Jared Diamond wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel more than 25 years ago to great acclaim. It won the Pulitzer Prize. He brought together anthropology, archeology, history, behavioral ecology, psychology, and other fields into a super history. Like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, he packs a lot of explanatory power into a small number of pages. Bill Gates and other influential people lauded the book, even trying to apply its “theory” to modern states and competition between businesses.
Diamond’s principal argument is that the Western-dominated modern world is a direct result of geography. Geography determined that technology and pestilence would spread more easily in along the east-west orientation of Eurasia, thus advancing and toughening its inhabitants so that they could dominate the globe. It was differences among peoples’ environments, not biological differences that gave rise to the Western-dominated modern world. But how well has this sweeping thesis kept up with the times?
Summary
Diamond begins his book by asking how Western Europeans, “plus those transplanted to North America, dominate the modern world in wealth and power” (Diamond, p 15)? Or, more generally, “why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents” (Diamond, p 16)? In asking, Diamond tackles the issue of racist theories that…