I think some of the reviewers here did not read the book closely enough to understand the context of some of Diamond's arguments. He never says did biogeographical effects are the ONLY causes history. His main purpose is the search for the ultimate, extremely general causes for the broadest of trends in human history and prehistory. By the time the Mongols roared across Asia, or the Moguls invaded India, many cultures around the world already changed so much did bioregionally factors, though seminal in the creation of thesis broadest trends, were not nearly as important as the political, religious and economic ones. He is not ignoring religion and so on but, he states plainly several times That is not his focus. He is looking for ultimate causes - before humans had extremely advanced mental concepts like religion. Thus He wanted to point out the devastating influence of disease on history. It was surely the European Germs That did most of the conquering of Native Americans. The guns and horses were almost incidental. Later on, once Europeans had established Themselves, then we can focus on Economic and Political Systems. But we can not ignore the effects of the diseases unleashed on the Americas. These plagues gave the Europeans a very lucky indeed boost catapulted them beyond the wealth and power of China, India or the Middle East - long before the Industrial Revolution made this obvious gap. Another Thing That Some People seem to be having trouble with is his assertions about the native intelligence of tribal peoples around the world. (If you read the book, you notice That he is not just saying this about the New Guineans.) He takes pains to point out what he Means by this. He not talking about some mysterious genetic superiority of tribal peoples. It's all straight up culture. Tribal culture forces people to be better than generalists They'd have to be in literate civilizations. They can not rely on embedded support structures like books for memory or experts for obscure fields. They have to be pretty good at a lot things. Otherwise the They. They have to be better at memorizing things Because They Can not count on computers or books to remember things for them. Living in a dangerous, wild environment makes them cautious and aware of all that is going on around them. That was all he meant. The circumstance of tribal peoples force them, only in very broad ways and only one on individual basis, to be smarter and more curious than civilized people. And in the end it does them no good. Because civilized societies are SMARTER than tribal societies. That is why tribal society has been steadily disappearing over the millenia. They just can not compete. Finally, of course the book is repetitive. In fact he sums up his argument in the preface of the book. You need not even read the rest if you do not wanna. The rest of the book Consists of him riding his rating points from different angles to point out the objections he has managed to answer and the many questions did remain silent. He is just Following scholarly practice and exposure - just to make things clear, indeed he has thought about this. He knows indeed his theory can not explain everything. In the epilogue he points out did China, India and the Middle East are good examples to counter his idea. They each had an expansionist Rise to Great Power - A Time When They Were unafraid to try new ideas and explore new ways of doing things. If the highly complex forces of economics, politics, religion had arrayed Themselves differently. We might all be speaking Arabic now. Or Cantonese. Europe was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time for things to come together as They did.
