“Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond
By Jay Pearlman, posted on July 31st, 2007 in Reviews
Book review by Jay Pearlman
Jared Diamond starts his book with a question from an acquaintance in New Guinea: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people have little cargo of our own.” Whether the cargo is wealth, power, good medicines or a long life, Diamond sets out to answer this question in a logical and analytical process and 440 pages later comes to some interesting and very thoughtful conclusions. His main thesis is that societies developed differently on different continents because of variations in the environment and not because of differences in human capabilities. Looking over 13000 years, “advances” in society have come through competition and the availability of seeds for civilization. When there were sufficient food surpluses, labor was freed for innovation, for organization and to support greater population densities and the need for written languages. But domesticable wild plants and animal species essential for the rise of agriculture were distributed unevenly over the continents. Thus centers of development varied over the world with advances in Mesopotamia, China and later Europe and North Africa.
By now, you are thinking this sounds like a classroom lecture series. The author then manages to slip in little factoids that strike the reader. He states (with some backup) that the Chinese were exploring South America before the Spanish knew of its existence. Another is that the Spanish overcame South America not by their armies of hundreds, but by the germs they brought with them (and to which they had developed immunity).
The basis of the book is that agriculture and domesticated animals (for power and transportation) created opportunities for denser civilizations. These, in turn, caused competition between societies (guns), the growth of and immunities to disease (germs) and creation of tools for manufacture and innovation (steel). The migration of these capabilities was uneven. It was easier for agriculture to move east-west through similar climates than north-south across temperate and tropical zones. Thus continents with an east-west orientation such as Asia developed more rapidly that those such as Africa or the Americas with a north-south axis. It was easier for societies to remain in competition and continue to advance if geographic barriers (as in Europe) suppress easy unification.
As a comment in the Afterword, the author begins to extend the discussion to corporations and their cultures. Here comments get sketchy, but it is not for the reader to forbid the author from creating an opportunity for a follow-on volume. This is a book worth reading. If it gets slow in the middle, jump a hundred pages, but don’t miss a full ride to the end
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NASA Daily Image
Remnant of a Supernova
Vital clues about the devastating ends to the lives of massive stars can be found by studying the aftermath of their explosions. In its more than twelve years of science operations, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has studied many of these supernova remnants sprinkled across the galaxy. The latest example of this important investigation is Chandra's new image of the supernova remnant known as G350.1-0.3. This stellar debris field is located some 14,700 light years from the Earth toward the center of the Milky Way. Evidence from Chandra and from ESA's XMM-Newton telescope suggest that a compact object within G350.1+0.3 may be the dense core of the star that exploded. The position of this likely neutron star, seen by the arrow pointing to "neutron star" in the inset image, is well away from the center of the X-ray emission. If the supernova explosion occurred near the center of the X-ray emission then the neutron star must have received a powerful kick in the supernova explosion. Data suggest this supernova remnant, as it appears in the image, is 600 and 1,200 years old. If the estimated location of the explosion is correct, this means the neutron star has been moving at a speed of at least 3 million miles per hour since the explosion. Another intriguing aspect of G350.1-0.3 is its unusual shape. Many supernova remnants are nearly circular, but G350.1-0.3 is strikingly asymmetrical as seen in the Chandra data in this image (gold). Infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (light blue) also trace the morphology found by Chandra. Astronomers think that this bizarre shape is due to stellar debris field expanding into a nearby cloud of cold molecular gas. The age of 600-1,200 years puts the explosion that created G350.1-0.3 in the same time frame as other famous supernovas that formed the Crab and SN 1006 supernova remnants. However, it is unlikely that anyone on Earth would have seen the explosion because of the obscuring gas and dust that lies along our line of sight to the remnant. These results appeared in the April 10, 2011 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Image Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/I. Lovchinsky et al; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“Guns, Germs, and Steel” tries to make the case that all differences among societies are due to geography, and neglects or minimizes cultural factors. It fails to explain why Europe, which was far behind Chinese and Arabic societies 1000 years ago, surged ahead in modern times.
Throughout history, repressive regimes have damaged preeminent intellectual institutions (the Inquisition destroyed Italian science; Hitler destroyed German universities, Lysenkoism destroyed Soviet biology, etc.) “the Wealth and Poverty of Nations” by David S. Landes, presents a much more balanced analysis.