Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (1997)
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Info: Diamond’s book is subtitled “The Fates of Human Societies,” and attempts to address a basic — yet potentially inflammatory — question: Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate the Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? For much of the past centuries the answer has usually been (even if politely) racist, nationalistic, or even reliant upon “God’s favor” — and for the past decade or two, even asking the question could get you stoned as either a cultural revisionist or a bigot .
Diamond, an evolutionary biologist, rejects arguments that the peoples of any particular continent or region are somehow inherently better than others, and instead goes back to first causes. He presents a persuading case that environmental and geographical factors — ease of communication and cultural spread, population size potential, and availability of suitable candidates for domestication of plants and animals — gave Eurasia with its broad temperate latitude east-west a catalyzing leg up on other parts of the world that they simply could not overcome before Eurasians brought “guns, germs, and steel” to decimate and conquer the other populations of the world.
It’s actually fascinating stuff, especially as factor after factor builds on one another. Along the way, Diamond presents interesting info on evolutionary biology (of course), ethnology, and the history of agriculture, technology, and trade, While there may be room to argue with some of his points or whether he’s disregarding other factors (especially since his emphasis is on the macro, not the variations of the micro, on factors measured in millennia, not decades or even short centuries), anyone considering this overall question in the future will have to take into account the information he presents here.
Writing: Jared writes like an academic, piling evidence on top of evidence, often with lengthy lists of animals and plants and cases to demonstrate his various arguments. At times, it gets to be a bit much, especially when he recaps previously demonstrated points. The slow, steady pace is both convincing and, at times, maddening.
Re-Readability: I’m not sure how likely I am to want to re-listen to the book — it does get a bit much at times with its catalog of supporting evidence. However, I actually have an urge to read the book itself, which would allow a bit more selectivity in the data dump, as well as focus on the parts I found most interesting..
Audio: This is an abridged recording — six hours on five CDs. Grover Gardner’s narration is dry and pedantic and perfect for the subject matter. The recording quality is clear and crisp. The writing style is such that the arbitrary interruptions of audiobook listening in the car worked just ifne.
Overall: I liked this book. It was interesting info, if sometimes a bit slow and repetitious. It’s garnered a lot of criticism as being “politically correct,” which I really don’t see, and on ignoring IQ tests (right) and social/cultural movements of the past few centuries (which had little effect on the events leading to Eurasian conquest of the world) or just those who want to impose a value judgment on who “won” or “lost.” While Diamond expresses his opinion in places, he identifies it as such, and generally he rests his conclusions on facts and fact-checkable assessments — and it’s there that folks who disagree with him ought to be focusing their attention, agreeing or disagreeing as they will.
I found the book well worth the time, though, reading/listening to, and recommend it to others who are willing to plow through a lot of broad science and history and listen to a lot of lists in order to gets some very intriguing and entertaining nuggets of understanding.
Read GG&S a fews ago and loved it. Hoping to get his “sequel” Collapse soon.
Sweet. Added to the wish list.
I read this book years ago when it was new and found it an excellent addition to the body of work that is evolutionary biology (a significant contributor to the bowing of my bookshelves). It’s a great piece of work. The one fault with it is that Diamond strains mightily at times to avoid allowing for the possibility that cultural factors might ever have anything whatsoever to do with one’s ascendance over another.
I don’t think he discounts cultural factors — indeed, he notes, for example, where cultures try to roll or hold back the technological clock for cultural reasons (e.g., the elimination of guns in Japan; the abandonment of ocean travel by China), and the consequences that come from that.
But most of the stuff he talks about are on time scales and geographical scales such that cultural decisions are almost below the radar. There were few if any cultural decisions that would have let the Aztecs, let alone the Australian Aborigines, have a chance against European conquest. In the periods that Diamond’s talking over, both Japan and China’s domination by European powers due to those cultural decisions are blips on the radar, in comparison to their present-day status.
That, in turn, is something of an end-of-days for the whole process, as the cultural and economic factors that played into it all are now becoming global, rather than regional (to the extent that, immersed in modern history, we can judge it in the same macro fashion). Until we start talking interstellar encounters and conquest, we’re not likely to be seeing the GG&S dynamics playing out again.
I just finished GG&S the other day. I found it provocative, but I thought it failed to do what Diamond wanted to do in a certain sense. Roughly speaking, he wants to explain why natives of Western Europe conquered the world rather than, say, natives of North America. He wants to give an explanation in terms of ultimate rather than proximate causes. His explanation includes four main factors, but he doesn’t really explain why those factors were the way they were, and hence his explanation isn’t really ultimate. It’s more ultimate than some, but not really ultimate.
For me, this is clearest when you consider the domesticability of various animals. Diamond suggests that natives of Eurasia had more domesticable animals available to them than natives of Africa or other continents, but he doesn’t seem to me to be able to explain why the animals of Eurasia were more easily domesticated than those of Africa. Why did Eurasia give rise to more easily domesticated animals than Africa? A similar question can be asked with respect to the domesticable plants. Why did Eurasia have grains with larger seeds than the grains of other continents?
Diamond does not seem to me to have ruled out an important possibility. Perhaps the natives of Eurasia tried harder and longer to domesticate the plants and animals available to them than the natives of Africa or other continents did. In some cases this seems likely to be true: if the first humans to arrive in North America from Asia quickly exterminated most of the large animals on the continent, as Diamond suggests, then the humans must not have spent much effort at domesticating the animals. Or, the North American Bison seems to have been very easy to domesticate within the last 200 years, which suggests that the pre-european occupants of the continent can’t have spent much effort at domesticating the Bison.
Anyway, I liked the book a lot in spite of this criticism. My brother, who has read them both, says that “Collapse” is a much better book than GG&S.
I think Diamond does address the “Why Eurasia” question on domestication. For example, there’s animals available across the range — many more (as it happens) in the broad Eurasian expanse than in Africa or Australia or the Americas. And those that were domesticated were not spread elsewhere because of geographical/ecological limitations (water barriers, ecosystem barriers). In other cases, domestication wasn’t tried because there was no pressure to do so (North American natives didn’t try to domesticate bison, even if they’d been domesticatable, because there were so many of them that a hunting society worked just fine for them).
In some cases, then, it seems to have been just the circumstances (the raw material to work with, the size of the laboratory, the ease of spreading the results); in other cases, it was simply not something that there was incentive for (Diamond notes out that early subsistence farming is actually more difficult and risky than hunting/gathering; it’s only later that the “advantages” become clearer).
I re-read some sections and finally read the 2003 epilog. My complaint isn’t about his discussion regarding why domesticated animals did or did not spread once domesticated. My complaint is about his discussion of why the residents of some continents successfully domesticated animals available to them while residents of other continents did not. Perhaps Diamond suggests that there were more candidates for domestication in Eurasia than in Africa; I could not find that part. What I did find was a discussion of why some animals are unsuitable for domestication (e.g. Zebras). I also found a passage in the 2003 epilog in which Diamond indicates that Bison are not yet domesticated, contrary to what I suggested earlier.
I’ll try to make my complaint as specific as possible. Compare Zebras to horses. They are very similar in appearance and in my ignorance, I suppose that they fill similar ecological niches. So why were Horses domesticable while Zebras were not? What was it about Horses and their environment that led to their domestication? What was it about Zebras and their environment that made them undomesticatable? Diamond says that Zebras are more prone to bite and that when they bite, they don’t let go. Why do Zebras have that reaction while Horses do not? Is it that this reaction has been bred out of the Horses, or was there some difference between the native environment of Horses and Zebras that made this behavior adaptive for Zebras but not adaptive for Horses? My impression is that Diamond asserts that Zebras are not domesticable but that he does not explain why this is the case.
Diamond makes a better case why Cheetahs are not domesticable. He indicates that their mating ritual requires lots of space, much more than any domesticated animal would be allowed. But the question then becomes, why did Cheetahs develop this kind of mating ritual? Diamond doesn’t go this far, but it’s easy to see an argument he could have used. Requiring the males to chase the females long distances before mating demonstrates that the males are fit and that they have the kinds of genes that a Cheetah needs to hunt well.
Diamond says that good candidates for domestication need to have a dominance hierarchy that humans can subvert. When humans can take over the top of the dominance hierarchy, then they can control the animals they want to domesticate more easily. But the question I have is, why do some species develop dominance hierarchies while others do not?
Yes, Diamond indicates that under some circumstances hunter-gatherers were better off than farmers, and this means that the incentives to domesticate animals were perhaps reduced in those circumstances. But notice that when domesticated animals were introduced in North America and Africa, they were quickly taken up by the natives. My stereotypical image of a North American Indian is riding horseback, and my stereotypical image of some residents of Africa is as a cattle herder. This suggests to me that the incentives to domesticate animals were actually fairly strong, and it makes it all the more puzzling why North Americans and Africans had to wait for the arrival of Eurasian domesticated animals to gain the benefits of such domestications.
Well, I’m going on too long, but I hope you see my point. I don’t think Diamond has given ultimate explanations for all his claims, and I don’t think he’s ruled out the possibility that some biological differences between different groups of humans played a role in the different development of their socities and civilizations. I’m not arguing that such biological differences exist, I’m only saying that Diamond hasn’t made a complete argument to rule them out.
That would be an interesting, but far more speculative discussion. It’s easier and more effective (and shorter) for the Diamond’s purposes just to demonstrate it.
I can’t speak as much about Africans and cattle, but for North American Indians, the horse came already domesticated, with demonstrable advantages, *and* fit into and enhanced the hunting-gathering lifestyle of the tribes that adopted them.
Which isn’t to say that there are not innate differences in different racial and ethnic groups other than physical appearance to explain some portion of the geopolitical balance of the last 2000-odd years … but I think the reasons that Diamond gives are sufficient to provide a plausible explanation without needing such an assumption.