Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

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Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond is an outstanding book about how different societies changed developmentally through time. Diamond tells readers about how many societies developed faster than others and how wealth and power spread throughout different regions of the continents. Wealth was spread unevenly because many societies had less technological advances or developed after another society. Diamond uses a question and answer approach to answers questions about society and the changes many of the societies went through during the Neolithic revolution. Diamond provides a realistic explanation of the development of different societies and different regions in 11,000 B.C., as well as developments of present day societies.
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies explores many questions about the development of societies and how societies have changed. Diamond uses this book to explain how “history followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of the biological differences among people” (25). Diamond first takes readers to New Guinea, where he is a biologist studying birds. Diamond is walking on the beach one day and meets a local politician named Yali. Yali was from a very different background than Diamond. Yali lived in a less developed country and had many questions for Diamond. Yali’s main question for Diamond was “why is it you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” (14). Diamond had difficulty answering the question without examining the historical perspective of Yali’s question. Diam...

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... Diamond asks is how people have the ability to develop when their population decreases and people are dying. Many people such as the Europeans started to become immune to the germs. Diamond states that “plant and human domestication led to denser human populations by yielding more food than did the hunter gathering lifestyle” (89). Readers learn that the Europeans formed immunity because they were the ones that introduced germs as they traveled. They carried their germs and disease with them. As a result, many Europeans were already immune to the diseases and would not catch them later. Instead the people who were not European that had contact with the Europeans contracted diseases such as malaria and smallpox as they did not have immunity.

Works Cited

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Society. New York: W.W.
Norton &, 1999. Print.

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