Guns, Germs, and Steel
Guns, Germs, and Steel is a book about history which is less focused on simply telling stories and more concerned with finding answers to the deeper questions that these stories raise. Jared Diamond invites readers to move beyond a view of history based just on what happened in the “Western” world, not so that they can be culturally “sensitive”, but because without a broad study of human history not even the recent phase of European dominance can be understood.
The book begins with a simple question, which Diamond recalls a Papuan man asking him while he was in New Guinea studying local birds. New Guinea is a large island north of Australia, which continued to be home to more than a thousand languages and thousands of small, divided tribes, mostly practicing a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, all the way into the modern era. Yali’s question to Diamond was why Europeans had developed so much technology and brought it to New Guinea, but the natives there had so little technology of their own.
By analyzing examples of societies along the entire continuum from simple to complex Diamond seeks to nail down the factors lead humans to develop new technologies and greater complexity in social organization. He draws in data and methodologies from a broad array of fields such as biology, ecology, geography, history and anthropology to explain and support one central conclusion– that the disparities in development between peoples of different continents resulted from differences in geography and not in the peoples themselves.
Making skillful use of illustrative examples to first introduce and then explain his ideas, Diamond has made an invaluable contribution not only to the canon of “pop” history but also to the advancement of what he envisions as an unexplored and promising field of study– “history as a science”.
Diamond initially addresses the various traditional answers to Yali’s question, and shows how each of them is unsatisfactory. The first answer is that differences in the fates of different peoples around the world are due to genetic differences and differing levels of intelligence. Diamond first points out that trouble in controlling for variables such as upbringing and education have so far frustrated attempts to show a genetic intelligence gap through IQ tests and other means. Second, from his point of view as an evolutionary biologist, he posits that Western populations who historically died most often from infectious diseases which strike dunce and genius alike, have experienced a less vicious selection for intelligence than New Guineans who historically have mostly from murder, continuous warfare and problems in acquiring food– all situations where innate intelligence gives the individual a big edge in survival.
A second traditional answer is that the colder climate in northern Europe requires more planning and technology to survive, so people from this region were stimulated to develop advanced societies. The refutation to this idea is simpler, as Diamond cites archaeological evidence showing that for most of history peoples in northern Europe mostly received technologies which had developed elsewhere, and that their relative advancement is only a recent phenomenon. Also in the Americas, the most complex civilizations arose in warm and tropical areas and peoples in the colder areas of these continents showed no advantage.
In responding to the idea that fertile river valleys produced civilization because centralized government was needed to manage irrigation canals, Diamond mentions fertile valleys outside of ancient Mesopotamia which failed to give rise to civilization, and cites evidence that even in the fertile crescent development of complex irrigation systems lagged the rise of complex government by hundreds of years.
The next approach to Yali’s question which Diamond addresses says that the answer lies in guns, germs and steel– the weaponry, infectious diseases, and manufactured tools which allowed peoples from Eurasia to conquer people from other continents. This explanation is on the right track, Diamond says, but does not explain any of the reasons why it was Europeans who acquired these advantages and not people from another continent. Archaeological evidence shows that at the end of the last ice age, 13,000 years ago, peoples around the world were all still hunter-gathers and on a more or less equal footing– what can account for the rise of huge disparities since then?
The first major factor Diamond looks at is food production, which has long been identified as a key component in the development of complex civilization. Analyzing data on wild grasses from around the world, he shows that a majority of the grasses most suitable for domestication are found naturally only in the historical fertile crescent. Once domesticated, these grasses, such as barley and wheat, spread quickly east and west to similar climates with similar seasonal variations. In all of Eurasia, only China, partially isolated by mountains and desert, developed food production independently– Diamond says that this is because it was much easier to adopt an already-developed system of crops than to develop a completely new one. Peoples all across Eurasia, after receiving the initial crop “package” from the fertile crescent, went on to domesticate local plants and pass them back around the continent.
To contrast, in the Americas the major grain crop which developed was corn, first domesticated in what today is Mexico. But unlike barley or rice, whose wild cousins are very similar to the domestic variety, the only wild relative of corn has a tiny cob and seeds with exceedingly hard shells. Based on this observation many archaeologists have proposed that it could have taken several thousands of years for the wild plant to develop into a corn crop with modern-sized cobs. Also, after the system of farming was developed in Mexico, it could only spread either north or south, across either deserts or dense jungles, mountains and a narrow isthmus. In eastern North America tribes developed some local crops, none of which were as productive as corn. But even after corn arrived, after a lag due to geographical barriers, there was a further lag until a variety developed which could actually grow well in short northern summers.
After looking at plants Diamond goes on to show similar inequalities in domesticable large mammals. He posits that domestic large mammals not only provide a source of food, but increase the efficiency of food production from plants, provide vehicles for transport and war, and were the origin of most of the crowd infectious diseases which now are adapted to affect only humans. To demonstrate that Eurasia had an advantage in availability of suitable large mammals, Diamond describes the traits of suitable animals and proposes that all the good ones were domesticated long ago– as evidenced by failures of many modern efforts to domesticate, for instance zebras or gazelles. He proposes that the lack of suitable species in the Americas and New Guinea is attributable to the mass extinction which coincided with the arrival of the first humans in those areas. He says that the reasons for the disparity are less clear in sub-Saharan Africa, which has a wealth of large mammals, but who all possess one or two traits which make them undesirable as farm animals.
Moving on, Diamond argues that technological inventions are a gradual process that arise in environments suitable to their adoption, rather than being the singular creations of individual geniuses. He seeks to discredit the notion that technologically undeveloped peoples as a whole are innately more set in their ways by offering examples of societies which quickly adopted radical innovations once they arrived from other continents– such as New Zealand’s Maori adopting the musket and potatoes and the plains Indians of North America adopting horses and guns. Furthermore, Diamond argues that societal complexity develops gradually as a response to developments in people’s environment– mostly from an increase in population density. He explains how the development of “civilization” is like an auto-catalyzing chemical reaction or a feedback loop– higher population density leads to more cultural complexity, which then leads to higher population density, and so forth.
Diamond then goes into greater detail describing a selected set of histories in order to illustrate how the theory he has laid out can be applied to the facts. By exploring population movements in New Guinea, China, Polynesia, the Arctic Circle between Norway and modern-day Canada, and sub-Saharan Africa, Diamond shows that the recent expansion of Europeans around the world, while unprecedented in scale, is part of a well-established pattern of history with identifiable causes– which do not include genetic superiority.
In the epilogue Diamond offers partial answers to some of the additional questions raised by his theory, such as why it was European peoples who colonized the rest of the world and not China, and suggests directions in which “scientific” historical research might progress in the future. For the 2003 edition he has also written an afterword in which he offers some newer evidence which clarifies certain areas of his theory and does some further postulation. It is interesting to note a distinctly pro-business pro-globalization slant in some of the ideas he puts forth in this afterword, almost certainly traceable to his interactions with admiring businessmen (such as Bill Gates) which he describes after the astounding success of his book.