Jared Diamond Rhetorical Analysis

Jared Diamond is a biologist concerned primarily with the evolution of birds. Diamond is conducting field research in Papua New Guinea when he meets a local politician named Yali. The pair delve into a friendly conversation. Yali eventually asks a question that stops Diamond in his tracks: “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?” Though on the surface this question may seem simple, to answer it fully one must dig into humanity’s past to discover why some societies were able to develop “so much cargo” and others were left in seemingly primitive civilizations. Many believe that the answer to this question lies in the biological differences

Diamond writes in such a way as to make his ideas accessible to all readers. One needn’t be a scientist or a historian to understand his theory and the logic supporting it. Diamond is very fond of the rhetorical device hypophora. He often asks questions, such as “why did the same plant package launch food production throughout western Eurasia,” and proceeds to answer them within the following paragraphs. This helps to engage the reader, making him think critically (182). Diamond clarifies his points by repeating them numerous times. This is helpful because it leaves no room for confusion, it gives the reader the opportunity to fully soak in a new topic. Diamond also makes frequent use of exemplum, inserting his own life experiences in order to provide insight or clarification to a topic. This helps engage the reader in the history of a tribe, or to add evidence for a point Diamond is trying to

One of which is that Diamond provides a substantial challenge for the racist theory that Europeans are superior to other races because they are the most developed. He makes it crystal clear that no one society is genetically superior to another. He accomplishes this through multiple avenues; the most compelling of which being his comparison of the Maori and the Moriori tribes, explaining that even though they share ancestry they have developed at different rates. Diamond also explains the importance of the geographical aspect of human development. Most importantly, according to Diamond, from his book we learn that environment is the tell-all factor of human development, with all other factors -such as food production- boiling down to who had the best and worst environments (53, 321, 400,