Guns, Germs, and Steel essays

Guns, Germs, and Steel essays Guns, Germs, Steel, and controversy: Diamonds unique look at evolution and history. Through out Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond attempts to explain the dominance of certain ethnicities. The backbone to this book and the questions that Diamond asks and answers, stem from a question asked of him in 1972 by a local politician in New Guinea named Yali. Our conversation began with a subject then on every New Guineans mind the rapid pace of political developments. What Yali wanted to know was why New Guinea and other cultures around the world seemed behind in technology. Why were the Europeans the dominant force in the world? 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? As Diamond puts it, Yalis question can be stretched out to not just the whites and New Guineans, but most of the world and whites. Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way? For instance, why werent native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australian s the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians? In the next 400 pages, Diamond does everything to convince the reader of all the agricultural and environmental reasons for this, while trying to bury the old theory of intellectual racism. That is, the belief that Europeans and Asians have a naturally higher intellect. After reading I found that his theory of environment and agriculture had a very strong base to it and made a lot of sense. He makes his points clear and very factual, using examples throughout history and his own personal life in some instances to hammer his point home. However Im a little skeptic of him disregarding at all the possibility of a certain race being inherently smarter than another. Although he makes a few points towards his theory, he dodges it for the...