Guns, germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a Pulitzer Prize winning book. It’s a 1997 book written by the author Jared Diamond who teaches geography and physiology at UCLA. Around the same year it had won the Pulitzer Prize, the book won the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. Guns, Germs, and Steel tries to explain to us how human history was shaped and offers insight into human foundations and success. Geography plays a crucially vital role in determining success. Jared Diamond revolved his book around one question asked by a New Guinean politician named Yali.
Jared Diamond starts off with Yali’s Question, whom is a New Guinean politician. His question was, “why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own.” His question can be rephrased as such: “why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?” Jared Diamond proceeds throughout the entire book discussing the possible reasons for Yali’s question. This book accounts for everything of everybody for the last 13,000 years including specific events for Eurasian civilization as well. In the first part of the book, Jared Diamond talks about human evolution and how they spread from culture to culture. Throughout this book, he discusses the causes of different continents, civilizations, and empires having dominance over another. The Great Leap Forward is when people make the first steps to technological advance. 50,000 years ago, that’s when we were making stone tools and cave paintings. Jared diamond provides insight into the reasons why certain civilization had their Great Leap Forward first.
Geography is of the utmost importance when analyz...
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...d 281). It’s strange, but people including I, don’t necessarily think about the complexities of technologies until someone tells it to you. I wouldn’t have really thought about it like that if it wasn’t for Guns, Germs, and Steel.
In conclusion, because of differences in geography on different continents’ ecology, societies developed differently on different continents. This disproves all theory and accusations based on racial speculation. Human biology has nothing to do with the development of societies. Advanced technology organized political systems, and complex societies could only become real in populations of people that are able to produce surplus on plant and animal domestication. Will humans continue to be ignorant based on non-conclusive speculation towards the racial profiling of unfortunate continents that just so happen to be primarily black?
The reason Jared Diamond wrote this book was to answer the question of his politician friend Yali that why did some societies like Eurasia was able to develop Guns, Germs, and
Jared Diamond, author of the Pulitzer Prize Winning, National Best Selling book Guns, Germs and Steel, summarizes his book by saying the following: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves." Guns, Germs and Steel is historical literature that documents Jared Diamond's views on how the world as we know it developed. However, is his thesis that environmental factors contribute so greatly to the development of society and culture valid? Traditions & Encounters: A Brief Global History is the textbook used for this class and it poses several different accounts of how society and culture developed that differ from Diamond's claims. However, neither Diamond nor Traditions are incorrect. Each poses varying, yet true, accounts of the same historical events. Each text chose to analyze history in a different manner. Not without flaws, Jared Diamond makes many claims throughout his work, and provides numerous examples and evidence to support his theories. In this essay, I will summarize Jared Diamond's accounts of world history and evolution of culture, and compare and contrast it with what I have learned using the textbook for this class.
I first read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel in the Fall 2003 based on a recommendation from a friend. Many chapters of the book are truly fascinating, but I had criticisms of the book back then and hold even more now. Chief among these is the preponderance of analysis devoted to Papua New Guinea, as opposed to, say, an explanation of the greatly disparate levels of wealth and development among Eurasian nations. I will therefore attempt to confine this review on the "meat and potatoes" of his book: the dramatic Spanish conquest of the Incas; the impact of continental geography on food production; and finally, the origins of the Eurasian development of guns, germs, and steel. In terms of structure, I will first summarize the book's arguments, then critically assess the book's evidentiary base, and conclude with an analysis of how Guns, Germs, and Steel ultimately helps to address the wealth question.
Race, which is another characteristic of demographic data, is a modern occurrence. It is being questioned and more than likely not a valid determinant. Our textbook in chapter five states, “racial identity or race consciousness is both controversial and pervasive. When early explorers in the 15th and 16th centuries came across people who were different from them a debate began which groups were “human” and which were “animal” (pg. 191).
“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” This was the question posed to Dr. Jared Diamond by Yali, a local politician in New Guinea. Answering Yali’s question became the focus of Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Diamond particularly focused on “why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?” Guns, Germs, and Steel took a scientific approach in viewing how certain locations in the world are far more advanced than others. I believe that this book as a whole is a very strong argument and response to both Yali and Diamond’s question. Observing
The book Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond, starts off with Yali’s question about why some places are more developed and have more resources compared to others. The essence of this book is based on Diamond’s thesis, he claimed: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples ' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves"(Diamond 25). Diamond tries to explain the cultural development of few societies at different places in the world. One of the question he described most vividly is about “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 author suggests that racial distinctions are obscured due to the fact that one population is forced to live amongst another population and do not comprehend the repercussions of this act; for example, slaves that were taken from West Africa and put in the Southern United States. Hacking goes on to say that it is possible that “the desire of one racial group to dominate, exploit or enslave another demands legitimacy in societies” (104). Due to the history of the United States, it is clear that the white race has considered themselves superior over other races. In fact, according to Ian Hacking, most anthropologists believed there were only five races. The races were named geographically but recognized by color. Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongolian, American and Malayan were the five
As it stands in the scientific community, there is currently a debate between two factions of anthropologists, and two theories, regarding the evolution of modern humans or Homo sapiens: The Regional Continuity Theory and the Replacement (or “Out-of-Africa”) Theory. In this paper, I will attempt to define both theories, evaluate the evidence and merits of both, and then draw a personal conclusion as to which theory I find the most plausible and likely to be correct out of the two.
Jared Diamond is a well-known American author/scientist popular for his works “The Third Chimpanzee” and “Guns, Germs and Steel” (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize)
Jared Diamond's bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel (GG&S) is an attempt to explain why some parts of the world are currently powerful and prosperous while others are poor. Diamond is both a physiologist and a linguist who spends a good deal of his time living with hunter gathers in Papua New Guinea. As a researcher and as a human being, he is convinced that all people have the same potential. Hunter gatherers are just as intelligent, resourceful, and diligent as anybody else. Yet material "success" isn't equally distributed across the globe. Civilization sprung up in relatively few places and spread in a defined pattern. I should emphasize that Diamond doesn't equate material prosperity with well-being or virtue. He's just curious about the global distribution of bling bling.
In 1758 a Swedish botanist named Carolus Linnaeus established the classification system still in use for various forms of life. He listed four categories that he labeled as "varieties" of the human species. To each he attributed inherited biological as well as learned cultural characteristics. He described Homo European as light-skinned, blond, and governed by laws; Homo American was copper-colored and was regulated by customs; Homo Asiatic was sooty and dark-eyed and governed by opinions; Homo African was black and indolent and governed by impulse. We can in retrospect recognize the ethnocentric assumptions involved in these descriptions, which imply a descending order of prestige. Most striking is the labeling of the four varieties as governed by laws, customs, opinions, and impulse, with Europeans on the top and Africans at the bottom. In fact, different populations within all four varieties would have had all four forms of behavior. (8).
Why did certain early civilizations thrive and some fail? Jared Diamond, a famous author and scientist, explains in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. He believes civilizations like the ones in Europe thrived because of geographical luck. Geographic luck is the idea that people in some areas got luckier than others. For example, the Fertile Crescent had a warm, moist climate, and fertile soil to grow wheat and barley, while people that lived in places like Papua New Guinea had to hunt, and forage for their food. Geographic luck aided the European empire, and was the reason they became so powerful. One of the key reasons Europe did so well was farming. Another reason they were able to conquer so much of the world was their well-placed civilization. Finally, Europe’s weapons, made from steel, were much more advanced than the weapons possessed by the rest of the world, and they came from their good geographic placement. Understanding geography’s role in Europe’s technological advancement is important, and to do so you must look at how they became powerful in the first place, which is because of farming, and domestication.
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W.
“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among people themselves.”(Diamond 25) This statement is the thesis for Jared Diamond’s book Guns Germs and Steel the Fates of Human Societies.
I believe that the environment deiced whether a society will or will not have technology, militaristic and farming abilities imbedded within the society. That will give an advantage so that one society is better equipped than others.