Guns, Germs, and Steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Cover of the first edition, featuring the painting Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru by John Everett Millais
Author	Jared Diamond
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Geography, social evolution, ethnology, cultural diffusion
Published	1997 (W. W. Norton)
Media type	Hardcover, Paperback, Audio CD, Audio Cassette, Audio Download
Pages	480 pages (1st edition, hardcover)
ISBN	(1st edition, hardcover)
OCLC	35792200
Dewey Decimal	303.4 21
LC Class	HM206 .D48 1997
Preceded by	Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality
Followed by	Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (also titled Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years) is a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1998, Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.

The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example, written language or the development among Eurasians of resistance to endemic diseases), he asserts that these advantages occurred because of the influence of geography on societies and cultures (for example, by facilitating commerce and trade between different cultures) and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes.