In Praise of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel

In Praise of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel

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.

Diamond's hypothesis is that geography gave certain groups big initial advantages. Specifically, some places are more conducive to domestication of plants and animals. Most people think that domestication is just a matter of capturing animals and breeding them in captivity. This is a misconception. Domesticated species of plants and animals have undergone major genetic changes through years of selective breeding. Compared to their wild ancestors, the major cereal crops are more nutritious, quicker to germinate, and easier to sow and harvest. Domestic animals are more docile, easier to train, and generally more suited to life in captivity. Diamond's key point is that not every wild species is equally susceptible to domestication and that domesticable species are not evenly distributed across the globe. Wild horses and camels had the "right" stuff, reindeer not so much. As modern attempts to domesticat...

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...ccupied with gathering and child rearing. In other societies, some people can devote their time to science, technology, philosophy, politics, finance and the other cultural roles that define state societies.

There's nothing in Diamond's book to suggest that he is anything but a friend of the Enlightenment. He's a practicing scientist who attempts to analyze historical trends in scientific terms. He is also a sympathetic interpreter who respects and admires human diversity. He believes in progress, but he doesn't assume that technologically advanced people are superior or even uniformly better off. Finally, he affirms the values of the Enlightenment by suggesting how we can use history and science to build more prosperous, stable, and just societies.

Source Cited

Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies. New York: Norton, 1997.