Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Guns, Germs, and Steel Questions

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How Does Diamond Reformulate It As The Main Theme Of the Book? What Are Some Possible Objections To Even Posing This Question?

 

karina p #260227
Jul 30, 2012 10:23 PM

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How Does Diamond Reformulate It As The Main Theme Of the Book? What Are Some Possible Objections To Even Posing This Question?

How Is Yali's Question The Main Theme Of The Book

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Aslan
Jul 30, 2012 10:34 PM

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Are you referring to the title as the theme of the book? Certainly we can draw correlations with guns, foreign germs and steel as the Europeans weapons in colonization but the question goes deeper than that. Author Jared Diamond's two-part thesis is: 1) the most important theme in human history is that of civilizations beating the crap out of each other, 2) the reason the beat-ors were Europeans and the beat-ees the Aboriginees, Mayans, et. al. is because of the geographical features of where each civilization happened to develop. Whether societies developed gunpowder, written language, and other technological niceties, argues Diamond, is completely a function of whether they emerged amidst travel-and-trade condusive geography and easily-domesticable plants and animals.

Source(s): http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1295202

 

Aslan
Jul 30, 2012 10:46 PM

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So, the question (if you are referring to the book's title, isn't that the Europeaans were somehow smarter and invented this lethal concoction rather they were just geographically better situated in the right place at the right time.
 

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