Yali's Discussion Questions Summary

Please address each question below with complete sentences and clear, specific explanation. The total word count of your writing should be between 750-1,250 words.

2. This quote is important because it foreshadows the uprising of the oppressed against the master class.

Firstly, in the introduction is basically an overview of how Dr. Ingle used what he wrote in his book in his own life. I thought it was a great way to introduce a book and the personal stories made the book added realism. Because Dr. Ingle provided his testimony it gave me as a reader a hope that I one day can also find my divine designs in my life as well.

In the book Guns, Germs, And Steel, Jared Diamond explains how different parts and people of the world advanced faster than others. He states that it is not because of race or ethnicity that caused this difference; it is because of the surroundings of the people that caused these improvements. Diamond argues this throughout the whole book. He makes his argument believable to his readers.

“Why you white men have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little,” was Yali’s question. Diamond’s reaction to this was absurd. His authentic belief was that it had nothing to do with race, though it was the geography that played the uttermost role in the modernization of these regions.

History is the most imporant thing in the world because it affects people and societies all around the world. Traces of history go all the way back millions of years ago forming wealth and power to this day. In this book Jared Diamond is determined to explain why there were so many different rates of human development on different continents and uses his opinions and information to back it up. There is evidence proving some theories to be correct while others are more questionable making Diamond even more curious to explain the unknown.

In the prologue, “Yali’s Question”, the author Jared Diamond is determined to answer the puzzling question his New Guinean friend, Yali, poses. Yali was curious to know why some areas of the world developed industrial cities with steel tools while other areas remained hunter-gatherer societies with crude stone tools. Even though Europe was one nation that rose to world power, Jared Diamond believes that discussing this topic does not mean that it will revolve around Europeans. He says, “In fact, most of this book will deal with peoples other than Europeans. Rather than focus solely in interactions between Europeans and non-Europeans, we shall also examine interactions between different non-European peoples...”. Each continent advanced

Yali’s question for Jared Diamond is: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo… but we black people had little cargo of our own?” (14). This is the main question Jared Diamond is going to try to answer throughout the whole book because he cares. This question implies that certain societies have been more successful than other societies. They’ve been healthier, wealthier, and more powerful. Yali wants to know why individual people across societies are very much alike in their intelligence and nature, yet why do some societies flourish or succeed while others don’t?

Human cultures and societies have developed at various rates and achieved different levels of progress over thousands of years, resulting in some societies being labeled as more advanced than others. More advanced societies experienced complex technologies, evident in their tools and innovations, and more refined cultural structures such as social class and government systems. Other societies experienced slower rates of development as they maintained rudimentary lifestyles with simple technologies and social structures. Examining and comparing the varying levels of progress and development achieved by different human societies across the world raises the question of how certain societies developed at a higher rate than others. Jared Diamond, an evolutionary biologist, and William McNeill, a historian, seek to explain this variation in development with each offering different perspectives. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond chronicles the history of human development through a biogeographical lens and proposes that environmental and biological factors are the main influences on the development of human societies. Diamond’s ideas, however, do not go unchallenged as McNeill presents in his article “History Upside Down”, that anthropological factors pertaining to human cognition are also crucial in explaining how human societies have developed. Although both authors examine human societal development through different lenses, Diamond’s ideas on geographic location and

In the documentary Guns, Germs, and Steel, there was a question that was presented to Diamond by a New Guinean man named Yali. Yali asked, "Why do you white people have so much cargo, but we New Guineans have so little?" This question from Yali threw Diamond off. He assumed that since it was a simple question, that there would have been a simple answer. Moreover, Diamond's experience with the New Guineans had showed him their ingenious ways. That they can go into uncharted, undiscovered territory. They could create a shelter from practically nothing. Then survive there, even thrive there.

In the prologue, Diamond focuses on introducing the structure and aim of the journey that the reader is about to embark on. This journey is contained in the pages and chapters of the book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. He rebukes the conventional way that most authors attempt to present world history to their readers. He claims that the "Eurocentric" way in which this is done provides a small viewing window in regard to time. It also fails to address why things are the way that they are.

Diamond's critiques call his work "academic porn", " blatantly misleading", and that Diamond claims that European domination is accidental. A lot of our history is

Diamond opens up the documentary by saying he spends a considerably long amount of time in New Guinea, learning the culture of the people and studying birds. He meets a man named Yali, who asks “why do white men have so much cargo? (ep. 1)” Diamond focuses most of his research on this statement. However, unlike Yali, he doesn’t blame a specific race saying “To me, any explanation based on race is absurd. I know too many really smart New Guineans to believe there’s anything genetically inferior about them. (ep. 1)” Instead of pointing an argument directly at a specific people group, Diamond focuses his findings more on geographical location.

1. The Overarching questions about global development that Professor Jared Diamond wished to answer were as follows: How did Europeans develop advantages in the first place?, Why did the world ever become so unequal?, What separates the haves from the have-nots?, and How have guns, germs, and steel shaped the history of the world? He was prompted to begin exploring these issues when he was visiting Papua New Guinea. He enjoys bird watching and began going to Papua New Guinea when he was twenty-six. He began making regular trips there since then. On one of these trips he met a man on the beach named Yali, and Yali asked him “Why you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?” This threw Diamond for a loop and from that moment on he began researching and trying to find an answer to Yali’s question.

Group One, Question #1: Cite a passage that was particularly interesting to you and ask why.