Plate 23. Above, AP/Wide World Photos. Below, W. B., American Museum of Natural History. Negative 2A13829.
Plate 25. Marjorie Shostak, Anthro-Photo.
Plate 26. Irven DeVore, Anthro-Photo.
Plate 27. Steve Winn, Anthro-Photo.
Plate 28. J.B. Thorpe, American Museum of Natural History. Negative 336181.
Plates 29 and 31. J. F. E. Bloss, Anthro-Photo.
GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
Jared Diamond
READING GROUP GUIDE
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
What are the other commonly espoused answers to “Yali’s question,” and how does Jared Diamond address and refute each of them?
Why does Diamond hypothesize that New Guineans might be, on the average, “smarter” than Westerners?
Why is it important to differentiate between proximate and ultimate causes?
Do you find some of Diamond’s methodologies more compelling than others? Which, and why?
What is the importance of the order of the chapters? Why, for example, is “Collision at Cajamarca”—which describes events that occur thousands of years after those described in the subsequent chapters—placed where it is?
How are Polynesian Islands “an experiment of history”? What conclusions does Diamond draw from their history?
How does Diamond challenge our assumptions about the transition from hunter-gathering to farming?
How is farming an “auto-catalytic” process? How does this account for the great disparities in societies, as well as for the possibilities of parallel evolution?
Why did almonds prove domesticable while acorns were not? What significance does this have?
How does Diamond explain the fact that domesticable American apples and grapes were not domesticated until the arrival of Europeans?
What were the advantages enjoyed by the Fertile Crescent that allowed it to be the earliest site of development for most of the building blocks of civilization? How does Diamond explain the fact that it was nevertheless Europe and not Southwest Asia that ended up spreading its culture to the rest of the world?
How does Diamond refute the argument that the failure to domesticate certain animals arose from cultural differences? What does the modern failure to domesticate, for example, the eland suggest about the reasons why some peoples independently developed domestic animals and others did not?
What is the importance of the “Anna Karenina principle”?
How does comparing mutations help one trace the spread of agriculture?
How does civilization lead to epidemics?
How does Diamond’s theory that invention is, in fact, the mother of necessity bear upon the traditional “heroic” model of invention?
According to Diamond, how does religion evolve along with increasingly complex societies?
How is linguistic evidence used to draw conclusions about the spread of peoples in China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and Africa?
What is the significance of the differing outcomes of Austronesian expansion in Indonesia and New Guinea?
How does Diamond explain China’s striking unity and Europe’s persistent disunity? What consequences do these conditions have for world history?
How does Diamond refute the charge that Australia is proof that differences in the fates of human societies are a matter of people and not environment? In what other areas of the world could Diamond’s argument be used?
What aspects of Diamond’s evidence do lay readers have to take on faith? Which aspects are explained?
Diamond offers two tribes, the Chimbu and the Daribi, as examples of differing receptivities to innovation. Do you think he would accept larger, continent-wide differences in receptivity? Why or why not? How problematic might cultural factors prove for Diamond’s arguments?
How, throughout the book, does Diamond address the issues he discusses in the last few pages of his final chapter, when he proposes a science of human history?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jared Diamond, professor of physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine, began his scientific career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, and has received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, a Phi Beta Kappa Award, the Burr Award of the National Geographic Society, and the National Medal of Science. He has published over 200 articles in Discover, Natural History, Nature, and Geo magazines.
*Throughout this book, dates for about the last 15,000 years will be quoted as so-called calibrated radiocarbon dates, rather than as conventional, uncalibrated radiocarbon dates. The difference between the two types of dates will be explained in Chapter 5. Calibrated dates are the ones believed to correspond more closely to actual calendar dates. Readers accustomed to uncalibrated dates will need to bear this distinction in mind whenever they find me quoting apparently erroneous dates that are older than the ones with which they are familiar. For example, the date of the Clovis archaeological horizon in North America is usually quoted as around 9000 B.C. (11,000 years ago), but I quote it instead as around 11,000 B.C. (13,000 years ago), because the date usually quoted is uncalibrated.
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