Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond -  Part 3: From Food to Guns, Germs, and Steel:
In the second section, Diamond explained the
ways in which food production contributed
to differences in ancient societies.
However, food production is not a proximate
cause.
It is only an ultimate cause, or a basic prerequisite
for certain other factors that directly determined
modern differences.
If a farmer and a hunter-gatherer fought each
other one-on-one and naked, for example, neither
one would have an advantage.
The advantages that distinguish these two
come from factors related to their different
strategies for food production: societies
with agriculture have denser populations,
breathe out bad germs, own better weapons,
and live in centralized governments with elites
who can start wars.
This section of the books explores how the
ultimate cause, food production, led to more
proximate causes such as germs, literacy,
technology, and centralized government.
Diseases were a crucial proximate cause of
domination by one society over another; in
the majority of wars, most deaths were caused
not by war, but by the exchange of diseases.
So, why was the exchange of nasty germs between
Europe and the Americas so unequal?
To answer this, Diamond first explains why
some microbes make us sick and others don’t,
why many diseases cause epidemics, and how
diseases pass between humans and animals.
Germs make us “sick” in order to pass
themselves from one host to another.
For example, coughing is a strategy by which
a germ can transfer through the air to a new
host.
Germs of course want sick people to cough
to make sure that they have enough available
hosts to stay alive.
In an epidemic, germs are quick and deadly,
and can kill normally healthy individuals.
Over time, human populations exposed to a
germ came to have a high number of people
with genes that resist it.
They were selected for survival of such epidemics.
This kind of “crowd disease” can only
continue in large populations, where there
are enough people for the germs to continue
to pass themselves along.
Otherwise, the germs would quickly die out
as all people in the society died out.
In small hunter-gatherer societies, of course,
such diseases would very quickly kill everyone
and therefore die out as well.
For this reason, new crowd diseases do not
develop in small societies—hunter-gatherer
tribes do not have enough population density
to create their own deadly diseases that they
could pass to larger sedentary societies.
Moreover, human proximity to domesticated
livestock is what caused certain deadly germs
to develop in sedentary, food-producing societies
instead of hunter-gatherer communities.
Animals carry a number of germs that were
first passed on to humans in a variety of
ways.
In fact, many deadly diseases such as smallpox
and AIDS first originated with animals, and
then spread to humans, in a new form, through
human contact with these animals.
Of course, these germs were most likely to
be passed along to humans who kept domesticated
animals and lived closely together with them.
These conditions were most common in food-producing
societies with a sedentary lifestyle.
Overall, it was populations higher in density
and with greater contact with domesticated
animals that developed the deadliest diseases
and were able to spread them to societies
that couldn’t cope with them.
This was how Europeans developed the smallpox
that would destroy Native Americans.
It also explains why Native Americans did
not develop diseases of the same scale that
could kill European populations.
Writing was also first developed in some societies
and not others, and brought these communities
several important advantages.
Writing made it possible to transmit knowledge
accurately, in greater quantity and detail,
across space and time.
But why did no traditional hunter-gatherers
adopt writing?
Actually, very few people invented writing
completely on their own throughout history:
the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, Mexican Indians,
Egyptians, and the Chinese.
Whether or not a given society developed or
adopted writing depended on whether they would
find it useful, and whether they could support
specialists who acted as scribes.
These conditions only existed in societies
that had complex and centralized political
institutions.
This kind of political institution was supported
by the ultimate cause of food production.
Food production was a necessary condition
for the adoption of writing, but not a sufficient
condition; some societies that were very isolated
because of their geographic barriers also
failed to adopt writing because the invention
had trouble reaching them.
The history of writing strengthens the importance
of geography and ecology to the spread of
human inventions.
The spread of technology can also be confusing
to historians.
Archeologists in Crete recently discovered
the “Phaistos Disk,” dating from 1700
B.C.E.
The disc seemed to be used as a stamp for
producing written documents, and anticipated
humanity’s invention of printing.
But we know this technology was not widely
adopted in the area for many more years.
Why was this disc not immediately influential?
Why did it take so much longer for these societies
to adopt printing technology?
Such questions suggest how unpredictable the
spread of technology can seem.
In fact, most inventions were developed not
in response to a demand for a new product,
but simply out of experimentation or curiosity.
Diamond argues that invention is “the mother
of necessity,” and not the other way around.
For example, Thomas Edison’s phonograph
was first meant to preserve last words, record
books for blind people, etc; none of these
uses seemed to have commercial value.
But once he started to offer them, other people
found a popular use for them: recording and
playing music.
Technology finds most of its uses after it
has been invented, rather than being invented
in order to meet a need.
Technology develops cumulatively, meaning
it requires contributions from several people
and organizations, instead of in individual
actions.
Individual geniuses are as important; it is
how a society responds to a new product that
determines the importance of any invention.
Also, most things we think a single person
invented actually followed previous work of
other inventors who had developed earlier
prototypes or parts of the resulting technology.
No one person worked alone to change an entire
society.
Even though we hear about many famous inventors,
especially from Europe, Europe did not actually
have more individual geniuses than other societies.
It simply had more inventions we hear about
today, because societies recognized their
uses and made them popular.
Four factors influence whether an invention
is accepted: relative economic advantage compared
with existing technology, social value and
prestige, compatibility with what companies
want, and how obvious its advantages are.
But how do different societies accept innovation?
Historians of technology have proposed many
factors.
These include life expectancy, which gives
potential inventors more time to work on their
products.
Five factors relate to the organization of
society: the availability of slave labor that
freed up time for others to focus on technology,
patents and property laws that rewarded innovation,
opportunities for technical training, a capitalistic
model that rewarded investment in technological
development, and the individualism of a society
that allowed inventors to profit from their
own work.
Four other factors are ideological: risk-taking
behavior, a scientific outlook, tolerance
of diverse views, and religions that encourage
innovation.
But none of these factors relate to geography,
or address ultimate factors.
Perhaps the amount and variety of different
factors helps to explain the patterns of the
spread of technology.
In fact, the development and reception of
inventions varied a lot from society to society
on the same continent, and over time within
the same society.
It is therefore impossible to claim that any
group of people has simply “always” been
more backwards.
We must look to broad patterns instead of
specific examples in order to understand the
spread of inventions.
So what are the most important factors for
the adoption of a new technology in a society?
New inventions tend to appear when, either
other societies learn of inventions elsewhere,
are receptive to it, and adopt it, or a society
lacks an invention that exists nearby and
finds itself at a disadvantage.
For example, the Maori tribes that adopted
muskets (a type of gun) were able to subjugate
the tribes that did not adopt this new technology.
Societies that are geographically isolated
can even adopt and then abandon a technology.
For example, Japan briefly adopted guns before
abandoning them soon after, which was possible
only because it was an isolated island that
could not easily be overwhelmed by neighbors
who did have guns.
If a location is isolated, it is less likely
to get and keep technologies.
Technology also spreads by “diffusion,”
meaning that one small invention can lead
to later inventions that build on this original
model.
This means that those societies that adopted
new technologies very early had an advantage
in inventing more and more complex technologies
later.
Sedentary societies were better able to do
this because they could hold on to possessions,
develop specialized roles, and had more people
who could potentially contribute new inventions.
In conclusion, it was Eurasia’s distinctive
geography that led it to develop more inventions,
which allowed it to overwhelm other, more
isolated, hunter-gatherer societies.
Government and religion are two other factors
that often go together.
They can determine the structure and power
of a society.
Human societies have generally progressed
in order from bands—small groups consisting
of 5 to 80 people—to tribes—hundreds of
people living in fixed settlements—to chiefdoms—several
thousands of people with established hierarchies—to
states, which had an even more complex political
structure.
In these larger and more complex societies
where power was typically concentrated in
a single leader, societal organization was
more complex.
An important challenge also came: how did
leaders, like chiefs or kings, motivate their
followers to keep them in power and obey them?
They could either take away weapons from the
public and give them to the elites, or redistribute
respect in ways that kept the masses happy,
or use their monopoly of force to keep order
and reduce violence, or create an ideology
or religion that justified their rule.
This last option explains why so many complex
societies also developed a religion.
Religion also brings two other important benefits
to centralized societies: it helps unrelated
individuals to live together without killing
one another by giving them a connection to
each other not based on family and close friends,
and it gives people a motivation to sacrifice
their lives for others.
Both of these benefits help these religious
societies to work together and conquer other,
less religious or centralized communities.
Size can predict the kind of complexity that
also leads societies to develop religion,
technology, writing, or diseases.
