toward equilibrium. What was Pizarro's vanquishing of Atahualpa's empire if not an example of such violent re-balancing? The beauty of Diamond's book is that it seems to pinpoint, with surprising simplicity, the original source of disequilibrium among men: geography. Roughly put, some got born in the right place and some didn’t. Skin color had nothing to do with it. Race has always been nothing more than an arbitrary mark to show the geographical birthplace of one's ancestors'.

By the way, if you do read this book, take note of the way we humans first discovered agriculture. According to Diamond, it happened at the latrine. We'd go out gathering seeds, eating some along the way, and then come back to camp and defecate, all in the same spot. Guess what started growing in that spot? Yes, my friends, as crude as it may sound, we humans shat are way to civilization. Thank your ass when you get a chance.

My three-star rating has nothing to do with the quality of the ideas in this book; I think they're all top-notch. My lukewarm response has to do instead with their presentation.

Jared Diamond's prose is very readable but prolix. How, one might ask, could I find prolix a book which purports to condense the entire history of humankind into 425 pages? (As Diamond himself points out, compressing 13,000 years of history into roughly 400 pages works out to "an average of about one page per continent per 150 years, making brevity and simplification inevitable" (408). My answer is simply that Diamond does not actually condense 13,000 years of human history into 425 pages but rather picks and chooses which years with which corresponding phenomena on which continents are most relevant to his thesis. In order to prove that "history followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people's environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves" (25), Diamond traces the domestication of plants and animals, the origins of agriculture, the emergence of crowd diseases such as Bubonic Plague and measles, the rise and spread of techological innovations like metallurgy and writing, and the seemingly autocatalytic process that promotes the development of large complex political entities from small, less complex ones. But "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is not a comprehensive treatment of the Black Death any more than it is a primer for understanding the development of metallurgy. In other words, he skips a lot, which I agree is inevitable; however, my beef is that in addition to skipping a lot, he repeats himself a lot, in effect writing a book that is not so much too long or too short as it is inefficient--prolix.

Diamond states the same ideas over and over again, and he always articulates BOTH the affirmative and the negative formulations, seldom omitting words that really could be ommitted without interfering with itelligibility: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people's environments, NOT because of biological differences among peoples themselves" (25); "the availability of domestic plants and animals ultimately explains why empires, literacy, and steel weapons developed earliest in Eurasia AND later, or not at all, on other continents" (92); "the reason for the failure of Native Americans to domesticate North American apples by the time Europeans arrived lay neither with the people nor with the apples....INSTEAD, the reason Native Americans did not domesticate apples lay with the entire suite of wild plant and animal species available to Native Americans" (156). While I agree that such a writing style is very clear and understandable (readable), surely after the first articulation of each idea and component, bolstering idea, Diamond could speed things up a bit?

But no, in fact, his 18th chapter (the penultimate chapter, not including epilogue, and entitled "Hemispheres Colliding") is an entirely redundant reformulation of ideas previously articulated, often referencing the exact same examples already referenced. This is evidenced by Diamond's tendency to include phrases like "in Chapter 9 we encountered," "as I explained in Chapter 11," and "as we saw in Chapters 5 and 10..." This, along with his tendency to provide overview (as in the Prologue: "Part 4...applies the lessons of Parts 2 and 3") as well as suggestions like "if we begin by comparing Figure 19.2 with Figure 19.1..." that contribute to the unfortunate impression on the part of the reader that he/she is reading the incomplete novelization of a textbook--a hitherto unknown literary hybrid.

This is not to say that Diamond has not ultimately provided a service to humanity by writing "Guns, Germs, and Steel" or that his arguments are unconvincing or that he never provides us with an arresting phrase or that the book is devoid of colorful and illustrative anecdotes. The very basis for the book rests in a personal experience of Diamond's in New Guinea in 1972 ("Yali's Question"); and I especially like the phraseology of the final sentence of Chapter 19, "...the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate." And one certainly cannot fail to be struck by the originality of some of his ideas, such as the orientation of the continents' major axes (East-West vs. North-South) having played a greater role in the differences between human societies than we have previously recognized. Overall, this book is very accomplished and worth reading.

However, Diamond gradually chips away at the various misconceptions, errors, and prejudgments that cloud our understanding of human prehistory and history in the manner of a slow-moving stream or a very patient archaeologist. Maybe he imagines that this gradual approach is necessary for changing slow-moving or simply out-of-touch minds in which repetition might accomplish what erudition might not, though I really can't imagine such individuals, let alone the genuine racists whose views Diamond is avowedly rebutting making it through the book. But really (to borrow a page out of Diamond's intellectual repertoire), I believe this book could be intellectually stronger, aesthetically superior, and ultimately more influential if Diamond repeated himself less while articulating more.

This book contains all the good stuff that a scientific approach can provide to the fundamental issues of life and history. Diamond puts all his cards on the table, presents his method of reasoning in a very clear way, clearly defines his starting-point questions, tests the hypotheses on his study object and weighs the value of his findings. This is like science should always be: clear, open and honest.

Diamond is wondering where the dominance of the Eurasian continent in world history is coming from. In essence, his assertion is that Eurasia had a clear comparative advantage over other continents due to a number of geographical, biological and environmental factors: it was much larger in scope, it had more plants and animals suitable for domestication, and the East-West orientation of the continent (without too many geographical barriers) made the spread and confrontation of ideas, technologies and germs more easily.

Diamond's argumentation is strong and cannot be wiped off the table. But his angle should better not be regarded as the only one: Diamond rightfully is endorsed by its critics as a geographic-ecological determinist. I would like to refer to the very interesting discussion between William H. McNeill, the nestor of World History (and my all-time favorite historian) and Diamond in the New York Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/...- Upside-down) and the more balanced follow-up by McNeill's son JR McNeill (The History Teacher Vol. 34, No. 2 ,Feb., 2001), pp. 165-174).

The weakness of Diamond's approach is especially clear when you focus on the past 500 years and you wonder why specifically the Europeans, on the western side of Eurasia, took the upper hand on the eastern Asian side. Diamond's arguments on this evolution remain inadequate, especially because to me cultural factors were absolutely decisive in this period.

This fascinating discussion has developed in what became known as the "Great Divergence"-issue. About the same time as Diamond’s “Gun, Germs…” David Landes published his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, with a rather provocative different approach, highlighting Western inventiveness. This triggered a whole series of corrective studies (Kenneth Pomeranz, John Gunder Frank, John Darwin, ...), and it seems that we can now go for the synthesis, even though a debate like this will never stop completely. Diamond has put on the fire with this book, and despite its flaws we ought to be grateful to him.

A Game Changer: The First Book of Historical Anthropology that Incorporates Geography, Agriculture, Animal Domestication, and Disease Exposure into Our Understanding of How Different Cultures and Continents Experienced Differing Rates of Development, and the Dramatic Clashes When Such Cultures Collided
This book will demolish your preconceived notions about why some civilizations and peoples have thrived, while others have not. Diamond explores the key role that environments and geography play in shaping different cultures, and the ultimate factors that affect cultures most, like: availability of domesticable plants and animals, shift from hunter-gatherers to farmers, ease of population movement due to geography, north-south vs. east-west axes of the continents, exposure to various animal-born diseases and resultant immunity, development of writing and metal-working, etc. His carefully-laid argument builds a compelling case that many societies have benefited greatly from their environment, and that their success is not necessarily due to an innate superiority. The implication too is that cultures that currently dominate the global scene may not always retain that position if they destroy their environments, an idea that is more fully explored in his next book Collapse.

I first read this book back in 2013 and it really opened my mind to seeing history and cultures and development through the lens of geographical factors. Needless to say one of the fundamental reasons Jared Diamond wrote it was to dispel the centuries-long belief that much of the dominance of advanced Western societies stems from racial/genetic superiority rather than environmental factors. This time I'm revisiting it via audiobook in 2020 with a lot more books of historical anthropology under my belt, and it remains a real powerhouse book of fresh ideas.

That is not to discredit the many discoveries, innovations, and efforts of Western civilization over the millennia, but rather to bring a more balanced view of the world, reminding us of the many early technological innovations that arose in China, the advanced pre-industrial societies of the Americas such as the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans, the early societies of the Fertile Crescent, and so forth. His arguments are so lucidly developed and well-argued that you might be led to believe that it was only these environmental factors that explain why some cultures thrived and become dominant in the modern world while others did not. This would be inaccurate of course.

There are many "ultimate" factors that supersede the "proximate" factors, such as the focus of industrial Western societies on innovation, technological advancement, rule of law, focus on scientific reasoning over religious dogma, acceptance of cultural and ideological diversity, and the constant drive for growth and expansion spurred by capitalism, whether for good or bad. So there are plenty of nay-sayers that discount much of Diamond's arguments. I think that is missing the point. He is not providing the all-encompassing answers to why some societies thrive while others struggle in the modern world. Rather, he's trying to redress the underlying preconceptions of racial/cultural superiority that have prevailed until now so that we can reassess things from a much balanced perspective. It's the starting point for further analysis of why the world has developed the way it has, and more importantly (as he addresses in more recent books), how we can shape future developments in a more sustainable way given that understanding.

This book explains why some countries became more powerful than others.

The author says that it had to do with things like geography and the environment.

Some places had more animals and plants to help people to survive and made them stronger.

Other places did not have as much so they struggled more.

This book is interesting and helps us to understand more history and geography about 13,000 years in the world.

The author, Jared Diamond provides a fresh and insightful perspective on history and social science, making it a must-read for anyone interested in these subjects especially me.

برخلاف آن چه نژادپرست های سفیدپوست می پندارند، استعمار آفریقا توسط اروپا هیچ ارتباطی به تفاوت های میان خود مردم اروپا و آفریقا ندارد. در عوض ،این امر ناشی از تصادف های جغرافیایی و زیست جغرافیایی- به طور خاص ناشی از تفاوت در مساحت، محور جغرافیایی و مجموعه ی گونه های گیاهان و حیوانات وحشی- است. به بیان دیگر، مسیرهای تاریخی متفاوت آفریقا و اروپا در نهایت از تفاوت در دارایی منقول آن ها ناشی شده است

The Purist

I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, "He never bungles!"
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
"You mean," he said, "a crocodile."

That bit of Ogden Nash whimsy came into my head as I thought about Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, a reflection on human history through the lens of evolutionary biology. Diamond, unlike Professor Twist, is seeking answers to real world problems. In this case, he seeks to understand the plight of indigenous peoples and their subordination to European and Asian cultures in light of evolutionary pressures. Even so, Diamond seems awkward in his attempts to justify the ways of the Blind Watchmaker to men as so. One false note comes early in the book, when he departs from his evenhandedness to assure us that not only should we not hold New Guineans to be less intellectually endowed than Europeans (a reasonable enough assumption), but that they are probably intellectually superior. He admits that he can't demonstrate that superiority empirically, so that assertion strikes the reader as an attempt to curry favor by a politically correct reverse bias.

On the other hand, there's a lot of really stimulating and interesting stuff in this book. Diamond talks about: what kinds of foodstuffs are necessary to support civilization; why disease almost always flowed from native Europeans to native Americans (and not vice-versa), whereas Europeans encounter many new diseases when they attempted to enter Africa; why those previous two topics are related; how innovation happens; etc. It seems like there's an interesting fact or point of view whenever you turn the page.

The book seeks a complete explanation for the course of human history. It has that sort of broad, sweeping intellectual appeal that a hefty work of philosophy or science has. For example, after someone learns Newtonian mechanics, he tends to see the entire universe as the interplay between physical forces that are expressed in terms of differential equations. A similar dynamic happens here, where the reader suddenly sees commonplaces in a new light.

As with most grand theories, it's important to see that there are some important limits to the analysis. While we can see why, in broad strokes, European and Asian peoples might have overwhelming advantages in human history in purely biological and geographical terms, Diamond's analysis is of no help in answering historical questions that still might strike us as large, but come within the realm of European or Asian culture, instead of at the border with other peoples. For example, it's hard to see how his analysis adds anything to our understand of conflicts such as the Greco-Persian wars, the rise and decline of Rome, the Napoleonic Wars, or the American Civil War. Certainly these questions are important, and we rightly inquire into agricultural, military, political, and culture causes for these events. In these cases Diamond's analysis is largely impossible, since we are dealing with peoples that share genetics, foodstuffs, climates, terrains, etc.

Perhaps I'm nit-picking. It's an excellent, thought-provoking book. I'd just like to temper the inevitable temptation to view all history through this lens.