Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Jared Diamond

Taschenbuch
Ausgabe vom April 1999
Verkaufsrang: 469 (je kleiner desto beliebter)
EAN/ISBN: 9780393317558
ASIN: 0393317552 (Amazon-Bestellnummer)
 Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - Jared Diamond
Life isn't fair-here's why: Since 1500, Europeans have, for better and worse, called the tune that the world has danced to. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond explains the reasons why things worked out that way. It is an elemental question, and Diamond is certainly not the first to ask it. However, he performs a singular service by relying on scientific fact rather than specious theories of European genetic superiority. Diamond, a professor of physiology at UCLA, suggests that the geography of Eurasia was best suited to farming, the domestication of animals and the free flow of information. The more populous cultures that developed as a result had more complex forms of government and communication-and increased resistance to disease. Finally, fragmented Europe harnessed the power of competitive innovation in ways that China did not. (For example, the Europeans used the Chinese invention of gunpowder to create guns and subjugate the New World.) Diamond's book is complex and a bit overwhelming. But the thesis he methodically puts forth-examining the "positive feedback loop" of farming, then domestication, then population density, then innovation, and on and on-makes sense. Written without bias, Guns, Germs, and Steel is good global history.

Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye-and his heart-belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years.