Καταπληκτικό βιβλίο. Με λεπτομέρειες και επιστημονική ακρίβεια.

Jared sticks to the basic premise and plugs every hole in his argument so well to construct a magnificent explanation of the evolution of societies. What makes the book particularly good is the intimate hands-on experience that Jared has on the wide variety of fields required to attempt a book like this.

The last four or five chapters start to get very repetitive, but except for that Diamond has taken a stunningly large scale view of history that keeps you enthralled throughout the 13,000 years we cover in this book.

Yo tenía 13 años cuando salió Civilization III, un videojuego al que le debo incontables horas de felicidad. Nunca había jugado a los anteriores de la serie, y tampoco jugué mucho a los que siguieron; creo que el Civilization III, en lo que hace a simular la historia humana, es más certero que sus sucesores, aunque estos sean, a su vez, técnica y visualmente más depurados. Una de las razones es la siguiente: en las ediciones posteriores se enfatizó mucho la diferencia entre las civilizaciones que el jugador puede elegir. A cada una se le concedieron bonificaciones y poderes especiales, que derivaron en estilos de juego distintos. Comparativamente, la treintena de civilizaciones de Civilization III se parecían mucho entre sí. Cada una tenía solo dos características de un total de seis, además de una unidad única (como el samurái japonés, o el legionario romano) que solo aparecía en una determinada época del juego. En esencia, todas las civilizaciones del Civilization III son iguales. Lo que no es igual es el lugar en el que cada una de ellas empieza el juego.

Una diferencia obvia son los recursos que cada una tiene a su disposición. En los mapas que emulan a la Tierra, algunas podrán acceder de inmediato a recursos estratégicos como el hierro o los caballos, y obtendrán una ventaja instantánea sobre las que no. Las más poderosas además serán más rápidas en la carrera tecnológica, aunque incluso si las civilizaciones pobres logran adelantos tecnológicos, no podrán beneficiarse de ellos en la misma medida. (Esto para quienes dicen que la educación es la manera de salir de la pobreza). Otra diferencia la hace la densidad de población. Donde hay más civilizaciones, también existen más posibilidades de compartir recursos y tecnologías, mientras que quienes comienzan en islas solitarias o en continentes poco poblados quedan al margen de la carrera y, para cuando se desarrollan las tecnologías que permiten la navegación interoceánica, se encuentran con rivales comparativamente muy avanzados. En el juego de las civilizaciones, la desventaja de llegar tarde es casi siempre irreparable. La de empezar en el lugar incorrecto, también.

Para quienes digan que los videojuegos no pueden ser educativos, estas son también las intuiciones básicas, a la vez que las conclusiones finales, de este texto clásico de Jared Diamond. Empezando por la observación obvia de que las civilizaciones euroasiáticas hoy dominan el planeta, y de que este dominio se debe al desarrollo de tecnologías superiores (las armas y el acero del título), Diamond quiso indagar un poco más allá: ¿por qué Eurasia, antes que África, América u Oceanía, desarrolló estas tecnologías? Su respuesta esquiva mayormente los factores ideológicos y se asienta en el determinismo ambiental. No es que las sociedades euroasiáticas tuvieran alguna ventaja intrínseca (por ejemplo, biológica o cultural) sobre las otras, sino que tuvieron el mejor punto de partida. En concreto: disponían de una cantidad crítica de plantas y animales a los que domesticar. Además, Eurasia es un continente con orientación oeste-este (a diferencia de América y África), con mayor homogeneidad climática, lo que facilitó la dispersión de los cultivos y, con ellos, de las nuevas ideas.

De esta diferencia inicial se deriva todo lo demás: el desarrollo temprano de la agricultura permitió sociedades más grandes y más organizadas; la mayor población aumentaba las probabilidades de desarrollar nuevas tecnologías, y gracias a la tecnología, a su vez, era posible sostener poblaciones más y más grandes. Un factor inesperado de este crecimiento fue la exposición a nuevos gérmenes. Muchos virus y bacterias son de origen zoonótico, es decir que se desarrollaron por nuestro contacto estrecho con animales domésticos o bien con roedores atraídos por la actividad agrícola. A esto, como Diamond observa, se suma el hecho de que los virus necesitan de una masa crítica (aparentemente, más de medio millón de personas) para volverse endémicos. Una desventaja temporal de las sociedades agrícolas que terminó convirtiéndose en una ventaja inesperada en su encuentro con otras sociedades. La viruela, el caso paradigmático, colaboró en la conquista de América al menos tanto como la pólvora y el acero.

Como ocurre por lo general con las grandes teorías del todo, la de Diamond es atractiva, al menos para aquellos que queremos ver cierta direccionalidad, ciertas regularidades en la historia humana (y, especialmente, si entendemos que la dirección de la historia no tiene por qué ser positiva). También hay gente para la que este tipo de determinismo resulta incómodo y hasta inaceptable. Una comentarista en esta página, por ejemplo, la considera aberrante porque cree que sirve para expurgar las culpas de los pueblos conquistadores y las naciones imperialistas. Lo que es una suposición incorrecta, ya que objetivamente puede decirse que siempre que dos culturas con distintos grados de desarrollo tecnológico se encontraron, la más avanzada dominó o incluso exterminó a la otra. Y podríamos decir, solo basándonos en tal evidencia empírica, y suponiendo en efecto que todos los seres humanos somos iguales, que lo mismo hubiera ocurrido de invertirse los papeles. Esto no es una valoración, sino la constatación de un hecho. El que las ideas de Diamond puedan servir para tranquilizar la conciencia del primer mundo no las hace en sí más o menos ciertas.

Juzguémoslas por sus propios méritos, como debe ser. Es posible que, en el plano científico y académico, le falte al libro cierto rigor. La línea entre los casos ejemplares y el cherry picking suele ser delgada y, en el caso de Diamond, todavía más difícil de determinar, por su desconocimiento profundo de algunas de las disciplinas con las que trabaja. Hay intuiciones que parecen correctas, aunque difíciles o imposibles de probar, por simple falta de evidencia: la importancia del eje de orientación de los continentes es un buen ejemplo. Algunos críticos apuntan a la falta de un análisis micro, que sin duda es demasiado pedir a una obra que se propone analizar los últimos 13 mil años de historia humana. Como el propio Diamond, su libro abarca más de lo que aprieta.

Vuelvo, sin embargo, a lo que sería la observación fundacional del libro: es obvio que hay ambientes que son más hostiles que otros. El universo que conocemos es hostil para la vida, e incluso el filamento nimio que es la Tierra resulta, casi toda, hostil para la vida humana, empezando por el simple hecho de que un 71% de ella está cubierto de agua. También hay desiertos y tundras, y un continente entero que es inhabitable. De lo que queda, de los ambientes que son amigables a la vida humana, tampoco son todos iguales. Me sigue sorprendiendo que los inuit puedan vivir en el Ártico y los beduinos en el Sahara, pero aun con todo el ingenio humano puesto sobre ellos, hay un límite para lo que estas regiones pueden dar de sí. El determinismo geográfico, como otros tipos de determinismo, suele ser una facilidad empírica pero una dificultad psicológica. Nos cuesta pensar que no controlamos todas las variables de nuestra vida o de nuestra historia, o que incluso no controlamos casi nada y somos resultado de nuestros orígenes y circunstancias y de factores externos a nosotros. Aun cuando todo parece señalarnos que, efectivamente, las cosas son así.

Author Jared Diamond's two-part thesis is: 1) the most important theme in human history is that of civilizations beating the crap out of each other, 2) the reason the beat-ors were Europeans and the beat-ees the Aboriginees, Mayans, et. al. is because of the geographical features of where each civilization happened to develop. Whether societies developed gunpowder, written language, and other technological niceties, argues Diamond, is completely a function of whether they emerged amidst travel-and-trade condusive geography and easily-domesticable plants and animals.

I'm not sure I agree that why the Spanish obliterated the Mayans instead of visa versa is the most interesting question of human history. (How about the evolution of ideas, or the impact of great leaders and inventors?) But it is an interesting question, and worth exploring. Diamond is a philosophical monist, neatly ascribing just about every juncture in human history to a single cause or related group of causes. Given his extensive background in botany and geology, it makes sense that he would look for the impact of those factors in the human story. Unfortunately, those factors are all he regards as important; he relegates to insignificance the contribution of ideas, innovations, and the decision-making of individuals or cultures. His view is fatalistic, seemingly motivated by a P.C.-era desire to pronounce all cultures equal, and their fates the product of random circumstance.

A contradiction here is that fatalistic viewpoints are incompatible with moral pronouncements. (If nobody can control their actions, who's to blame for anything?) Diamond is condemnatory of the Spanish incursion into Mayan lands, but the logical consequence of his theory is that the Mayans would have done the same to the Spanish if they had been first to develop the musket and frigate. Taking Diamond's theory seriously means we'd have to view imperialism as natural and unavoidable, like the predation of animals, and be unable to criticize any culture's actions whatever.

All that said... this is a fascinating and worthwhile read.
There's no doubt that the factors Diamond identified had some role in human progress, however, and if you can put aside the author's predisposition towards his own field and somewhat sketchy philosophical foundation, the book is a compelling and vivid account of what life was like for the earliest civilizations. Diamond describes the evolution of agriculture, written language, and other indispensable facets of human history, giving us a crash tour through the earliest days of human history. The specialized expertise that ultimately derails Diamond's overview at the same time offers a compelling and detailed view of the rise of mankind.

The first impression that history gave me was of a never ending series of dates and occurences which needless to say is an extremely boring way to learn. The whole perspective of history changed for me when I began viewing this like I do soil. Multiple layers all held together by a common force, some of them interleaving and some totally independent with each layer telling a story of its own. At one point of time, the layer of top soil thinks of itself as invincible but with changing circumstances it paves way for the next layer. History is similar to this in many ways and such a perspective forms the wireframe for this wonderful book.

In roughly 400 pages, Jared Diamond gives a highly compressed version of the world as it is. His is not a dry recounting of occurences and how they shaped world events. Rather he delves deeper into why the world is as it is right now. Why did the Western civilizations get to influence the world more ? Why were the conquerors of lands across the world from the Eurasian landmass ? The answer to all these questions lies in the title of book : Guns, Germs and Steel. At first glance all three of these factors are entirely unrelated but on a deeper look they prove to be the most decisive factors that cut across world history. The conquerors who brought the guns overpowered the masses and they brought along with them the germs of epidemics from across the seas. Those that did not fall by the bullets, fell by the diseases and then it was a relatively easy way (full of corpses !) that the European conquerors could walk across. The author goes into details of the Spanish conquest of the Incas, The extermination of the American Indians and subduing the Aborgines of Australia as examples of these.

The power of the weapon and of the germs was not the only factor of power for the Western world. What really set apart Eurasia was its power of food production. This is where the steel part comes in. What fascinated me most were the questions that Jared Diamond poses and answers. For instance : Both agriculture and animal husbandry began in the fertile crescent - which is modern day Iraq and thereabouts but then how did the center of power shift westward ? When China had a headstart from all other parts of the world in everything from agriculture to maritime navigation why did they lag behind others in innovation ? The first human beings began life in Africa so how did the continent go far behind ? All these questions do not have simple straightforward answers but answers that are an amalgamation of economic,social,political and environmental factors. The author explains all these in depth and satisfactory detail.

The analysis, interpretations and observations in this book are not things that glance at the skin and fall away but they are facts that go down to the bone marrow of present civilizations. The research that Jared Diamond would have done for this book shows in the pages.

Undoubtedly one of the best and most informative books I have read in the last two years. Highly recommended for those who love a strong dose of cultural history, anthropology and a study of civilizations.

Diamond explains why some groups of humans have done well based on local circumstances: material resources, pathogens, human migratory patterns, that sort of thing. It's such a useful and non-racist theory that it holds immediate appeal. I've no idea how well it's withstood research over the past twenty years, but I'll assume that my understanding of it is too simplistic to be quite true.

Library copy.

Geographic determinism

Been waiting a long time to get to this book. Diamond attempts to answer the pertinent question: why did western European countries come to dominate the modern world? This book is the answer to the racist assertion of racial and biological determinism, that white European countries were inherently more clever to devise methods to take over other countries. The answer that Diamond is simple: white European countries fell ass-backwards into bounteous lands full of large livestock that hadn't been killed off and was actually amenable to domestication. The seasons of land masses were more easily cultivated to create durable crops. When people can farm, they increase population density and can create division of labor beyond hunter/gatherer. This lends to advanced warfare and other social pressures that may spurn innovation.

With higher population density comes the phenomenon of people living in their own sewage and with their animals resulting in something that hunter gatherer societies lack: exposure and immunity to pathogens. Thus western societies were a neat package of unwitting biological and social welfare that easily conquered the rest of the world by virtue of happenstance of where they developed.

It's a fascinating theory that many may also find problematic. Diamond explores a lot here in a very scholarly way with mountains of anthropological evidence. This is a long but engaging read. I'd highly recommend.

I can perfectly understand why this book is so successful: Diamond works very methodically, takes his reader everywhere by the hand, constantly clarifies his approach and makes very clear conclusions. And of course there is a lot to be said for his approach to history especially zooming in on environmental issues: geography, climate and biology indeed had an incredible impact on the development of life and certainly also on human history. The evolutionary biologist Diamond is very right to put this into focus. His conclusions make sense, but ... he commits the classic mistake to present his approach as the only possible, logical, rational approach, or maybe the only really relevant approach. That he blatantly dismisses cultural factors is a pity. Okay, in his afterword he spends some brief attention to the importance of cultural factors, but he is getting rid of it by saying that there is little to say about them with certainty. A bit too cheap to my taste, Jared. Nevertheless, this is a very valuable work in the development of World History!
Tip: also read 'Sapiens', by Yuval Hariri, (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) that builds on Diamond, but giving the culture sphere the place it deserves.

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.

3,5 den 4 eder mi bilemem :D Ağır bir okuma oldu benim açımdan. Çok akıcı olduğunu düşünmüyorum kitabın

È un libro che, dopo averlo finito, ti fa sentire un po' più colto.
Che poi è quello che un saggio dovrebbe fare.
L'argomento, perchè alcune civiltà sono più ricche e tecnologicamente avanzate di altre, mi interessava molto, quindi non ho sofferto più di tanto le ripetizioni, che comunque ci sono, e che, se vanno bene per esempio in un corso universitario, finiscono per appesantire un testo di divulgazione.
La tesi di Jared Diamond è che le diversità culturali non siano innate, ma dipendano da differenze geografiche, ecologiche e territoriali sostanzialmente legate al caso.
Non essendo un antropologa non posso dire quanto sia scientificamente fondato quello che dice Diamond, ma quasi tutto quello che dice mi sembra ben giustificato da prove e logica. Ho detto quasi perchè se il discorso mi sembra filare perfettamente quando parla di preistoria e civiltà antiche, mi pare che quando faccia riferimento alla storia più recente (es. conquista delle Americhe e gara per il predominio tra Europa e Cina) il tutto sia un po' troppo semplicistico e deterministico.
Comunque, un ottimo saggio, comprensibile a chiunque. Interessanti soprattutto i capitoli dedicati alla nascita dell'agricoltura e all'addomesticamento degli animali. Se vi siete mai chiesti perchèabbiamo addomesticato il cavallo, ma non la zebra, che pure sembra somigliargli così tanto, qui troverete la risposta.

3.5 stars

This is an interesting and influential book that in its broad conclusions makes a lot of sense, though I have doubts about Diamond’s reasoning on some of his smaller points. It’s longer than it needs to be, but largely because it is thorough and takes the time to break down academic subjects to be accessible to intelligent but non-specialist readers.

First published in 1997, this book sets out to explain why Europe was able to colonize such a large part of the world in the last few centuries. Europeans’ possession of “guns, germs and steel” was an immediate cause, but why did they have these things when people on many other continents did not? Diamond’s answer comes down to the environment in different parts of the world. In essence, all of these advantages come down to agriculture. In a hunter-gatherer society, population is kept relatively small, people have to focus on acquiring food, and (unless they live in an especially bountiful area), small groups typically need to move from place to place, such that they can’t have too many belongings, especially if they have no domestic animals to carry them. A society built on farming, however, tends to be much more populous, can support a class of people who do something other than farm (an elite class of nobles, but also specialized trades), and can accumulate belongings, which makes developing new technology more worthwhile. So, parts of the world that had a head start on farming also had a head start on developing technology, such as metallurgy.

Meanwhile, European germs played probably the most decisive role in their conquest of the Americas, as well as some other parts of the world; given the size of the native population (an early European visitor to the east coast of the modern U.S. wrote that there didn’t really seem to be room for colonies because the area was so heavily populated) and the difficulty of getting even small numbers of people across the ocean on wooden ships, one can imagine that this could have turned out much more like the English conquest of India, or might not have happened at all, if not for the epidemics that killed some 90% of the population. Why were the Europeans the ones with the germs? Well, human epidemics have come from domestic animals (think swine flu and avian flu today), and epidemics need a large population to stay alive; otherwise they will simply kill everyone they can kill and then die out with no new hosts. Therefore, epidemics evolved in places where people lived in close quarters with domestic animals, and stuck around in populations large enough to produce a new crop of children before the epidemic died out (this is why diseases like measles were once considered “childhood diseases” – not because children were more susceptible, but because the diseases were so prevalent that children would almost inevitably catch them before growing up). Both individuals and populations exposed to these germs would eventually develop immunity if they survived.

But the opportunity to domesticate animals wasn’t spread evenly around the world. Asia and Europe (referred to throughout the book as “Eurasia” since it’s really one landmass, considered two continents for political rather than geographic reasons) had lots of options, including horses, cows, water buffalo, sheep, pigs, and goats. As far as domesticable large mammals go, the Americas had only the llama (which didn’t spread beyond the Andes), while sub-Saharan Africa had none. It isn’t that people didn’t try – people will keep almost anything as a pet – but numerous factors influence whether a large mammal is a good candidate for domestication. It needs to live in herds, to tolerate its own herd’s territory overlapping with others (or you’d never be able to bring in a new cow that wasn’t related to your current cows), to not be overly or unpredictably aggressive toward humans (this is why the zebra has never worked out), to not panic, bolt and throw itself against the fence until it dies, and more. Eurasia had a couple of major advantages here. Being the largest landmass, it had the most animal diversity. And, as modern humans evolved in Africa and Eurasia, animals evolved alongside them, presumably learning how to deal with human hunters’ increasing skills; on the other hand, most large mammals went extinct in the Americas and Australia shortly after people arrived.

With agriculture, too, Eurasia had an advantage, causing it to kick off there early. Again, there was a greater diversity of plants, only some of which make sense to domesticate and begin to grow. The Fertile Crescent (roughly modern-day Iraq and Turkey), perhaps the first site of agriculture in the world, had it particularly easy: wheat already existed in a form quite similar to its modern equivalent, and grew bountifully, so the idea of taking it home and growing it wasn’t much of a leap. On the other hand, with corn – a staple crop of Mexico and eventually the eastern U.S. – there isn’t even agreement on what the wild ancestor was; the plant that might have been the original corn produced husks only about an inch long with tiny kernels and other disadvantages. People had to work on it for a really long time before it became a suitable staple crop for large swathes of the continent.

And then too, you wouldn’t switch from hunting and gathering to farming for just one crop. While hunting and gathering seems like a precarious lifestyle to us, it can actually be better than subsistence farming. Farmers worked harder – which makes sense, since they had to nurture their food every step of the way rather than simply finding it and bringing it home – and based on their skeletons, early farmers’ nutrition was worse than that of hunter-gatherers. So it’s the total package that counts; in areas that provided a nutritionally-balanced diet of domesticable plants, plus domesticable animals to supplement that diet and also provide labor and fertilizer, farming made a lot more sense than it did in areas without such a bounty. Essentially, the sort of lifestyle people had depended on the food options available, and some places supported agriculture much more than others. Nobody’s building a densely-populated empire from a desert like the Australian outback.

There is a lot more to the book of course, but I think it’s the central thesis that’s the most convincing. Many of Diamond’s other points – ancillary to his main argument – don’t work so well. For instance, he’s very interested in how a Spanish force of about 150 managed to defeat and capture the Inca emperor Atahualpa, who was supported by thousands of troops. Certainly the Spanish weaponry played a decisive role, particularly since it was the first time the Inca had encountered guns or cavalry. But Diamond claims that we know well what happened based on the (likely self-serving) accounts of several Spaniards, without apparently realizing that the Inca would probably have told a different story, and then makes a big deal of the fact the Inca lacked writing, arguing this is why they weren’t aware of prior Spanish conquests in Central America and therefore walked into a trap. But this ignores the fact that people who can’t depend on storing information in written form tend to have far better memorization skills than people who write everything down (Homer was not unusual in being able to recite epic poems from memory), and the fact that “they’re going to try to kill you with terrible weapons” is a simple message that could certainly have been transmitted intact had the Inca had envoys in Central America, all while assuming that Atahualpa didn’t know it was a trap. Without contemporary Inca sources, we have no idea whether perhaps he did know, but being new to the throne of an empire destabilized by epidemics, had to go anyway or risk looking weak to his subjects and promptly being overthrown.

There’s some other questionable reasoning here: that it makes sense that the wheel, while invented in Mexico, wasn’t actually used for transportation because there were no animals capable of pulling carts. (So what? People too can transport far more weight on wheels than they can carry.) That New Guineans are probably smarter than Europeans because their society has a higher homicide rate. (A society with lots of murder and warfare would select for strength, skill with weapons, and ability to maintain strong social ties far more than it would select for abstract, creative, or analytical thinking. Plus, an anthropological study of a New Guinea tribe found that those typically targeted for murder were the elderly, who would have already passed on their genes regardless.) And the 2003 epilogue, attempting to apply principles of societal development to how corporations should organize themselves to best promote innovation – apparently inspired by business leaders writing to Diamond about the book – even if true, has nothing to do with the contents of this already-long book.

Obviously there’s a lot to chew on here, hence the long review. I do think the book is worth reading, though it’s unfortunate that Diamond doesn’t cite sources for individual facts, and only includes generalized “further reading” lists. The book has some repetition that makes it a little longer than it needs to be, but overall I think it does a sound job of explaining some of the broad strokes of human history.