Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel should’ve actually been called Germs, Christianity, Culture, and Economics. Christianity was the vital cultural technology that allowed such a violent and comprehensive imperial expansion, and economic ideas and technologies (also heavily influenced by Christianity) provided the engine thereof.

There can be non-experts in a field who write a book that is perspicacious and breaks new ground. Alas, Diamond’s book is not one of those. It is anthropologically unsound, ashistorical, and ignores the most important elements in favor of relatively-unimportant ones (guns, steel).

Diamond went the long, stupid way ’round to “prove” the genetic non-superiority of European populations. The whole idea of genetic superiority is already prima facie idiotic, so why all the “being colossally wrong” was necessary, I haven’t any idea.

It’s not that all of Diamond’s ideas are wrong, or even bad. It’s that history is far, far more contingent than Diamond gives credit for, and if events had turned a little differently, Diamond would’ve been able to find post hoc reasons for why they occurred, too.