Jared Diamond: A Genius or A Nut Case?.
It was the prehistory of the world that drew attention to Diamond's brain that gave him the wonderful thought of writing a 480 page book about how our world is today, with the differences of culture, cargo, religions, skin color, etc. One simple question his friend Yali asked, "Why is it that you white people develop so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?- (14), and he went racing off the idea of all the possible answers in the entire world. His purpose of writing this book was to explain how " History followed different courses for different people because of differences among people environment, not because of biological differences among people themselves - (25) And then he goes on about all his details of domestic animals and food production over and over again. Well, my perspective of what his purpose of the book was to bore us to death. His perspective of the world shows of nothing but facts, facts, facts! But even though I say the book would do some good if it were never written (or at least write it a bit shorter), there were some good things that caught my eyes. .
My friends sometimes say, natural is as good as it gets. I don't entirely agree with them even though I just nod and smile to them most of the time so I wouldn't get into an argument about it with them. But in the case of natural selection, I would agree on. It was one of the things that actually made sense in this book. People could see some animals and crops were dominant over others (for example, banana trees grows faster than oak trees that take forever to grow). The more people there were in that population to dominate over the land, the more food production, and complex technology there were. Bigger populations also tend to stay in one place. All societies started out as small groups ("bands") which hunted animals and gathered food, making them "hunter-gatherers.
