Guns, Germs & Steel: The Tales of Human Societies

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	• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Jared M. Diamond W. W. Norton & Company, 1999 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 1075 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

intriguing ideas but not groundbreakingly new

The book consolidated some not-so-new ideas and presented in an entertaining and refreshing style. It is disappointing that it lacks proper attributions in many places. The book also gets a bit repetitive and boring after a while. The key ideas should be able to be delivered in half of the current length.

amazing collection of information

This is an amazing book, and a lifetime of research and thinking by Mr. Diamond must have gone into creating it. Even though it is almost 500 pages in length, it concisely covers the basics of much of human history and civilization. Thankfully, Mr. Diamond puts forth the opposite of a racist interpretation of human history. It is very much taboo to suggest that genetic differences between different races resulted in one group of people conquering or dominating another, but it turns out that there are genetic differences in the brain between the populations of people in different countries of the world today. For example, different populations have differences in the composition of certain neurotransmitter receptors, that may influence such things as exploratory behavior (i.e., novelty seeking), and might something like that not influence global patterns of migration? Read C. Robert Cloninger's 'Feeling Good' for more information on dopamine receptors. Another point is that this book seems to have arrived at a time when people want to write and read 'histories of everything'. That type of book seems to be selling well right now. Overall, a very interesting and worthwhile read. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.

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Answering the why of it all

Why did western culture triumph in the struggle for world dominance? Here's your answer, clearly and boldly laid out by a far-sighted historian grounded in evolutionary biology and biogeography. Or, rather, here are the four answers, all deriving from one overarching truth: human history is a function of the environment. 1. There are significant continental differences in wild plant and large animal populations, particularly in regard to domesticability. Most of the plant species on which humans depend today originated in southwest eurasia in the region known as the Fertile Crescent. Africa south of the Sahara (and a bit of West Africa) had and has no native domestic plants or animals. Australia has none of either except the macadamia nut (domesticated by Europeans at a late date). The Americas have only a handful of native domestic plants, all low in protein, and only the llama was domesticated - and that in a limited area. 2. The geographic axes of the continents were crucial. Whereas domestic plants and animals from the Fertile Crescent could easily spread to both the Atlantic and Pacific in a contiguous climate zone, the north-south orientation of Africa and the Americas meant that agronomic innovations in one place could not easily spread to other inhabited INTRAcontinental regions. (Think of planting a tropical food crop in Canada, for example. For crops to spread from the Andes to even central Mexican highlands with a similar climate, they would have to traverse tropical rainforest regions. >From Mexico to the Southwest U.S. meant traversing a desert, etc.) 3. The geographic arrangement of the continents affected INTERcontinental movement. The oceans prevented any new eurasian cultural infusion of the Americas until 1492, and delayed its spread to Polynesia. Similarly, though North Africa benefited from Fertile Crescent agriculture the Sahara blocked movement south (making North Africa in this regard part of eurasia). When invaders arrived with their advantages of domestic food and animals they almost invariably overwhelmed every native hunter-gatherer population: the advantages of nutrition and energy afforded by agriculture were huge. 4. The advantages of the first three factors created the final factor which is population size. Agriculture permitted a population explosion wherever it took hold. It allowed the creation of specialists, leading to metallurgy, writing, empires or national governments, investment in public works including military, underwriting of expeditions, etc. Also, and critical to their success, the combination of agricultural settlement and close association with domestic animals permitted the evolution of animal-based microbes into human diseases. All the killers to which eurasians became more or less immune, and which devastated native populations elsewhere, came to us from pigs and cows (and other animals to a lesser degree). (An estimated 95 percent of Native American deaths after Columbus arrived are attributed to smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, the plague, and other hitchhikers ó not guns and swords.) Jared Diamond marshals his facts, arranges them in easily understood chapters, and illustrates the whole with specific examples from biology, medicine, geography, archaeology, linguistics, and scholarly history to deliver a readable and convincing overview of how we got here and why. Excellent and recommended.

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Guns, Germs & Steel: The Tales of Human Societies

My husband is in the process of reading this book that was suggested by one of the other men on on trip to London, Paris and Rome. He's an avid reader. He's enjoying reading this book.

reviews: 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, page 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20

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