But he did complete his science degree and landed in Papua New Guinea as a passionate thirty-something biologist studying bird evolution. program in physiology to become a linguist. A self-described “fanatical bird-watcher” since the age of seven, he came to study biology, then nearly dropped out of his Ph.D. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world’s most troubled areas today.ĭiamond arrived at studying the interplay of these complex forces via an unlikely path. The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics, and genocide.

Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way? For instance, why weren’t Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians? Questions about inequality in the modern world can be reformulated as follows. While those differences constitute the most basic fact of world history, the reasons for them remain uncertain and controversial.

Those historical inequalities have cast long shadows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies. In the 13,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, some parts of the world developed literate industrial societies with metal tools, other parts developed only nonliterate farming societies, and still others retained societies of hunter-gatherers with stone tools. We all know that history has proceeded very differently for peoples from different parts of the globe. Only by grasping the richness and diversity of the entire ecosystem can we begin to dismantle our assumptions about the value of others and realize that people from different groups fared differently in history not due to their innate abilities but due to a complex cluster of environmental and geopolitical forces. His Pulitzer-winning 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies ( public library) is a foundational text illuminating the conditions that led to inequality in the modern world and combating the broken logic that perpetuates these toxic beliefs.Īt the heart of Diamond’s work is the notion that in order to understand any one society, we must contextualize it in the larger ecosystem of humanity and therefore must understand all societies. September 10, 1937) has done more than anyone since Margaret Mead to decondition the Eurocentric approach to history and debunk the biological fallacies on which the monster of racism feeds. By bridging the fields of anthropology, evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, geopolitics, and social science, trailblazing scientist Jared Diamond (b.

Diamond guns germs and steel