A review by rubiscodisco
Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years by Jared Diamond
5.0
This book was very interesting for me. Jared Diamond was brilliant, and I the way that he explained the broader trends of history in terms of ultimate causes that were environmental in nature is very refreshing. One can hardly accuse this history book of being about "one damn fact after another".
I do take some of his views quite skeptically. For example, his seeming aversion to point out cultural causes of disparity between nations seems to hinder his ability to answer some questions. Not that I'm saying that cultural/genetic differences are a big factor in my opinion, but it seems to me that in his fear of being labelled as racist or a western chauvinist, he would avoid some questions entirely. Questions like, for example, why after being exposed to peoples of a more technologically advanced culture, the technologically disadvantaged cultures are usually displaced, rather than adapting those higher-order technologies to remain competitive themselves.
I did like his ending chapter exceedingly though, because of a particular point he brought up. The branches of science like evolutionary biology, astronomy, archaeology, and other such historical sciences, are often seen as somewhat being less "sciencey" as opposed to things like physics and chemistry. His point is that, methods applicable for those sciences cannot be applied to the historical sciences because they involve too many variables, and laboratory experiments are usually impossible to do. Furthermore, they deal with ultimate causes rather than proximate causes. In this light, such fields of study could be considered to be a pedestal higher than those of the more "hard" sciences. That's quite refreshing, since we all know how people seem to think that those other sciences are on top of the intellectual pyramid.
I do take some of his views quite skeptically. For example, his seeming aversion to point out cultural causes of disparity between nations seems to hinder his ability to answer some questions. Not that I'm saying that cultural/genetic differences are a big factor in my opinion, but it seems to me that in his fear of being labelled as racist or a western chauvinist, he would avoid some questions entirely. Questions like, for example, why after being exposed to peoples of a more technologically advanced culture, the technologically disadvantaged cultures are usually displaced, rather than adapting those higher-order technologies to remain competitive themselves.
I did like his ending chapter exceedingly though, because of a particular point he brought up. The branches of science like evolutionary biology, astronomy, archaeology, and other such historical sciences, are often seen as somewhat being less "sciencey" as opposed to things like physics and chemistry. His point is that, methods applicable for those sciences cannot be applied to the historical sciences because they involve too many variables, and laboratory experiments are usually impossible to do. Furthermore, they deal with ultimate causes rather than proximate causes. In this light, such fields of study could be considered to be a pedestal higher than those of the more "hard" sciences. That's quite refreshing, since we all know how people seem to think that those other sciences are on top of the intellectual pyramid.