By Jared Diamond

In his book, Guns, Germs, and Steal, Jared Diamond gives a thorough and convincing explanation as to why the world’s great surviving civilisations have managed to do so, and how they’ve come to conquer others. Diamond stands against the idea that such civilisational success is the result of any kind of intellectual, moral or genetic superiority.

Diamond notes that many indigenous people around the world (e.g., Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, Sub-Saharan Africans, and New Guineans) have to a great extent been colonised, displaced from their places of habitation, and (at least in some cases) even exterminated and killed. Primarily, Diamond explains, this happened because of certain societies’s combative and political power, which is a consequence of the emergence of agriculture thousands of years ago. Agriculture, howerver, only emerged in geographic locations where there was one or a few species of plants and animals, which were suitable for domestication and herding. This, Diamond asserts, is a relative rarity in the world of flora and fauna, and was naturally limited to a very few geographic locations in the world (the Middle East, Ganges River Valley, China, and Central America). And consequently, everything else emerged from the advantage of the early rise of agriculture.

Therefore, the variance in wealth, power and technology in various human societies, Diamond writes, is the result of environmental differences. In other words, any advantage a human society has managed to achieve over others is due to the influence of geography on cultures and societies, and was never inherent in anybody’s genome.

Web links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

http://www.mcgoodwin.net/pages/gungermsteel.html