Guns, Germs, and Steel: Prologue Summary & Analysis

The book will try to determine why certain societies became powerful and dominant on the global stage, while others did not.

Yali is one of the few individuals mentioned in the novel. Diamond emphasizes Yali’s intelligence and talent as a politician, suggesting that the technological and economic superiority of one civilization over another (most relevantly, the technological and economic superiority of Europe and the U.S. over New Guinea) has little to do with the intelligence or talent of individual people.

This is one of the most important passages in the book, because it sets up the “mystery” that Diamond will proceed to solve in the next 500 pages. Certain societies have, by almost any material measure, been more successful than other societies: healthier, wealthier, more powerful, etc. And yet individual people across societies are very much alike in terms of nature and intelligence. Why, then, do some societies flourish while others do not?

This passage explicitly states the question that the book will try to solve. Another important thing to notice here is that Diamond illustrates the problem he’s attempting to solve with a “case study": the colonization of the New World by European societies after 1492 A.D. Diamond will often rely on case studies—that is, individual, somewhat isolated, examples—before generalizing his findings to all of human history (the fourth part of the book is made up almost entirely of case studies of specific regions).

This is an important passage because Diamond clarifies that he’s describing, not judging. There are several points in the book in which Diamond’s own point of view about human history becomes very clear (in particularly, he seems disgusted with the European colonists’ racism). But for the most part, Diamond’s tone will be scientific and dispassionate.

Diamond will show how humans learned to replace their hunter-gatherer practices with agricultural and industrial practices. But he’s not saying that agriculture is superior to hunting and gathering. On the contrary, agriculture is just the most efficient way to extract food for certain times and places in the world—just as hunting and gathering has been the most efficient way in other places and at other times.

In no small part, Diamond writes his book in order to refute persistent, but ultimately unscientific, claims that whites, Europeans, and Westerners are superior to people from other parts of the world. Racists often attempt to twist science—most notoriously, Darwin’s theory of evolution –in order to justify their beliefs, and even to justify their brutality while colonizing places outside Europe. But, Diamond insists, scientifically there’s no link between race/culture and intelligence.

Diamond continues the previous passage to argue from his own experience that people from non-European societies aren’t less intelligent than Europeans. Despite the fact that Darwin’s theory of evolution has often been twisted to claim Europeans’ superiority to indigenous non-Western peoples, one could just as easily use Darwin to argue the reverse. In an industrialized society, intelligence and talent aren’t necessarily prerequisites for producing offspring, but in New Guinea, they are. Therefore, one might even think that natural selection has made New Guineans smarter than Europeans (though Diamond doesn't explicitly argue so).

Many of the most famous European philosophers of the early modern era, such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believed that humans responded to their environment in a limited sense: cold weather influenced them to be harder working. While these thinkers may have been on the right track to argue that environment can shape society, their particular interpretation of such an idea has turned out to be factually wrong.

One of the most popular answers to the question of why certain regions became more powerful than others is that the powerful, successful regions were located near rivers. Again, such an explanation is getting at an important truth—environment can shape society—but still relying on factually incorrect data.

It’s clear enough that civilizations with access to metal and immunity to disease have a big advantage over civilizations that don't. But this doesn’t get to the core of the question; it doesn’t explain why certain civilizations do and don’t develop such advantages.

Diamond doesn’t claim to be presenting any truly “new” ideas—indeed, almost all of the ideas he presents have been discussed elsewhere in the literature on archaeology, anthropology, or history. Diamond’s aim in his book isn’t to make new points but to put together other thinkers’ points to make a single, organized thesis about why societies do and don’t prosper. (In real life Diamond is a polymath with many eclectic interests, perhaps explaining why he feels comfortable synthesizing many different fields of knowledge; many other people in those fields would feel uncomfortable making big, ambitious claims of the kind that Diamond routinely makes. At the same time, some have criticized Diamond for what they see as his vague, overly general knowledge of history, archaeology, and anthropology.)

Here Diamond sketches out the structure of the book. He’ll begin with the history of agriculture, followed by a discussion of how agricultural developments “snowballed” over time to lead to major advances in technology. Finally, he’ll examine some specific examples of his idea.