The phrase “guns, germs and steel” comes from Jared Diamond’s 1997 book of that name. He calls it “a short history of everyone for the last 13,000 years”. It answers the question of how whites got on top. He says our destiny is written not in our genes but in our geography.
Diamond went to New Guinea to see its birds. He made friends there and one of them, Yali, asked him why whites were so rich:
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 ruled out intelligence: New Guineans were “more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is.”
He also ruled out culture and politics: those things are always changing and have little long-term effect across thousands of years.
That leaves him with geography and biology: with the lands and seas, the plants and animals that make up the world.
Not all places are created equal:
- Of the 13 kinds of large animals that are easy for man to tame and control, 12 live in Eurasia: cows, pigs, goats, horses, camels, etc. Only the llama is missing. Men do not ride zebras, for example, because they are too wild to be tamed. Places like Australia, New Guinea and North America had no large animals that could be tamed – just dogs.
- Of the grains that are easy to plant and store, again most are found in Eurasia. Australia had none at all!
- Eurasia goes mainly from east to west. So plants and animals that work in one part of Eurasia work well elsewhere. That is way less true for Africa and the Americas which run from north to south.
This meant that civilization could spread more widely and deeply in Eurasia than elsewhere. Civilization is based on being able to produce more food than you need, freeing up human labour for other things.
So the world’s four largest civilizations are found in Eurasia in a chain that stretches from east to west: China, India, the Middle East and Europe.
It was just a matter of time before one of these invented gunpowder and ocean-going ships and be able to take over the world. It was China that invented those things, yet it was Europe that took over. Why?
Because Europe’s geography makes empires rare. There are just too many mountains and rivers. So while in China the emperor could (and did) outlaw building ocean-going ships and not suffer in the short term, no country in Europe could get away with that.
But genes do matter in one way: disease. From living with cows for so long most whites had built-in defences against smallpox – but not against malaria. That made it easy for them to take over and stay in North America (where smallpox played a big part in wiping out the American Indians), but not in most of Africa.
See also:
- The white inventor argument
- sexual selection and race – also based on Jared Diamond’s views
- white people
- Steve Sailer
I read this book and loved it. Really made you think about civilization and how it begins.
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he forgot about china and that thing called the industrial revolution.
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This is an excellent book and well-written. I devoured the whole thing in 2 days. I nearly burned my eyes out. 🙂
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This is a good book. It explains quite a bit.
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It’s an amazing book, and Abagond did a great job of summarizing it.
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I read this years ago and it’s fabulous. Thanks for doing a spectacular summary and spreading the word to those who aren’t aware of it.
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This is a very, very good book. Even if science one day prove it to be inaccurate, it’s still interesting because it offers a plausible answer on many important questions.
It’s also written in easy to understand way.
If we truly believe all people are born equal and if we truly believe no human group is naturally “inferior”, “primitive” or “evil”, then we must seek answers elsewhere.
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Jared Diamond argues that a society’s wealth is not due to culture, but on page 252 he describes how two tribes in New Guinea differed significantly in their reaction to technological opportunity, thus offering an effective counterexample to his own thesis.
Relevant passage:
“For example, when Europeans first reached the highlands of eastern New Guinea, in the 1930s, they “discovered” dozens of previously uncontacted Stone Age tribes, of which the Chimbu tribe proved especially aggressive in adopting Western technology. When Chimbus saw white settlers planting coffee, they began growing coffee themselves as a cash crop.
….
When the first helicopter landed in the Daribi area, they briefly looked at it and just went back to what they had been doing; the Chimbus would have been bargaining to charter it. As a result, Chimbus are now moving into the Daribi area, taking it over for plantations, and reducing the
Daribi to working for them.”
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Randy,
You do realize your entire argument hinges upon two separated paragraphs, right? I mean, the whole book seems to get swept under the rug… Basically you’re nitpicking in an attempt to undermine his conclusions, but the evidence is much more than just simply, “Oh, I think he just wrote an effective counter-argument to his own position. Therefore he must be wrong!” Haha. Scientists do that all the time — question results, offer counter-explanations and assert that there are many possibilities for what happens/happened, yet they measure it with their evidence.
That said, your example is confusing because I don’t see it as a refutation of his premise at all. A society’s wealth IS due to culture, especially since different cultures value different things. That one tribe adopted Western technology while one did not is no different than American-Indians who chose to utilize horses and rifles when they were introduced by the Spanish, English, and French colonists. This does not change the premise that wealth is culturally based. In fact, it reinforces this concept because indigenous peoples respond to changes in their environment by adapting and subverting cultural introductions into their habitat.
Better yet, why not actually refute the premise of the book instead of nitpicking around it in an attempt to hedge your work? Do you disagree with Diamond’s evidence and conclusions that state that Eurasian civilizations are not inherently better morally, intellectually, or genetically, and that positive feedback loops (namely, guns, germs, and steel) are what allowed Eurasian civilizations to conquer the world through force?
Also, I think you would do well to deal with the fact that Diamond rejects IQ based evidence because it cannot be used in a historical context due to the fact that there’s simply no way to measure the IQ of much of human history. While Lynn, and others embrace the IQ/genetic-model as a convincing explanation for the modern world, they fail to apply it to the historical world, ignoring important cultural and environmental factors which helped in large part create the conditions their methodologically flawed and ethnocentric IQ tests are measuring.
A good example that Diamond uses is comparing the Middle-East and Europe’s agricultural climate along with what animals they possessed in the region. Sub-Saharan Africans did not have access to easily domesticated animals like Eurasian populations did, nor did they live in a climate hospitable to generating massive food surpluses. However, when there were surpluses, cultural developments followed, and Diamond uses the Mississippian culture as an example of that.
So again, your challenge to Diamond appears to be based on how New Guineans treated Western technology that was introduced into their environment, but ignore the actual arguments that Diamond makes. Thus, it seems to me that your “effortlessly spanked using his own words” claim on a different thread is more bluster and hot air than real criticism.
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It’s an interesting read.
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North America had lots of large animals, like horses and camels, but humans killed them off before figuring out they could use them to help humans in their daily lives.
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Diamond’s an interesting guy, but read Blaut’s critique of Guns, Germs, and Steel. He’s more qualified to write about this kind of stuff than Diamond.
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/diamond.htm
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This book was mentioned on another social media site that I frequent I remembered that Abagond had mentioned it in one of his thread post. I am curious to read it now.
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