Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
by Jared M. Diamond
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jared M. DiamondEdition: Paperback
Published: 1999-04-01
ISBN: 0393317552
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Book Reviews of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Book Review: A scientific historical treatise on the reasons for the rise and fall of civilizations
Summary: 3 Stars
Guns, Germs and Steel is a scientific historical treatment on the rise and fall of civilizations and the reasons why the western world is considered successful. In many ways Jared Diamond has built a city with one stone. He has established the necessity for the scientific method in history, reversed the problem of a western biased orientation of the analysis and identified several challenges to a racist explanation for western success.
The book comes about as a result of a fundamental question raised by the friend of the authors from New Guinea. Yali asked in a roundabout way why whites have been more successful than blacks. Diamond felt that human genetic diversity in the form of racism did not answer this question and proceeded to produce this deep treatise which looks more at environmental factors as the causal agent of success or failure.
Chapter 1: Up to the Starting Line
This chapter does a brief synopsis of the evolution of humans and deals with the Great Leap Forward, extinctions and the Clovis culture in Americas in 11,000 BC.
Chapter 2: A Natural Experiment of History
Diamond shows that common stocks can produce very diverse cultures based on the environment. He cites the case of the Maoris victory over the Morioris on the Chatham islands in 1835. Both are Polynesian decedents.
Chapter 3: Collision at Cajamarca
Francisco Pizarro conquers the Inca emperor Atahuallpa in Cajamarca Peru in 1532. Guns, germs, steel and horses decide the victory as well as the Inca making serious mistakes many times over. It is this situation that requires an explanation as to how things got to this point and is what this book is about.
Chapter 4: Farmer Power
Food production is a huge part of this book and occurs frequently throughout. The book might well have been called 'farming' there is so much of it. This is an extensive fact based chapter that deals with food production. A lot of it is raw data and tables. Crops and animal domestication get the full treatment. There is an important link between animals and human germs brought up.
Chapter 5: History's Haves and Have-Nots
This chapter deals with carbon dating and is an extension of the last chapter verifying the types of crops and animals various civilizations had or didn't and why.
Chapter 6: To Farm or Not to Farm
Diamond explains the slow progress of farming and why hunter gatherers simply had more than early farmers but farming eventually outgrew hunter-gathering. He explains why some civilizations didn't adopt it based on lack of domesticated crops and animals and or inappropriate environments.
Chapter 7: How to Make an Almond
Because wild almonds are poisonous Diamond explains how mutations and breeding selection produces edible crops. More importantly he discusses why some crops are not edible and how this effects civilizations depending on their environment. Some civilizations had it easier than others.
Chapter 8: Apples or Indians
Here the Fertile Crescent richness is compared with places of sparse productivity. It becomes clear that a very low percentage of biological life can be domesticated for human consumption.
Chapter 9: Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle
Some animals cannot be domesticated and thus domesticated animals must be imported. This chapter is about the failure to domesticate certain animals and why. It is also about the spread of domesticated animals.
Chapter 10: Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes
Geography plays an important part in how wide a naturally occurring or bred species can spread. East to west is much easier than north to south because of climate. This explains why species spreading across Europe and Asia is easier than up and down North and South America.
Chapter 11: Lethal Gift of Livestock
Animals are responsible for a lot of human diseases and plagues. Diamond links animal husbandry and large populations with developing immunity against epidemics.
Chapter 12: Blueprints and Borrowed Letters
The evolution of writing. This chapter may be worth the book alone. Diamond covers the evolution of writing and is one of the reasons why this book (containing writing!) has a nice twist in its tale. Writing is important because it became a method of communication over long distances and record keeping for farmers and supplies.
Chapter 13: Necessity's Mother
This deals with the Cretan Minoan Phaistos disk of 1700 BC and is a continuation of the previous chapter but deals more with why technologies develop. Diamond correctly identifies that technologies don't spring out of nowhere. They evolve.
Chapter 14: From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy
The evolution of governments. This is a heavy data and fact laden account of the evolution of governments from small bands to tribes to cities. It is all about how societies get organized.
Chapter 15: Yali's People
Here Diamond applies everything we have learned to the conquest of New Guinea by Europeans. He shows how essentially they are the victims of their own environment. The conquest of Australia is also examined in the same way.
Chapter 16: How China Became Chinese
This is about how China's many inter-civilizations interacted and the Austronesian migration of people to the Far East and Australia.
Chapter 17: Speedboat to Polynesia
Moving on from the previous chapter Diamond explores the colonization of Polynesia and the evolution of the double-canoe.
Chapter 18: Hemisphere's Colliding
Revising everything, Diamond goes back to Chapter 3: Collision at Cajamarca and attempts to explain how things led up to that point. Food production, domestication, metallurgy, weapons, cavalry, transport, writing and political organization lead the way. The environment is given a reason behind the slower development of these points by the Inca. Diamond then reveals that the Norse, not Columbus, were the first Europeans to visit the Americas through Greenland.
Chapter 19: How Africa Became Black
This examines how Africa evolved internally, the various tribes involved and their long battles that have lasted centuries as well as the slow movement of technologies and discoveries from the north to the south.
Epilogue: The Future of Human History as a Science
Diamond puts forward his case for scientific history, dispenses with the idiosyncratic Great Man theory, points out that there are social factors involved and possibly even chaotic ones before calling on the use of the scientific historical method to predict future outcomes for humanity.
There is no arguing the point that Diamond is making and he has established it very scientifically. Environmental conditions have an impact on how a civilization will appear and act. This is Darwinian in every sense. Using the examples of the same genetic stock from the same culture developing into two opposite lifestyles in short spaces of time because of island separation and geological differences is a good argument. You can't help but note the degree of luck and opportunity involved in success and as Diamond so aptly puts it, this is much more about the quality of real estate than the quality of a race. This is not to say that slight genetic variations don't make a difference, they do and Diamond doesn't challenge that as some have wrongly accused of him of saying (as a note the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins often cites Diamond's work). What Diamond does is to challenge that genetic variations within a species are a sufficient explanation for the success of white man. He may be riding a wave of political correctness with this book but he does dispute justifications for racism scientifically. He also breaks down absolutism by showing that success is relative when it comes to doing one's best in the environment they are in. As he points out, Aborigines conquered some of the harshest lands in the world.
Diamond himself knows the problem with his oversimplification. His findings when applied to all civilizations throughout history will turn up contradictions that fly in the face of his reasoning but he has explained the big picture of social conquest and doesn't need to shuffle genes to do it.
There are a few more problems with Guns, Germs and Steel though. His overall reasoning touches on environmental determinism. Diamond does deal with this serious predicament by elaborating on the social conditions and cultural qualities at play. He believes and states often that human choices influence things. Diamond does his best to cover these in the political organisation sections and throughout but a type of environmental determinism does emerge as the overall message even if it is caricatured by his critics to mean geological determinism without human influence. Diamond is not saying that. What is really the problem here is not that Diamond says the environment plays a major role in the forces at play but that he doesn't do enough to challenge the view that environmental determinism is the sufficient explanation for the success of white man. Diamond doesn't say it is sufficient but it is his conclusion that amounts to most of what he is writing. So he leaves himself open and quite frankly gets intellectually decked quite easily because a lot of people leave this book thinking as environmental determinists. Environmental determinism is just as false as racism. We go from prejudice based on skin color to prejudice based on country. He really deals with this problem in the space of just a paragraph in the epilogue and that just doesn't cut it.
The other problems are that sometimes the picture plates are not linked to anything in the text and this book is such a torrent of facts that casual readers may find themselves skipping huge sections about which part of which country developed wheat or camels first and in which quantities just to get to his overall point. Guns, germs and steel can be taxing at the best of times because of this. There is also an expectation that maybe you would find more about evolutionary biology or important battles along with at least some case made for genes. Instead the evolution is minimal, important battles limited and no genetic defence appears. This is all about how much corn Europe can produce, how many horses Asia can tame and how much politics does the Zulu need.
There are other weaknesses here but he does have a huge task set for himself into 400 pages. It is doubtful that the truth is the complete opposite of what Diamond is suggesting but more of a deeper elaboration of what is being said while attributing more socio-economic reasons for success along with his geographical ones. You can also just play the probability card by saying 80% of humans lived in Eurasia but the improbable does happen and has happened and the geological explanation needs to be covered anyway.
Experts in world history may view this work as being too simple and even go as far as to call it wrong, but Diamond's task is to show the importance of environmental factors not just genetic ones when it comes to the progress of modern humans. Experts want to make that environment plus socio-economic but both are on the same side when it comes to criticizing those who argue solely the race card.
The main point behind reading Guns, germs and steel is that it changes how we think about ourselves and the conditions leading to how we got here. At the very least your horizons will be broadened and at the very most you will be hitting the environmental determinism socio-economic debate and both are a far cry from discrimination ideologies based on Ethnic identities.
(As an end note it is my understanding that Diamond is aware of these criticism and answered it by... writing another book that includes more of a socio-economic dynamic, called 'Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed'. So see you there for a follow up review).
Summary of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal.
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