Guns Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies [Paperback]

By the time the Mongols roared across Asia, or the Moguls invaded India, many cultures around the world already changed so much that bioregional factors, though seminal in the creation of these broadest trends, weren't nearly as important as the political, religious and economic ones. He is not ignoring religion and so on but, he states plainly several times that isn't his focus. He is looking for ultimate causes--before humans had extremely advanced mental concepts like religion.

He also wanted to point out the devastating influence of disease on history. It was surely the European germs that did most of the conquering of Native Americans. The guns and horses were almost incidental. Later on, once Europeans had established themselves, then we can focus on economic and political systems. But we can't ignore the effects of the diseases unleashed on the Americas. These plagues gave the Europeans a very lucky boost that catapulted them beyond the wealth and power of China, India or the Middle East--long before the Industrial Revolution made this gap obvious.

Another thing that some people seem to be having trouble with is his assertions about the native intelligence of tribal peoples around the world. (If you read the book, you notice that he is not just saying this about the New Guineans.)

He takes pains to point out what he means by this. He not talking about some mysterious genetic superiority of tribal peoples.... It's all straight up culture. Tribal culture forces people to be better generalists than they'd have to be in literate civilizations. They can't rely on embedded support structures like books for memory or experts for obscure fields. They have to be pretty good at a lot things. Otherwise they die. They have to be better at memorizing things because they can't count on computers or books to remember things for them. Living in a dangerous, wild environment makes them cautious and aware of all that is going on around them. That was all he meant. The circumstance of tribal peoples force them, only in very broad ways and only on an individual basis, to be smarter and more curious than civilized people.

And in the end it does them no good. Because civilized societies are SMARTER than tribal societies. That is why tribal society has been steadily disappearing over the millenia. They just can't compete.

Finally, of course the book is repetitive. In fact he sums up his argument in the preface of the book. You needn't even read the rest if you don't want to. The rest of the book consists of him reiterating his points from different angles to point out the objections he has managed to answer and the many questions that still remain. He is just following scholarly practice and exposition--just to make things clear that he has thought about this.

He knows that his theory can't explain everything. In the epilog he points out that China, India and the Middle East are good counter examples to his idea. They each had an expansionist rise to great power--a time when they were unafraid to try new ideas and explore new ways of doing things. If the highly complex forces of economics, politics, religion had arrayed themselves differently. We might all be speaking Arabic now. Or Cantonese. Europe was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time for things to come together as they did. Read more ›

The answer is: sloppy repetition and over-playing his hand. Diamond's commissioning editor should have been firmer and used the red pencil more vigorously. Over and over again, Diamond repeats great chunks of his text almost verbatim. The effect on the reader, who has got half way through the book and is just getting interested in a new point Diamond is beginning to make, of running into the third or fourth reprise of an argument (complete with evidence and rhetorical touches) on another issue is incredibly frustrating. I can't believe Diamond thinks his readers need the repetition in order to understand his argument. The fact that many of the phrases are repeated exactly suggests to me that He has been just a little careless about proof reading and has failed to delete dozens of relicts of the word-processor's "copy and paste" function....

Second, as several of the other reviewers have noted, Diamond spectacularly fails to demonstrate that his hypothesis accounts for all the data in the case of China. It had the domesticable plants and animals, the population size and density, the climate, access to and East-West aligned continent and so on, just like Europe and the Near East. He acknowledges that the reason for the halting of "progress" in China from the middle ages was purely a cultural one but attempts to explain this by a geographically deterministic argument based on the shape of the two regions' coastlines. I think most readers will find this unconvincing, to say the least.

Finally, in my view, he holds too strongly to the rather discredited wave-of-advance and related models of the displacement of one culture by the movement and expansion of peoples of superior cultures. Until relatively recently, one was very swayed by an interpretation of the available evidence (language distribution, archaeological artefacts, blood group frequencies, racial appearance) to believe that cultural replacement inevitably involved mass migration and genocide. More recent evidence (see, for example, Sykes' "Seven Daughters of Eve") shows that is not always the case at all.

In summary. The second edition of this book, edited to 2/3 its present length, revised to include the latest genetic evidence and with a more honest appraisal of the accidents of cultural difference, will be well worth 5*. Read more ›