Book Review: Guns, Germs, and Steel

Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Okay, so it's been around for a while, but I just recently finished reading it. This book seeks to answer the question "Why did some nations/cultures survive and conquer, while others failed and disappeared." Dr. Diamond narrows the reasons down to three main developments that enable some nations/cultures to beat out others. These developments lend the book its title:

• The development of firearms
• Immunity to diseases, particularly ones found among groups living in higher population densities
• The ability to make steel, useful for weapons and other purposes

But this only gets us one step down. Why did some nations/cultures develop guns and steel and resistance to diseases they could then pass to others who weren't resistant? The author traces the chain of causality down to the basic structure of the Earth, with different parts having different types and numbers of useful plants and animal species depending on the lay of the land. The meat of this book is taking the reader on that journey with heaps of well-explained evidence along the way. As an ecologist working on symbiotic bacterial species, I appreciate his survey of "macrobial" species that influenced human evolution. As someone whose work involves looking at the evolution of human milk across the world, I liked the anthropological information he gave as well. And a book that ties the fate of nations in to microbes... well that's just right up my alley.

This book makes my list because not only is it interesting, it also makes some important points. I know of some fundamentalist religious and political groups that try to justify institutionalized racism by saying that God favors one group of people over others, and cite as evidence the history of specific groups being conquered by others. They say that a nation's/culture's current economic state is evidence of some blessing or punishment given by God for past obedience or disobedience. This book gives readers the scientific ammunition to support a (to me) less odious explanation of how the world ended up the way it is. The idea that one race of people is somehow (genetically?) superior to another can be fought with information about the evolutionary history of the area they live in.

Overall, this is one of my better reads from the last few years. I give it 5/5 Petri dishes!