OPPapers.com

Guns,Germs And Steal

Guns, Germs and Steel
By Jared Diamond

In the book Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond who is a biophysics scientist and a psychologist, set out on a journey to find out the reason behind great achievements and conquest of the Europeans. What is the secret of success of Europeans? His hypothesis was very original and at first looked very simple, it was guns, germs and steel. The journey of Diamond took over 30 years and helped him answer the main questions of human history and what is it that separates humans today from “rich and poor” and from “haves and have not’s.” To do this he had to go back when everyone was equal.
His quest started off in New Guinea when he was asked by Yali a New Guinean politician a question: “why you white man have so much cargo and us New Guineans have so little?”   Cargo in this case was material goods. This question stunned him and made him search for the answer. In the past it was believed that white people had a greater superiority because of their race and that race was the reason why they had more power. Jared Diamond didn’t believe in these explanations from history. In New Guinea, that still today lives as a very poor society and still has some rituals and customs that haven’t changed for over 10 000 years main observation of Diamond was that the food source was very different. While Europeans had wheat and barley that was very nutritious peoples of New Guinea had few of the large trees that were a source of food. For New Guineans gathering of the food was extremely time consuming and took enormous amount of strength to do however it yielded food that lacked nutrition. Another important difference that Diamond was able to observe was the geographical difference they were in. The difference was in their geographical latitude. Signs of first great civilization originated in Middle East that was called the Fertile Crescent. Diamond believes that the main reason why people were able to create such a great civilization in Middle...