GUNS, GERMS, & STEEL BOOK REVIEW | UCLA Anthropology Student Explains | Summary, Analysis & Opinions
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.ค. 2024
- Looking for a Guns, Germs, and Steel book review? In this video, I discuss the argument, a brief summary, and share my opinions on Jared Diamond's perspectives. The book centers around the idea of geographic determinism. Geographic determinism essentially describes our actions as being primarily the byproduct of our environment. Jared Diamond retells our human history in the context of this argument quite well. Additionally, it is important to note that I am an Anthropology student-not a geography student. Therefore, I am coming at this with an anthropological perspective. I hope you enjoy the video!
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4:30 Interesting discussion of determinism vs. free will. I find it interesting how philosophical questions often enter into discussions on history, geography and anthropology.
I completely agree with you! The intersection between these fields is undeniable yet so under discussed
Fantastic review. I enjoyed this book. My professors were always critical of Diamond, as they think he takes credit for the ideas in his books. I never got that impression. Collapse is another great Diamond book.
I absolutely see how your professors might have those criticisms. So glad you agree and enjoyed this review. I liked it too!
Hi, some help pls? I have to answer the prompt would Jared be pleased or displeased with the statement that geography determines everything in human history. I'm almost done reading the book some thoughts would help pls
Hi! I think for the most part, Jared Diamond would agree with this statement! His whole view is human actions being determined by your geography. If you were in a different place, you would be acting differently-hence, geographic determinism. I hope this helps!
Great video, it does make me wonder what some realistic examples of human agency undermining the argument of geographic determinism in terms of how societies develop or how people act. I kinda got what you meant about the glass of water example, but I still ultimately felt that you drank from a glass of water from your kitchen tap because you had it.
Thank you! And yes how these two ideas oppose one another in a more realistic way is definitely a large pill to swallow as in some ways they are directly related to one another. I think generally speaking though, it seems Jared argues that some parts of the worlds were quicker to domestication, for example, due to the plants and animals which were present in that area. Some plants and animals are easier to domesticate so the argument would then be domestication happened first in some places because of the environment rather than the people present. Of course, there is much more to it than this but I hope this helps in some way!
i really needed this- thank you!
So glad I cold help!
Love this Book, this book was a port of our PhD curriculum
I have a few thoughts and clarifications to make as I don't feel that most people who read or review Diamond's books come at it from as broad a perspective as the author has. My post is quite long, so I hope you take time to read it but understand if you won't. It is much shorter than a book however. I myself came from a poor rural farm in West Virginia to become the first of my family to go to college, then graduate school. I have lived five miles from the nearest town of 400 people for twenty years and for a decade in one of the largest cities in the state with friends from five continents. I think I have some insight into how geography creates and limits opportunities.
"Jared Diamond is not anthropologically trained. He is first and foremost a geographer" -- Jared Diamond is a professor of geography. He is also a wildlife biologist who has spent the better part of his career studying birds in southeast Asia and particularly in highland New Guinea and has spent decades living and working with people who were still Neolithic farmers isolated from the outside world until the 1930s. The root of his book is a question posed to him by a local New Guinean politician in 1972: "Why is it that white people have so much cargo (technological inventions) while my people developed so little ourselves?" This book is his attempt at answering that question based on evidence from a number of fields.
"Geography determines who develops agriculture first" -- In a way. What he is really showing is that the people of the Fertile Crescent had access to many highly productive plant species (large seeded, high protein grains which are easy to store) in their natural environment while other areas had less productive species. The same is true of animals (large herbivores living in stable herds dominated by one or two individual members, in a hierarchy that humans could effectively hijack to become the leader of the herd) while other areas had animals that were more aggressive or less responsive to a single leader. People of the fertile Crescent were already living in small villages, gathering grain and managing herds before they switched to active cultivation. They did so because a change in the climate made it less viable to live as semi-nomadic gatherers. Faced with the option to either abandon their villages and move to more fertile areas or turn to more intensive food production they went with option 2, which led to agriculture. If the geographic area hadn't been so favorable for food production they likely wouldn't have developed it. Similar factors were at play in parts of China, southeast Asia and highland New Guinea, all of which developed agriculture independently somewhat later than the Fertile Crescent. A few other areas also developed agriculture independently but did so much later because the plants and animals available for domestication in those areas were less productive, harder to control, and lower population densities and lack of settled villages made it easier to simply pack up and move than to settle into intensive cultivation.
"Geographic Determinism > Human Agency" -- I don't think that is his argument. His argument is more about opportunity. Agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent because the people there had higher population density and settled villages (less opportunity to move in response to environmental changes) and a local flora and fauna more amenable to domestication (more opportunity to harness a stable food source near home). Thus, when climate change made hunting and gathering less viable, the option to pack and move was limited by hostile neighbors trying to guard their own dwindling food resources, but intensive cultivation and herding was more viable here than in much of the world.
(1) Because of Eurasia's temperate climate along its predominant east-west axis, the temperate crops and animals first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent could easily live and grow anywhere from Spain to Japan. Thus, once established as farmers in the fertile Crescent, it was relatively easy for people with this package of food, animals and technology to expand their territory to the east and west. Because Europe had only a thin population there was plenty of opportunity for farming people to move up the river valleys, gradually squeezing the hunter-gatherers into less and less productive environments until the only way for them to survive was to become farmers themselves.
(2) The same was true in the Nile valley of Africa: it was perfect for temperate zone crops and allowed the creation of a major urban civilization, but to the east and west of the Nile are deserts where nothing will grow, and to the south are tropical regions where rainfall and seasonal patterns make it almost impossible for Eurasian crops to grow. Tropical Africa has its own crops but they are less productive, so less able to support urban populations, and won't grow properly outside the tropics so the expansion of farmers using them is limited. The tropics are deadly to temperate-zone animals because of disease, with the exception of a few highland conduits, so while small scale herding of goats and cows was possible it did not allow large populations to grow.. Temperate southern Africa and coastal Australia are also suitable for Eurasian plants and animals, but southern Africans had no contact with them until brought by sea by European colonists thousands of years later.
(3) Areas that adopted food production were able to support larger populations on less land area and to feed a surplus population who did not do their own farming. Thus, the areas who adopted food production early had the earliest opportunity to develop towns, hierarchical organization, a professional artisan class, and political-social ideologies. Although individual subsistence farmers are smaller and less healthy than the hunter-gatherers they replace, any ten small, sickly farmers can overwhelm one strong, healthy hunter and this seems to have happened around the world as the remaining hunter-gatherer groups are surrounded by farmers and isolated in areas where farming just isn't feasible. The first people to adopt food production therefore had the earliest and longest opportunity to spread their languages, cultures and ideologies.
(4) Most epidemic diseases are mutations of diseases among herd animals that have evolved to infect humans. Farmers are in almost constant contact with herds of such animals, and so were the first to become infected with the mutant pathogen. Due to long exposure, the descendants of Eurasian farming societies have gone through natural selection for resistance to these diseases, When introduced to new populations with no inherited resistance, such as native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, the rates of transmission and mortality are massively increased. The epidemic diseases that decimated New World populations and made them so vulnerable to conquest are a direct legacy of the spread of animal domestication. New World people who adopted food production did so only in the last few thousand years, had zero domestic animals except for the llama in Peru and the dog, and thus very few opportunities to develop lethal mutant diseases. The tropical diseases of Africa and the Americas mostly don't spread from human to human and therefore haven't ravaged the populations of Europe. Syphilis may be the exception but that was harder to spread than smallpox or measles.
(5) Communication fosters the spread of technology. New developments can spread quickly in open land and among people who have relations across borders. Areas isolated by mountains, deserts or other sparse population barriers rarely receive innovations from outside. Eurasia from Britain to India, and to a lesser extent China, have been connected by trade routes for thousands of years. Communication between Eurasia and most of Africa was severely limited by the Sahara, and between Eurasia and the Americas and Australia was nonexistent until recently. New ideas and inventions starting from one end of Eurasia were quickly known on the other end. Western Europe particularly benefited by having contact with external sources of technology and resources while being far enough from the old centers of power to avoid domination.
(6) Political unification can stimulate but also stifle innovation. The Islamic world and East Asia in the Middle Ages were far advanced beyond Europe in math and science. The Mongol invasions and conquests forced a kind of reset in both worlds. The regimes set up by or following the Mongols were extremely conservative and stifling in the Middle East. China became a world leader in naval technology and exploration around 1400 before completely abandoning both just before the European wave of exploration and exploitation began. In Europe there was no political unification until recently, but there was active trade and communication and diplomacy facilitated by common languages and cultural traditions.
(7) Competition can stimulate military and technological innovation. Europe's hundreds of independent states existed in a constant cycle of small-scale warfare and shifting alliances. Hence, any military innovation proven to work by one state would be quickly adopted by the others. Guns, for example, were unknown in Europe before 1300 but used from Spain to Sweden and Russia within a few generations. Abandoning guns would be suicidal. On the other hand, China invented the gun but never perfected it, and abandoned naval exploration on the advice of a political faction in the imperial court. Japan imported European guns enthusiastically during the wars of unification, then immediately made contact with the outside world and the use of guns illegal for centuries by order of the shogun who used guns and foreign contacts to consolidate his power. In Europe even small states had to have some kind of army and technological parity with their rivals to maintain independence. Most advances in military technology after the Middle Ages came from Europe, soon became widely spread within Europe
We want more book review videos.
Thanks for the book 📕 review.also, u should do more book review about anthropology.
Of course! And yes, that is absolutely the plan!
Wonderful 👍 review ❤❤❤
try this book: "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" by Frederick Engels
Thanks so much!
You are amazing. I read this book while in the Marines. I agree with you. I would recommend any book by Malcolm Gladwell. All are good and they go into why things are the way they are but in a different approach.
This is so kind, thank you!! Definitely going to add Gladwell to my list of books yay!
I used to like Gladwell until his Munk debate vs Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray, it was honestly hard to watch
Great video.
Thank you!!
I reccomend Why Natins Fail which is another great book that try to find an answer to the same mystery that Jared tried to solve in his masterpiece
This is wonderful, thank you!
It's been years since I read this book but I believe there is something you missed.
A big factor geography plays is, some areas better allow for people, and therefore ideas to travel. While the geography of other areas leave certain populations more isolated.
Why does that matter?
Let's say there's a one in a million chance that someone is going to come up with an idea that's going to take a society to the next level of technological advancement. So chances are, its not going to be you or anyone in your little village. But with a million brains out there working on the next big thing, SOMEONE'S going to come up with it. And once they do, learning from them is the easy part. Only challenge is, how accessible are the people who have this more advanced knowledge?
Where geography makes travel difficult, that great idea will won't spread much beyond your village or other local villages in your valley. Everyone else in such an area can only relay on the limited population they have access to for new ideas.
Where travel is easy, the idea will spread, then you have a million more educated brains working on the NEXT big idea. The more people, your local geography allows access to, the more advancements will eventually reach you.
Over centuries and millennia, areas with more accessible geography will become exponentially more advanced than more isolated populations.
Is there anyone who thinks that she looks like Scarlett Johansson 😍
I know this may be a little controversial but maybe IQ differences between populations was more significant than many let on.
The question would be though, what brought about these discrepancies? If we can accept that there's physical adaptations between population groups why can't we accept that there may be cognitive adaptations and thus differences between populations?
a century ago women had significantly lower IQs than male counterpart. IQ doesnt perfectly quantify intelligence and has a bias with who is administrating it
@@mockingbxrd Ok, so IQ is biased and isn't a meaningful measure of intelligence, can I ask you what is then? And if there's no IQ differences between populations then why are certain populations technically way more advanced than others?
IQ is only a measure of a specific idea of intelligence, and it's not particularly effective. They aren't at all objective or measuring something innate, and there has been plenty of discussion on this topic, both in very academic and journalistic sources, but in some more pop Social Science sources as well. I recommend a video by the TH-camr Shaun about the Bell Curve, which dives more into the book The Bell Curve which attempts to tie IQ and Race. The list of problems is pretty long, but the big ones are that IQ tests were deliberately altered to be less familiar to poor and non-white communities, using dialect and terminology that only reflects the daily lives of White Europeans, and White Wealthy Americans. The other big problem, and the one that stays with IQ tests throughout its modernizing, is that the results are not consistent. Even taking the test multiple times in one sitting can net wildly different results, and studying for it dramatically shoots up scores. IQ tests only tell you how good you are at IQ tests basically, virtually no academic institution I know of cares in the slightest.
Technological progress is way more complicated than cognition too! Up until about the 15th or 16th century, most of the world had roughly the same level of technology and standard of living, at many points through Medieval and Mughal India, the Mughal Empire was on par with several western powers. Diamond chalks these up to geographical factors, which there is some merit to, as well the ease of conquest of America that Europeans had found, which is mostly seen as resulting from disease outbreaks from unprotected immune systems among native peoples. But it's also incredibly important to consider that the Aztecs were not one united political entity, but an alliance that was internally turned against itself. Without those factors, Europe was able to build networks of resources from the Americas and Africa which enabled industrialization at the expense of colonies.
Why African, Asian, and Latin American societies today haven't recovered is again complicated and controversial. One of the most convincing to me is from Michael Parenti: "third world" nations are not underdeveloped, they are over exploited. France, for example, still requires several provisions from its former colonies, including rights to their resources, and repayments for their "loss" of colonies. Outside of those arrangements, large transnational corporations have either used the gaps in political power in places like the Congo to set up mining and manufacturing operations without much care for the exploited workers, carting off manufactured goods and mined resources away from the countries they are mined to the United States, the Commonwealth, and Europe. Also consider that many of the colonies before independent were run by college educated Europeans, who killed natives that tried to lead, disallowed them from serving as politicians, students, and officers, and left with as much money and power as they could. This has left a huge vacuum that allows opportunists to take power, and those opportunists then either take power for themselves, or sell out to broad corporate interests.
I hope you're genuinely curious and in good faith, and that I can provide a fresh and sympathetic perspective.
@@liamcunningham-soper9816 The IQ test is the best test on intelligence there is unless you know of a better exam? Diamond overlooks the human influence of their success from what I've read, I haven't yet read his book so can't really comment.
@@Wass_85 it's not really practical to measure human intelligence in the first place, it's more of a qualitative measure than a quantitative measure. Someone could be what we call "smart" in one aspect of something, like keeping track of the interrelationships of quantities (such as in a mechanical system), but they might not have the same capability in other aspects, such as the qualitative relationships in an environment (such as in an ecosystem). It's why universities and other places don't care about raw intelligence, they mostly teach critical thinking and the ability to self teach. Intelligence is learned, not innate.
How does this information fit over 'average IQ by country'?
It depends do you think IQ perfectly measures intelligence? if thats the case why did women a century ago have lower IQ's than males. Was it a recent genetic evolution to now allows women to have a similar average IQ or was it the fact that now women are given the opportunity of education.
Jared Diamond is a physiologist, not a geographer, and his book's thesis is that the physiology of plants and animals was the hinge of history. For instance he notes the mutation in one gene that keeps wheat seeds from falling when ripe.
No amount of human agency or human ingenuity could have enabled Africans south of the Sahel and north of the Zambezi or Polynesians or Australian Aboriginals to develop animal husbandry. Those who would dismiss animals as important should try and imagine the conquets of the Roman Empire or Islam or of the American West by European settlers with zero horses or oxen. Imagine Wyatt Earp having to attempt his adventures on foot.
Sorry, but I do not understand the water analogy. If you want a drink of water and you have access to it, what does that have to do with being a human being with ethics and morals? What if you're stuck in the middle of a desert? You could be a human, an animal or an alien from Uranus, but without water, the person or whatever they are will just still be thirsty.
Prof Jared’s primary weakness is that he has not been trained in social science, i.e., he is trying to prove his point, he is not testing any hypotheses. Hence, he ends up with geographic determinism without considering how interconnected Homo sapiens are economically, linguistically, genetically, etc. Like Adam Smith who ignores slavery in the Wealth of Nations, Prof Jared is spinning a story to justify the use of guns, bioweapons, and cannons against native peoples. I would suggest that if you are going to major in anthropology, you should minor in statistics. (You can use statistics everywhere, but anthropology generally leads to a career in HR.) I was the Honors Programs Director in Economics and the Associate Director of Public Policy for 25 years at Stanford. My advice is that you skip the class with Prof Jared and do as much field work as you can, e.g., 4-Corners. Have fun, but don’t follow Diamond into a hole.
Jared Diamond tries to simplify a lot of concepts too much and end up with a limited perspective of human development leading to some wrong results, with a more profound study of African, Asian and American history disproving him. So much so that most historians and geographers disregard his work as not serious enough. If you are going to enter this field of researching why Europe became a dominant power in the world I recommend not stopping at Diamond and reviewing some alternative theories. One I recommend to start is The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History by J. M. Blaut. He has a different perspective than Diamond and his book isn't very big or complex to understand. It's important to always seek the criticisms of this theories that go viral, they are generally too simplified in public discourse.
You bring up some excellent points-listening to one author is certainly not enough when it comes to understanding this topic in depth. And while in my opinion Diamond shares some really interesting claims, it is by no means "fact" and is not the whole picture. Thanks so much for sharing these suggestions and I will dive into them whenever I get the chance!
Please take this as helpful advice, or you can completely disregard. Don't wave you hands around in front of you. You are bright and have a good message but I am so distracted by your hand movement I had to close your excellent message
He isn't a geographer.