Diamond, NOT an anthropologist, takes Marvin Harris' theory of cultural materialism and uses it to explain everything in life, history, and the current state of the world. This is what happens when you take an intelligent person, and casually make a few mentions of a field of study they have no knowledge of. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion-as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war-and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. In this 'artful, informative, and delightful' (William H. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race. one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years.' 'Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope.

Guns germs steel