Rather, it was all about agriculture, a geographical accident. For Diamond, Yali’s question meant trying to explain why Europeans had become imperial powers, wealthy nations, whereas others had not.ĭiamond’s answer was that it had nothing to do with any innate European superiority, neither intellectual nor genetic. Yali asked: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” (1997:14). In Guns Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond purports to answer “Yali’s Question.” Diamond had met Yali in New Guinea in 1972. 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' is a distorting disservice to the real historical record. I argue anthropologists should be critiquing Diamond’s ideas in Introduction to Anthropology courses. Diamond claims that the differential success of the world’s nations is due to the accidents of agriculture, except when societies “choose to fail.” This claim does not withstand scrutiny. I argue that although Diamond makes interesting points, his work from Guns Germs and Steel to Collapse is a distorting disservice to the real historical record. The key question is whether Jared Diamond’s work is broadly correct about human history or a distortion of that history.
Jared Diamond’s ideas about human society and human nature continue to be enormously influential. Guns Germs and Steel is surely the most widely read book about agriculture anyone has ever written. It’s become a landmark, best-seller book that would win the Pulitzer Prize and be filmed by National Geographic for PBS. In 1997, ten years after calling agriculture The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, Jared Diamond came out with Guns, Germs, and Steel.
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