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Discussion
Questions
1. What are
the other commonly espoused answers to "Yali's question,"
and how does Jared Diamond address and refute each
of them?
2. Why does Diamond hypothesize
that New Guineans might be, on the average, "smarter"
than Westerners?
3. Why is it important to differentiate
between proximate and ultimate causes?
4. Do you find some of Diamond's
methodologies more compelling than others? Which,
and why?
5. What is the importance of the
order of the chapters? Why, for example, is "Collision
at Cajamarca"—which describes events that occur thousands
of years after those described in the subsequent chapters—placed
where it is?
6. How are Polynesian Islands "an
experiment of history"? What conclusions does Diamond
draw from their history?
7. How does Diamond challenge our
assumptions about the transition from hunter-gathering
to farming?
8. How is farming an "auto-catalytic"
process? How does this account for the great disparities
in societies, as well as for the possibilities of
parallel evolution?
9. Why did almonds prove domesticable
while acorns were not? What significance does this
have?
10. How does Diamond explain the
fact that domesticable American apples and grapes
were not domesticated until the arrival of Europeans?
11. What were the advantages enjoyed
by the Fertile Crescent that allowed it to be the
earliest site of development for most of the building
blocks of civilization? How does Diamond explain the
fact that it was nevertheless Europe and not Southwest
Asia that ended up spreading its culture to the rest
of the world?
12. How does Diamond refute the
argument that the failure to domesticate certain animals
arose from cultural differences? What does the modern
failure to domesticate, for example, the eland suggest
about the reasons why some peoples independently developed
domestic animals and others did not?
13. What is the importance of the
"Anna Karenina principle"?
14. How does comparing mutations
help one trace the spread of agriculture?
15. How does civilization lead
to epidemics?
16. How does Diamond's theory that
invention is, in fact, the mother of necessity bear
upon the traditional "heroic" model of invention?
17. According to Diamond, how does
religion evolve along with increasingly complex societies?
18. How is linguistic evidence
used to draw conclusions about the spread of peoples
in China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and Africa?
19. What is the significance of
the differing outcomes of Austronesian expansion in
Indonesia and New Guinea?
20. How does Diamond explain China's
striking unity and Europe's persistent disunity? What
consequences do these conditions have for world history?
21. How does Diamond refute the
charge that Australia is proof that differences in
the fates of human societies are a matter of people
and not environment? In what other areas of the world
could Diamond's argument be used?
22. What aspects of Diamond's evidence
do lay readers have to take on faith? Which aspects
are explained?
23. Diamond offers two tribes,
the Chimbu and the Daribi, as examples of differing
receptivities to innovation. Do you think he would
accept larger, continent-wide differences in receptivity?
Why or why not? How problematic might cultural factors
prove for Diamond's arguments?
24. How, throughout the book, does
Diamond address the issues he discusses in the last
few pages of his final chapter, when he proposes a
science of human history?
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