Post #8 IRB Post 2: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

            I finished the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. A main part of the book was attempting to answer Yali’s essential question “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” (15). After finishing

the book I can definitely say that Diamond answered this question and achieved his purpose of purpose to prove that history is the way it is because of differences of peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences. I think that the intended audience is people who really have a large interest in all forms of history. I learned so many interesting facts about history that I would have probably never learned without this book. While reading, it was clear a highly intelligent individual wrote it because the context demonstrated a deep understanding of many different areas of history. It makes sense that Diamond is currently a professor of geography at the University of California, but has spent his entire life as an author, physiologist and geologist. One of my favorite aspects of this book was Diamond’s use of real life examples to get a better understanding of the points he was making. In one on the most interesting chapters about how livestock was the reason for such an evolution of deadly disease the topic of how microbes evolve to live and propagate. The example of syphilis is used when it was first recorded in Europe in 1495 its victims only lived for a few months and experienced serious symptoms such as flesh falling off the face. By 1546 syphilis evolved into pretty much what it is today, which allows the victims to live longer and thus able to transmit the disease to other people. The use of the real life example makes the topic so much easier to understand. I believe that Diamond was able to achieve his purpose, because I know that for me I left this book with a whole new understanding as why history turned out the way it did. In terms of racism I now see that the people who believe this just have zero understanding of how the world works.