The author, Jared Diamond, presents a question in the prologue. Diamond is walking with a local politician, Yali, on a beach in New Guinea where Diamond studied bird evolution. Yali asked, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had so little cargo of our own?” The book, Guns, Germs, and Steel is Diamond’s attempt to answer this question. I am expecting an interesting mashup of history and science to emerge.
In Diamond’s anticipation of objections around race and domination, he expected only to understand what happened, not to justify. He’s an evolutionary biologist, not a psychologist or historian, and wondered why Caucasian cultures (Diamond calls them white) built industrialized societies while nearby non-whites did not. It wasn’t intelligence, he reasoned, as his work with New Guineans showed him that they were at least equally intelligent. His initial reasoning is that epidemics and murder did not wipe out portions of the population who then lived to pass on their genes. In New Guinea, only those smart enough to escape disease lived long enough to reproduce, while in “white” populations, one didn’t need to be smart to live through epidemics. (Ok, I’ve simplified the evidence here,) Why, then didn’t the more intelligent New Guineans become a world power? The connecting theme here seems to be evolution. The themes I expect to emerge are Diversity of Organisms, Ecology, and Heredity. I’m reading on……..
