Guns, Germs, and Steel

Author: Jared Diamond

Why it’s on the list: Argues that environmental and geographic factors, not innate differences, explain why some societies developed dominant technology, agriculture, and immunity to disease.

Where I saw it: Recommended in Poor Charlie’s Almanack — part of Charlie Munger’s perennial reading list of books that build a latticework of multidisciplinary mental models.

Connections

• Poor Charlie’s Almanack — surfaced on Charlie Munger’s recommended-reading list.

Highlights

9 highlights captured while reading. Kyle has not finished the book.

• “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?”
• Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way?
• This objection rests on a common tendency to confuse an explanation of causes with a justification or acceptance of results.
• Modern European and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults. Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation. This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans.
• “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”
• Those extinctions eliminated all the large wild animals that might otherwise have been candidates for domestication, and left native Australians and New Guineans with not a single native domestic animal.
• What significance, if any, do the continents’ differing dates of settlement have for subsequent history? Suppose that a time machine could have transported an archaeologist back in time, for a world tour at around 11,000 B.C. Given the state of the world then, could the archaeologist have predicted the sequence in which human societies on the various continents would develop guns, germs, and steel, and thus predicted the state of the world today?
• Contributing to these differences among Polynesian societies were at least six sets of environmental variables among Polynesian islands: island climate, geological type, marine resources, area, terrain fragmentation, and isolation.
• In short, literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history. By contrast, not only did Atahuallpa have no conception of the Spaniards themselves, and no personal experience of any other invaders from overseas, but he also had not even heard (or read) of similar threats to anyone else, anywhere else, anytime previously in history. That gulf of experience encouraged Pizarro to set his trap and Atahuallpa to walk into it.