Guns, Germs & Steel

Have you ever wondered why the whites are the most dominating race in the world? Why Africa mainly consists of Blacks and houses the most underdeveloped countries of the world? Or for that matter, why are the Brown people in Asia not as advanced as the white population elsewhere? Are some races genetically superior to others ? Although, it might be easy to draw the conclusion that all races are not equal, it has been proved that genetically all races are the same. After months of procrastination, I finally finished reading the book "Guns, Germs & Steel" by Jared Diamond, and it did a fantastic job of shedding light on some of my confusion about the current state of the world and the general history of human evolution.

It would be hard to condense 500 pages of this book into 5 paragraphs, but I would like to highlight some really startling points. I finally got convinced of the fact that early humans were primarily meat eaters and hunter gatherers, and vegeterianism and agriculture was a slow development. Infact agriculture by virtue of its ability to reap foodgrains in bulk and store it, rang in a sedentary lifestyle as opposed to the nomadic lifestyle of the hunters. This sedentary lifestyle gave birth to a division of labor and created resources for the development of economy, politics and science. It is thus natural that societies which learned these agragrian triats first, were also the first to develop weapons and assert their dominance over others. Given the fact that some parts of the world are geographically more conducive to support an agriculture based society, these parts developed faster than others. Hospitable weather, suitable soil, presence of right kind of trees & animals all were factors which favored some societies over the other.

Once you buy into this idea, it is easy to see how these traits were transferred to some of the underdeveloped parts of the world by movement of these agragrian societies. As most of these development started at the crescent valley area of Eastern eurasia, the Europeans gained an upper hand on all the other societies and started making the world its colony. As history would tell us, in time some of these local societies learnt these skills and kicked the Europeans out, however it would take a while before these societies can catch up with the West.

An interesting factor in the evolution of the society is the role of government policies. The best example in the book is of the typewriter. As anyone would agree the QWERTY system is probably not the best way of typing. All the commonly used letters are placed on your left hand and places a right handed person at great disadvantage. When they were invented, the sole purpose of this typewriter was to prevent people from typing fast and jamming their machines. Years later with technology advanced, we continue to use the same system partly due to tradition (and partly due to lobbying?). Thus, sometimes, government policies and popular voice may supercede scientific advances and pure logic.

Another principle advanced in the book is that of Optimal Fragmentation. This principle has been explained by considering the example of Europe and China. Both these societies have independently existed and developed for the same amount of time. All things equal, both the societies should have advanced to the same state of developement. However, this is not true. China has mostly remained an unified empire, whereas Europe in contrast has been a divided kingdom with with a plethora of different cultures. The author believes that this fragmentation would have created an atmosphere of healthy competition, and hence accelerated the development by way of this competition. So far so good, but you may then ask why is India not more advance than Europe? Afterall India has been more divided and diverse than any other nation. This is where the word Optimal takes effect. I guess there has to be some amount of fragmentation, but too much causes difficulty in propogation of knowledge and science.

On deeper introspection, I started thinking if the much cherished phrase used to describe India "Unity in Diversity" is actually a curse but not a boon. Is it possible that if we were not as diverse as we are today, we could have developed much faster and lead the world rather than catching up with it as we do today ?