Table of ContentsSummaryBook ReviewReferences:SummaryJared Diamond's Gun, Germs and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize and the British Popular Science Book Award in 1998. This book highlights that environment has a great influence on human history and negates the theory of human determinism. Beginning with the capture of the unfortunate Atawalpa (the bare-shouldered man wearing only a bath towel on the cover), the book develops this contact between American and European civilizations and explores what caused such a wide divide between the America and Europe for decades. thousands of years. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the Original EssayBook ReviewJared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began his scientific career in physiology and later expanded to evolutionary biology and biogeography. He is also a historian and author best known for his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. I've been hearing about this book for a long time and finally finished reading it. This book took me to another perspective, looking at the development of human beings over tens of thousands of years with God's eyes. The author only wrote this book because a good African friend of his wondered why most of the money and resources in the world were earned and earned by white people. Instead of giving an answer, Diamond was confused about the question. Thus the book was born. In this book, the author uses a question from one of his African friends as an introduction: "Why did you white people develop so many goods...while we black people had few goods of our own?" .” We've heard so much about these kinds of questions, but they're not presented in a very "down-to-earth" way in an academic setting, and Jared begins his quest for answers. Let me try to give a brief overview of the human experience in Jared's eyes. Some people were born in environments with potential for development during this time, such as the "crescent of fertile land" in the book. There are enough large mammals that are easy to tame and plants that are easy to selectively improve. As a result, agriculture developed on a large scale and the population increased. Due to the possibility of emergence of exceptional people within a fixed probability, new technologies and civilizations have been created. The cross-sectional expansion of Eurasian geography makes the spread of civilization relatively practical. After all, the same animals and plants are better able to survive at the same latitude. In this process, Africa and America unfortunately expand longitudinally, which not only makes the spread of civilization difficult due to the different latitudes, but also causes natural barriers such as Saharan Africa to appear on these continents . The emergence of advanced technologies may only develop slowly. Then there is the accumulation of conquering factors in Eurasia compared to other continents. Due to the development of agriculture and livestock, increased contact between humans and livestock has led to the production of highly deadly pathogens. During a plague, the immunity of the ancient people on the continent was continuously improved, and the lethality of pathogens was continuously improved. At present, the development of agriculture in new continents is slow, and there are not many deadly pathogens where people's immunity is naturally weak. Finally, theOld World was ready, and with their destructive weapons, the dead germs began to conquer the New World. The following scenes are all too familiar to us. Europeans are brutally slaughtering the indigenous peoples of Africa, America, and Oceania, while more and more natives are dying from dead pathogens that frighten them. Eventually, the old continent firmly occupies the new continent and a solemn history of conquest ends. “Thus, invention is often the mother of necessity, rather than the other way around. Guns and steel represent technology, and the author believes that the development of European technology benefits their region, Eurasia. It must be said that Eurasia is a paradise compared to other continents. The reason is that the Eurasian continent has a relatively good longitude length compared to other continents and the terrain is not too complex like that of Africa and America, so transportation to the The interior of the Eurasian continent is relatively developed. Therefore, the exchange of civilizations is easier than in other regions. “Thus, an observer going back as far as 11,000 BC could not have predicted on which continent human societies would develop most rapidly, but could have made a strong case for any of these continents.” Therefore, the technology of wheels, words, iron smelting and gunpowder were produced and spread in Eurasia. Additionally, there are many small countries in Europe. From time to time, wars break out between them. As a result, small European countries place great importance on technology. Because European technology is far superior to that of the Americas, the author proposed two ways to spread new technologies, which made me shudder. The first is that only the technology is diffused, that is, the new technology comes to the local area and is accepted or used by the local population. The second is population spread, that is, people who master the new technology use the new technology to eliminate and occupy the local population. This will bring new technologies to the local market. Ninety percent of Americans died from diseases brought by Europeans during the invasion of Europe, feeling that America was hell on earth at that time. Why are Europeans bringing germs to eliminate Americans in large quantities? First, the author confirms that most human infectious disease pathogens originate from livestock. And Americans have almost no livestock. For what? Because human beings developed in Eurasia and Africa for millions of years, and during these years, human beings gradually developed hunting techniques and strategies, and animals in Eurasia and Africa Africa have gradually adapted and learned to manage human beings. Therefore, animals in Eurasia and Africa can reproduce according to the ability of human beings to domesticate animals and become human livestock. America was only migrated by humans 120,000 years ago, so people with high technologies developed over millions of years arrived in the pure and insane world. American animals that had never seen anyone before, and the consequences were conceivable. A large number of species have disappeared. As a result, Americans lost livestock and the risk of getting sick, and most of them had no resistance to infectious diseases. On the other hand, Eurasia has relatively developed transport and a relatively large population, so ».