Diamonds Thesis For Guns Germs And Steel Essay

Diamonds Thesis for Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond is on a mission to prove his thesis, "History followed different courses for different people because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves"(Pg 25). He writes many chapters filled with intriguing reasons to prove his thesis. It takes a lot of facts and countless arguments to prove something everyone thinks is true, wrong, and after reading the book, I think Jared completed the task of proving his thesis by explaining how the differences in terrain, animals, and resources affected the development of different nations. The Earth is filled with many different environments, but only a few are suitable for the domestication of crops. Throughout the first few chapters, Diamond emphasizes the importance of crops being domesticated in certain areas. The nation's that learned to domesticate crops first became more prosperous. A good example of this is the Fertile Crescent. The reason the Fertile Crescent got such a head start on developing a civilization was because they were quickly able to domesticate crops. Some civilization's, like the Maori people, could not prosper because they did not have the correct environment to do so. The book explains, "Maori tropical crops could not grow in the
Chathams' cold climate, and the colonists had no alternative except to revert to being hunter-gatherers" (Pg. 54). They are a perfect example of a civilization cursed by the plague of having improper conditions to grow crops and eventually fell behind the pace of other civilizations. Animals were a very important factor in the advancement of civilizations. When civilization's spread out across the earth they encountered many different animals. Some civilization's got lucky and ran into cattle, horses, or even camels. Others weren't as lucky, and didn't have a chance domesticate large animals for labor. Large animals could be used for transportation or for labor jobs that required lots of strength. Civilizations in Eurasia got very lucky and obtained many of these large animals, whereas places like America didn't have as many. The presence of these animals gave civilization's an advantage in war and also more time to create a civilized nation. Once the countries had the animals and were advancing they had time to find and use resources. One of Diamond's most important arguments is that different civilizations had different resources. Travelers never knew what they would stumble upon when they entered a new part of the world. They could be blessed with silver, gold, and other useful resources, or cursed with nothing useful. Civilization's truly had to be lucky to come upon useful resources. Without the proper resources, nations would be dominated in wars. If one country had steel, and the other had wood and stone, the obvious champion would be the nation with steel. Even though Diamond tends to make extremely factual and persuasive conclusions, he misses out on some important pieces of evidence. He completely ignores the fact that wars can be won by strategy. He only explains the difference in weapons. The weapons used only work when the people using them know what they are doing. Also, Diamond doesn't cover all of history. He doesn't talk about recent times. He is more focused on explaining how everything started out and then goes on to say everything happened because of geographic luck. Without covering every time period, it is not possible to conclude that every time period is affected by geographic luck. Diamond used all of these arguments to prove his point that countries' prosperity was based off of geographic luck.
Even though their are a few flaws, his strong points and endless evidence has led me to believe that his theory must be right. Civilization's needed to be able to domesticate their crops to make time for specialization. They needed to have large animals to do work the a regular man could not do, and they definitely needed to have a great amount of luck to stumble upon the correct resources that could help them win wars. Without a little luck, civilization's had no chance against other prospering
nations.