Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

By a strange stroke of timing, I happened to catch PBS's three-part documentary Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, just as I was finishing up reading Jared Diamond's Pulitzer-prize-winning book by the same title.

The question Diamond - "linguist, molecular physiologist, and bio-geographer" at UCLA - tries to answer is why people and cultures in different parts of the world developed at different rates from each other. In other words, why are people in Papua New Guinea (a place where Diamond spent over 40 years studying birds) still hunting and gathering while people in the United States and other developed countries are not, or at least are not in the way the New Guineans are?

Diamond's answer to the question is first and foremost, geography. He doesn't believe that people are all that different from one another; rather, he thinks that different people have different advantages and disadvantages due largely to where they are. In the geography world (of which I was a small part, or at least enough to get a degree back in my college days), this is called determinism, and Diamond's determinism says that the regions of the world more conducive not just to hunting and gathering but to larger scale food production gave those cultures an advantage in freeing up "specialists" to focus on other things.

Diamond goes on to postulate a three-fold thesis as to why European cultures seem to have leaped ahead of African and some Asian ones: guns, germs, and steel. His theory is that man's ability to "get ahead" in the course of human evolution was in direct correspondence to his success in war, medicine (i.e. the ability to inflict and control disease), and industry.

While both the book and the television special simplify the complexities of thousands of years of humanity (and in the television special, Diamond is particularly interesting to listen to just because his life, personality, and voice are all so, well, weird), the conclusions drawn sure take a lot out of who we are as human beings.

If all I am as the sum of my culture is someone who figured out how to fight, heal, and make money better and sooner than other cultures, I'm not sure how exciting that really is. The arguments for this pattern throughout history can be, I suppose, compelling in a presentation, but they sure don't feel too fulfilling in their consideration. There's more to us than that. I'm sorry, there just is.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is an interesting read, particularly when you consider the vast scope of Diamond's research across multiple disciplines, as well as his efforts at synthesizing his findings in each. Not sure I buy it all, but I was impressed by the attempt.