guns, germs, and steel

Today in class we start to research the 1997 non-fiction book called “Guns Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond. Jared Diamond is a teacher at UCLA who is also a biologist and physiologist. He loves bird watching and loved to travel to New Guinea to see them because New Guinea is a basically untouched country. One time in his travels, a guy named Yali asked him “Why do you white men have so much cargo, but we New Guineans have so little?” This sounded like an easy question to answer but he couldn’t come up with one. Cargo to New Guineans are the material goods that Europeans brought to their country. Western colonials believed power was better mined by race and the Britain’s thought they were genetically superior to the New Guineans and smarter than them. Jared Diamond disproved this by seeing all the complex shelters and ways of living the New Guineans have created, but if they are just as smart (or even smarter than the Britain’s) then why don’t they have what Britain has? This is a question Jared Diamond did not know the answer too and is also how far we got into the National Geographic video we were watching. This will be continued next blog (Wednesday).