Gun, Germs & Steels

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In Guns, Germs, And Steel, author Jared Diamond uses environmental and geographical determinism to explain why Eurasian people have advanced so much more than the rest of the people such as Sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans who been largely conquered, displaced. His basic thesis is that environmental differences, not biological differences, led to the sometimes extreme differences in the worlds societies. Why is it that the Europeans dominated the other races? Throughout Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond desperately attempts to answer Yali’s question asking “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”? Diamond summarizes his answer to Yali’s question essentially attributing the environment for the success of the Europeans and discredits racial superiority of any sort. Although other factors contributed to the rise of the European civilization, the environment was the main factor. Some specific factors falling under environment that affected the European civilization are geography, food production, diffusion and population. Diamond explains the importance of writing in the European society. Literacy allowed them to conquer foreign lands easily because through writing, they could now have maps, sailing directions, and descriptive reports of previous sailors which would improve their experience. Diamond connects this growth in literacy to the reason behind Europe’s successful colonial power. This is the main reason why they were able to travel, find new places and therefore conquer because Europeans felt they were more superior and advanced because they had literacy. Diamond also talks about the three types of writing which were logogram, syllabary and alphabet. Logogram stood for a word, syllabary was for a syllable and alphabet was for a basic writing. The
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