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¶ … Guns, Germs, and Steel is the documentary film version of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning book of the same name. Like the book, the documentary is divided into three separate sections. This allows for the logical development of Diamond's ideas, and for the application of the underlying thesis to different time periods, themes, and human populations. Although extensive ground is covered in the three episodes, the premise and themes are straightforward enough so that the documentary never becomes complicated or clunky. The title explains the primary three issues that have impacted human history, allowing some people to have a strategic advantage over others. When these advantages occur in groups, the results can be dramatic to the victors and devastating to the losers.
Developing guns and other armament depends not only the availability of resources to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, but more importantly, the political situations that warrant their use. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond talks about the fact that geographic conditions like availability of resources or the presence of natural barriers may create situations in which people are divided into smaller and more protective tribes, or alternatively, into larger groups and expansive territories like China. Moreover, the film shows that peaceful people who have lived without great conflict have not developed military strategies and thus when they are confronted by a militaristic cultures, they are unprepared to defend themselves. This...
Without antibodies, the person cannot fight the disease, and the person or group may be highly susceptible to plague or mass death. A perfect example of this phenomenon is the smallpox epidemic and other diseases that devastated the Native American populations after contact with Europeans.
Steel refers to the strategic advantages some groups of people have over others due to the luck of their location or climate. Regions ripe with local resources may have led to a more lackadaisical response to resources, because abundance breeds complacency. On the other hand, people and cultures that have had to work harder to survive may have been better equipped or more interested in expanding their territories. How some cultures became dominant has a lot to do with agriculture, sedentary lifestyles, and the evolution of ranching and livestock rearing.
The point of the documentary is to show why the power balance of the world had been skewed toward Europe. The success of the United States and Australia are only related to their having been…
Reference
Guns, Germs, and Steel. PBS Documentary. Retreived online: http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/show/index.html
What are the symbols of group identity in the United States? Are they good or bad in your opinion? Symbols of group identity often pertain to foodstuffs (such as the critical evolution of wheat, corn, and the animals consumed) and cultural symbols such as literacy. What one eats, where one lives, and how one expresses one's self-reflects one's cultural associations -- whether a society was a hunter-gatherer or agrarian in ancient
Till the period up to 11,000 BC every individuals remained Stone Age hunters/gatherers. Nearly that time, the roads of growth of human societies on various continents started to move away in a large scale. (Guns, Germs, and Steel- the Fates of Human Societies: (www.2think.org) During that period, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers comprised the total human population, a big segregation happened in the proportion that the human societies progressed. In
As the world is more thoroughly explored, social scientists seem to find that the words social and science are largely contradictory and an oxymoron. Even rational choice theory bases its conclusions upon statistics and upon a costs and benefits analysis to come up with their conclusions in a more logical manner. Simply put, rationality can not be directly tested. Rather, social scientists that base their ideas upon rational choice
Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond, in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, explains how he went from being a biologist, studying birds in New Guinea, to developing an entirely new theory on the evolution of human societies. It began in 1972, when a native New Guinean asked him "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea,
9. Wild almonds contain cyanide: a person can die from eating only a few dozen of them (Diamond, p. 114). They taste bitter due to the presence of amygdalin, the precursor to cyanide. The chemical serves as a defense mechanism for the almond, deterring animals (and people) from eating them and better ensuring the propagation of the almond plant because the nut is its seed. As Diamond points out, if
Strengths of Author's Argument On their face, the author's main arguments seem to make sense. The way different societies developed depended largely on the natural resources available to them. Greater resources led to larger and more complex societies that both permitted and promoted subsequent technological development and advancement. By the time Western societies encountered and dominated tropical societies, the means through which they did so were result of earlier (natural) causes