Summary Of Guns, Germs, And Steel

“Ender did not hesitate. He stepped on the head of the snake and crushed it under his foot. It writhed and twisted under him and in response he twisted and ground it deeper into the stone floor… And in the mirror he saw a face that he easily recognized. It was Peter.” (117)

In his work, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” (W. W. Norton, New York, NY, 1997) Jared Diamond attempts to explain why human history has carried out the way it has, he often refers to accounts from history to support his argument. Accounts that will be deemed adequate will discuss specific groups of people, at a specified period of time. Diamond suggests that guns, germs, and steel are three contributing factors for why the world is in its current state. It is not difficult to recognize while reading, that the book spends a large amount of time talking about germs and much less text discussing guns and steel. In “Guns, Germs, and Steel” Diamond does adequately account for the historical development of guns and steel, in the way he accounts for the role of germs in the history of human societies. It is no debate that germs played a massive role in many important events in history, but guns came late, were not very effective at first, and steel production was most important militarily.

Many historians and politicians ponder over the reason why Europeans have much more wealth and power than other ethnicities. However, this question was abandoned and rarely brought up because there wasn’t enough evidence to have a clear answer. Yali, a local politician in New Guinea, asked a similar question: “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?” Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, believes that the differences in wealth and power between different groups of people is because of the environmental differences. An event that helped answer this question was when the Spanish Conquistador Francisco Pizarro easily defeated the Incas despite having only a few men because of their geographical location, resulting advanced military technology, and writing.

The overall point of this chapter in Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond was to give a quick explanation on why Europeans societies have dominated, and even stomped out, other ones. He attempts to find this answer after a man named Yali, asked him, “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?” It was a seemingly simple question that Diamond did not have the answer to. He researches and writes this book, years later, to answer Yali’s question. The author acknowledged other answers to this question, for example: Europeans are more intelligent. Diamond rebuttals this with an explanation on why that is not correct, and tells us why he believes people like the New Guineans, are more intelligent. He points out that European children stay at home and watch tv, sit at the computer, and play video games, while New Guinean children, play outside with friends and family. Though, how playing outside, rather than inside, is a good point to make about who is more intelligent, is not explained any further. A lot of the answers historians have come up with are racist, that many do not accept, but many also do.

In the book, Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, the author asks many questions about histories of the world. These question are questions that lie in the main question Jared Diamond is trying to answer. In the Prologue, the author discussed about his personal experience in New Guinea where a local politician asked him the major question "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?” (Diamond 14). When further exploring the meaning of this question it could represent why major civilizations developed and advanced so much faster technologically and economically but other civilizations like New Guineans are behind in these advancements. Which could explain

The Inca empire was the largest and most advanced empire in Pre-Columbian American. However, the Spanish led by Francisso Pizarro subjugated the Inca empire in 1572. Within mere 62 soldiers mounted on horses and 106 foot soldiers against 80,000 Incan soldiers, the Spaniard wins and killed thousands of the Incans. The Spaniard also apprehends the Inca emperor, Atahuallpa;the Spaniard received the greatest ransom in history and killed Atahuallpa afterward. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond, Diamond summarize the Inca empire collapsed so fast during the battle against the Spanish are because the lack of technology and knowledge and the diseases brought to the land by the Spanish. In my point of view that even if Pizarro's attack had

Jared Diamond starts off his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel with stating his attempt to answer Yali’s question, “Why is it that you white people developed much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own.” Diamond elaborates and brings to simpler terms how Yali’s question relates to many questions on the origins of humans, but more specifically, how Eurasians, the white people mentioned by Yali, came to successfully dominate the rest of the world. In the prologue, Diamond mainly drives his point of the “effects of continental environments on history over the past 13,000 years” as to what he believes is the main root to why Eurasians came to dominate so successfully. Alongside of continental environments,

1.Jared Diamond states that the environment of a race determines whether or not it’s going to survive.

In Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, Diamond’s explains that Europeans progressed faster than Native Americans technologically. Since the beginnings of time Europeans advanced faster than Native Americans, but why? To begin with, the Eurasian land mass had more species of large animals to domesticate. In addition, Eurasia had more varieties of grains for large scale farming. Finally, Eurasia was more accessible for trade between civilizations.

In the movie Guns, Germs, and Steel and Matthew Restall’s book Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, two very different accounts of the early conquests by the Spaniards are uncovered. The movie, which follows Jared Diamond through his studies, presents a more European-centered view, while Restall individually debunks commonly believed myths of the conquest that are perpetuated in the film.

The question of why civilization has evolved to it's present form is a complicated one. It is an area of study that is fraught with pitfalls and easy-to-make assumptions about cultures, specifically why some have advanced far enough to control the majority of the world while others have never managed to advance beyond simple hunting and gathering. In his book “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies”, author Jared Diamond attempts to explain the factors at play in our history that led to the modern world. In Chapter 9, titled “Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle”, Diamond explores the patterns of domestication in ancient cultures. He examines the types of animals that humans domesticated, as well as the distribution of domesticated animals and the effect on human society that this uneven distribution would bring. Ultimately he will argue that environment, not culture, is what drove the domestication of animals in the ancient world.

Prologue: “Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way?” is how Diamond reworded it in the prologue.

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. Print.

Lenina watches a man get whipped who speaks good english, then he explains how his mother was not from the reservation but from there world.

There are essentially two schools of thought on what life was like for early humans: Thomas Hobbes’ famous quote that life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” and the popular Western image of the “noble savage” that dominated literature and archaeology in the Victorian era. In our modern era, this view has been termed the “Garden of Eden” conception of early humanity, as expounded by Ponting in his book, A Green History of the World: a fruitful, easily productive environment that allowed its inhabitants a heavenly existence living in connectivity and harmony with nature. The difference between these two polarized views is essentially the difference between idealizing and condemning early humanity through its