what is jared diamond's thesis

'Guns, Germs and Steel': Jared Diamond on Geography as Power

In an interview with National Geographic, scientist Jared Diamond argues that geography shaped how history unfolded across the world.

Why did history unfold differently on different continents? Why has one culture—namely that of Western Europe—dominated the development of the modern world?

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel, scientist Jared Diamond argues that the answer is geography. The physical locations where different cultures have taken root, he claims, have directly affected the ability of those societies to develop key institutions, like agriculture and animal domestication, or to acquire important traits, like immunity to disease.

Now the book has been turned into a three-part National Geographic Special, which airs on PBS on three consecutive Mondays, July 11, July 18, and July 25, at 10 p.m.

National Geographic News spoke with Diamond, a professor of geography, environmental health science, and physiology at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Why over the past 10,000 years has the development of different societies proceeded at such different rates?

I say the answer is location, location, location. It's overwhelmingly due to the difference in the wild plant and animal species suitable to domestication that the continents made available. All the interesting stuff like technology, writing, and empires requires a productive economy that is producing enough food to feed technological experts, bureaucrats, kings, and scribes. Hunter-gatherer societies don't produce enough food surpluses to support those extra people.

Where did the first farming societies appear?

The first farming, as far as we know, appeared in [the Middle East region known as] the Fertile Crescent some 11,500 years ago, and shortly thereafter in China. These places had the greatest variety of wild plants and animals suitable for domestication. Only a tiny fraction of wild plants and animals were both useful and possible to domesticate. Those few species were concentrated in a few areas, of which the two with the greatest variety were the Fertile Crescent and China.

What were the benefits of the agricultural lifestyle compared to the hunter-gatherer existence?

Farming lets you feed far more people than hunting and gathering. In a one-acre [0.4-hectare] wheat field there's more to eat than in a one-acre forest. In a one-acre sheep pasture, there are more animals to eat than in a one-acre forest. Also, farming lets you settle down in villages next to your wheat fields and pastures, whereas hunter-gatherers have to move around.

You point out that knowledge and new technology spread east and west much easier than north and south.

The reason is easy to understand if one understands geography. Climate, temperature, seasons, and habitat all depend strongly on latitude. Above 85 degrees north, you don't have tropical rainforest, you have Arctic ice fields. Certainly plants and animals tend to be adapted to particular habitats and climates. The same is also true of people. The practices of the farming societies in the Fertile Crescent are easily transferred west [to Europe].

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What is the link between agriculture and war.

Farming makes possible the development of technology, including military technology. Wars are not something new invented by those nasty Europeans. Everyone about whom we have enough knowledge has been involved with wars. Groups of people are competing with neighbor groups, and any group that develops some advantage is likely to be able to fight off, conquer, drive out, or exterminate their rivals. Throughout human history there's been this reward for developing more potent technology, including military technology.

The Spaniards certainly used weapons technology to their advantage in defeating the Incas.

In the battle of Cajamarca [in 1532, in what is now Peru], 169 Spaniards faced an army of 80,000 Inca soldiers. In the first ten minutes, there were 7,000 Incas dead. When the dust settled, not a single Spaniard was dead. [Spanish conquistador] Francisco Pizarro got a slight wound. That's because the Spaniards have the steel sword and the Incas have wooden clubs. It really showed the power of military technology.

In a way, the Spaniards also unwittingly deployed powerful biological weapons, including smallpox.

It is estimated that 95 percent of Native American casualties throughout North and South America were due to disease rather than military conquest. Smallpox killed about 50 percent of the Incas in the first epidemic.

Why did the Spaniards pass this disease on to the Incas and not the other way around?

It turns out that most of the nasty, infectious diseases of human history came to us from domestic animals. Thirteen of the fourteen herd domestic animals were Eurasian species. The only herd domestic animal of the New World was the llama, but the llama didn't live in really big herds. So we didn't get diseases from llamas, but we did get diseases from pigs and sheep. And Eurasian people in general got exposed to these diseases at childhood and therefore developed an immune system. In the New World, smallpox arrives and nobody is exposed to it, so it's hitting everybody, including adults.

When the European settlers arrived in southern Africa, it was the same story at first. But as the settlers went north, they soon began to encounter problems.

People of the north were farmers themselves, and it's possible that they had been exposed to smallpox. What we're sure of is that Africans had tropical diseases [such as malaria] to which they had some resistance. But Europeans did not have resistance. In tropical Africa, the disease advantages were reversed. Instead of Europeans carrying diseases that wipe out the locals, the locals carry diseases that wipe out the Europeans. That's why the Europeans never settled in large numbers in Africa outside of the temperate zone of southern Africa and the highlands of Kenya.

Africans developed complex farming societies, and they were able to stave off the European intruders. Yet ultimately the Europeans conquered Africa through colonialism. Is that why much of modern Africa is mired in poverty?

Africa today, paradoxically, is the poorest continent. I say paradoxically because this is where humans evolved, so [humans] had a huge head start in Africa. Tropical diseases kept the Europeans out at first, but those tropical diseases nonetheless pose a big public health and economic burden on Africa today. That is linked with colonialism. Europeans could not settle in large numbers, but what they still could do was to extract wealth from Africans, initially slaves, then rubber, diamonds, and copper. Basically that means robbing Africans and setting up legalized institutions for corruption. Colonialism also changed the Africans' traditional way of life. They moved to cities next to the mines where their immunities no longer provided protection against tropical diseases.

There is a scene in the film where you react very strongly to seeing some children dying of malaria in a Zambian hospital. Is there a disconnect between thinking about these huge issues as a prominent academic and seeing them in action up close?

There is a difference between understanding something intellectually and having something in your face. When I wrote Guns, Germs and Steel, I had a whole chapter on Africa and a chapter on diseases in Africa. I was perfectly aware of the statistics on malaria and so forth, but that is impersonal and sanitized. It's different from standing there in a hospital and seeing kids who were then the age that my kids had been and having flashbacks to one of my own kids in a hospital. That's just an emotional experience and very different from the sanitized statistics.

Do you worry that audiences may sense an inevitability in your argument—as if we're destined to be either poor or wealthy depending on where we are born, and that there is not much we can do about it?

If you make a complex argument, there will be people out there who will simplify and misuse it. I recognize that there are people who will say geography deals out these immutable cards and there's nothing we can do about it. But one can show the evidence and say there is something we can do about it. Look at Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan. They recognized that their biggest disadvantage was public health. They didn't say, We got these tropical diseases—it's inevitable. Instead they said, We have these tropical diseases and they are curable and all it takes is money so let's invest in curing the diseases. Today they are rich, virtually First World countries. That shows that poverty is something you can do something about.

People have a misunderstanding that geography means environmental determinism, and that poor countries are doomed to be poor and they should just shut up and lie down and play dead. But in fact, knowledge is power. Once you know what it is that's making you poor, you can use that knowledge to make you rich.

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Guns, germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies

Norton & Co., New York, 1997

THE QUESTION

Buy Guns, germs, and steel

Although every lay person sees that this is a question crying out for answer, historians have mostly ignored this question.  Several reasons explain their neglect.  One reason is that the answer clearly lies in the pre-literate past, because by 3400 BC Eurasians (and North Africans, biogeographically and politically part of Eurasia rather than of sub-Saharan Africa) had already had metal tools for thousands of years and were starting to develop writing and empires, thousands of years before any of those things would appear on any other continent.   But most historians consider history to begin with the origins of writing, and consider the pre-literate past as lying outside the scope of their discipline and instead to be left to archaeologists.  Also, as we shall see, the answers to this question involve details of subjects (especially plant and animal biology and microbiology) in which history graduate students receive no training.  But lay people still want an answer to this obvious question.  As a result of the failure of historians to supply an answer, lay people often fall back on the transparent interpretation of supposed racial superiority of Eurasian people themselves, despite the lack of evidence for that interpretation.

My own interest in this question became rekindled by my experiences in New Guinea over the last 50 years.  When I arrived in New Guinea for the first time, it became clear to me almost immediately that New Guineans are curious, questioning, talkative people with complex languages and social relationships, on the average at least as intelligent as Europeans and Americans.  In New Guinea I’m the dope who can’t do elementary things like follow an unmarked trail or light a fire in the rain.  My New Guinea friends are patient with my shortcomings and don’t expect much of me when it comes to the everyday challenges of New Guinea life.  Why did I nevertheless come to New Guinea as a representative of the “advanced” colonizing society possessing steel tools and writing, when my New Guinea friends traditionally had only stone tools and no writing, 46,000 years after their ancestors had reached New Guinea?  Eventually, a New Guinean named Yali, in the course of a long conversation with me about birds and volcanoes and my work and other things, asked me the question directly: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [i.e., steel tools and other products of civilization] and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”  Despite the obviousness of Yali’s question, I didn’t know how to answer him.  It took me 25 years until I was ready to offer an answer, in Guns, Germs, and Steel .

Traditional warfare: Dani tribesmen fighting with spears in the Baliem Valley of the New Guinea Highlands.  The highest one-day death toll in those wars occurred on June 4, 1966, when northern Dani killed face-to-face 125 southern Dani, many of whom the attackers would personally have known (or known of).  The death toll constituted 5% of the southerners’ population.  Photo credit: Karl G. Heider.

The answer depends on a synthesis of four bodies of information, in the fields of social science, botany, zoology, and microbiology, applied to findings of archaeology, linguistics, and human genetics.  Many social scientists have studied the development of complex societies around the world, and the emergence of technology, writing, centralized government, economic specialization, and social stratification.  The conclusion of social scientists is that all of these developments required sedentary populous societies producing storable food surpluses capable of feeding not only the food producers themselves, but also capable of feeding full-time political leaders, merchants, scribes, and technology specialists.  Until 11,000 years ago, all people everywhere on Earth were hunter/gatherers, living at modest population densities because the hunter/gatherer lifestyle yields only modest food quantities and little or no storable food surpluses.  (Some hunter/gatherers in especially productive environments became semi-sedentary and developed chiefs, but no hunter/gatherers went as far as developing kings, metal tools, or writing).  Beginning 11,000 years ago, it was the rise of food production (agriculture and herding), yielding 100 to 1,000 times more food per acre than the hunter/gatherer lifestyle, that fueled the rise of sedentary populous societies with storable food surpluses and all of their consequences.  That’s the first step in answering Yali’s question.

One might still wonder: if food production had arisen simultaneously all around the world, then peoples everywhere would have developed complex societies simultaneously, and the subsequent world dominance of Eurasian societies would remain unexplained.  Here, the bodies of information in the fields of botany and zoology become relevant.  Food production didn’t arise simultaneously around the world: in most of the world it never arose independently at all; it did arise independently in just nine small regions, from which it diffused to other regions; and, among those nine regions, it arose more than 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and possibly in China, but only as recently as 2500 BC in the eastern United States.  The value of the domesticated plants and animals also varied among regions: the  most numerous and productive suites of domesticated species arose in the Fertile Crescent, followed by China, Mexico, and the Andes, while the least numerous and least productive suites arose in the eastern U.S., New Guinea, and Ethiopia.

Image from The World Until Yesterday .  Photo credit: Marka/SuperStock.

The spread of food production from those nine centers of origin followed a striking geographic pattern: rapid spread along east/west axes (such as the axis of Eurasia), slower spread along north/south axes (such as those of the Americas and of Africa).  That’s because crop and livestock species, and people using technologies and social behaviors associated with those species, can spread more rapidly at the same latitude, where they always encounter constant day length and seasonality and similar diseases, than across bands of latitude, where they must adapt to different day lengths and seasonality and diseases.  My listeners and readers find this pattern as fascinating as did I: after I give a lecture on Guns, Germs, and Steel, I can often recognize those people nearby who have just come out of my lecture, because they are tracing horizontal and vertical lines in the air as they talk to each other.

Thus, one can explain as follows the reasons why the people who spread around the world were Eurasians, not Aboriginal Australians or Native Americans or sub-Saharan Africans.  The reasons had nothing to do with differences in the peoples themselves.  Instead, the reasons were continental differences in the available wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication, resulting in earlier domestication of a more productive suite of domesticates in Eurasia, plus Eurasia’s east/west axis that facilitated the spread of those domesticates throughout Eurasia.  That long sentence is what I answer when journalists ask me to summarize my 518-page book and 25 years of research in just one sentence for their busy readers.  That sentence also explains why Guns, Germs, and Steel , a book about the biggest pattern of human history, contains seven chapters about plant and animal domestication, plus four chapters about domestication’s consequences, but only five chapters about history itself; and why Guns, Germs, and Steel wasn’t written by a historian, but by a biogeographer.

Microbiology, the fourth of the four bodies of information necessary for answering Yali’s question, played a specific role in the Eurasian expansion.  One means by which Europeans were able to spread at the expense of other peoples was by infecting them (usually unintentionally) with epidemic infectious diseases such as smallpox and measles, to which Europeans had evolved some genetic resistance and had acquired much immune (antibody-based) resistance through historical and lifetime exposure respectively, while unexposed non-European peoples had no such exposure, hence no such resistance.  But why didn’t non-European peoples evolve deadly diseases of their own to give back to invading Europeans?  The explanation lies in microbiological studies of recent decades, which I summarized in one chapter of Guns, Germs, and Steel , and which Nathan Wolfe, Claire Panosian, and I updated in a 2007 paper posted on this website.  The exchange of major epidemic infectious diseases was one-sided, because most of those diseases in the temperate zones came to us humans from diseases of our domestic animals (such as cattle, pigs, and chickens) with which our ancestors lived in close contact after those animal species had been domesticated.  But of the world’s 14 species of valuable domestic mammals, 13 were Eurasian, only one American, and none Australian.  Hence Eurasians ended up as disease bearers, and with much resistance themselves to their own diseases.

EXTENSIONS AND DISCOVERIES SINCE PUBLICATION IN 1997

Since I published Guns, Germs, and Steel in 1997, much new information has accumulated, which has enriched our understanding without fundamentally changing interpretations.  I discussed some of these extensions in new English-language editions of Guns, Germs, and Steel released in 2003 and 2007. 

Japan .   The two most important geographic areas that did not receive detailed separate coverage in the 1997 edition of Guns, Germs, and Steel were Japan and the Indian subcontinent.  The 2007 edition added a chapter on Japanese geography and pre-history, agriculture’s spread to Japan, and its consequences.

Origins of food production .   A recent series of excellent papers on plant and animal domestication was published in the Journal of Anthropological Research (volume 68, no. 2, 2012).  This series includes evidence that the Indian subcontinent should be considered an additional minor center of independent agricultural origins.  Other updates are my article “Evolution, consequences and the future of plant and animal domestication” (Nature 418: 34-41 (2002)) and Peter Bellwood’s book First Farmers: the Origins of Agricultural Societies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). 

Spreads of language families .   Updates include my paper with Peter Bellwood, “Farmers and their languages: the first expansions,” posted on this website; Peter Bellwood’s above-cited book First Farmers; and a book edited by Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew Examining the Language/Farming Dispersal Hypothesis (Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2002).  Much new information has emerged about the farming-related spread of the Austronesian and Indo-European language families and the Bantu sub-sub-sub family.  Edward Vajda made the surprising discovery of the first well-attested relationship between an Old World language family and a New World language family, when he demonstrated a relationship between the Na-Dene family of North America and the Yeniseian family of Central Siberia (The Dene-Yeniseian Connection (Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, N.S. vol. 5, nos. 1-2, 2010)).  This implies a long-distance ancient spread by hunter/gatherers in the absence of farming, as is also true for the spread of the Pama-Nyungan language family of Aboriginal Australia.

Spreads along east/west axes .   My evidence in Guns, Germs, and Steel for preferential spread along east/west rather than north/south axes was anecdotal; I did not do systematic surveys.  Two studies have now demonstrated this phenomenon quantitatively and systematically: Peter Turchin’s et al. (J. World-Syst, Res. XII: 219-229 (2006)), for the spread of political power; and a paper on the spread of languages, by David Laitin et al. (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 109: 10263-10268 (2012)).

Extensions to economics .   Since 1997, some economists have extended the reasoning of Guns, Germs, and Steel to understanding a central question of historical economics: why are some nations rich while others are poor?  Ola Olsson and Douglas Hibbs showed that an early start towards farming and then to state formation explains much of the variation among national wealth today.  Valerie Bockstette, Areendan Chanda, and Louis Putterman “States and markets: the advantage of an early start” (Journal Economic Growth 7: 351-373 (2002)) showed that, if one compares nations that have still been poor in modern times, an early start towards farming and state formation helps explain the rate at which those poor nations are catching up in wealth today.

Extensions to the world of business .   From conversations with Bill Gates, Bill Lewis of McKinsey Global Institute, and others in the business world, I learned of possible parallels between the histories of societies as discussed in Guns, Germs, and Steel , and the histories of national business sectors, industrial belts, and individual companies.  Delicious examples include the contrasts in productivity between Germany’s beer industry and its metal industry, or between Japan’s food-processing industry and its consumer electronics industry.  The Afterword to my 2003 edition of Guns, Germs, and Steel discusses these and other equally delicious examples.

Modern trade: a professional store-keeper, selling manufactured goods to anyone who enters the store, in return for the government’s money.  Photo credit: Blend Images/PunchStock.

UNRESOLVED ISSUES

Differences within Eurasia .  Guns, Germs, and Steel is about differences of human societies between the different continents over the last 11,000 years.  Those differences are largely due to differences in the wild plant and animal species available for domestication, and in the continental axes.  The question arises: at how small a geographic scale, and on how short a time scale, are those factors still important?  They surely don’t explain the divergence between North and South Korea within the last 65 years.  In practice, the most important such question at an intermediate scale is the question: why, within Eurasia, were European societies, rather than the societies of China, the Indian subcontinent, or the Near East (the Fertile Crescent), the ones to expand?  Although that question is not the subject of Guns, Germs, and Steel , I knew that I couldn’t ignore that question entirely, and so I discussed it briefly in the Epilogue to the 1997 edition, and again in the Afterword to the 2003 edition.  Numerous interesting recent books have been written on this subject, of which a recent one is Ian Morris Why the West Rules – For Now (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).  We are still not close to agreement on the answers.  Interpretations fall into two categories: a majority view invoking proximate causes of the last few centuries; and a minority view (including my view discussed in 1997 and 2003) invoking ultimate causes rooted in geography. 

Advantages of Eurasian species .  Eurasia was home to the largest number of valuable domesticable wild plant and animal species.  Why was that the case? 

A naïve answer would be: that’s just because Eurasia is the largest continent, and because species diversity is (all other things being equal) higher on large land masses than on small land masses.  But that naïve answer proves to be either wrong or else incomplete.  Tropical areas are more species-rich than are temperate areas, and most of Eurasia’s area lies in the temperate zones.  In at least the two groups of plants and animals most important to humans, something about Eurasia besides its area causes it to harbor a disproportionate number of the world’s valuable domesticable species.

One of those two cases is understood: the case of large-seeded wild grasses (cereals) such as wheat and barley, which contribute more calories to human diets than any other plants.  The geographer Mark Blumler tabulated the native distributions of the world’s 56 grasses with the largest seeds (summarized in Table 8.1 on page 140 of Guns, Germs, and Steel ).  Of those 56, almost all are native to Mediterranean zones or other seasonally dry environments, and 32 are concentrated in the Mediterranean zone of Western Eurasia.  The world’s four other Mediterranean zones – those of Chile, California, South Africa, and Southwest Australia – offer respectively only 2, 1, 1, and 0 large-seeded wild grasses.  Half of the reason is that a Mediterranean climate of mild wet winters and long hot dry summers selects for large seeds of annual plants able to survive the long dry season, and to grow rapidly and outcompete smaller seeds when the rains return.  The other half of the reason is that, among the world’s Mediterranean zones, that of Western Eurasia is by far the largest, the one with the greatest range of altitudes and topographies within a short distance, the one with the greatest variation in climate between seasons and between years – hence the one that evolved the largest number of large-seeded wild grasses.  It’s possible that the same reasoning might apply to large-seeded wild legumes such as beans, but no one has done the corresponding calculations for legumes that Mark Blumler performed for grasses.

The other case is not understood.  Of the world’s 14 species of valuable large domesticated mammals, 13 are native to Eurasia, while only one (South America’s llama) is native to another region.  It’s true that Eurasia is home to more wild species of terrestrial herbivores or omnivorous mammals (72 species) than the next richest continent, Africa with 51 species.  Those wild species are the potential “candidates” for domestication.  But a much higher percentage of those candidate species were actually domesticable in Eurasia (18%) than in the other continents (0% for sub-Saharan Africa and Australia, 4% for the Americas), so Eurasia ended up with more domesticated species (Table 9.2 on page 162 of Guns, Germs, and Steel ).  Why did so few of the big mammals for which Africa is famous proved domesticable?  It turns out that the domesticable large Eurasian species have a follow-the-leader herd structure based on a dominance hierarchy.  Hence it’s feasible for us humans to maintain the species in captivity in herds, to take over that hierarchy, and to drive the herds.  In contrast, all of Africa’s social antelope species are territorial in the breeding season, when they fight and don’t tolerate each other and can’t be herded.  What is it that selects for herds based on dominance hierarchies in Eurasia, and for territorial breeding behavior in sub-Saharan Africa?  We don’t know the answer.  It’s a question of zoology rather than of human sociology, but it’s a question that had important consequences for human history.

Questions about the failure to domesticate particular species . In many cases we can point to the factors, discussed in Guns, Germs, and Steel , that made it feasible to domesticate certain wild species (such as wheat and sheep), and impossible to domesticate others despite their importance and value to hunter/gatherers as food sources (such as oak trees and gazelles).  However, there remain cases that are often mentioned by my readers and listeners, and that puzzle them, as they do me.  The most frequently raised questions concern the non-domestication of zebras and of bison.

Of the eight species of wild equids (horses and their relatives) that survived until recent times, two were successfully domesticated (horse and donkey); the onager was commonly hunted in antiquity, but it is uncertain whether it was ever tamed and kept in captivity; and the other five (Africa’s three zebra species, the South African quagga, and the kiang of Tibet) were not domesticated.  Why were zebras not domesticated, despite their apparently being so similar to horses, able to interbreed with horses and donkeys, and locally abundant?  Suggested answers include: nasty disposition (by biting and kicking, captive zebras kill or cripple more American zoo-keepers than do captive tigers); keen peripheral vision that makes them impossible to lasso; and anatomy of the back that makes it difficult for them to support a rider’s weight.  Zebra-lovers object that there are some gentle captive zebras, and that zebras have occasionally been hitched to carts and (rarely) borne riders.  The fact remains that, even when Europeans experienced with livestock reach South Africa, they did experiment with zebras but abandoned them, suggesting that there really are obstacles to domesticating zebras.

The next most often-discussed non-domestication is that of bison.  Neither European nor American bison (probably conspecific rather than separate species) were domesticated, despite American bison being the dominant wild ungulate and most important game species of the North American plains and being successfully ranched today, and despite five other species of wild cattle having been domesticated (the aurochs ancestral to cows, the mithan, the banteng, the yak, and the water buffalo).  When I ask American readers and animal handlers familiar with bison the possible reasons for bison non-domestication, they mention two factors: unpredictable dangerous disposition, such that bison ranchers remain wary of them; and ability to jump fences, such they could not be penned until modern strong high fences became available.  One may object to citing claims of nasty disposition as a reason for non-domestication of bison and zebras, by noting that wild horses are, and the now-extinct aurochs was, also nasty and dangerous.  One may also object that some wild species have had nastiness successfully bred out of them by domestication, notably wolves and silver foxes.  However, one should not overgeneralize those successes by assuming that, because behavioral obstacles to domestication have been successfully bred out of a few wild animal species, they could be bred out of any wild animal species.  The fact remains that bison have not been domesticated in either North America or Europe despite long co-existence with human livestock handlers, and that suggests obstacles.

Criticisms and alternative views .   Guns, Germs, and Steel asks why human history unfolded differently on the different continents over the course of the last 11,000 years.  The book answers this question in two stages.  The first stage involves continental differences in the antiquity and productivity of food production and food storage, resulting from continental differences in wild plant and animal species available for domestication, and in continental axes.  That stage in turn rests on a huge body of studies by botanists and zoologists.  The second stage involves the political, social, economic, and technological developments in human societies caused by those differences in food production and in food storage.  That stage rests on a huge body of studies by archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and other social scientists.

There is no serious, detailed alternative theory to explain why human history unfolded differently on the different continents.  There has been no refutation of the body of studies by botanists and zoologists about food production, nor of the body of studies by social scientists about food production’s consequences.

Nevertheless, Guns, Germs, and Steel has been criticized from three directions.  None of those criticisms constitutes an attempt to refute the book’s reasoning.  The criticisms instead involve people disliking the book’s interpretation or question, and expressing their generalized dislike.

One of the criticisms consists of using the term “geographic determinism” as a pejorative.  This term is invoked by some scholars in many contexts, in order to deny arguments that geographic factors contribute importantly to explanations of some human phenomena and dominate explanations of other human phenomena.  Elsewhere on this website, I have discussed what is wrong with this reflex response of “geographic determinism” to deny geographic explanations.

A second criticism comes from many people of European and Japanese ancestry, who believe that the long-term differences between human societies on different continents are instead due to genetic differences in IQ between different human populations.  Specifically, supporters of this view believe that Europeans or Japanese are on the average innately more intelligent than other peoples, and that’s why they were the first to develop guns, steel, and the other ingredients of modern power.  I have never heard proponents of this view discuss why IQ led to germs, a major driver of European conquests, also arising preferentially in Europe.  Proponents of this view also don’t discuss the bodies of research by botanists, zoologists, and social scientists underlying the interpretations of Guns, Germs, and Steel .

Proponents of this view recognize that their view is often viewed as “politically incorrect,” so I have encountered it much more often expressed privately in conversation than in writing.  Among the many accomplished and influential people who have expounded this view to me are numerous famous academics (especially in fields other than the social sciences), famous inventors, and powerful cabinet ministers. 

One problem with the view is that there is no convincing evidence for higher IQ, and for stronger genetic factors contributing to IQ, among people of European and Japanese ancestry, despite much effort devoted to obtaining such evidence.  It has proved difficult to develop cross-culturally valid methods of measuring IQ, and to separate genetic from learned contributions to IQ.  Another problem is that the view’s proponents focus on the IQ’s of modern Europeans and Japanese.  However, history’s broad pattern discussed in Guns, Germs, and Steel was already mostly in place by 3400 BC, by which time peoples of the Fertile Crescent had developed empires, writing, metal tools, and highly productive agriculture thousands of years before those ingredients of power arose elsewhere.  In fact, in most parts of the world, including Europe and Japan, those ingredients of power never arose independently at all: they were imported from the Fertile Crescent and from China via Korea respectively.  Hence IQ-based explanations should not focus on modern Europeans and Japanese, but instead on descendants of Fertile Crescent inhabitants of 3400 BC, such as modern Iraqis and Syrians.  So far as I know, proponents of the IQ hypothesis haven’t claimed that modern Iraqis and Syrians are innately superior to modern Europeans and other peoples in intelligence.

The remaining criticism comes especially from some politically liberal social scientists.  A pejorative term that they often invoke to tarnish Guns, Germs, and Steel is “Eurocentrism” i.e. focusing on Europe.  Racism and sexism are also sometimes mentioned or implied as criticisms.  One often cited example is a paper by the geographer Blout “Eight Eurocentric historians” [including me].  Explicitly or implicitly, the critics believe that discussions of Europe’s rise to power ought to be condemned as Eurocentric.  However, it’s a fact of history that Europe did rise to power, and that fact deserves explanation.  Guns, Germs, and Steel actually says little specifically about Europe but says a lot about the Fertile Crescent.  As for the charge of racism, Guns, Germs, and Steel ’s conclusion is that history’s broad pattern has nothing to do with human racial characteristics and everything to do with plant and animal biology, so that the vast majority of readers see Guns, Germs, and Steel as refuting rather than promoting racist explanations.  As for the implication of sexism, Guns, Germs, and Steel contains scarcely any discussion of gender roles, not because they are unimportant in general, but because I know of no evidence that continental differences in gender roles contributed to the continental differences in societal development.

For these reasons, my current view, and that of many (most?) scholars who have seriously studied the question posed by Guns, Germs, and Steel , is that the book’s interpretation is correct, fundamentally and in detail.

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared diamond, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

In Guns, Germs, and Steel , Jared Diamond outlines the theory of geographic determinism, the idea that the differences between societies and societal development arise primarily from geographical causes. The book is framed as a response to a question that Diamond heard from Yali , a charismatic New Guinean politician. Yali wanted to know, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo … but we black people had little cargo of our own?”—in other words, why have European societies been so militarily, economically, and technologically successful in the last 500 years, while other societies have not approached such a level of achievement?

In Part One of the book, Diamond sketches out the course of recent human history, emphasizing the differences between civilizations. Beginning about half a million years ago, the first human beings emerged in Africa, and eventually migrated around the rest of the world in search of game and other sources of food. About 11,000 years ago, certain human beings developed agriculture—a major milestone in human history. By the 15th century A.D., enormous differences had arisen between civilizations. For example, when Francisco Pizarro led a Spanish expedition to the Inca Empire in the early 16th century, he was able to defeat the Incan Emperor, Atahuallpa , easily. Why did the Europeans colonize the New World, and not the other way around?

In Part Two, Diamond talks about the dawn of agriculture and explains why it arose in certain parts of the world, but not others. Using carbon-dating technology, archaeologists have determined that the first sites of agriculture were Mesopotamia (in the Middle East), followed by Mesoamerica and China. Agriculture arose in those areas for a few reasons. Most of the human beings on the planet at the time were hunter-gatherers, meaning that they hunted game and picked nuts and berries for their food. But in the parts of the world that first developed agriculture, game and fruit were becoming scarcer, motivating experimentation with new forms of food production. In Mesopotamia, ancient humans used trial and error to learn how to plant certain large seeds in the earth, resulting in crops that could be harvested and converted into highly nutritious foods. These early peoples also learned how to domesticate wild animals, breeding familiar modern animals like dogs, cows, and horses. Humans used their domesticated animals to assist with agricultural work, while also learning how to domesticate certain wild crops, breeding most of the world’s familiar modern crops.

Agriculture arose in Mesoamerica and China. Due to environmental qualities like soil fertility, availability of domesticable animals, and availability of edible crops, however, it took a longer time for agriculture to supplant hunter-gatherer culture in most other regions. Once agriculture had arisen around the world, it spread or diffused to neighboring regions. By and large, Diamond argues, it is easier for ideas, goods, and foods to spread from east to west than it is for them to spread north and south—this is because the Earth spins east-west, meaning that areas with the same latitude share a similar climate and environment. Archaeological data indicates that agricultural innovations diffused east and west far sooner than they diffused north and south.

In Part Three, Diamond shows how basic agricultural differences between early societies magnified over time, leading to vast differences between societies’ health, technology, and social structure. First, he shows that agricultural societies developed immunities to deadly diseases like smallpox. Constant proximity to domesticated animals, combined with increased population density, meant that new germs were constantly circulating in agricultural societies. As a result, these societies became resistant to many epidemics—those who couldn’t survive died off, while those with immunities survived and passed on their immunities to their offspring.

Another important development in the history of agricultural societies was the invention of written language. While it’s difficult to show exactly why writing emerged in certain agricultural societies but not others, it’s clear that the structure of agriculture society (which requires lots of record-keeping for crops) put a high premium on a writing system. Furthermore, east-west diffusion patterns ensured that, once one society developed language, it diffused, along with agriculture itself, to surrounding areas, particularly those with similar latitude.

The history of language acts as a case study for the history of technology in general. While it’s again difficult to explain why certain inventors develop certain inventions, the structure of agricultural societies favored the invention of new technologies. This is true for a number of reasons. Agricultural societies lead to the creation of leisure time, since crops can be stored for long periods—in their leisure time, citizens of early agricultural societies experimented with the resources and raw materials around them. Additionally, agricultural societies were denser than hunter-gatherer societies, increasing the velocity with which people exchanged ideas. As a result, agricultural societies developed more new technologies than hunter-gatherer societies, and passed on their innovations to neighboring agricultural societies.

Ancient agricultural societies tend to develop into large, complex states. While the earliest agricultural societies were “bands” and small tribes, these small tribes gradually merged into larger and larger societies, either through conquering or mutual agreement. As societies became larger and denser, they tended to develop centralized structures of power—in other words, a central leadership that commanded a set of subordinate leaders, who in turn commanded local groups of people. States ruled through a balance of kleptocracy—i.e., leaders ordering their subjects to give up a portion of their possessions—and religion or patriotic fervor. By the 16th century—not coincidentally, the time when Europe was beginning its conquest of the New World—the state had become the dominant mode of society.

In Part Four, Diamond looks at a series of case studies that support his theory. In the first, he demonstrates that the New Guineans developed agriculture, sophisticated technology, and political centralization while the neighboring aborigines of Australia did not, due to geographic distances and factors like the ones sketched out in Part Two. He also argues that China was able to become the world’s first large, centralized state for environmental reasons—the temperate climate and homogeneous geography enabled easy communication and political unification between the states of China. The New Guineans were more successful than their neighbors, the peoples of Java and Borneo, in staving off European colonization and massacre in the 18th and 19th centuries, largely because their agricultural practices made them resistant to malaria, preventing colonists from staying for too long on their island. In the New World, agriculture arose in certain regions, but did not diffuse to neighboring regions due to the presence of geographic barriers like deserts and mountains. Finally, Diamond studies the history of Africa and argues that the Bantu peoples of North Africa were more militarily successful than their sub-Saharan neighbors because they developed some limited forms of agriculture. In the sub-Saharan environment, however, peoples didn’t have any way of developing agriculture, so their societies never had the time or organization to develop complex technologies.

In conclusion, Diamond argues, the differences between different peoples and societies of the world are largely attributable to geographic differences between different regions of the world. In certain parts of the world, humans began pursuing agriculture because the fertile soil and temperate climate made agriculture a good use of time and resources. Agricultural societies then gained tremendous advantages over non-agricultural societies, because the increase in leisure time enabled people to develop technologies and centralized political structures, and the proximity to animals gave people immunities to deadly diseases. As a result, some societies were able to conquer others.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

The book in three sentences.

Some environments provide more starting materials and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions and building societies than other environments. This is particularly notable in the rise of European peoples, which occurred because of environmental differences and not because of biological differences in the people themselves. There are four primary reasons Europeans rose to power and conquered the natives of North and South America, and not the other way around: 1) the continental differences in the plants and animals available for domestication, which led to more food and larger populations in Europe and Asia, 2) the rate of diffusion of agriculture, technology and innovation due to the geographic orientation of Europe and Asia (east-west) compared to the Americas (north-south), 3) the ease of intercontinental diffusion between Europe, Asia, and Africa, and 4) the differences in continental size, which led to differences in total population size and technology diffusion.

Guns, Germs, and Steel summary

This is my book summary of Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. My notes are informal and often contain quotes from the book as well as my own thoughts. This summary also includes key lessons and important passages from the book.

• History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences in their environments not because of biological differences in the people themselves.
• This book seeks to answer the question, “Why did the rate of progress differ so much for cultures on different continents?”
• Around 11,000 years ago all human societies were hunter gatherers.
• Understanding the causes of history improves our ability to intervene and improve the world. Many people mistakenly assume that discussing history is just a way to explain away tough issues. Not at all. It improves our ability to take effective action.
• The most common explanation of the different trajectories experienced by Europe compared to Africa, Asia, Oceania, etc. is genetic and biological. People assume there is some innate biological difference that made Europeans smarter, more creative, or more resilient. Science, however, has produced no substantial evidence to indicate this is the primary cause of different outcomes.
• Interesting side note: scientists are always competing to discover the “earliest human remains” or the earliest XYZ. As a result, every few years there is a new “earliest” discovery. Only one can actually be the earliest, of course.
• The occupation of Australia was an incredible feat. It was the first use of water craft and range extension by humans.
• Humans were likely responsible for the extinction of nearly all of Australia’s large mammals. The same is true for many large mammals that occupied the Americas over 10,000 years ago.
• The environment of ancient Polynesian society heavily dictated the lifestyle and behaviors. The many islands have widely varying landscapes and climates. Whether or not cultures developed weapons and became skilled at warfare, whether they became hunter gatherers or farmers, whether they acted more tribal or more hierarchical was largely determined by the environment in which these people lived.
• Food and animal domestication arose independently in five different areas of the world (at widely differing times) and possibly four others although there is still some contention about those.
• We often think there is a clear division between farmer and hunter gatherer lifestyles, but actually there can be a blending of the two. For example, some cultures plant crops, resume a hunter gatherer lifestyle while they grow, then return to harvest and eat.
• Agriculture did not lead to an unequivocally better lifestyle. In fact, for those who actually grow food life tends to be worse than it would be as a hunter gatherer. If this is true, and the evidence seems to point that way, then it means that advancement of civilization has essentially happened on the backs of society’s have-nots. In other words, the entire system we live within – agriculture, capitalism, etc. – requires inequality to function.
• Agriculture allowed food production per unit area to increase, which meant a given area could support a larger population. This allowed farming cultures to defeat hunter gatherer cultures by sheer force due to larger populations. This, in turn, led to the spread of more agricultural societies across the globe.
• Throughout the industrial revolution in Great Britain, moths of darker colors became more likely to survive because the surrounding environment become dirtier and covered in soot, smoke, and debris. Thus, it was more likely that dark-colored moths would survive than light-colored moths. As the environment changed, so did the evolution of moths. A fascinating example of evolution on a small scale.
• Cereal crops alone account for more than half of the food consumed by modern humans.
• The rise of indigenous food production in certain areas was the result of a few factors. First, certain areas had plants better suited to domestication. This led people to domestic earlier in those regions. Second, because of this early start, these people eventually domesticated more difficult plants. Evidence seems to indicate that all people’s are capable of food production and even modern hunter gatherers seem to be naturally moving that way.
• The rise of agriculture in some areas before others has to do with the environment, not the intelligence of the people.
• The Anna Karenina Principle: In many areas of life, success is not about doing one thing correctly, but about avoiding many possible modes of failure.
• Domesticated animals differ in multiple ways from their wild ancestors. For example, many domesticated animals are different sizes and have smaller brains than their wild ancestors.
• Domestication of large mammals ended approximately 4500 years ago. This indicates humans attempted to domesticate all of them and no suitable species remained. This is another piece of evidence that the type of animals available dictated the domestication in certain regions, not the people living in the region. This the spread of agriculture was once again impacted by the environment.
• There is a inefficiency during the eating process. The nutrient transfer is much less than 100 percent and typically around 10 percent. For example, it takes 10,000 pounds of corn to create a 1,000 pound bull.
• The primary geographic axis of North and South America is north-south. That is, the land mass is more longitudinal than latitudinal. The same for Africa. But for Europe and Asia, the primary axis is east-west. Interestingly, this positioning and shape matters greatly because it appears that agriculture and innovations spread more rapidly along east-west axes than along north-south axes.
• Locations along the same east-west axis share similar latitudes and thus have similar day lengths, seasons, climate, rainfalls, and biomes. All of which increase the speed of innovation relative to north-south axes.
• All tropical rainforests are within 10 degrees of latitude of the equator.
• One collection of evidence for the difference in spread along geographic axes is the spread of domesticated crops. Many crops spread across Asia with one domestication, while crops like cotton or squash were domesticated in multiple individual areas throughout Mesoamerica. This is because the crop spread too slowly for one domestication to takeover the region.
• It is vital to realize that although Diamond is discussing long time frames of hundreds or thousands of years, the core idea can be applied to short time spans of individual behavior as well. Indeed, large long term differences only occur because short term differences are repeated over and over again. Small environmental differences led to small changes in individual behavior, which resulted in significant differences when repeated for thousands of years.
• One reason farming communities developed immunity to diseases that wiped out hunter gatherer populations is that some diseases (like measles) are “crowd diseases.” They require a large population to sustain themselves because they act quickly: you either die or develop immunity. In order for the disease to sustain itself there must be enough new babies born to contract the disease from those who have already developed immunity. Only agricultural communities could grow to the required population size.
• On average, farming sustains populations that are 10x to 100x larger than hunting and gathering.
• North America was populated by about 20 million Native Americans when Columbus landed in 1492. Within two centuries, 95 percent of the native population had died, most of them from infectious diseases.
• Writing systems are historically seen as the deciding factor on whether an ancients civilization is considered advanced or not. This can be debated. The Incas built a great civilization without writing.
• All alphabets in the modern world evolved from one original alphabet, either in idea or actual written form, developed in the Middle East.
• Writing evolved independently in a few areas, but was spread via idea diffusion in most cultures and locations.
• Most inventions are not a result of necessity, but rather the result of tinkers and curiosity.
• Technology develops cumulatively rather than in isolated heroic acts. Even people we often associate with acts of genius like the Wright Brothers and Thomas Edison actually built upon the work of predecessors and had capable people who followed them and advanced ideas.
• Technology finds most of its uses after it has been invented rather than being invented to solve a foreseen need. The phrase, “necessity is the mother of invention” is generally incorrect. (Even though some examples, like the Manhattan Project, exist.)
• Long life expectancy is one reason technology might develop and spread faster in some locations rather than others. A longer life increases the surface area you have to test ideas and allows you to take on longer projects that you might otherwise avoid with limited time.
• Geographic location is a key determinant in the pace of technological innovation and acceleration because a centrally located society will not only accumulate knowledge and technology from their own inventions, but also from neighboring societies. In the case of a particularly large land mass like Eurasia, technologies can spread from one culture to another and continue to do so along the entire span of the continent. This spread occurs much more quickly in these locations than it would to, say, aboriginal cultures in Tasmania, which did not receive outside contact from other civilizations for over 10,000 years.
• Government and religion are two of the main reasons some societies overcame others. These shared myths led to collaboration and increased power.
• There are four levels of organization in society: bands (5-80 people), tribes (100-1000 people),  chiefdoms (1000 to tens of thousands of people), and states (50,000 or more people).
• Humanity has been on a clear path from small groups to larger ones, culminating in states, over the last few thousand years.
• The size of a population in a region is a strong predictor of the complexity of the society.
• Culture is heavily dependent on population density. The higher the population, the more culture seems to spawn and spread.
• War, or the threat of war, is the primary factor in the amalgamation of human societies throughout history. It is how cultures merge.
• Five dog night is an Australian phrase referring to a very cold night because you would need to use five dogs as blankets.
• Isolation is a key factor preventing creativity and innovation from spreading because most people and societies get their ideas from outside societies. So constant connection to others and trading of ideas and resources is essential for technological and creative progress.
• Food production was a key component in the determining the strength of a society. People sharing similar ancestors inhabited New Guinea and Indonesia, but the Indonesians were still hunter gatherers while the New Guineans had develop agriculture. When Austronesians invaded the region, Indonesians fell under their control, but New Guineas (with their food, germ resistance, and technologies) were able to resist.
• Again and again, the environment dictated the spread of power throughout islands of East Asia and the Pacific. Depending on location, islanders differed in their connectedness to other peoples and in the plants and animals available to them to domesticate. People with favorable locations for food production and access to technology replaced those with less favorable environments.
• The end of Chapter 18 shares multiple interesting examples of peoples who were largely similar genetically because of similar ancestors, but developed very different societies and technologies due to the their individual environments.
• Example of cultural evolution: the Moari of New Zealand were able to determine the most useful rocks and animals for domestication within a century of arriving.
• The striking differences in the histories of peoples on different continents have been due not to differences among the peoples themselves, but to differences in their environments.
• There are four primary reasons Europeans rose to power and conquered the natives of North and South America, and not the other way around.
• Reason 1: Continental differences in the plants and animals available for domestication. The differences are vast. Europe and Asia had the best prospects, then Africa, then the Americas, then Australia. The improved agricultural aspects led to larger populations and larger armies in Europe and Asia.
• Reason 2: the rate of diffusion of technological innovation due to the orientation of continents (east-west vs. north-south) and geographic barriers (mountains, deserts, etc.). The favorable geography of the Europe and Asia landmass resulted in much faster agricultural and technological expansion.
• Reason 3: ease of intercontinental diffusion. It was easy for ideas, technologies, and innovations to spread between Europe, Asia, and Africa. However, it was quite difficult for things to spread to the Americas because of large oceans and the only close landmass being in cold climates and at high latitudes unsuitable for farming.
• Reason 4: continental differences in total population size. Europe and Asia had a huge landmass where there was constant and widespread competition.
• All human societies contain inventive people. It’s just that some environments provide more starting materials and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions than other environments.
• The fragmentation of Europe was a key in enabling Columbus to cross the Atlantic. He was turned down by four different kingdoms before finally convincing the king and queen of Spain to fund his trip. Meanwhile, Chona had the technology to explore the world by ship, but their dictator at the time did not want to do so. In this way, one person prevented an entire made of people (with the technology) from succeeding. A little fragmentation is good. Too much centralized power means one person can handcuff the creativity of many.
• In the 1960s and 1970s, the decisions of a few Chinese leaders resulted in the schools closing in the country for five years. Crazy how so much centralized power is still playing a huge role.
• Europe has always been far more fragmented than China. Even at its peak, the Roman Empire never controlled more than half of Europe.
• Understanding ultimate causes is essential to understanding human behavior.
• Prediction of history is much easier over long time spans, but basically impossible over short time spans.
• Great discussion of science in the last half of the epilogue.
• Careful observations of natural experiments (things happening in the real world) can lead to fascinating and useful insights.
• Epidemiology, ecology, and evolutionary biology are developing better methods for dealing with the confounding factors often present in natural experiments.

Reading Suggestions

This is a list of authors, books, and concepts mentioned in Guns, Germs, and Steel, which might be useful for future reading.

• Toynbee’s 12-volume series on history
• Film: The Gods Must Be Crazy
• Maori New Zealand’s musket wars
• Applications of Chaos Theory. The QWERTY keyboard vs. Dvorak keyboard is one example.

Additional Thoughts

This is a list of interesting notes, side stories, or additional thoughts that were sparked as a I read the book.

• Many large mammals used for food production were not domesticated in the Americas because they became extinct around 13,000 BC (due to the appearance of humans?). This was well before agriculture arrived in America, thus domesticating these animals never occurred to prehistoric hunter gatherers. But why?

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How accurate or supported is Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel"?

Jared Diamond wrote a fascinating book that purports to explain, in a very broad way, the development of civilization. It has several explanations for the development of Eurasian civilization rather than American civilization.

Domesticated Animals : In Eurasia, there were several large domesticated animals, including the cow and horse. This had advantage for animal-powered farming and transportation, as well as infecting the Eurasians with numerous diseases the Americans had no resistance to. Diamond places great importance on diseases in human development, and likens the results of making contact with a more diseased civilization to being digested.

Direction of Expansion It's easier for a civilization to expand in a roughly east-west direction than a north-south direction, since climate is more similar east-to-west (an example would be the lack of horses in South Africa until imported by sea, since they couldn't go by land through the tse-tse fly zone). Eurasia extends more east-west, and America more north-south, as does Africa.

Food Production Wheat is a better grain than corn, in terms of nutrition supplied per unit effort.

There are other factors, but it's at least a well-written book, and superficially plausible.

How accurate, well-supported, and well-regarded is this book?

• ancient-history
• colonization
• historiography

• 11 Nice question. The book seems to be turning up in several answers. –  apoorv020 Commented Dec 30, 2011 at 20:20
• 1 Re cattle, what about buffalo? People ranch them for meat today, and presumably they could have been bred intentionally for domestication. It seems like an accident of history that Northern Europeans figured out dairy farming and evolved lactose tolerance. I don't see why the same couldn't have happened in the Americas. –  user2848 Commented Aug 14, 2014 at 15:53
• Ironically some recent article (sorry, cannot find the link) argued that corn is better than wheat, therefore precolumbian agricultural civilizations had much more spare time to go for war than European ones. However, you can pretty convincingly argue that whatever is the main crop and whatever is the level of technology, population density growths till can fully use up all the resources (up till Industrial Age, maybe). –  Greg Commented Jan 6, 2015 at 16:03
• @BenCrowell: The book does discuss water buffalo, and several other cattle-like animal (gwar, yaks). As for bison , unfortunately I don't have my copy of G,G,&S with me, but you could raise that (why weren't bison domesticated) as a separate question. –  user4139 Commented Jan 18, 2016 at 17:41
• there is this perspective: livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/… –  amphibient Commented May 17, 2017 at 20:47

8 Answers 8

The book is well written and well explained; Jared Diamond actually takes real pain to explain that his theories are not implacable and must not be taken as a 100% reliable blueprint for predicting success or failure of any civilization (even if we could actually define what "failure" means for a civilization).

The book, though, attracted criticism because it seems to relate indirectly to notions of geographical determinism that were used in German Geopolitik and incorporated in the Nazi ideology. That's a knee jerk reflex; Diamond's book links in no way geography to notions of human races, and its themes do not really apply to industrialized societies. In that sense, the guns, germs and steel culminate in the great showdown of the Columbian Exchange ; afterwards, worldwide transportation of people, goods, ideas, and (of course) germs tends to nullify the geographical-induced effects that Diamond expands upon. For instance, there now is cattle in America, and I can eat oranges in winter (I live in Canada...).

Some points developed in Diamond's book are still open to lively debate; while they do not invalidate the whole book's thesis, they are worth mentioning. For instance, after some discussion, Diamond confidently asserts that there was no human being in America before about 12000 BC; this is the "short chronology" of the settlement of the Americas and Diamond uses it as an argument to support the overkill hypothesis , by which most big animals in America were hunted to death in a short time by human hunters, of which animals had not evolved to be wary. In Diamond's book, overkill implies no suitable large animal for domestication and food production, and therefore no evolution of germs by transfer from cattle to humans. On that question of the settlement of America and of overkill, Charles Mann's 1491 , another well known and well written book, takes a different path.

I encourage you to read both books, so as to get more viewpoints and then think for yourself. Generally speaking, this is how you should read all books: not as collections of Revealed Truths, but as food for personal thought.

• 4 +1 for 1491 as a counterweight to Guns, Germs and Steel. –  BOB Commented Mar 2, 2015 at 20:07
• 1 Recent archeological findings indeed suggest human presence in the Americas can be pushed much further back than 12000 BCE: nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2509-0 –  Boaz Commented Aug 12, 2020 at 7:07
• I always found those arguments of determinism funny because if anything the book debunks notions of superiority of a particular group over the others. Guns, Germs, and Steel basically argues the human geopolitical landscape is the result of historical accidents and if the situation were reversed (say, North America has all the horses and cattle and Eurasia had none), Eurasia would get just as colonized as the New World was in our timeline. –  user2352714 Commented Jan 3, 2021 at 21:37

The Wikipedia entry on the book is pretty thorough. Guns, Germs, and Steel is definitely controversial, because Diamond is writing from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist, and essentially is arguing that history is if not wholly determined by geography, at least heavily influenced by it.

From the Wikipedia entry:

Guns, Germs and Steel met with a wide range of response, ranging from generally favorable to rejection of its approach. In 1998 it won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, in recognition of its powerful synthesis of many disciplines, and the Royal Society's Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books. The National Geographic Society produced a documentary by the same title based on the book, and it was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.

The book is well supported and well regarded. I want to add a caveat to the above answer, since the Wikipedia page doesn't emphasize this point. He is writing from a viewpoint of environmental determinism . This area of academics is having a bit of a revival right now, but environmental determinism has long been used to explain European (and according to Wikipedia other races as well, depending on the author) absurd and racist theories. For example: "In the chapter "Water and Earth" (Shuidi 水地), we find statements like "Now the water of [the state of] Qi is forceful, swift and twisting. Therefore its people are greedy, uncouth, and warlike," and "The water of Chu is gentle, yielding, and pure. Therefore its people are lighthearted, resolute, and sure of themselves." Climate determinism is especially famous. "For example, tropical climates were said to cause laziness, relaxed attitudes and promiscuity, while the frequent variability in the weather of the middle latitudes [Europe] led to more determined and driven work ethics."

It's therefore controversial to attempt to use the methodology at all when it may have such serious flaws. However, it is by no means useless, since there are real, quantifiable relationships between geography and development in the case of latitude, climate and access to rivers, ports and other features.

Diamond discusses the controversy on his website in detail here. He rejects the accusation that his theories are only based on geographical determinism.

• 9 Clearly, people criticizing GG&S as a work promoting those racist theories you mention simply didn't read the book, or at least severely misunderstood it. –  Dmitry Grigoryev Commented Oct 17, 2019 at 22:47

The book is very well regarded: it won a Pulitzer Price for non-fiction and figures in many lists of the more important books of the end of the 20th century.

It's impossible to say how accurate it is regarding the truth of its main thesis: that the long-term and gross differences between societies in different continents and environments, come ultimately from geographical factors. As always with History, one can think that it's plausible, but no more. "Correlation does not imply causation".

Guns, Germs and Steel is definitely controversial: the most important opponents (that I know of) are Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, who in "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty" argue that the differences in wealth and success come mainly from political and economic institutions. There is a "slow random drift" in institutions, and when a crisis comes, some regions are more likely to cope with it because they have better institutions, and the differences get bigger.

In my opinion, this other theory is more plausible, at least for the short and mid-term differences in modern times (the two Koreas, the two Germanies).

The controversy is not bitter, but it is deep.

The blog of Acemoglu and Robinson

http://whynationsfail.com/

A critique of "Why Nations Fail" by Jared Diamond himself.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/what-makes-countries-rich-or-poor/

• 5 A good crack at answering the question (so +1). I'm not sure I agree entirely about the two bodies of work being at odds with each other. GG&S deals with much larger units (continents) than does WNF (individual countries). However, Mr. Diamond happened to have another different book on the subject ( Collapse ) when WNF came out. He essentially used the cover of a theoretical dispute to pump his own book, so now I suspect the difference is personal. –  T.E.D. ♦ Commented Jan 6, 2015 at 19:05

Question: How accurate, well-supported, and well-regarded is this book (Guns Germs and Steel)?

Short Answer: Not that accurate, not well supported, pretty well regarded as a very ambitious project which necessarily sacrificed important detail as it brought together many different fields of study into one new interlocking amalgamation to answer a specific question.

• 1997, Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science.
• 1998, Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, in recognition of its powerful synthesis of many disciplines the Royal Society's Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books.
• 2005, The National Geographic Society produced a documentary of the same title based on the book that was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.

While praised by many and well received, the book "Guns Germs and Steel" has been roundly criticized by the scientific specialists which make up the fields Diamond drew upon. The criticism notes that Diamond's book is a profound oversimplification of the topics presented and thus sacrifices accuracy.

Details Jarrett Diamond didn't invent the theories he wrote about in his book from 1991. He just synthesized them in a new and engaging way and applied that synthesis broadly on a specific question regarding New Guinea and Britain. Why Britain and New Guinea had such different histories. The theories Diamond presents to answer this question are from many different fields of study and widely regarded individually to be good science. However; if their is one criticism of Jarrett Diamond's work it is that the broad use of these works and use as an amalgamation leads to oversimplifications of the original theories and thus inaccuracy.

The Steppe Tradition in International Relations Russians, Turks and European State Building 4000 BCE–2017 CE International Relations scholars Iver B. Neumann (of the London School of Economics and Political Science) Einar Wigen (of University of Oslo) "while empirical details should, of course, be correct, the primary yardstick for this kind of work cannot be attention to detail." They state, "Diamond stated clearly that any problematique of this magnitude had to be radically multi-causal and then set to work on one complex of factors, namely ecological ones", and note that while Diamond "immediately came in for heavy criticism from specialists working in the disparate fields on which he drew..... Until somebody can come up with a better way of interpreting and adding to Diamond’s material with a view to understanding the same overarching problematique, his is the best treatment available of the ecological preconditions for why one part of the world, and not another, came to dominate."

historian Tom Tomlinson "Given the magnitude of the task he has set himself, it is inevitable that Professor Diamond uses very broad brush-strokes to fill in his argument.

GG&S was criticized by several scientists, including Russian biologist and paleontologist Kirill Eskov . Eskov wrote an article about the book in his blog in 2006, which was later reprinted in several online journals, e.g. here . I'm not aware of any English translations of it though.

In short, the main reason for the rebuke is the alleged cherry-picking of facts which fit into Diamond's theory, while ignoring contradicting facts. It should be noted that the criticism doesn't completely deny all of Diamond's ideas, rather, it points out that in many cases the situation is much more complex than GG&S depicts it.

Domesticated Animals / Plants

While African and American plants and animals may be not as good or as numerous as what is found in Eurasia, species suitable for domestication do exist, and the reason why they weren't domesticated or didn't become a factor in the development of the civilization could not be adequately explained by Diamond's theory. The prime example is the potato, which is native to South America, and which played a key role in the elimination of hunger in Europe when it was introduced there, yet it didn't give Aztecs or Mayas a significant advantage.

While other native American and African plans and animals are not as good as their European counter-parts, they are still good enough for domestication given no other option. For instance, Eskimos domesticated reindeer in the absence of horses and cows, and it's not clear why e.g. elands in Africa and musk oxes in America weren't domesticated until recently.

Eskov makes a comparison between such "second-grade" domestication candidates and Russian car models, which didn't stand a chance against West-European cars when the USSR fell and the border was open, yet served their purpose rather well while the country was in isolation behind the iron curtain.

Direction of Expansion

The geographical barriers described by Diamond are either not as solid as one may assume or weren't true the past:

South America is dominated by the Andes mountain chain which creates several climatic zones on each latitude. As a result, many such climatic zones span from North to South along the Andes, making migration and sharing of domesticated species possible.

The fact that the Panama jungle was impassable at the time couldn't prevent economical links via ship navigation and cabotage, which was known to the ancient Americans. If anything, cabotage (which gave rise to many trade civilizations in Mediterranean Europe) is easier than caravan trade and doesn't require having horses/camels and wheel.

The Sahara was not a desert at a time when domestication started, and in later times was not impassable as the Nile Valley served as the equivalent of the Silk Road.

Unused Inventions

Many technologies which according to GG&S gave European colonists a competitive edge over aborigines in Africa and the Americas were known to those aborigines, sometimes long before Europeans. Yet those technologies were never put to good use.

Iron artifacts in equatorial Africa predate European iron by 2000 years.

Americas had plentiful ore deposits, yet Maya / Aztec metallurgy didn't go further past smelting naturally found nuggets.

Aztecs were aware of the wheel, yet they didn't make any vehicles or pulleys.

The Price of Germs Immunity

The last argument goes against the claim that germs helped Europeans conquer other civilizations which had no immunity for them. In fact, while germs give a tactical advantage to the side which is immune to them during a war, those same germs strongly disadvantage the civilization which has them by slowing down development. For instance, the two major plague epidemics cost Europe 30-50% of the population at the time, and in both cases it took the affected countries some 200 years to recover to the pre-epidemic population levels. Considering how badly Aztecs were affected by European infections such as smallpox, we cam assume that those infections also cost hundreds of years to the early European civilizations which first contracted them.

• 1 I was going to give some of the shaky reasoning I was seeing reported here a pass, on the theory that the obvious holes in it were likely explained better in the book. However, the last paragraph is just nonsense. We have numerous historical examples of disease making a huge impact in favor of colonialism in the Americas and Oceana over long periods, so arguing against that is arguing against a gigantic historical record. –  T.E.D. ♦ Commented Oct 17, 2019 at 13:14
• 1 Let's quote from the second paragraph of the WP page on the Fall of Tenochtitlan : "it was the siege of Tenochtitlan—its outcome probably largely determined by the effects of a smallpox epidemic (which devastated the Aztec population and dealt a severe blow to the Aztec leadership while leaving an immune Spanish leadership intact)—that directly led to the downfall of the Aztec civilization" –  T.E.D. ♦ Commented Oct 17, 2019 at 13:58
• 1 We don't have to theorize about the effects of disease, because we have the historical record. It clearly shows European diseases were a huge factor. Anyone who argues otherwise isn't using evidence-based reasoning. –  T.E.D. ♦ Commented Oct 17, 2019 at 14:01
• 5 @T.E.D. The epidemic only made a difference in this particular battle, allowing such a small Spanish force to win. It's not like if Aztecs could tolerate smallpox they would have dominated the world by now. The Spanish could have easily assembled 100 times more cannons if this were a fight to the death for them. –  Dmitry Grigoryev Commented Oct 17, 2019 at 14:13
• 7 @T.E.D. In my view that's still a tactical advantage which can win a battle, while having access to a more developed industry is a strategical one, which wins a war. And records can only show correlation (Aztecs had no smallpox immunity and they lost), the causation always comes from "theoretical reasoning". IMO the whole book was written to answer the question "could other civilizations have dominated if they had X?", which is necessarily a speculation because we know for a fact that it didn't happen. –  Dmitry Grigoryev Commented Oct 17, 2019 at 22:14

The book gives an account on historic events and some causes based on archeology, genetics research, linguistics and other fields, with a focus on the differences between Eurasia and the Americas + Australia. Those were as accurate as possible when the book was written, and are not substantially different in 2020, even if some data has changed.

However the main theory advertised by the book remains is based on environmental determinism, which is not an objective way to approach history.

Whenever comparing 2 groups of people that have diverged in any characteristics (looks, abilities, power, technology), there are common categories of factors that might explain the difference, environmental factors (geography, climate, terrain, resources, climate change), biological factors (available animals, plants, diseases), catastrophes (volcanoes, droughts, floods, pests), cultural factors (language, law, religion, politics, trade, economy), genetic factors, important personalities (Alexander the Great, Aristotle), inventions and discoveries, important battles, wars, outbreaks of epidemics.

Those are not even all, just examples. When historians create theories to explain causality of events, the safest bet is to say "It's a combination of factors, it's complicated".

However in GG&S, all difference are reduced to food production and geography as "ultimate causes", and when this is too difficult then the author allows for other causes as "proximate causes", still determined by "ultimate causes". That way, the differences of power of populations until 1500 CE all appear to be derived from the environment.

However, the logic is not viable. Just because we know that population P1 developed faster than population P2, and we know that P1 had an advantage X, this does not mean we can infer X alone determined how much faster P1 developed than P2. Even if we know that the "fertile Crescent" had advantages in wild plants and animals, this does not tell us whether the speed by which it developed compared to other regions was 100% determined by this advantage, or whether this improved the speed by 50% and other factors were equally important.

The theory of the book is nevertheless better than other simplified theories like:

• "Western Europe got most powerful because God chose the white race as his most beloved creation and led the white race to victory" (divine determinism)
• "Western Europe got most powerful because the white race is superior, genetically" (genetic determinism)
• "Western Europe got most powerful because Judeo-Christian philosophy is superior to others" (cultural determinism)
• "Western Europe got most powerful because it was lucky enough to have most geniuses in it's history" (chaotic random determinism)

But GG&S still falls into the same category of theories that try to reduce complex history to just one simple factor. While it seems obvious that any continent achieving food production earlier than others is an important factor in becoming dominant (especially between distant continents), this does not eliminate potential other factors also being involved. The differences between connected Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Western Asia, East Asia, and the different parts of Africa are not explained very convincingly by the theory provided in GG&S, the author merely defers this to "extended research".

Nor is there any other competing simple theory explaining the differences well within Afro-Eurasia. And the most honest and accurate theory may still be: "It's complicated".

• Skimming this (it is overly long for my taste), it seems to set up ED as a strawman, and then attack that early on. It then finishes off talking about Western Europe isolated from Asia, which GG&S explicitly did not address (it was quite insistent and consistent in treating Eurasia as a unit). This looks a lot like an answer from someone who's read a lot of criticism of GG&S, but not the book itself. –  T.E.D. ♦ Commented Aug 12, 2020 at 12:42
• It's in the Epilogue, starting page 409, "why, within Eurasia, were European societies, rather than those of the Fertile Crescent or China or India, the ones that colonized America and Australia...". Indeed the rest of the book treats Eurasia as a unit for the sake of making the theory more plausible, just as sub-saharan Africa is treated as a unit throughout most of the book. I did also read criticisms of GG&S, and I don't think that's a bad thing to do before answering this question. –  tkruse Commented Aug 12, 2020 at 16:55
• That bit in the eplogue is a throwaway (and IMHO worth just that). The rest of the book treats Eurasia as a unit, for the same reason that Newton's theory of Gravity doesn't address radioactive decay: because that level of detail is outside of the scope of what its talking about. If you are interested in why Western Europe in particular rather than China or India or even Tajikistan, you need some other book. GG&S isn't about that. –  T.E.D. ♦ Commented Aug 12, 2020 at 19:31
• I shortened the answer a bit. I believe the rest of our disagreement is a mere matter of opinion, so I wont comment further. –  tkruse Commented Aug 13, 2020 at 0:30
• Diamond was not arguing for determinism, see this section of the epilogue which shows he was arguing about what sort of statistical patterns we'd see if we could have a large number of repeated "trials" of history starting from similar initial conditions (similar to Stephen Jay Gould's thought-experiment about replaying life's tape ). Obviously a very speculative question but he argues there is some basis for reasoned inferences based on "natural experiments". –  Hypnosifl Commented Apr 10, 2021 at 3:22

I was delighted by the book and used to keep it in great regard. The only problem that after one malicious person started to fact check all the premises, big part of reasoning and my faith in Jared Diamond started to crumble.

1) I suspect that everyone here heard about Irish Potato Famine. Yes, Europe was revolutionised by an American plant because it was bringing higher yields per hectare. Somehow I also was shocked that I overlooked that contradiction with whole premise of book.

Fun part: concerning crop Europeans were clearly the least lucky, as they were not only beaten by American corn/ potato but also Asian rice in yield. Thus following the theory it should have doomed Europe.

By contrast, wheat comes in at about 4 million calories per acre, soy at 6 million. Rice is also very high-yielding, at 11 million, and potatoes are one of the few crops that can rival corn: They also yield about 15 million (although record corn yields are much higher than record potato yields)

Source: Washington Post

If, as LangLangC this is a comparison of modern species - US settlers were planting corn for its higher yield than wheat ( Even if one moved corn to Spain in premodern times and foreign environment it had similar yields to wheat )

2) Zebras actually could be domesticated, and in XIXth century German colonisers were successfully utilising them. Yes, it has nasty character. On exactly what premise are we assuming that wild, undomesticated horses millennia ago were nice? Domestication puts very strong evolutionary pressure on animals, including making their brains smaller and their behaviour much more docile.

German colonial zebra cavalry prior to WW1

3) In North America actually spread of corn among native tribes was not showing any evidence of this claimed north-south problem. Instead it was "jumping" in weird way, showing that some other factors were dominating.

4) Modern cows origin from aurochs, which in original form were a bison size animal. According to historical accounts (extinct in XVIIth century) they were not only fearsome challenge for hunters but even people did not fully grasped that were related to cows. In other words unless in this case, against Jared Diamond claims, it was not being lucky in getting nice animal, but millennia of domestication.

There is a third kind, consisting of those animals which are called uri. These are a little below the elephant in size, and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied. These the Germans take with much pains in pits and kill them. The young men harden themselves with this exercise, and practice themselves in this kind of hunting, and those who have slain the greatest number of them, having produced the horns in public, to serve as evidence, receive great praise. But not even when taken very young can they be rendered familiar to men and tamed. The size, shape, and appearance of their horns differ much from the horns of our oxen. These they anxiously seek after, and bind at the tips with silver, and use as cups at their most sumptuous entertainments.

Julius Ceaser desription of Auroch, from Commentaries on the Gallic War, Book 6

5) The book reasoning is based on assumption that if some specie was not domesticated, then it means it was practically impossible. In last century Russians were running a breeding experiment and managed to domesticate fox as pet as they were selecting friendlier and friendlier generations. Yes, maybe a bit pointless from practical perspective, but that's exactly the point. If one does not need some domesticated animals then does not put the effort. In consequence whoever managed the domestication of useful animals first would get and edge and manage to spread them, thus making later domestication of similar species pointless.

6) The argument concerning lack of wild horses or camels in Americas is could be equally well interpreted in the opposite direction. The problem is that both species had been driven in to extinction by early hunter-gatherers. Nothing unique. In Eurasia we managed also to more or less drive in to extinction wild horses (there are some semi-wild reintroduced like tarpan or Przewalski's horse), aurochs or wild dromaders. So equally well we may use the same data and ask whether one bothers to domesticate a specie before driving it in to extinction, and reach a conclusion that the differentiating factor was some seemingly minor decision at key divergence point.

Link to link base of research articles of the above mentioned malicious guy, who run a nasty fact check: https://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2019/05/05/guns-germs-and-steel-sources/

• Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat . –  MCW ♦ Commented Sep 15, 2019 at 18:26
• Those zebras are tamed, not domesticated. –  tkruse Commented Aug 7, 2020 at 6:25

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Jared Diamond on the Root of Inequality and How the Mixed Blessings of “Civilization” Warped Our Relationship to Daily Risk

By maria popova.

By bridging the fields of anthropology, evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, geopolitics, and social science, trailblazing scientist Jared Diamond (b. September 10, 1937) has done more than anyone since Margaret Mead to decondition the Eurocentric approach to history and debunk the biological fallacies on which the monster of racism feeds. His Pulitzer-winning 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies ( public library ) is a foundational text illuminating the conditions that led to inequality in the modern world and combating the broken logic that perpetuates these toxic beliefs.

At the heart of Diamond’s work is the notion that in order to understand any one society, we must contextualize it in the larger ecosystem of humanity and therefore must understand all societies. Only by grasping the richness and diversity of the entire ecosystem can we begin to dismantle our assumptions about the value of others and realize that people from different groups fared differently in history not due to their innate abilities but due to a complex cluster of environmental and geopolitical forces.

Diamond writes:

We all know that history has proceeded very differently for peoples from different parts of the globe. In the 13,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, some parts of the world developed literate industrial societies with metal tools, other parts developed only nonliterate farming societies, and still others retained societies of hunter-gatherers with stone tools. Those historical inequalities have cast long shadows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies. While those differences constitute the most basic fact of world history, the reasons for them remain uncertain and controversial. […] Questions about inequality in the modern world can be reformulated as follows. Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way? For instance, why weren’t Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians? […] The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world’s most troubled areas today.

Diamond arrived at studying the interplay of these complex forces via an unlikely path. A self-described “fanatical bird-watcher” since the age of seven, he came to study biology, then nearly dropped out of his Ph.D. program in physiology to become a linguist. But he did complete his science degree and landed in Papua New Guinea as a passionate thirty-something biologist studying bird evolution. He spent the decades that followed doing fieldwork in evolutionary biology, which took him into a remarkably wide range of human societies. Out of that immersion sprang the centerpiece of Diamond’s work — an unflinching invitation to nuance in how we think about progress.

He confronts a common bias:

Don’t words such as “civilization,” and phrases such as “rise of civilization,” convey the false impression that civilization is good, tribal hunter-gatherers are miserable, and history for the past 13,000 years has involved progress toward greater human happiness? In fact, I do not assume that industrialized states are “better” than hunter-gatherer tribes, or that the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for iron-based statehood represents “progress,” or that it has led to an increase in human happiness. My own impression, from having divided my life between United States cities and New Guinea villages, is that the so-called blessings of civilization are mixed.

With an eye to the social environment and educational opportunities that shape the intellectual destiny of human beings, Diamond argues that our notions of intelligence are not only gravely skewed by the Western perspective but just about inverted. The IQ tests on which technologically advanced societies like our own do better than technologically primitive societies like aboriginal cultures — results on which many racist claims are predicated — actually measure cultural learning rather than innate cognitive ability. He writes:

My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not.

In this excerpt from a talk at British science powerhouse The Royal Institution , animated by artist Andrew Khosravani , Diamond illustrates New Guineans’ intellectual superiority with one particularly striking example of their sounder judgment in everyday matters:

In Guns, Germs, and Steel , Diamond points to two factors that explain New Guineans’ superior intelligence: First, European cultures have spent thousands of years in areas so densely populated that infectious disease spread and became the major cause of death, while centralized government and law enforcement kept murder at a relatively low rate. In New Guinea, on the other hand, societies were too sparse for epidemics to evolve, making murder, accidents, and tribal warfare the primary causes of death. Smart people were more likely to escape murder and avoid accident, passing their intelligent genes forward.

The second factor Diamond considers strikes much closer to the present and points to perilous forces we still have a chance to avert:

Modern European and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults. Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation. This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans. That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental dis advantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up.

Writing in 1997, Diamond could not yet point to other developmentally detrimental Western technologies that now hijack our cognitive faculties by reducing the world’s complexity to clickbait and listicles. But the cultural forces he examines make sense of how we ended up here. A revelatory read in its entirety, Guns, Germs, and Steel is thus no less timely today, packed with insight into the microscopic and monumental forces that shape our daily lives. Complement it with a very different and equally important perspective on the unconscious biases that permeate our world .

— Published September 10, 2015 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/10/jared-diamond-guns-germs-and-steel-risk/ —

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Jared Diamond Biography

Birthday: September 10 , 1937 ( Virgo )

Born In: Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Jared Mason Diamond is an American scientist and author reputed for his highly acclaimed and popular science books. He has penned down eight books and a number of academic monographs. The fields he covers are varied from ecology to evolutionary biology and from geography to anthropology. Some of his notable books are ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee’, ‘Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed’, ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies’ and ‘The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?’. His book ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies’, translated in thirty-three different languages, garnered sales of millions of copies across the globe. While the book shot him to global fame it also fetched him the prestigious ‘Pulitzer Prize’ in 1998 apart from other prizes. He travelled to Africa, Australia, Asia, North America and South America for his field projects that include twenty-two expeditions to the New Guinea and its neighbouring islands. He made path-breaking studies of the birds of Papua New Guinea. He received the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 1985. Diamond received several awards including the ‘Zoological Society of San Diego Conservation Medal’ (1993), ‘International Cosmos Prize’ (1998) and ‘National Medal of Science’ (1999). He was ranked 9th among top 100 public intellectuals in the polls conducted by two magazines namely ‘Foreign Policy’ and ‘Prospect’ in 2005. At present he is serving at the ‘University of California’, Los Angeles (UCLA) as a Professor of Geography.

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Also Known As: Jared Mason Diamond

Age: 86 Years , 86 Year Old Males

Spouse/Ex-: Marie Cohen

father: Louis Diamond

mother: Flora Kaplan

Born Country: United States

Physiologists Non-Fiction Writers

City: Boston

U.S. State: Massachusetts

education: Harvard University Trinity College, Cambridge

awards: Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science (1997) Royal Society Prize for Science Books (1992 1998 & 2006)

Pulitzer Prize (1998) International Cosmos Prize (1998) National Medal of Science (1999) Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (2001) Wolf Prize in Agriculture (2013)

You wanted to know

What is jared diamond most known for.

Jared Diamond is most known for his work as a popular science author, particularly for his books "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse."

What are some criticisms of Jared Diamond's work?

Some criticisms of Jared Diamond's work include accusations of oversimplification, cherry-picking data, and presenting a Eurocentric view of history.

How did Jared Diamond become interested in the study of human societies?

Jared Diamond became interested in the study of human societies during his fieldwork as an ornithologist in New Guinea, where he observed traditional societies and their interactions with the environment.

What is the central thesis of Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs, and Steel?"

The central thesis of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is that geographic and environmental factors, rather than inherent intellectual or moral superiority, shaped the course of human history and the development of civilizations.

How has Jared Diamond's work influenced the fields of history and anthropology?

Jared Diamond's work has influenced the fields of history and anthropology by challenging traditional narratives of societal development and emphasizing the role of geography, environment, and technology in shaping human societies.

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Jared Diamond is not only a renowned author and professor, but he also holds a passion for birdwatching and has documented his observations in various publications.

Despite his academic achievements, Jared Diamond is known for his down-to-earth personality and approachability, making him a popular figure among students and colleagues alike.

In addition to his expertise in geography and anthropology, Jared Diamond is a talented musician and has been known to play the piano for relaxation.

Jared Diamond has a unique sense of humor and enjoys incorporating witty anecdotes into his lectures and presentations, adding an engaging and light-hearted touch to his academic discussions.

Outside of his work in academia, Jared Diamond is a dedicated conservationist and actively supports various environmental causes, demonstrating his commitment to protecting the natural world.

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Jared Diamond’s Worst Mistake

Jared Diamond has made the argument in several books and essays — most notably Guns, Germs, and Steel — that the move from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies was the “worst mistake” in history. To support this conclusion, he cites various evidence which indicates that the larger families of early agricultural societies actually resulted in poorer nutrition, hygiene, and even longevity compared to the hunter-gatherer societies they replced.

But Diamond’s thesis makes little sense: No one would willingly choose a less appealing lifestyle. Diamond argues that these societies were “forced” into this lifestyle due to their inability to control their birth rates. But this contradicts the known facts: For tens or hundreds of thousands of years, mankind was able to regulate their birth rates just fine while continuing to live in hunter-gatherer societies. And, in fact, modern hunter-gatherer societies manage to similarly regulate their birth rates.

I suspect the reality is that the agricultural lifestyle was preferred specifically because it allowed for larger families. This is a point of view which is probably difficult for a scholar from the latter half of the 20th century to understand, given that contemporary western society puts a very low premium on children compared to previous epochs of history.

Oh, we still like our children… we just tend to like them in moderation. The idea of a single woman bearing 20 children seems unspeakably alien and even slightly distasteful to most of us… but would seem incredibly desirable to most cultures of recorded history.

So those early farmers may have been hungry, dirty, and short-lived… but it wasn’t a mistake. They were gaining something that they valued even more.

2 Responses to “Jared Diamond’s Worst Mistake”

This is a great reflection, where you try to make sense of a foolish decision. You rightly point out that people wouldn’t take bad gambles. It’s possible you may no longer believe this, since it was published 12 years ago. This is especially the case given that in that period of time, we’ve had plenty of other literature that covers the same topic with different focuses.

One of the most popular examples is Harari’s book Homo Sapiens. There, he describes how the transition from hunting-gathering happened. It was gradual. It was subtle. It made us want more of the plants we started domesticating. And little by little, as we were both enchanted by the ease of this lifestyle and simultaneously started creating cultures to reflect the times, we settled for agricultural life. It just so happened that that enchanting lifestyle was riddled with problems. But we didn’t see that. The change was too gradual, spanning generations.

The effect of this gradual change can be understood in many ways. One is that the new farmers could not think of another way of living, given their ancestors likely had similar lifestyles —again, since this change was so gradual. The stories these farmers heard of their origins as a cultural group legitimized the agrarian lifestyle. Another perspective is that, even if people could choose, it could have been a similar choice between cheap calories and slow food. Most people can understand the links between cheap calories and worse health, but our biology, culture, infrastructure, as well as our economic and political systems collude to make it possible for Coke to be in almost every menu, every store, and not be questioned enough for it to disappear. Too bad it’s killing us and making our lives worse. But we’re stuck here regardless.

I remember reading somewhere that early states were extremely reliant on slavery, to the extent that the upper class would periodically have to go out and capture new peasants to replace the ones that had run away to go be hunter gatherers again.

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