Yali's Question By Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond’s prologue, “Yali’s Question” is a brilliant introduction to his award-winning book, In Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Its title refers the question asked by Yali, a local politician, during Jared’s trip to New Guinea where he was studying bird evolution. The politician had asked, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” In other words, Yali had asked why cultures developed at different rates. This “simple question” as Jared Diamond wrote, is quite difficult to explain; there is no answer that is generally accepted. Instead, there are several possible explanations that do not fully answer the underlying cause.