OPEN A BOOK,OPEN THE WORLD
為什麼歐亞人征服、取代或消滅美洲原住民、澳大利亞人和非洲人，而不是相反？在這本我們時代的經典之作中，進化生物學家賈里德·戴蒙德通過揭示實際造成其最廣泛種族歧視的環境因素，推翻了人類歷史上的種族主義理論。模式。
故事始於 13,000 年前，當時石器時代的狩獵採集者構成了整個人類。大約在那個時候，不同大陸上人類社會的發展道路開始大相徑庭。在中國、中美洲、安第斯山脈和其他地區，野生動植物的早期馴化使這些地區的人們在新的生活方式上搶先一步。但事實證明，農牧業起源只是它們命運不同的部分原因。糧食生產從這些最初的中心擴散的不平等速度，受到氣候和地理其他特徵的影響，包括不同的大小、位置，甚至大陸的形狀。只有脫離了狩獵採集階段的社會才能繼續發展文字、技術、政府、和有組織的宗教以及致命的細菌和強大的戰爭武器。正是那些在海洋和陸地上冒險的社會入侵了其他社會，通過屠殺和疾病傳播消滅了當地居民。
作為我們理解人類社會的一個重要里程碑，《槍砲、病菌與鋼鐵》記錄了現代世界及其不平等現象的形成方式。
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this “artful, informative, and delightful” (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, a classic of our time, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond dismantles racist theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for its broadest patterns.
The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and other areas gave peoples of those regions a head start at a new way of life. But the localized origins of farming and herding proved to be only part of the explanation for their differing fates. The unequal rates at which food production spread from those initial centers were influenced by other features of climate and geography, including the disparate sizes, locations, and even shapes of the continents. Only societies that moved away from the hunter-gatherer stage went on to develop writing, technology, government, and organized religions as well as deadly germs and potent weapons of war. It was those societies, adventuring on sea and land, that invaded others, decimating native inhabitants through slaughter and the spread of disease.
A major landmark in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way in which the modern world, and its inequalities, came to be.
