What is the central question that scientist Jared Diamond is seeking to explain in the video Guns, Germs, and Steel Episode 1 Out of Eden?
There, in 1974, a local named Yali asked Diamond a deceptively simple question: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”
What is diamonds purpose in asking readers to pause to consider some objections?
What is Diamond’s purpose in asking readers to “pause to consider some objections” before discussing Yali’s question (p. 17)? Diamond wants to “pause to consider some objections” so he can demonstrate that investigating “Yali’s question” is necessary and not “offens[ive],” as “[s]ome people” may think (p. 17).
What beliefs does Diamond aim to disprove through the arguments he makes central to his book?
Diamond refutes the common beliefs that farming is always more beneficial to a society than is hunter-gathering. He continuously proves that in certain situations, where crops are few or wild game is plentiful, hunter-gatherers have no reason to transition to a farming lifestyle.
What is Jared Diamond’s definition of world history?
Diamond thinks history can be a science in roughly the same way that evolutionary biology or astronomy are sciences. Experiments are impossible in all these fields (as opposed to physics or chemistry), but so-called natural experiments are possible.
What did Jared Diamond say?
Jared Diamond: This jungle around us, you might think it’s a cornucopia, but it isn’t. Most of these trees in the jungle don’t yield, don’t give us anything edible. There were just a few sago trees, and the rest of these trees don’t yield anything that we could eat.
What is Diamond’s argument?
At the risk of oversimplifying Diamond’s 440-page book, and the debate about it, the discussion goes something like this: Diamond’s book argues that the differences in progress for different societies around the world do not result from one group being smarter or more resourceful than another.
What was the impact of Guns Germs and Steel on the African continent?
The discovery of Mapungubwe overturned centuries of prejudice about African history and proved the continent played host to a sophisticated tropical civilization centuries before the arrival of Europeans.