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Guns, Germs and Steel
by Jared Diamond

In this book, Jared Diamond tries to answer a puzzling question: why did European civilisations go on to explore and conquer the rest of the world instead of the other way round? The obvious (and wrong) answer would be, "Because Europeans were genetically superior." As Diamond shows, the real answer is much more complicated and definitely not due to any possible genetic superiority.

The path towards the answer (or answers) to that question is a long and winding one as Diamond shows in this book (subtitled "A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years" on the cover, and "The Fates of Human Societies" inside). He covers geology, linguistics, antrophology, evolutionary biology and several other fields in his quest to show us how various factors affected the rate of development of various societies around the world including Polynesia, the Incas and the New Guinea and Australian aborigines.

Among the factors that Diamond believes affected the development of various societies include: the geography of the area, the availability of plants and animals that can be domesticated (giving rise to agriculture-based civilisations), the ease at which such domesticated plants and animals can spread to other areas, etc.

Diamond also examines the question of why Europeans conquered the New World rather than the other way round and shows how those factors account for the way things turn out. For example, the New World lacked large mammals that could be domesticated (other than the llama), it major axis was north-south, limiting the spread of domesticated crops and animals, the various civilisations did not mix because they couldn't occupy new lands to plant new crops and, probably most important, they didn't develop killer diseases (like the equivalent of smallpox) to drive off invaders because such diseases usually originate from animals, of which Europeans had lots (horses, oxen, dogs, pigs, cats, etc.).

Moving on to other areas, he shows how early civilisations spread and shows how this spread was reconstructed based on linguistic studies when archeological evidence is not available (using common root words to trace the development and spread of various languages).

This is a fascinating book on many different levels, which is to be expected in a book that draws on so many disciplines to make its case that external factors help to determine the development of human societies. However, as Diamond says at the end of the book, we shouldn't take to mean that we have no say in how society develops. Our environment provides opportunities for societies but it is still up to the society to take advantage of the circumstances. He gives the example of China which had some of the advantages of European civilisations. But in ancient times, China decided to insulate itself from the outside world, leaving it to Europeans to take over. How things could have been different if China had kept on expanding instead.

Now, if anybody comes up to me and tries to explain the 'superiority' or 'inferiority' of certain races, I now have a way to provide a counter explanation.

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Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs and Steel
by Jared Diamond