Freethinkers Book Club
Guns, Germs, and Steel
By Jared Diamond
Wednesday, September 27, 2023, 7:00 – 8:30 pm
Hosted by: Karen C.
In 1998, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. This classic work answers questions of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples.
Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. Diamond argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and necessity, and a result of a chain of development made possible by certain preconditions. Guns Germs, and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a foundation for understanding human history.
Jaren Diamond is an American geographer, historian, ornithologist, and author best known for his popular science books, The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse, The World Until Yesterday, and Upheaval. His original background is biochemistry and physiology, and he is known for drawing from a variety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. He is a professor of geography at UCLA.
Feel free to join if you have not read the book, but if so, please take a look at one or more of these resources.
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