Archive for the 'Guns Germs and Steel' Category

This is the 2nd article in an ongoing series of articles discussing Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel. The 1st article in the series can be found here and a table of contents of this series can be found here.
——————

The first paragraph of Guns, Germs, Steel:
“This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. The question motivating the book is: Why did history unfold differently on different continents? In case this question immediately makes you shudder at the thought that you are about to read a racist treatise, you aren’t: as you will see, the answers to the question don’t involve human racial differences at all. The book’s emphasis is on the search for ultimate explanations, and on pushing back the chain of historical causation as far as possible.”

Yali’s question is very controversial subject because there are lot of people who have immoral answers. The mere effort to talk about Yali’s questions can be confused as effort to justify why certain groups of people have dominated others. As Mr. Diamond points out psychologists attempt to analyze the minds of rapists not to justify the act, but to understand the causes so that future rape crimes can be prevented.

Throughout history and even today have used very racist justifications for dominating and enslaving other groups of people. For example, slavery of Africans in the United States was justified for many slaveholders because it was believed that people with dark skin where somehow sub-human. Obviously this a ridiculous belief, but sadly the idea that one race is better than another still persists in our world. The Holocaust is the obvious example and by far the most horrific example, but Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing reconstruction of New Orleans have brought racism front and center once again.

The fact that you’re reading an article written by me is simply a byproduct of my environment. I was born into a loving family in the most powerful and wealthy nation the world has ever know. Would you be reading this article if I had been born into the few remaining hunter-gather tribes still in existent? The odds of that happening would be very slim.

As this book explained to me (and I will explain to you) is that Eurasian people were simply dealt a winning hand in terms of geography and ecology. They got lucky. Because they got lucky thousands of years ago, the basis for modern civilization came into existence. They got a head start and these advantages were passed along to my ancestors who came to America in early 20th century from England, Ireland, Poland, and Russia. That is why you’re reading this article. I’m no better a person than individuals born in a hunter-gather tribes during 1981. Not only is it arrogant and racist to believe this, it’s simply scientifically false.

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

——————
Stay tuned for the next article in this series on Guns, Germs, and Steel.

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

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.

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

——————
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.

This page has moved, please see the new location for the index of Guns, Germs, and Steel.

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