Critical Analysis of Diamond

Prologue

Key Terms/Ideas:
Yali’s question: Why did some parts of the world develop and change at a much faster rate than other parts of the world? Why did Europeans end up with all the guns, germs, and steel that enabled them to take over the world?
Ultimate Factors: things that were in a place naturally, the environmental factors
Proximate Factors: things that were derived or created because of the ultimate factors

Key Arguments:
The reason Jared Diamond wrote this book was to answer Yali’s question. Yali’s original question was, “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?” (14). The author took this question in a more general sense, wishing to find out what factors contributed to certain areas becoming more developed and complex than others.
Diamond believes that the answer to this question is not as simple as one might think. He argues that biological differences are not a factor because people living in places like New Guinea are actually smarter than people living in societies where a person survives because they are immune to a disease. In New Guinea, more intelligent people are more likely to survive and people have more active childhoods, making the New Guineans genetically superior to more populated and advanced societies. Because Diamond believes that common theories that try to answer Yali’s question are invalid, he thinks there is no correct common answer to the question and feels the need to write this book.
Diamond’s nutshell sentence (sentence that summarizes the whole book) is this: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people’s environments, not because of biological differ...

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...iple types of plants in them) rather than monoculture as found in the Old World.
So, why were we able to completely change and domesticate some crops (like the almond) while others (like the acorn) remain un-domesticated to this day? Well, according to Diamond, oak trees grow slowly, have evolved to become suitable to squirrels, have their bitterness controlled by multiple genes.

Critical Analysis:
Diamond seems to take an unnecessarily long time getting to the point of his argument. It is almost like Diamond is trying to show off his knowledge rather than get to the point, which makes the book unnecessarily lengthy and boring when it is actually an interesting topic. However, it is probably good that he is backing up his argument with facts. I think that what Diamond is saying is actually pretty interesting, but it would be more convincing if it weren’t so long.