Books>Business, Finance & Law>Economics>History>
History Search History HistoryGuns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years
Vintage Search Vintage by Jared M. Diamond Search Jared M. Diamond
Amazon.co.uk Review
Life isn't fair--here's why: Since 1500, Europeans have, for better and worse, called the tune that the world has danced to. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond explains the reasons why things worked out that way. It is an elemental question, and Diamond is certainly not the first to ask it. However, he performs a singular service by relying on scientific fact rather than specious theories of European genetic superiority. Diamond, a professor of physiology at UCLA, suggests that the geography of Eurasia was best suited to farming, the domestication of animals and the free flow of information. The more populous cultures that developed as a result had more complex forms of government and communication--and increased resistance to disease. Finally, fragmented Europe harnessed the power of competitive innovation in ways that China did not. (For example, the Europeans used the Chinese invention of gunpowder to create guns and subjugate the New World.) Diamond's book is complex and a bit overwhelming. But the thesis he methodically puts forth--examining the "positive feedback loop" of farming, then domestication, then population density, then innovation, and on and on--makes sense. Written without bias, Guns, Germs, and Steel is good global history.
Customer Reviews:
Worth persevering with
This book was a gift - one of the best as I would never have chosen it myself but am so pleased to have had it given to me and therefore to have read it. It's not an easy read and there were chapters which I skim read, but its hugely fascinating subject - the spread of humanity out of Africa and the rise of civilisations, agriculture and technologies at different rates and different locations - is riveting. The book is a work of serious scholarship and major importance: Nick Griffin please take note!
Very interesting, but a bit long. 
Very interesting analysis of how the environment shapes who you are and how humanity evolved throughout the millennia to come to its present state.
Some of the arguments are somewhat repeated though, and I had the feeling that the whole book could be edited down to about half its size.
Another Great Book 
Having read one of his other books I couldn't wait to read more from this writer. The subject matter is so interesting and written in an easy to read style. I will look out for more of his work.
Fascinating account
This is a remarkable and thought-provoking book, full of insights into our past.
At the end of the last ice age, in 11,000 BC, all peoples on all the continents were hunter-gatherers. Why the great subsequent differences? Biology? Different genetic endowments? No, it is not a matter of racial differences - there is only one human race, as Diamond shows.
Why did bronze tools appear early in parts of Eurasia, but late and only locally in the New World, and never in aboriginal Australia? Diamond answers that environmental geography lays down the conditions of economic and social development.
Eurasia is the world's largest and most diverse landmass. Diamond shows how its larger stock of domestic plants and animals gave it the lead, starting in southwest Asia's Fertile Crescent. Big-seeded annual cereals, like wheats (emmer and einkorn) and barley, were easy to domesticate, and Eurasia's wheats have a higher protein content than East Asia's rice or the New World's corn.
Eurasia also had the largest number of wild mammalian species, 72 candidates for domestication. There were 14 ancient species of big herbivorous domestic animals: 13 were confined to Eurasia, one to South America. There were none in North America, Australia or sub-Saharan Africa. Eurasia had the unique combination of domesticable animals - sheep, goats, cows, pigs and dogs. Also, Eurasia's east-west axis enabled a swifter spread of crops and livestock across its 10,000-mile band of temperate latitudes.
The ultimate cause of progress - food production - led to the proximate causes - germs, literacy, technology and centralised government. Guns, germs and steel are power factors.
But Diamond underestimates how empires seized their given advantages to attack, conquer and exploit other less fortunate peoples. And he tends to justify the current inequitable world order, as when he writes of, "revolts ... promising less oppression ... all the misery still being caused by such struggles in the modern world."
Forgets Evolution Did Not Stop 50,000 Years Ago 
1. Diamond omits that virtually all genes that are related to individual differences in human health and behavior differ to some degree in their frequency between racial populations. Genetically there are readily identifiable clusters of points, corresponding to traditional continental ethnic groups: Europeans, Africans, Asians, Native Americans, etc. (see, for example, Risch et al., Am. J. Hum. Genet. 76:268-275, 2005.).
2. Surprisingly for an evolutionary biologist, Diamond fails to inform his readers that it is different environments that cause, via natural selection, biological differences among populations. All of the Eurasian developments he described created positive feedback loops selecting for increased intelligence and various personality traits (e.g., altruism, rule-following, etc.).
3. Racial differences in brain size and IQ map very closely to the same cultural histories Diamond explains. Although Diamond dismisses such research as "loathsome", he fails to tell his readers what, if anything, might be scientifically wrong with any of it. One hundred years of research has established that East Asians and Europeans average higher IQs than do Africans. East Asians, measured in North America and in Pacific Rim countries, typically average IQs in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America, Europe, and Australasia typically average IQs from 85 to 115 with an overall mean of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Britain typically have mean IQs from 70 to 90.
Discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for a review). And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Project on 53,000 children by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter at birth significantly predicts head perimeter at 7 years -- and head perimeter at seven years predicts IQ. It also shows that Asian children average a larger head perimeter at birth than do White children who average a larger head perimeter than do Black children.
Rushton, J. P., & Ankney, C. D. (2009). Whole-brain size and general mental ability: A review. International Journal of Neuroscience, 119, 691-731.
4. The heritability of intelligence is now well established from numerous adoption, twin, and family studies. Particularly noteworthy are the genetic contributions of 80% found in adult twins reared apart. And most transracial adoption studies provide evidence for the heritability of racial differences in IQ. For instance, Korean and Vietnamese children adopted into white American and white Belgian homes were examined in studies by E.A. Clark and J. Hanisee, by M. Frydman and R. Lynn, and by M. Winick et al. Many had been hospitalized for malnutrition. But they went on to develop IQs ten or more points higher than their adoptive national norms. By contrast, the famous Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study marked black/white differences emerged by age 17 even though the black children had been reared in white middle-class families (Weinberg, Scarr & Waldman, 1992).
5. Although Diamond (pp. 38-40) acknowledges the accumulating evidence in favor of the "Out-of-Africa" theory of human origins that Homo sapiens arose in Africa 200,000 years ago, expanded beyond Africa in an African/non-African split about 110,000 years ago, and then migrated east in a European/East Asian split about 40,000 years ago, he refuses to acknowledge any relationship between this evolutionary sequence and the parallel ranking of Africans, Europeans, and East Asians in brain size and other behavioral traits. Nor does he tell his readers that evolutionary selection pressures were different in the hot savanna where Africans evolved than in the cold Arctic where East Asians evolved.
6. What seems to be true (from preliminary studies) is that the gene variants that were under strong selection (reached fixation) over the last 10k years are different in different clusters. That is, the way that modern people in each cluster differ, due to natural selection, from their own ancestors 10k years ago is not the same in each cluster -- we have been, at least at the genetic level, experiencing divergent evolution.
7. Recent research suggests that 7% or more of all our genes are mutant versions that replaced earlier variants through natural selection over the last tens of thousands of years. There was little gene flow between continental clusters ("races") during that period, so there is circumstantial evidence for group differences beyond the already established ones (superficial appearance, disease resistance).
'Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution' (2007)
John Hawks*,, Eric T. Wang, Gregory M. Cochran§, Henry C. Harpending,§, and Robert K. Moyzis,¶ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
8. Whether you look at genes linked to aggressiveness like MAO-A, the RR variant of ACTN3, a gene that affects fast generation of muscular force, or candidate genes for intelligence (rs2760118-C on SSADH, rs324650-T on CHRM2, and rs760761-C on DTNBP1, for example) they are not distributed evenly among the populations sampled in the Hapmap.
9. A fair fraction of the recent evolutionary change affected brain & axon growth. For example, you see new versions of SLC6A4, a serotonin transporter, in Europeans and Asians. There's a new version of a gene (DBA1) that shapes the development of the layers of the cerebral cortex in east Asia.
10. There is considerable psychometric evidence of group differences consistent with the recent neurological changes (Ashkenazi Jews consitently average 2/3 of a std deviation above Europeans. East Asians have a group average of about 103, Europeans 100) Rushton, J.P. and Jensen, A.R. (2005). Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol. 11, No. 2, 235-294. [easily located on the web]
6. Also, see 'A Farewell to Alms' by Greg Clark, Professor of Economics, UC Davis:
The study of wills reported in A Farewell to Alms implied that economic
competition could change the genetic composition of the English population over time. This study of rare surnames shows that indeed economic success in 1600 by a man could permanently increase the relative frequency of his surname, and by implication of his genes. This does not demonstrate that these genetic changes had significant impacts in changing the behavior of the average person in England by 1800. But Clark (2008) shows that economic success in modern societies has its roots a significant genetic component."
7. For a more up to date account that doesn't ignore genetics see 'The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution'.
Listmania Lists:
Pop Science books
Non-Fiction that everyone should read
Attempting to make sense of the world
A primer for BU123
My All Time Greats !!
My favourite history books
Essential Reading for all
Eclectic Reading List
Some random cuts, 2007
It's Party Time!
RELATED:
Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years & More...
related blog:
Douglas Carswell MP: Europe in decline
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Guns-Germs-Steel-history-everybody/dp/0099302780/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235655421&sr=1-1. Posted on 26 February 2009 13:37 by Dave B. Please could you not refer to a Euro elite? ...
http://www.talkcarswell.com/show.aspx?id=497
guns, germs and steel
isbn: 0099302780. ddc: 304.209. this book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13000 years. the question motivating the book is this: why did history unfold differently on different continents? ...
http://www.susanhatedliterature.net/guns-germs-and-steel/
Econbrowser: The distribution of world income
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Guns-Germs-Steel-history-everybody/dp/0099302780/sr=8-1/qid=1169738577/ref=pd_ka_1/026-5690459-3902020?ie=UTF8&s=books. Posted by: frank quietly at January 25, 2007 07:27 AM. Very nice. ...
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2007/01/the_distributio.html
Per Occitània, l'utilitat de Jared Diamond, quand vívon las ...
... l'UCLA http://www.geog.ucla.edu/people/faculty.php?lid=3078&display_one=1&modify=1. [2] en occitan embolnèri o esfrondrament. Per o crompar en anglés e mens car : http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099302780/026-1404260-4768434.
http://jacmetolosa.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!49914F5702C5C72E!583.entry
läslista i sommar, vilka böcker behöver man läsa?
http://www.adlibris.com/se/product.aspx?isbn=0099302780. - 50 management ideas you really need to know http://www.adlibris.com/se/product.aspx?isbn=1847240097. - zittrain, j, the future of the internet—and how to stop it (2008) ...
http://www.xn--skrothg-f1a.se/laslista-i-sommar-vilka-bocker-behover-man-lasa/
jared diamond: guns, germs and steel: a short history of everybody ...
title: guns, germs and steel: a short history of everybody for the last 13, 000 years. date added: 2009/04/18. publisher: london : vintage, 1998, c1997. published in: english. asin: 0099302780. giver: jahoga (hong kong)
http://www.bookmooch.com/detail/0099302780
