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Title: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond ISBN: 0-393-31755-2 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: April, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.93 (610 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An opus of breathtaking scope worth multiple readings
Comment: I read this book when it came out and saw Diamond on the lecture circuit when he plugged the book. I thought highly of it at the time. Seeing it still selling well four years later, I wanted to review it but felt a re-reading was in order. It was even better this time.
Diamond's central rhetorical device is answering New Guinean friend Yali's questions why Europeans have so many more goods than New Guineans do. The answer is location, location, location: location with lots of domesticable crops; location with lots of domesticable animals; and location with lots of productive acreage having 'Goldilocks' access to the rest of the world -- strong enough for crop and idea diffusion but weak enough to prevent political unification. The book is twenty solidly written essays like his 'Discover' magazine articles. Linguistics, evolutionary biology, history, archaeology, anthropology, epidemiology, agronomy and paleontology are just part of the palette from which Diamond draws for his sweeping portrait of the most recent 13,000 years of human existence.
There is hardly a wrong word written, a false step taken, or an error made in this exciting book, which delights in no small part by raising as many questions as it answers. Diamond knows a lot about a lot of things, and provides many an aha! moment. He also asks interesting questions about some things that neither he or anyone else knows about, and those questions are as interesting as any of his answers. He answers questions like: How did Africa become black? How did China become Chinese? and Why aren't Australia, New Guinea, and Malaysia Polynesian? One may not like the answers, but he takes a great shot at them, and I relish his doing so. He asks why proselytizing religion (Christianity and Islam) were driving forces for conquest among Europeans and West Asians but not Chinese. He also relates several interesting bits about his extensive field work (as an ornithologist) in New Guinea.
The best page of the book is page 87, figure 4.1, "Factors Underlying the Broadest Pattern of History." The entire book is spent explaining that diagram, which is itself an answer to What are the proximate, intermediate, and ultimate causes to history's broadest pattern? I would modify his ultimate factors to be geography (adding carrying capacity to his east/west axis) and, more controversially, co-evolution between humans and large animals (with respect to their availability and behavior). I am also surprised that he did not cite the island-area effect in species or cultural diversity. But perhaps that would have been gilding the lily. There is nothing in the author's framework that precludes a change in where the most goods are today. He notes carrying capacities and access have changed radically over the last 13,000 years, shifting the balance of power from time to time. 200 years ago, for instance, China had the most goods. 200 years from now it may again.
If you like history, evolutionary biology or (like me) both, read this book today!
Rating: 3
Summary: One star for scientific treatment, five for Liberal Science
Comment: I define "liberal science" as the prostitution of science to the service of political bias. Diamond's book is the most edifying example I've found to date of this form of junk science. Diamond crafts a tight argument by what he doesn't include as well as by what he packs into 500 pages. He picks and chooses carefully among disciplines only for data that supports his premise: that Earth's varied environment had, over millenia, privleged whites and asians, but left all others holding dead tickets. He goes to great pains to emphasize that environment had no evolutionary impact on intelligence (his underlying theme) and "proves" it with the most specious arm-waving anecdote imaginable. He doesn't return to this subject after that, and crucially,he ignores psychometric science entirely. He must. He ends many of his chapters with a self-congratulatory florish on how they explode "white racist's" beliefs. (In this book, a racist is anyone who believes that environment may have had an effect on the evolutionary rate of intelligence increase.) Diamond struts out geographic determinism as the sole cause for the way world history turned out-a bare-faced crime against open-minded science. But it is his masterful manipulation of data from disperate sources that has given his book so many positive reviews. I have been convinced by his argument that geography has a hand in the development of civilization. But he demands that you believe it is the only hand: that 50,000 years in northern climes only gave W&A better farm products but imposed exactly the same evolutionary pressure on the traits called intelligence and temperment as did the tropics, even though color and bone structure diverged; that civilization, itself a radically new environment we've been undergoing seletion in for 300 generations, hasn't placed even a smidgen of differing selection pressure on intelligence and temperment than did the forest. And if the reader doesn't swallow these remarkable coincidences,so amply supported by Diamond's adroitly culled data, this book, not too subtly, calls him a racist. This book is well worth a careful read. From it one can learn many fascinating points from prehistory-I loved the explanation of the origin of the Samoans (but why was Diamond so lenient on them for destroying his favorite people-the New Guinea negritics). But remember that Diamond is on a political mission, and he is selectively using his extensive scientific background to make you believe that half of the story is the whole story. What is needed, after this book, is a for a real scientist to write a critique pointing out all the data, the literature, the disciplines that Diamond saw fit to ignore in his quest for the Liberal grail.
Rating: 5
Summary: This will change how you see the world
Comment: Diamond's careful analysis of how geography influences the development of societies is one of those ideas that stick in your head and change your thinking on a whole host of other subjects. It isn't so much a new scientific theory, but a new way of looking at things. The feeling I came away from the book with is that the world is really a very small place: we may think that everything has been tried, and what succeeded was the best, but in reality the whole course of human history has been shaped by a handful of accidents, like the shapes of the continents, the social behavior of certain large animals, the nutritional value of certain plants, and so on. Along with Dawkins' The Selfish Gene and Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic this is one of those books I'll force my children to read.
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Title: The Third Chimpanzee : The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal by Jared M. Diamond ISBN: 0060984031 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 02 December, 1992 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor by David S. Landes ISBN: 0393318885 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 May, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Why Is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality by Jared M. Diamond ISBN: 0465031269 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: November, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.50 |
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Title: Guns, Germs, and Steel Reader's Companion by Jared Diamond ISBN: 1586638637 Publisher: Barnes & Noble Books-Imports Pub. Date: August, 2003 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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Title: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson ISBN: 0767908171 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 06 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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