Summary Of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, And Steel

Time is continuous. Whether you look at time in seconds, minutes, hours, or millions of years, it continues to pass in the same direction. With the idea of time, humans have further developed the concepts of the past, present, and future. And while people live in the constantly moving present, they often wonder how it came to be and what is to come. Jared Diamond attempts to answer the question of how it came to be with his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, in which he argues that geography, environment, guns, germs, and steel were the factors that shaped the present world.

Diamond’s purpose for this book is based on a question brought to him by the New Guinean politician (of sorts), Yali. Diamond reframes Yali’s question

McNeill critiques Diamond’s book for centering on biological and environmental factors, while ignoring other important aspects of the world’s civilizations development. McNeill writes that, “…vast differences in the wealth and power that different human societies have at their command today reflect what long chains of ancestors did, and did not, do by way of accepting and rejecting new ways of thought and action, most of which were in no way dictated by…environmental factors” (McNeill 3-4). McNeill believes that Diamond misses aspects of why societies are the way they are, specifically how culture has effected development. According to McNeill, there may have been a time when access to food and the environment limited human capacity, but as time went on humans were able to start shaping the environment around them, thus having less influence on the development of civilizations (McNeill 5). Another main point of criticism is how Diamond belittles religion’s effects on civilizations’ development. Diamond talks about religion as if it were just a side-effect of development rather than a determining factor. McNeill ultimately concludes that Diamond needed to look more into culture as a tool for conquest then he did. It appears that, to him, culture controls aspects of human behavior and looking at history and the future without it in mind, will never

The first point of his that I find interesting is that the societies with better technologies were more likely to come out ahead. Diamond writes that, “Empires with steel weapons were able to conquer or exterminate tribes with weapons of stone and wood” (Diamond 16). This point makes sense because it is a pattern we have seen time and time again, which goes back to Diamond’s point of looking at patterns in the past. The same is true in the present; the country with the bigger guns has the advantage to win. The specific example Diamond gives from 1835 demonstrates how better technologies improve the odds of success. He includes, “The Moriori were a small, isolated population of hunter-gatherers, equipped with only the simplest technology and weapons,” whereas, “The Maori invaders…came from a dense population of farmers chronically engaged in ferocious wars, equipped with more-advanced technology and weapons, and operating under strong leadership” (Diamond 54). This demonstrates that there was not that much hope for the Morioi to come out as the successful civilization in this case. The next example Diamond provides is from 1532 and has to do with the Spaniard’s conquest in South America. In order to demonstrate the differences between the two groups’ technologies Diamond writes, “Pizarro's military advantages lay