The main reason why Jared Diamond wrote “Guns,

Germs, and Steel” was a conversation he had with a New

Guinean politician called Yali.

Yali asked Diamond:

“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 Mason Diamond

- American polymath (geographer, physiologist,
biologist, anthropologist) and the author of many
popular science books, such as “The Third
Chimpanzee” and “Why Is Sex Fun?”

- professor of geography at UCLA, he is one of the

most influential public intellectuals in the world.

“Guns, Germs, and Steel Summary”

“It seems logical to suppose that history’s pattern
reflects innate differences among people themselves,”
writes Jared Diamond in “Guns, Germs, and Steel” in a
sentence which sounds controversial despite the
italicized verb.
But, nevertheless, it’s difficult to dismiss it simply
because it is not politically correct.

After all, there are some questions which seem

unanswerable without a “convincing, detailed, agreed-
upon explanation for the broad pattern of history.”

For example, why almost all of the hunter-gatherer

societies disappeared even though the ones we could
study until recently seemed non-violent, lawful in the
absence of laws, egalitarian, and, for all intents and
purposes, more content than us?

Why did practically every technological innovation you

can think of was made either by a European or a Chinese
for millennia?
Even more controversially: why did the white people
enslave the African-Americans and not the other way
around?

In fact, the main thesis of the book, in the words of the

author, is the following one:

History followed different courses for different peoples

because of differences among peoples’ environments, not
because of biological differences among peoples
themselves.

In other words, it does matter where you are born; not

because of the who; but because of the where.

The main environmental difference between the

conquerors (Europe and Asia) and the conquered (Africa,
the Americas) is the primary geographic axis.

Namely, as opposed to the Eurasian east-west latitudinal

axis, the African and the American axis is longitudinal,
i.e., north-south. And, unfortunately, that is the direction
in which climate changes.

Consequently, European and Asian countries were able

not only to communicate easily between them even
before the proper sailing and marine technology was
developed, but they were also able to almost
inadvertently share each other’s progress in agriculture
as well.

For example, domesticated crops could easily spread

from Europe to Asia and vice versa via one
domestication, few bugs and a little bit of wind; contrary
to this, cotton or squash had to be domesticated over and
over again in Mesoamerica in multiple individual areas,
because the crops couldn’t spread by themselves in
north-south direction.

As Diamond notes, “all human societies contain

inventive people. It’s just that some environments
provide more starting materials and more favorable
conditions for utilizing inventions than other
environments.”

And this, logically, meant many different things in the

long run, best summed up in this cycle: more food →
more people → more intellectual power → better
technology → more food…

Less intuitively, it also meant better immunity, due to the

domestication of numerous animals and the subsequent
exposure to deadly germs.

Which is why far more Native Americans, Australians,

and South Africans died from infectious diseases than
from knives and guns.

Speaking of which, Jared Diamond points out four

primary reasons why the Europeans conquered the
Americans and the Africans and not the other way
around:
#1. Opportunities for domestication of plants and
animals.

Europe and Asia had by far the best prospects in this

area, as opposed to, say, Australia, whose chances to
become a superpower were always going to be slim to
none. We can place Africa and America somewhere in the
middle.

However, the fact that Europeans and Asians could eat

far better food and in far larger quantities (these
continents were inhabited with a far larger number of
domesticable animal and plant species) meant that they
were able to reproduce in larger numbers when
compared to the inhabitants of Africa or the Americas.

#2. Agricultural and technological expansion.

In addition to having more domestication-worthy/viable

animals and plants, the Eurasians also had the luxury of
domesticating them at a faster rate, due to the primary
direction of the continent’s geographic axis (east-west)
and the absence of any significant geographic barriers
(deserts and mountains).
#3. Intercontinental diffusion.

Since Eurasia is one large (easily traversable) landmass,

it was always easy for ideas and technologies to spread
from China to Portugal – even in the absence of direct
contact. The northern parts of the African continent
profited from this communication as well.

However, such communication was all but impossible in

the Americas which are connected by an almost
inhabitable area notorious for its susceptibility to floods,
landslides, and earthquakes.

#4. Population size.

This is self-explanatory: you can’t have a large army if

you don’t have a large population. And you can’t profit
from competition if you don’t have someone to compete
against:

In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa [and America]

had nothing to do with differences between European
and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume.
Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and
biogeography — in particular, to the continents’ different
areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species.
Key Lessons from “Guns, Germs, and Steel”
1. Geography and Progress
2. The Anna Karenina Principle
3. Centralized Power vs. Fragmentation

Geography and Progress

The main thesis of Jared Diamond’s transdisciplinary

classic “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is that “history
followed different courses for different peoples because
of differences among peoples’ environments, not because
of biological differences among peoples themselves.”

Throughout the book, he attempts to show that

Eurasians had the opportunity to develop more and
better than the Americans or the Africans simply because
they lived on the better continents.

In a nutshell, the fact that Eurasia is one large landmass

and that its primary geographic axis is east-west meant
better diffusion of technology and culture and more
efficient communication between the people living on
these continents as opposed to the ones living in the
Americas and Africa whose geographic axis is north-
south.

The Anna Karenina Principle

According to the Anna Karenina principle – inspired by

the memorable first sentence of the Leo Tolstoy classic –
in order for an endeavor to be successful, all factors must
be met; in other words, if any one of these factors
remains unmet than the endeavor is doomed to fail.

Jared Diamond uses this principle to explain why there

are only 14 (out of 148 possible candidates) domesticated
species.

In his opinion, the factors which must be met for an

animal to be domestication-worthy are at least six:
diet (it must be easy to feed)
growth rate (it must grow fast enough)
captive breeding (it must be able to breed in captivity)
disposition (it must not be ill-tempered),
tendency to panic (it mustn’t take flight), and
social structure (lonely animals are not good candidates).
Very few animals – in Diamond’s opinion only the 14 we
have already domesticated – meet all six criteria.

Centralized Power vs. Fragmentation

Interestingly enough, the only reason why Europe

crossed the Atlantic first – and not China the Pacific – to
colonize the Americas was the social structure of the
continents.

China, in other words, had the technology, but about half

a century before Columbus set sail, a local political
dispute resulted in a national ban on transoceanic
expeditions. This was possible because one man had the
power to do that.

In Europe, Columbus was turned down by four different

kingdoms before Spain decided to fund his trip. A Chinese
sailor with an idea to cross the Pacific didn’t have
another country to look funds from but China.

In other words, a little fragmentation is good; too much

centralized power is not.
GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL QUOTES:

Much of human history has consisted of unequal

conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago,

people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to
encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill
them.

It’s striking that Native Americans evolved no

devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in
return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that
Indians received from the Old World.

Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have

overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.

One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability

of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy,
is to note that long chains of causation may separate
final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the
domain of that…