“Guns, Germs and Steel” is one of those books I regret haven’t read before, when I was a kid. It should be mandatory among high school’s books. Jared Diamond is able to resume in 300 words all the topics developed in 5 years of school and put in an consequential factors’ order. I’d dream to have such a professor during those years, someone able to understand, link and entwine the different cause of human evolution: from history to ecology, from biology to geography.
Diamond’s skill – namely and not – is to address finally history in a purely scientific vision, through the independence and autonomy of quantitative science and lesser of historic one. 1998 Pulitzer was simply worth for. Even, He avoids the typical scientific mistake to find the ultimate cause and explanation. He underlines the limits of studying history as a science, however he’s able to interlace 13000 years of evolution and factors. He’s able to find similitude through differences, and differences in the similitude. He explains natural biological and geographic recurrence comparing several local case studies, remote each others.
It’s an essay against every sort of racism, which demonstrates once for all that all humans use the same mental process. The differences stays in the natural context and timing which affects these processes, forging different cultures. This is a book which answer to precise and consequential questions, not the habitual historic factsheet. It’s a portrait of our world beginning from the most remote places, which can teach us more than our surroundings. The antipodes represents the differences but also the necessity to discover the similitude of those histories.
Diamond avoids also to address the political issues through history, which are too much complex and irrationals, too far from a scientist. He’s able to insert this part just in the epilogue, since the human is able to affects the nature only in the end, after he understood and sorted a way to solve it’s problem: innovation. As a matter of fact, the chapter about technology is the milestone about the entire group, the summa of all the parts, the final step which made the differences in the evolution. Some of us had similar starting conditions but then the ability to create the proper technology unified to other natural factors (as geography and biology) made the differences among the civilizations.
I think we should lunch a campaign to put this book among those mandatory in the high school. It will be useful for our development and re-civilization.