Analysis Of Guns, Germs, And Steel By Jared Diamond

In the book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, Part Three talks about the evolution of germs, writing, technology, government, and religion. Jared Diamond seems to feel like the development of technology helped shape the world as it is today (most importantly Eurasian societies) except, even he had a struggle figuring out how technology was developed. He compares how the Eurasian societies developed technology compared to the Western societies. Technology, in general, helped shape those societies and created many powerful inventions that are used in our world today. Jared Diamond is also interested in answering Yali’s question from Chapter One which makes his curiosity grow on to how everything happened the way it happened. His background

He also states, “In life in general, though, one has to understand the enemy in order to beat him, and that’s especially true in medicine” (Diamond 189). Jared Diamond doesn’t exactly think diseases are bad, but wants to know more about how diseases came to be. He starts talking about how diseases came to be in the next few pages, but he says something interesting later on, “For example, in 1837 the Mandan Indian tribe, with one of the most elaborate cultures in our Great Plains contracted smallpox from a steamboat traveling up the Missouri River from St.Louis. The population of one Mandan village plummeted from 2,000 to fewer than 40 within a few weeks” (Diamond 203). Jared Diamond starts to feel that disease had a huge role in driving these societies since it killed off so many people in the New World and most importantly in

He starts off the chapter by stating his own opinion, “Today, all land except Antarctica’s is so divided. Descendants of those societies that achieved centralized government and organized religion earliest ended up dominating the modern world” (Diamond 255). In the beginning of the chapter, right of the bat, he believes that religion and government play a key role as to how some societies ended up dominating the world today. He then moves onto food production and how it affected societies, “Finally, food production permits or requires people to adopt sedentary living, which is a prerequisite for accumulating substantial possessions, developing elaborate technology and crafts, and constructing public works” (Diamond 274). He’s saying that without food production, people wouldn’t know what it feels like to sit around. Food production is another type of technology that helps shape the world because without food, life would be a mess. He wraps up the chapter by talking about the ultimate causes, “Thus, food production, and competition and diffusion between societies, led as ultimate causes, via chains of causation that differed in detail but that all involved large dense populations and sedentary living, to the proximate agents of conquest: germs, writing, technology, and centralized political organization. Because those ultimate causes developed differently on different continents, so