★★★★★ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond
The biology of history
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond
The biology of history
I think I read Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies for the first time shortly after it won a 1998 Pulitzer Prize. I was at the time a Professor of Molecular Biology. I found it fascinating. I later recommended it to a book club I belonged to -- most of the other members were businesspeople. Most of them also enjoyed it. Jared Diamond is not always right, and you will not always agree with his ideas. But he is always intelligent and lucid, and, in my opinion and the opinions of the Biz School friends, he writes well.
These positive reactions are not universal. Diamond is not a historian or an anthropologist -- he's an evolutionary biologist. He does something to history that you might expect a person with a background in the so-called hard sciences to do: he tries to find broadly applicable theories to explain history. In Physics, Chemistry, and Biology this is the name of the game. But many professional historians passionately hate the idea of broad theories of history. Beyond that -- here's a broadly applicable theory -- groups of people tend to have a powerful impetus to defend their borders. I guarantee you that if a historian writes an insightful and popular book about biology that upsets existing dogma, hordes of biologists will rise in rabid rage to denounce the intruder. (I might even be one of them.)
That, in my opinion after a quick survey of some of the negative reviews, is what most of them are. These opinions should not be ignored. Some of the more thoughtful reviews (sadly, only a small minority of the one-star reviews deserve the adjective "thoughtful") make good points between the screams of primal rage.
There is, I think, one respect in which Diamond is certainly right. History is biology: human biology, the biology of the animals and plants with which we live, and the biology of the viruses, bacteria, and parasites that prey on us. It is not JUST biology, but the importance of our underlying biology is emphasized in any view of history that extends over the Holocene epoch. Now, while I suspect almost every historian would agree in principle with the statement that humans are living things, therefore have biology, and that biology plays some kind of role in history, works of mainstream history that discuss the impact of biology on history are vanishingly rare. In describing the biology of history, Diamond pushes the discipline in a direction it needs to go.
But I *WOULD* say that, right? I'm a self-confessed biologist.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies on Amazon