From beginning to end, Diamond stresses that he realizes that efforts to compare societies have frequently been used by racists or nationalists to belittle groups or justify mistreatment of them. Rather, he focuses on the impact of geography - whether food and other key items were plentiful, whether and how disease spread, and how these developments led to different levels of industrialization, and wealth. Hundreds of scholars are posting and cross-posting in an unusually intense and broad debate for a book that has been out for eight years.Īt the risk of oversimplifying Diamond's 440-page book, and the debate about it, the discussion goes something like this: Diamond's book argues that the differences in progress for different societies around the world do not result from one group being smarter or more resourceful than another. Two of the eight people who lead Savage Minds posted their objections to the book, and things have taken off from there, with several prominent blogs in the social sciences picking up the debate, and adding to it. This summer, PBS broadcast a series based on the book, with Diamond explaining many of his ideas.Īnd in the last week, a relatively new blog in anthropology - Savage Minds - has set off a huge debate over the book. In 2001, Cornell University had all of its freshmen read the book. By 1999, the book was one of 12 recommended to freshmen at the University of California at Berkeley (along with some works that had been around a while longer, like Genesis and Exodus from the Bible). Norton in 1997, the book won a Pulitzer Prize the next year for its author, Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles.Īlmost immediately, the book sold much better than most serious works (more than 1 million copies) and started to turn up on college reading lists - in courses on world history, anthropology, sociology and other fields.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies has had the kind of impact that most scholarly authors can only dream about for their works.

Blood germs and steel