a book
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond · 2005 · 528 pages
“One of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation” (Gregg Easterbrook, New York Times), Guns, Germs, and Steel presents a groundbreaking, unified narrative of human history.
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this “artful, informative, and delightful” (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, a classic of our time, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond dismantles racist theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for its broadest patterns.
The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and other areas gave peoples of those regions a head start at a new way of life. But the localized origins of farming and herding proved to be only part of the explanation for their differing fates. The unequal rates at which food production spread from those initial centers were influenced by other features of climate and geography, including the disparate sizes, locations, and even shapes of the continents. Only societies that moved away from the hunter-gatherer stage went on to develop writing, technology, government, and organized religions as well as deadly germs and potent weapons of war. It was those societies, adventuring on sea and land, that invaded others, decimating native inhabitants through slaughter and the spread of disease.
A major landmark in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way in which the modern world, and its inequalities, came to be.
recommended by 24 people
sourced from public statements
Andrej Karpathy
“In the ~mid 16th century the Spanish conquistador Pizarro captured the Incan Emperor Atahualpa despite being outnumbered a few hundred to few tens of thousands. Why didn’t Atauhalpa’s warriors instead land in Spain and capture King Charles I? More generally, why did Europeans conquer the world? And what factors govern the broad trends of societies in the history of our species? Are they predominantly biological? cultural? geographical? is it all luck and chaos? Guns, Germs, and Steel seeks to answer these questions. The central thesis is that if you carefully trace the major factors they will lead you to geography. Do you play Civilization? Of course you do. The book argues that the winner of the game of Civilization has very little to do with the players and almost everything to do with the distribution of resources near the starting locations of different civs. And if there are any biological factors (e.g. civ-specific bonuses), they are negligible in the scheme of things (as it is in Civ games as well). The Europeans, for example, happened to spawn next to a lot of bonus tiles for a wide variety of nutritious plants giving +10 food, and also bonus tiles for several domesticable animals, giving +5 food and +5 production. Any civ player can tell you that if your population grows faster and the cities become bigger and denser you will get lots of nice bonuses: specialist civilians, social stratification, faster research, more culture, etc. Over several hundred years these bonuses add up and the next thing you know you're showing up with 10 +28 attack Musketeers in a territory full of gold tiles defended by a +8 attack Aztec warrior. Unmodeled by Civilization games, you also enjoy carrying more germs that you’re also resistant to, and it's cheaper to establish trade routes west-east instead of south-north due to climates (convenient for Eurasia, not so much for America). These are very important questions and it’s all great to know and contemplate, but dammit is it painful - the book feels like eating your vegetables. Be prepared to hear (in excruciating detail) about different protein:carb:fat ratios of dozens of plants species you’ve never heard of. Be prepared to learn much more than you ever wanted about all possible candidate animals for domestication. Jared in fact manages to enumerate them all. These sections are definitely interesting and you can’t help but admire the thoroughness and attention to detail here, but it’s exhausting. There are a few more things that can be critiqued: - the hypocrisy in the dubious claim that Papa New Guineans are smarter than whites is jarring, considering that the whole point of the book is to discredit biological determinism. - the book is almost certainly sometimes guilty of post-hoc reasoning, but admittedly Jared is aware of this criticism and tries hard to avoid it. - the pacing is slightly off: there are hundreds of pages devoted to plant seeds, and only dozens of pages devoted to much more interesting patterns of development (especially in the last chapter). I can’t decide if I should recommend this book. I personally liked it (i.e. 3/5 on Goodreads scale). It was a significant undertaking and I feel that I’ve gained quite a bit of insight into the development of societies in the history of our species, but… at what cost? **shudders**.”
Bill Gates
“Fascinating.... Lays a foundation for understanding human history.”
Nassim Taleb
“He put Guns Germs and Steel and Naomi Klein's book justiably in "fiction".”↗
Yuval Noah Harari
“A book of big questions, and big answers. It turned me from a historian of medieval warfare into a student of humankind.”↗
René Redzepi
“A monster of a book, where you get to learn about the world and the people that we are. It is a book that I tried to read several times before finally reading it through, each time wishing I didn’t have a couple of kids on my shoulder or the roaring engine sound of a modern kitchen in my ears. It is simply the perfect book when you have time to really focus and think.”↗
Jesse Williams
“Helped rid me of the nagging incompleteness in my understood connection between the successes and failings of ancient and modern civilizations.”↗
Patrick Arnold
“Gave a big eye opening on why certain people of the world are more advanced than others and behave a certain way, as opposed to just genetics and this person is smarter because of this or that.”↗
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