Guns, Germs, and Steel – Yali’s Question

One of the things on the docket for this science blog is a detailed discussion of great science books. The current plan is to breakdown a book (i.e. chapter a week). For people who haven’t read these books, it will be a great way of learning key concepts without having to read the entire book. Executive book summaries are becoming more and more popular, but I personally find them to be somewhat lacking. So, I hope to find the happy medium between a short summary and reading an entire book.

For people who have read the books , it will be a chance to revisit these books. I’m sure you have learned something after reading the book and this new knowledge will help you further understand concepts discussed on this blog. That’s what learning is all about: making connections with new and prior knowledge.

The first book I will discuss is one of my favorites: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

Mr. Diamond explains why Europe and America came to dominate the world in wealth and power during the past 500 years. He answers some very powerful and complicated questions like: why didn’t Native Americans colonize Europe and why didn’t Africans capture Europeans to be slaves in Africa?

The book begins in New Guinea where Mr. Diamond was doing research in the 1970s. White Europeans had colonized the island in the last 200 years and found a New Guinea population still using stone tools. The New Guineans were stunned to see all the tools and various goods (they called all these material goods “cargo”) that the Europeans brought to their island.

The thesis to this book is a question that a very inquisitive New Guinea politician named Yali asked the visiting researcher Mr. Diamond in 1973: “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?”

He describes not having answer to Yali’s question at the time and this book is his way of answering. Before I read this book, I definitely didn’t have an answer to this question. It’s a hard topic to discuss because the theme of this book is integral to foundation of my country the United States. Let’s face it, Manifest Destiny and the westward expansion wasn’t just about conquering the wilderness – the ancestors of many American conquered a native population.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

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Next article in this Guns, Germs, and Steel discussion series: The Controversy of Yali’s Question

For a table of contents of this series, click here.