Diamonds are where you find them

I was driving home from work, listening to NPR, when they started in on a book review. I don't remember a single word of it now, except for the idea that human civilization is literally shaped by the shape of the continents, but I was hooked. "I'll have to read that book someday," I thought to myself.

If you know me, you know that thoughts like that mean one thing -- I'll never do it. But for some reason, I pulled off into a bookstore and bought Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond.

What a find! The author was asked by a New Guinea friend why Europeans came to New Guinea, instead of vice versa. Diamond spent the next twenty years trying to figure it out. Here's my understanding of his reasoning.

Civilization developed first in Mesopotamia, because the winters are cool and wet, and the summers are hot and dry. This is ideal weather for wild wheat. The hot, dry summers forced wheat to grow hard, nutrient-enriched, seed-bearing kernels to survive. These kernels normally fall off before they're good to eat, but some defective plants hold on to them longer than others. Humans ate these defective kernels and defecated the seeds near their homes. Over time, this process of "unnatural selection" wiped out wild wheat and replaced it with the "defective" stuff, which then became "normal".

Rice (East Asia), corn (Americas), and sorghum (Africa) are reasonably nutritious, but wheat has them all beat, so the Mesopotamians had a head start, aided by the blind luck of having all but one of the fourteen domesticable animals over 100 pounds. Their stored nutrition gave them the ability to specialize, which allowed cities to grow, which nurtured diseases, which eventually they developed resistance to.

Here's the best part. The Mesopotamian culture spread because the habitable portions of Eurasia run east-west. They could move without changing their lifestyles, and take their wheat with them. Cultures also arose in Africa and the Americas, but the north-south orientation of these continents meant that the inhabitants were restricted to fairly small areas. Without stored nutrition, they never developed cities and the resultant resistances, and were eventually decimated when contact came, although Africa gave as good as it got in that regard.

The only quibble I have with this book is at the beginning, when Diamond lays out the multiple ideas he originally had for why European culture dominates. One of the ideas was racial superiority of some kind. He rejected this out of hand, never bothering to test the idea. Now I'm not saying that he missed the right answer, but this doesn't sound like the Scientific Method that I was taught.

If I had just five books on my bookshelf, this would be one of them. It's that good.