Analysis Of Gun, Germs And Steel By Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond’s book Gun, Germs and Steel draws dramatically much more attention from both society and academia than most other nonfiction books in recent years. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998, and was translated into numerous languages, sold out more than one million copies around the world. Inspired by a question from Yali, a New Guinean politician: “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?” Diamond Attempts to answer this question 25 years after by publishing Gun, Germs and Steel, which brought out his groundbreaking idea: The different courses of history are not a result of biological or cultural differences among people, but from varying environments

So at the beginning of the book, Diamond objects this view, because “such explanations is not just that they are loathsome, but also that they are wrong.” (19, Diamond) In the book, Diamond tries to discredit the racial explanation and emphasizes the geological reasoning. He recalls his experience working with New Guineans, and was impressed by their intelligence, alertness and curiosity. He found that they could handle some brain-function tasks more adeptly than westerners do. He thinks that the reason why western countries is more developed than others is that they are just being lucky to be born in Eurasia and Aboriginal Australian and New Guineans can “routinely master industrial technologies when given opportunities to do so.” (19, Diamond) Ironically, such anti-racism view is attacked by some opponents who commenting that Diamond’s idea actually imply racism. They argue this environmentalism helps westerners to exonerate their faults on colonization, slavery and wars, since “geography made them do it”. Wisely, Diamond already countered this argument in the Prologue, what he is doing is just like “psychologists try to understand the minds of murderers and rapists…social historians try to understand genocide …physicians try to understand the causes of

The former is too radical and arbitrary: it denies all the effect and action our ancestors done to push history forward, and implies that they just acted like mindless robots, followed the instructions posted by environment. Clearly, that’s not what Diamond wants to tell the readers in the book, instead, he recognizes the role that human played in the history. He believes that “without human inventiveness, all of us today would still be cutting out meat with stone tools and eating it raw, like our ancestors of a million years ago”, and environments just “provide more starting materials and more favorable conditions”. (408, Diamond) Therefore, it could be tell that Diamond himself is actually not the proponent of environmental determinism. Besides the confusion between “environmental determinism” and “environmental factor”, some historians even object the importance of environment at all. They worship “human spirit” and “free will”, and think that any attempt to explain human history by referring general patterns is meaningless. However, Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel is not just a history book, it involves multiple other field of knowledge including geology, botany,