Appearance
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
"Guns, Germs, and Steel" is a decent book, and Diamond makes arguments based primarily on the geographic outlay of the world and relates that to how and why certain civilizations thrived and developed faster than others. This is an interesting concept, and one that I had never thought about before. Beyond that though, the book gets a bit slow.I would recommend reading Diamond's "Collapse" in lieu of "Guns, Germs, and Steel". I found "Collapse" to be much more interesting as Diamond explores the reasons civilizations have failed. Often these reasons are related to said civilizations destroying their environments and devouring all of their resources to the point of the civilization's extintion. These were sophisticated and arguably advanced civilizations which still destroyed themselves. Very relevent to today's world."Guns, Germs, and Steel" = How did we get here?"Collapse" = Where are we headed?The first question is interesting. The second question is essential to survival.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
2005 Vintage reprint of 1st edition (1997), 480 pages.This is another of the twenty books Charlie Munger recommends in the second edition of Poor Charlie's Almanack (the most useful book I have read) along with Diamond's first book, The Third Chimpanzee.The Third Chimpanzee is the story of how humans became 'different' to other animals and what the future might hold for us, as evidenced by our recent past. It contains a section on why some peoples and societies came to dominate others. Guns, Germs and Steel is that section made into a book.I found this detracted from my interest somewhat, as I was already aware of Diamond's broad conclusions and why he had reached them before starting the book (conversely, I found that section of The Third Chimpanzee very interesting). I have no regrets, though. Reading the books in the order they were published allows us to understand Diamond's thoughts and research better, as we get to follow his progress.I talked in my earlier review of The Third Chimpanzee about the dangers of man-with-a-hammer syndrome (those who focus only on a narrow discipline are likely to interpret all findings through a single, distorted lens - just as a man equipped only with a hammer tends to see everything as a nail). Jared Diamond is an exemplar of the opposite: he started off in medical research, then pursued a parallel second career in bird ecology, evolution and biogeography and is (or was) learning his twelfth language. I greatly admire the way he synthesizes huge amounts of data across several disciplines to arrive at his striking conclusions.Guns, Germs and Steel - as with another book on Munger's list of twenty recommended books, Garrett Hardin's Living Within Limits - is both a terrific book on its specific subject but also provides a superb broader example of how to think critically.A couple of examples might help to illustrate what I mean. The first is a theme of both of Diamond's first two books: searching always for the ultimate rather than the proximate explanation. Eurasian technology, germs and societal structure were key factors that allowed Eurasian societies to dominate the others. However, Diamond asserts that underlying these proximate factors were the ultimate factors of the plant and animal species available for domestication and the general geography.The availability of far better plant and animal species allowed farming and animal husbandry to take hold much earlier in Eurasia. This allowed much higher population densities - both of humans and their domesticated animals. This in turn led to a larger incidence of powerful human epidemic diseases - which in a number of cases originated from the domesticated animals. The more efficient food production and higher population densities in their turn allowed for specialisation, as societal classes could exist whose practitioners did not have to provide their own food (including professional soldiers).Thus, the ultimate factors determine the existence of the proximate factors. Most people never see beyond the proximate factors - which appear to explain the outcomes, but in fact do not. This is an extremely important lesson.Charlie Munger's mental models, for example, can be best viewed as an attempt to distil the way the world works to the simplest underlying (ultimate) reasons. This approach carries two massive benefits: if ultimate explanations exist we cannot understand how the world works (become 'wise') without knowing what they are (or even knowing that we should be searching for them). And secondly, it is much easier to remember and make use of fewer, simpler underlying factors.Once you begin looking for ultimate factors, you begin to see them everywhere. The search for underlying reasons is usually explicit (or at least implicit) in all of the really good books. Karen Pryor shows this clearly in `Don't Shoot the Dog' (one of my favourite books that I have just re-read):"These principles [of training with reinforcement] are laws, like the laws of physics. They underlie all learning-teaching situations as surely as the law of gravity underlies the falling of an apple. Whenever we attempt to change behaviour, in ourselves or others, we are using these laws, whether we know it or not."The second excellent example of an approach to problem solving from Diamond is one of Charlie Munger's favourites. Diamond calls it the Anna Karenina principle, after the first sentence in Tolstoy's novel:"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."Diamond explains what Tolstoy means: in order for a marriage to be a success, it must succeed in many different respects. The failure of any one of, for example, sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline or religion can doom a marriage - no matter how positive all the other factors.Diamond then uses this principle to show us why so few animals have been successfully domesticated (because every one of at least six significant factors must be present for a species to be a suitable candidate for human domestication):"This principle can be extended to understanding much else about life besides marriage. We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure."This principle underlies the reasoning behind the Harvard School Commencement speech Charlie Munger gave in 1986 (included in Poor Charlie's Almanack). In it Munger inverts the problem of achieving a good and successful life by telling his audience how to virtually guarantee a miserable and unsuccessful life. By avoiding the key causes of failure, one is likely to end up with success by default: sometimes difficult problems are best solved (or even can only be solved) backwards.As Sertillanges says: "What is knowledge, but the slow and gradual cure of our blindness?" I am grateful to Diamond (and Munger, who pointed me towards him) for helping me to see a little better.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond's work gets to the heart of the question: how did Europeans come to colonize most of the modern world when the Africans and Chinese had such a long head start in human history? The interesting answer is notGuns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, but rather how Europeans came to acquire those advantages much more quickly and efficiently than other societies (Native Americans, Africans, etc.) The four-part answer begins with the advantages of a dominant East-West axis (which Eurasia has) versus a dominant North-South axis (which Africa and the Americas lack). This East-West axis leads to greater success in food production, a sedantary lifestyle geared towards creating and accepting new technologies and diffusion of useful inventions, thereby giving the ability to outnumber and outfight societies who lack this natural geographic advantage. Diamond is an anthropologist who spent over 30 years studying the myriad ethnic groups of Papua New Guinea. A modern-day historian could never have written so broad a work. Diamond does not hesitate in going back tens of thousands of years continent-by-continent explaining what was and how it came to be. He makes good use of the 400 pages and is dead on most of the analysis.Alas, Diamond's greatest strength is also one of the book's weaknesses. There is a tendency to go in extreme detail in cases where this is unnecessary to make his point. There are many more pages on the various language families (and subfamilies, and sub-subfamilies) of various regions of the world than what is required. While this might be extremely appropriate for a scholarly journal, Guns, Germs and Steel is clearly intended for a mass-market audience. Occasional pacing aside issues aside, Diamond's work is surely a must-read for those grand historical debates that come up frequently politically-oriented social circles.The updated 2005 edition includes an epilogue chapter detailing the role of Japan in Guns, Germs and Steel. This was left out in the earliest editions.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
One of the most important books of our time; it single-handedly wipes out every justification for racism, and gets to the roots of why humans groups are where they are presently. An amazing synthesis of disciplines into one very readable explanation of how it came to pass that Europeans happened to be the ones that colonized the rest of the planet instead of some other group. The most clear example I've ever seen of why archaeology, and all the social sciences are not only important but vital to modern people. The better our understanding of the past the more likely we are to be able to let go of the emotionality that keeps us at each other's throats. A modern "just so" story.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
This book is fascinating content-wise, easy to read, but ultimately gets very repetitive. Nevertheless, I learned a lot and will read definitely read "Collapse."
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Guns, Germs, and Steel is a great read, with provocative ideas that pose a grand unifying framework (I would not describe this as a "theory" for reasons explained below) for how to think about cultures, civilizations, and development. However, the argument is actually much more limited in scope than what the readers are liable to get out of the book--and I could not escape the feeling that Diamond was subtly encouraging in his prose the somewhat more extreme interpretation that is not necessarily warranted by his argument alone.Make no mistake: the core of the book is the comparison between whey civilizations that arose in Eurasia went farther than its counterparts in Africa, Austronesia, or the Americas, not necessarily what parameters guided the paths of development the civilizations that appeared within these mega units. The larger geographic scope and greater biological diversity within the larger mega units provided greater external limits on possible growth and development for the societies that emerged therein. So, it came to that some civilization from Eurasia would have been much more likely to conquer the Americas, rather than the other way around. But what about the different civilizations within these mega units? I don't think the framework offered by Diamond can be meaningfully used to compare, say, why the Spanish, rather than the Chinese or the Persians, came to conquer the Incas and the Aztecs. In the mega-unit framework, after all, Spanish, Chinese, and Persian civilizations are equivalent--they are all Eurasian civilizations that had access to similar natural endowments and remained in constant contact with each other, either directly or indirectly, that facilitated transfers of technology amongst them. I don't think this book can contribute much to the question of what differentiates among these civilizations (which, I'd expect, would be of much greater interest to the present day readers since, like or it not, very little of the New World civilizations survive as major forces shaping today's world.). That should belong to the realm of social sciences--as some reviewers suggest, David Landes' book might be a useful contributor.Yet, Diamond tries to superimpose his framework onto analyzing inter-civilizational differences within mega units, and that seems rather ineffectual. In the original edition of the book, the chapter on China seemed rather naive and underinformed on the topic--specifically, he seems to buy too much into the notion that a homogeneous "China" exists, both historically and at present, as opposed to a diverse "West." The new edition (which I had not read) is supposed to contain a chapter on Japan, built on the premise of explaining the alleged uniqueness of Japan's civilization--and that'd seem even more problematic not only because of the potential inapplicability of his framework to the case as well as the disputable premise itself. Diamond's article in the June, 1998, issue of the Discover magazine sparked a storm of controversy especially for the latter reason).All in all, then, Diamond's work provides an excellent insight into why the modern world is dominated by Eurasian civilizations, but no more. Eurasia is complex enough that there is much variation to be explained within--and this book really cannot explain intra-Eurasian variation. Readers should constantly remind themselves of the limits of its applicability.