Resumo de Guns, Germs And Steel

Having never heard of Jared Diamond, or his book, I maligned it from the start as just another critique of European diffusionism; I was way off. This book is the most concise interpretation of human societal history that I have ever read. Not only does Diamond attempt to explain why certain groups have prospered while others have not, he also uses objective sciences to underpin his thesis. This thesis, that environments dictate the flow of history, is fairly simple to understand and apply. This book is worth reading for two overarching reasons: Diamond presents a salient historical theory of human societies and he dismisses longstanding baseless assumptions for historical outcomes.
Jared Diamond cites many differences within human societies that have dictated their specific historical progressions. One must understand that any discussion of human history will be replete will generalizations because, in many cases, specificity can be misleading. For the sake of brevity, Diamond divides up these differences into four broad categories: plant and animal domestication, diffusion and migration among continents, diffusion and migration between continents, and geographical differences between continents. I will start with the most important factor, food.
It only seems reasonable that fledgling societies that were set against a background of bounty, with regard to the availability of food, stood a better chance of both survival and prosperity than those societies that were not so lucky. To put it quite succinctly, societies that could produce and store food could produce and maintain new life, thereby increasing population, and eventually leading to higher forms of society-sustaining productive resources?including standing armies.
Having established the importance of food production to historical societal development, Diamond then goes on to cite certain differences that existed between continents that have inexorably led to developmental differences between societies. The vast bi-continent of Eurasia was, by most accounts, had a distinct advantage over Africa, the Americas, and Australia because of its geography. In other words, with respect to food production, societies that developed in Eurasia would have stood a much better chance of developing into vast human societies.
Diamond, in one particularly insightful chapter, writes about the spread of innovation from society to society?sometimes referred to as diffusionism?that can be simply summed up as borrowing on a grand scale. The great majority of inventions are never left alone, remaining singular staples of the development of individual societies. On the contrary, nearly every innovation that has given a certain advantage to one society has inevitably been replicated in others. This is true with respect to communication, transportation, food production and weaponry. And so, the ability of societies to diffuse innovations was of vital import to the survival and prosperity of human societies.
How people carrying with them borrowed ideas and productive resources was of utmost importance to the development of certain societies over others. Eurasia had certain advantages in this vein over its continental contemporaries. Anyone who has ever looked at a map of the world would be able to see one distinct advantage right off the bat, Eurasia?s east-west axis. Like Dom Deluise, Eurasia is wider than it is tall. This fact gave the inhabitants of the continent both territorial and climatic advantages. Moving east to west the Eurasians would not have encountered the same degrees of disparity between climate and terrain that would have prevented ease of advancement?directional and technological?in Africa, and the Americas. Not only did the more uniform nature of land and climate in Eurasia allow for ease of advancement for individual societies, it also provided them with better relations between neighbors?here I speak mostly of communication and commerce. And so, in this way the particular environment in which such societies began is invaluable information to the understanding of the fate of such societies. Further such information can be found when we look at how societies could or couldn?t relate to one another across continents.
In order for diffusion and migration to occur between continents one factor must be present, adequate global positioning. For the inhabitants of the Australian continent and the surrounding land masses isolation prevented serious diffusion from occurring early on. Eurasia, as has been the case thus far, had the advantage of being well connected to the continent of Africa?in fact, closer geologically then than now. Because of this, Eurasia had the advantage of being able to both migrate between continents and to diffuse the innovations therein. This advantage, essentially, stunted the societal evolution of the Australian continent and the Americas. The fourth and final factor reaffirms the geographic advantage of Eurasia over all others.
Any student of evolutionary science knows that the selection process is of evolution is maximized by increasing pool of traits that can be selected for or against. This is the situation that exists when one considers how certain human societies progressed differently than others. The vast continent of Eurasia, notwithstanding the three advantages written of prior, had the advantage of being a massive landmass with the most sizeable population of any continent. As a result of this, it stands to reason that Eurasia would prosper at the societal level much sooner than any other continent. Essentially what we have here is a discussion of macroevolution in human history. That Eurasia had more societies, more people, and more land from which to gain productive resources cannot be overstated in any discussion of the fates of societies in world history.

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