Diamonds book is meant to answer a simple question put to him by a politician from
Papua New Guinea: given than Europeans and New Guineans are equally smart, why is it that
Europeans have so much more stuff? Diamonds answer avoids the commonplace assertions about
culture or race (for instance, that science did not rise in China because Confucianism did not
value scientific inquiry) and instead focuses on geography and environment as determining
factors.
For Diamond, the rise of technologically sophisticated
civilizations in Eurasia can be traced to conditions that made the evolution of...
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