Guns, Germs, and Steel

[gilfan]

Guns, Germs, and Steel is a book by Jared Diamond that has been mention in passing on this forum before. It explores the question of why some civilizations progressed far more rapidly than others. I've not read the book, but National Geographic made a 3 part documentary out of it that has been showing up on cable the last couple months. I've seen it on at least two different stations, and it's very interesting. It's on right now on my PBS station, which prompted me to post about it.


You can search your local listings for it at www.tvguide.com or www.zap2it.com




If you don't want to or can't watch it, the cliff's notes version of his theory is that it boils down to the most nutritious food crops and best domesticated animals. He points out that of the 14 species of domesticated animals in the world, only the llama comes from the Americas. He also points out that the fertile crescent area had 4 different domesticated animals (cows, pigs, sheep, goats) and several excellent crops, and they thrived in areas with a similar climate/latitude (i.e. Europe)


Thus reinforcing the value of researching agriculture and animal husbandry. Be sure to secure your local resources.

[-SafaN-]

guess it has to do with efficiency: if u spend less time in producing food, you have more time to spend on thinking and experimenting with other buisness. U can't spend time making pottery or writing books if your stomach is empty.

Atm about 2% of the western world makes ennuf food for the other 98% In africa its vice versa.

[gilfan]

Efficiency and quality, yes. Pigs are fine, but they can't pull a plow or give you milk or hide like cattle, and some crops give you much more nutrition for less effort put into raising/harvesting them.


But yeah, basically that's it. The civilization that has abundant food for less effort has leftover manpower, so someone can be a cobbler, someone can be a blacksmith, etc... they aren't all out in the fields trying to get enough food to eat.

[CreepyD]

some civs (or tribes) still havn't progressed - they are perfectly happy as they are using bows and spears, living in tree huts etc.

It takes a few people each generation with desire to progress and make things easier imo.
Most people aren't bothered with such things, it used to be far more difficult to accomplish this than today.

interesting subject tho.

[xenophile58]

Guns, Germs and Steel is about the relative success of civilisations from different regions of the planet and why some regions eventually subdued others. (There's much more to it than just 'growing more/better food'. Like: living on a land-mass oriented east-west rather than north-south is a good thing; lots of different domesticated animals give you the occasional disease outbreak but eventual immunity; it's handy if some large animals survive your ancestors' hunting activities for when you start to depend on agriculture.)

In game terms, it provides some justification for the importance of and sometimes the scarcity of basic resources. It might be interesting to have the occasional population crash associated with actually having a particular resource. Perhaps with the eventual advantage of being able to spread a one-off massive epidemic to those civilisations which don't have it?

'Collapse' is also by Diamond. It's about why some human populations grow to a peak over a period and then fall rapidly away. Examples are Easter Islanders, Greenland Norse, Anasazi, Maya. (The game might be even more interesting if the game included these factors and consequences! 'Chopping' might not be as popular a tactic as it now is. Clearing jungles might just create a salt desert. And the primitives in their huts often did have something positive to contribute!)

(I don't seriously suggest these ideas be incorporated in the game, but if you are curious about why some human societies succeed (for a time) and others die, then Diamond's books explore some very plausible ideas. They might change CreepyD's mind about why some societies progressed the way they did and other's haven't.)

[Nikolai]

Guns, Germs and Steel... Makes me wonder, is that old civ project dead? I guess so, haven't seen anything in a year or two now I think. Sad, it was an interesting project, although IIRC they had some problems getting progress., didn't they?

[One_more_turn]

Apolyton is hot on Guns, Germs, and Steel. It has a special section dedicated to it.

[Bill3000]

Now, go ahead and tell me an analogous Guns, Germs, and Steel for Civ4.

I want to try to make the AI civs balanced in a custom scenario/map given an ancient start, but it seems to be impossible.

[mgdpublic]

If you liked GG&S, I highly suggest you check out "The Axemaker's Gift" by Burke and Ornstein. Less readable but exhaustive is "Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention from Fire to Freud" by Watson.

[Rook]

this thread reminded me of a great show called Connections hosted by James Burke. I used to love that show. It would start out with James showing you an atomic bomb or something, then he'd take you on a trip through time showing how different discoveries, events, and inventions all connect together to make the atomic bomb.

I used to love that show. years later they had a connections II, but it wasn't as good.

[gilfan]

I loved Connections, that was a great show.

[Destroyer]

Ive always thought it was about land and transport infrastructure too.

This affects trade which boosts a "civ" massively, and allows city states to form counties more easily.

[ike7]

That was an excellent book, very readable.

In addition to the excellent sections on food crop and animal domestication, i liked the chapter on technology indifference.

It seems that many cultures discovered technologies at incredibly early stages, and promptly ignored them, or used them for very mundane tasks. The Japanese ignoring firearms because the samurai ruled their society, the Chinese ignoring ocean-faring vessels.

It's interesting to wonder if that emperor decided to not scrap all the ocean faring vessels and discovered the Americas centuries ahead of Europe. This would be quite a different world altogether.

[JimG]

Well on the strength of this thread I've now watched the 1st part of Guns, Germs & Steel.
Good stuff, though we had a similar programme here in the UK called some think like "The triumph of the west" .

I remember "Connections" too, Rook.
But Burke got far too self indulgent with his later series and hasn't been on British telly for years.
(I don't know if you know, but "Berk" over here means much the same as "dork" )

[zombielordzero]

all the show listings for "guns germs and steel" that i get at tvguide.com are for july 11th, 18th, and 25th 2005. is there anywhere that lists for 2006?