HOW TO GET RICH: A Talk by Jared Diamond

In Guns, Germs, and Steel I asked why history has unfolded differently over the last 13,000 years in Eurasia, in the
Americas, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in Aboriginal Australia, with the result that within the last 500 years
Europeans were the ones who conquered Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians and sub-Saharan Africans,
rather than vice versa.

Most of that book, was concerned with comparing the peoples of different continents, but I knew that I couldn't
publish a book comparing the histories of different continents and considering Eurasia as a unit without saying
something about the fascinating problem of the differences of history within Eurasia. Why, within Eurasia, was it
Europeans who conquered the world and colonized other people, rather than the Chinese or the people of India or
the Middle East? I devoted seven pages to that subject at the end of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I think I arrived
at the correct solution. Nevertheless, since the publication of Guns, Germs, and Steel, I've received a lot of
feedback, and the most interesting feedback has been about the implications of that comparative analysis of the
histories of China, Europe, India, and the Middle East.

In particular, in addition to the review of my book by Bill Gates, I've received a lot of correspondence from
economists and business people, who pointed out to me possible parallels between the histories of entire human
societies and histories of smaller groups. This correspondence from economists and business people has to do
with the following big question: what is the best way to organize human groups and human organizations and
businesses so as to maximize productivity, creativity, innovation, and wealth? Should your human group have a
centralized direction, in the extreme having a dictator, or should there be diffuse or even anarchical organization?
Should your collection of people be organized into a single group, or broken off into a number of groups, or broken
off into a lot of groups? Should you maintain open communication between your groups, or erect walls between
them, with groups working more secretly? Should you erect protectionist tariff walls against the outside, or should
you expose your business or government to free competition?

These questions about group organization arise at many different levels and for many types of groups. They arise,
of course, about the organization of entire governments or countries: what is the best way to govern a country?
Remember the classic arguments about whether the best government is a benign dictatorship, or a federal system,
or an anarchical free-for-all. The same questions also rise about the organization of different companies within the
same industry. How can you account for the fact that Microsoft has been so successful recently, and that IBM,
which was formerly successful, fell behind but then drastically changed its organization over the last four years and
improved its success? How can we explain the different successes of what we call different industrial belts? When I
was a boy growing up in Boston, Route 128, the industrial belt around Boston, led the industrial world in scientific
creativity and imagination. But Route 128 has fallen behind, and now Silicon Valley is the center of innovation. And
the relations of businesses to each other in Silicon Valley and Route 128 are very different, possibly resulting in
those different outcomes.

Of course there are also the famous differences between the productivities of the economies of different countries:
the differing national average productivities of Japan and the United States and France and Germany. Actually,
though, there are differences between the productivities and wealths of different business sectors within the same
country. For example, the German metal-working industry has a productivity rivaling that of the United States, so
the Germans are certainly capable of organizing industries well, but the German beer-brewing industry is less than
half as productive as the American beer-brewing industry. Or take Japan — we Americans are paranoid about the
supposed efficiency of Japanese business, and the fact is that the Japanese steel industry is 45% more productive
than the American steel industry. Why is it, then, that the Japanese food-producing industry is less than 1/3 as
productive and efficient as the American food-processing industry? Still another example: in Korea, the steel
industry is equal in efficiency to American steel making, but all other Korean industries lag behind the United
States. What is it about the different organization of the German beer brewers and the German metal workers, or
the different organization of the Japanese food processors and the Japanese car manufacturers, that accounts for
the different productivities of these sectors within a given country?

Obviously, the answers to these questions about the different success of organizations partly depend upon
idiosyncracies of individuals. The success of Microsoft must have something to do with Bill Gates. If an idiot were in
command of Microsoft, then however superior Microsoft's organization, Microsoft would be unlikely to be a
successful business. But nevertheless one can still ask , all other things being equal, or else in the long run, or else
on the average, what form of organization of human groups is best? I'm sure that there are many of you here who
are involved with businesses that would like to know the answer to that question.

I propose to try to learn from human history. Human history over the last 13,000 years comprises tens of thousands
of different experiments. Each human society represents a different natural experiment in organizing human
groups. Human societies have been organized very differently, and the outcomes have been very different. Some
societies have been much more productive and innovative than others. What can we learn from these natural
experiments of history that will help us all get rich? I propose to go over two batches of natural experiments that will
give you insights into how to get rich.

The first batch of natural experiments concerns understanding the effects of isolation and of group size and of
communication with other groups on the productivity of human societies. Let's learn from the extreme examples of
isolation of human societies. If isolation has any effect on human societies, the places we're most likely to see that
effect are the histories of those two islands off southeastern Australia called Tasmania and Flinders Island. They lie
about 200 miles off the southeast coast of Australia and are separated today from Australia by Bass Straits, but
those straits are relatively shallow, so their floor lay above sea level at glacial times of low sea level up to about
10,000 years ago. The Bass Straits between Tasmania and Australia were then dry land, and Tasmania was part of
the Australian mainland, just as Britain used to be part of the European mainland. When the glaciers melted, sea
level rose and cut off Tasmania from the Australian mainland. So when Tasmania and Flinders were part of the
Australian mainland, Australian Aborigines walked down to Tasmania and Flinders from the mainland.

And then 10,000 years ago the glaciers melted, sea level rose, and Tasmania became cut off from mainland
Australia by Bass Straits, which are really rough waters. In addition, the watercraft of the Tasmanians were wash-
through rafts that got waterlogged and sank after about a dozen hours. The result was that the boats of the
Tasmanians could not reach Australia, and the boats of the mainland Aboriginal Australians could not reach
Tasmania.

Thus, for the last 10,000 years the Tasmanians represented a study of isolation unprecedented in human history
except in science fiction novels. Here were 4,000 Aboriginal Australians cut off on an island, and they remained
totally cut off from any other people in the world until the year 1642, when Europeans "discovered" Tasmania. What
happened during those 10,000 years to that isolated 4,000-person society? And what about nearby Flinders Island,
which originally supported a population of 200 cut-off Aboriginal Australians? — what happened to that tiny isolated
society of 200 people during those 10,000 years?

When Europeans discovered Tasmania in the 17th century, it had technologically the simplest, most "primitive"
human society of any society in the modern world. Native Tasmanians could not light a fire from scratch, they did
not have bone tools, they did not have multi-piece stone tools, they did not have axes with handles, they did not
have spear-throwers, they did not have boomerangs, and they did not even know how to fish. What accounts for
this extreme simplicity of Tasmania society? Part of the explanation is that during the 10,000 years of isolation, the
Aboriginal Australians, who numbered about 250,000, were inventing things that the isolated 4,000 Tasmanians
were not inventing, such as boomerangs. Incredibly, though, archeological investigations have shown one other
thing: during those 10,000 years of isolation, the Tasmanians actually lost some technologies that they had carried
from the Australian mainland to Tasmania. Notably, the Tasmanians arrived in Tasmania with bone tools, and bone
tools disappear from archeological record about 3,000 years ago. That's incredible, because with bone tools you
can have needles, and with needles you can have warm clothing. Tasmania is at the latitude of Vladivostok and
Chicago: it's snowy in the winter, and yet the Tasmanians went about either naked or just with a cape thrown over
the shoulder.

How do we account for these cultural losses and non-inventions of Tasmanian society? Flinders Island was even
more extreme — that tiny society of 200 people on Flinders Island went extinct several millenia ago. Evidently,
there is something about a small, totally isolated human society that causes either very slow innovation or else
actual loss of existing inventions. That result applies not just to Tasmania and Flinders, but to other very isolated
human societies. There are other examples. The Torres Strait islanders between Australia and New Guinea
abandoned canoes. Most Polynesian societies lost bows and arrows, and lost pottery. The Polar Eskimos lost the
kayak, Dorset Eskimos lost dogs and bow drills, and Japan lost guns.

To understand these losses in extreme isolation, the easiest case to understand is Japan, because the loss of
firearms in Japan was witnessed and described. It took place in a literate society. Guns arrived in Japan around
1543 with two Portuguese adventurers who stepped ashore, pulled out a gun, and shot a duck on the wings. A
Japanese nobleman happened to be there, was very impressed, bought these two guns for $10,000, and had his
sword-maker imitate them. Within a decade, Japan had more guns per capita than any other country in the world,
and by the year 1600 Japan had the best guns of any country in the world. And then, over the course of the next
century, Japan gradually abandoned guns.

What happened was that the Samurai, the warrior class in Japan, had been used to fighting by standing up in front
of their armies and making a graceful speech, the other opposing Samurai made an answering graceful speech,
and then they had one-on-one combat. The Samurai discovered that the peasants with their guns would shoot the
Samurai while the Samurai were making their graceful speeches. So the Samurai realized that guns were a danger
because they were such an equalizer. The Samurai first restricted the licensing of gun factories to a hundred
factories, and then they licensed fewer factories, and then they said that only three factories could repair guns, and
then they said that those three factories could make only a hundred guns a year, then ten guns a year, then three
guns a year, until by the 1840s when Commodore Perry came to Japan, Japan no longer had any guns. That
represents the loss of a very powerful technology.
This loss was possible only in Japan because of its isolation; there were no other neighbors threatening Japan.
When firearms arrived in Europe, there were European princes who similarly banned firearms, and there were
European princes who banned printing, but you can guess what happened. When a prince in the middle of Europe
banned firearms, within a short time the prince next door who did not ban firearms either walked in and conquered,
or else the prince who banned firearms quickly realized his or her mistake and reacquired firearms from next door.
The banning of the guns could work only in isolated Japan, where there were no neighbors as a threat, and where
there were no neighbors from whom to reacquire the technology.

So these stories of isolated societies illustrate two general principles about relations between human group size
and innovation or creativity. First, in any society except a totally isolated society, most innovations come in from the
outside, rather than being conceived within that society. And secondly, any society undergoes local fads. By fads I
mean a custom that does not make economic sense. Societies either adopt practices that are not profitable or for
whatever reasons abandon practices that are profitable. But usually those fads are reversed, as a result of the
societies next door without the fads out-competing the society with the fad, or else as a result of the society with the
fad, like those European princes who gave up the guns, realizing they're making a big mistake and reacquiring the
fad. In short, competition between human societies that are in contact with each other is what drives the invention
of new technology and the continued availability of technology. Only in an isolated society, where there's no
competition and no source of reintroduction, can one of these fads result in the permanent loss of a valuable
technology. So that's one of the two sets of lessons that I want to draw from history, about what happens in a really
isolated society and group.

The other lesson that I would like to draw from history concerns what is called the optimal fragmentation principle.
Namely, if you've got a human group, whether the human group is the staff of this museum, or your business, or the
German beer industry, or Route 128, is that group best organized as a single large unit, or is it best organized as a
number of small units, or is it best fragmented into a lot of small units? What's the most effective organization of the
groups?

I propose to get some empirical information about this question by comparing the histories of China and Europe.
Why is it that China in the Renaissance fell behind Europe in technology? Often people assume that it has
something to do with the Confucian tradition in China supposedly making the Chinese ultra-conservative, whereas
the Judeo-Christian tradition in Europe supposedly stimulated science and innovation. Well, first of all, just ask
Galileo about the simulating effects of the Judeo-Christian tradition on science. Then, secondly, just consider the
state of technology in medieval Confucian China. China led the world in innovation and technology in the early
Renaissance. Chinese inventions include canal lock gates, cast iron, compasses, deep drilling, gun powder, kites,
paper, porcelain, printing, stern-post rudders, and wheelbarrows — all of those innovations are Chinese
innovations. So the real question is, why did Renaissance China lose its enormous technological lead to late-starter
Europe?

We can get insight by seeing why China lost its lead in ocean-going ships. As of the year 1400, China had by far
the best, the biggest, and the largest number of, ocean-going ships in the world. Between 1405 and 1432 the
Chinese sent 7 ocean-going fleets, the so-called treasure fleets, out from China. Those fleets comprised hundreds
of ships; they had total crews of 20,000 men; each of those ships dwarfed the tiny ships of Columbus; and those
gigantic fleets sailed from China to Indonesia, to India, to Arabia, to the east coast of Africa, and down the east
coast of Africa. It looked as if the Chinese were on the verge of rounding the Cape of Good Hope, coming up the
west side of Africa, and colonizing Europe.

Well, China's tremendous fleets came to an end through a typical episode of isolationism, such as one finds in the
histories of many countries. There was a new emperor in China in 1432. In China there had been a Navy faction
and an anti-Navy faction. In 1432, with the new emperor, the anti-Navy faction gained ascendancy. The new
emperor decided that spending all this money on ships is a waste of money. Okay, there's nothing unusual about
that in China; there was also isolationism in the United States in the 1930's, and Britain did not want anything to do
with electric lighting until the 1920s. The difference, though, is that this abandoning of fleets in China was final,
because China was unified under one emperor. When that one emperor gave the order to dismantle the shipyards
and stop sending out the ships, that order applied to all of China, and China's tradition of building ocean-going
ships was lost because of the decision by one person. China was a virtual gigantic island, like Tasmania.

Now contrast that with what happened with ocean-going fleets in Europe. Columbus was an Italian, and he wanted
an ocean-going fleet to sail across the Atlantic. Everybody in Italy considered this a stupid idea and wouldn't
support it. So Columbus went to the next country, France, where everybody considered it a stupid idea and
wouldn't support it. So Columbus went to Portugal, where the king of Portugal considered it a stupid idea and
wouldn't support it. So Columbus went across the border to a duke of Spain who considered this stupid. And
Columbus then went to another duke of Spain who also considered it a waste of money. On his sixth try Columbus
went to the king and queen of Spain, who said this is stupid. Finally, on the seventh try, Columbus went back to the
king and queen of Spain, who said, all right, you can have three ships, but they were small ships. Columbus sailed
across the Atlantic and, as we all know, discovered the New World, came back, and brought the news to Europe.
Cortez and Pizarro followed him and brought back huge quantities of wealth. Within a short time, as a result of
Columbus having shown the way, 11 European countries jumped into the colonial game and got into fierce
competition with each other. The essence of these events is that Europe was fragmented, so Columbus had many
different chances.

Essentially the same thing happened in China with clocks: one emperor's decision abolished clocks over China.
China was also on the verge of building powerful water-powered machinery before the Industrial Revolution in
Britain, but the emperor said "Stop," and so that was the end of the water-powered machinery in China. In contrast,
in Europe there were princes who said no to electric lighting, or to printing, or to guns. And, yes, in certain
principalities for a while printing was suppressed. But because Europe in the Renaissance was divided among
2,000 principalities, it was never the case that there was one idiot in command of all Europe who could abolish a
whole technology. Inventors had lots of chances, there was always competition between different states, and when
one state tried something out that proved valuable, the other states saw the opportunity and adopted it. So the real
question is, why was China chronically unified, and why was Europe chronically disunified? Why is Europe
disunified to this day?

The answer is geography. Just picture a map of China and a map of Europe. China has a smooth coastline. Europe
has an indented coastline, and each big indentation is a peninsula that became an independent country,
independent ethnic group, and independent experiment in building a society: notably, the Greek peninsula, Italy, the
Iberian peninsula, Denmark, and Norway/Sweden. Europe had two big islands that became important independent
societies, Britain and Ireland, while China had no island big enough to become an independent society until the
modern emergence of Taiwan. Europe is transected by mountain ranges that split up Europe into different
principalities: the Alps, the Pyrenees, Carpathians — China does not have mountain ranges that transect China. In
Europe big rivers flow radially — the Rhine, the Rhone, the Danube, and the Elbe — and they don't unify Europe.
In China the two big rivers flow parallel to each other, are separated by low-lying land, and were quickly connected
by canals. For those geographic reasons, China was unified in 221 B.C. and has stayed unified most of the time
since then, whereas for geographic reasons Europe was never unified. Augustus couldn't do it, Charlemagne
couldn't do it, and Napoleon and Hitler couldn't unify Europe. To this day, the Europe Union is having difficulties
bringing any unity to Europe.

So, the lesson I draw is that competition between entities that have free communication between them spurred on
Europe. In China one despot could and did halt innovation in China. Instead, China's experience of technological
innovation came during the times when China's unity fell apart, or when China was taken over temporarily by an
outside invader.

You've seen that effect even in modern times. Twenty years ago, a few idiots in control of the world's most
populous nation were able to shut down the educational system for one billion people at the time of the Great
Cultural Revolution, whereas it's impossible for a few idiots to shut down the educational system of all of Europe.
This suggests, then, that Europe's fragmentation was a great advantage to Europe as far as technological and
scientific innovation is concerned. Does this mean that a high degree of fragmentation is even better? Probably not.
India was geographically even more fragmented than Europe, but India was not technologically as innovative as
Europe. And this suggests that there is an optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation, that a too-unified society
is a disadvantage, and a too-fragmented society is also a disadvantage. Instead, innovation proceeds most rapidly
in a society with some intermediate degree of fragmentation.

Okay, let's now start to apply all this to what we should do if we want to try to go out and get rich. Let's apply this to
some affluent modern industries and companies. I'll give you two examples. The first example concerns that image
of productivity that we Americans have as we look toward Japan. We fantasize that the industrial productivity of
Japan and Germany is greater than that of the United States. And that's not true. On the average, American
industrial productivity is higher than the industrial productivity of either Japan or Germany. But that average figure
conceals differences among the industries of the same country, related to differences in organization — and those
differences are very instructive. Let me give you two examples from case studies carried out by the McKinsey
Corporation, an economics study industry based in Washington. These two examples involve the German beer
industry and the Japanese food-processing industry.

What about the German beer industry? Well, the Germans are very efficient in some of their industries. The
German metal-working industry and the German steel industry are equal in productivity to those of the United
States, but the German beer-producing industry has a productivity only 43% that of the United States. And it's not
that the Germans make bad beer; the Germans make wonderful beer. Whenever my wife and I go to Germany, we
take along an extra suitcase specifically for the purpose of filling it up with bottles of German beer, which we take
back and dole out to ourselves for the year after each of our trips to Germany. Why, then, since the Germans make
such great beer, and since their industrial organization works so successfully for steel and metal, can't they achieve
a successful industrial organization for beer?
It turns out that the German beer industry suffers from small-scale production. There are 1,000 little local beer
companies in Germany, shielded from competition with each other because each German brewery has virtually a
local monopoly, and shielded from competition with imports. The United States has 67 major beer breweries,
producing 23 billion liters of beer per year. Germany has 1,000 major beer breweries, producing only half as much
beer per year as the United States. That's to say that the average brewery in the U.S. produces 31 times more beer
than the average brewery in Germany.

That fact results from German local tastes and German government policies. German beer drinkers are fiercely
loyal to their local brand of beer. And so there is no national brand of beer in Germany, analogous to Budweiser or
Miller or Coors in the United States. Instead, most German beer is consumed within 30 miles of the place where it
is brewed. And any of you who have been in Germany know that Germans love their local beer and loathe the beer
that comes from next door. The result is that the German beer industry cannot profit from economies of scale. In
the beer industry, as in other industries, production costs decrease greatly with size. The bigger the refrigerator unit
for making the beer, and the longer the bottle-filling line, the cheaper is the cost of brewing beer. So these tiny
German beer industries are relatively inefficient. There's no competition; there are just 1,000 local monopolies.

That outcome, of Germans having their local beer loyalties, is reinforced by German government law. The German
government makes it hard for foreign beers to compete on the German market. The German government has so-
called beer purity laws. The German government specifies exactly what can go into beer, and not surprisingly what
can go into beer is what German breweries put into beer, and it's not what American, French, and Swedish
breweries like to put into beer. So it's difficult for foreign breweries to compete on the German beer market. The
result is that German beer is not exported very much. Any of you who like to buy Lowenbrau in the U.S. should look
at the label in the supermarket: your U.S.-bought Lowenbrau is not brewed in Germany, it's brewed on license in
the United States with American productivity and American efficiencies of scale.

The same inefficiency turns out to characterize some other German industries. The German soap industry and the
German consumer electronics industry are also inefficient; their companies are not exposed to competition with
each other, nor are they exposed to foreign competition, and so they do not acquire the best practices of
international industry. But that disadvantage is not true for the German metal-producing industry or steel industry.
There, big German companies compete with each other and they compete internationally, and therefore they are
forced to acquire best international practices through competition.

There you have an example from the German beer industry about the disadvantages of having lots of small groups
that are secretive and don't compete with each other. The other example that I want to tell you about is the
Japanese food-processing industry. I mentioned that we Americans are virtually paranoid about the efficiency of the
Japanese, and it's true for some Japanese industries, but not for their food-processing industry. Japanese
processed food is produced with an efficiency 32% of American processed foods. There are 67,000 food
processing companies in Japan; there are only 21,000 in the United States, although the U.S. has double Japan's
population, so the average food-processing company in the United States is six times bigger than its Japanese
counterpart. What is the reason why the Japanese food-processing industry, like German beer industries, consists
of small companies with local monopolies?

It turns out to be basically the same two reasons as with German beer: namely, local tastes creating local
monopolies, and government policies. The Japanese are fanatics for fresh foods. Any of you who have been to
Japan, as my wife and I were in October, will remember what it says on Japanese containers. In the United States,
when you go to the supermarket, there's one date on the container, the date by which you're supposed to throw
away that bottle of milk. In Japan there are three dates on the container: there's the date when the milk was
manufactured, and there's the date when the milk arrived at the supermarket, and then there's the date when the
milk should be thrown away, and these dates are in big letters; the Japanese really care about the dates. So the
result is that milk production in Japan always starts at one minute past midnight, so that the milk that goes to
market that morning is today's milk. If milk had been produced at 11:59 p.m., the milk company would have to
stamp on its container that this milk was made yesterday, and no Japanese person would buy it. The result is again
that Japanese food-processing industries enjoy local monopolies. Obviously, a milk producer up in Hokkaido,
northern Japan, is not going to be able to compete in Kyushu, in southern Japan, with a Kyushu producer, because
of the several days in transit from Hokkaido. By the time a carton arrives in Kyushu, the people will read on the
container that this milk is three days old, and no Japanese person would buy it.

So that's one thing that creates local monopolies for food production in Japan: Japanese fanaticism about really
fresh food. And the second thing is Japanese government policy, which reinforces these local monopolies. The
Japanese government obstructs the import of foreign processed food by slapping on a ten-day quarantine. And
because the Japanese care about food that was produced that very day, naturally by the time that American beef,
chicken, or whatever arrives at the supermarket and the date says ten days old, the Japanese are not very
enthusiastic about buying those American products. And there are other restrictions that the Japanese government
imposes on foreign imports.

The result is that Japanese food-processing industries are not exposed to domestic competition, they're all local
monopolies, they're not exposed to foreign competition, and they don't learn the best methods in the international
trade for producing food. And the result is that, in Japan, Japanese beef costs $200 a pound. My wife and I had
heard about that before we went to Japan, but what we did not realize until we were brought into a supermarket by
my wife's Japanese cousin is that chicken in Japan costs $25 a pound. The reason the Japanese can get away
with that is that Japanese chicken producers are not exposed to competition with super-efficient American chicken
producers.

Now all those features are not true for some other Japanese industries. The Japanese steel industry, the Japanese
metal industry, the Japanese car industry, their car-part industry, and their electronic industries have productivities
greater than our American counterparts. But the Japanese soap industry, and the Japanese beer industry, and the
Japanese computer industry, like the Japanese food-processing industry, are not exposed to competition, do not
apply the best practices, and so have ended up with productivities below those of corresponding industries in the
United States.

Now let's finally apply these lessons to comparing different industries or industrial belts within the United States. I
mentioned that when I was growing up, Route 128 outside of Boston led the world in productivity for an industrial
belt, but Route 128 has now fallen behind Silicon Valley. Since my book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" was published,
I've spent a lot of time talking with people from Silicon Valley and some from Route 128, and they tell me that the
corporate ethos in these two industrial belts is quite different. Silicon Valley consists of lots of companies that are
fiercely competitive with each other, but nevertheless there's a lot of collaboration, and despite the competition
there is a free flow of ideas and a free flow of people and a free flow of information between these companies that
compete with each other. In contrast, I'm told that the business of Route 128 are much more secretive, and
insulated from each other like Japanese milk-producing companies.

Or again, what about the contrast between Microsoft and IBM? Again, since my book was published, I've acquired
friends at Microsoft, and I've learned about Microsoft's organization, which is quite distinctive. Microsoft has lots of
units, with free communication between units, and each of those units may have five to ten people working in them,
but the units are not micro-managed, they are allowed a great deal of freedom in pursuing their own ideas. That
unusual organization at Microsoft, broken up in to a lot of semi-independent units competing within the same
company, contrasts with the organization at IBM, which until four years ago had much more insulated groups. A
month ago, when I was talking in the industrial belt of North Carolina, the Raleigh-Durham area industrial belt, I met
someone who is on the board of directors of IBM, and that person told me, Jared, what you say about IBM was
quite true until four years ago: IBM did have this secretive organization which resulted in IBM's loss of competitive
ability, but then IBM acquired a new CEO who changed things drastically, and IBM now has a more Microsoft-like
organization, and you can see it, I'm told, in the improvement in IBM's innovativeness.

So what this suggests is that we can extract from human history a couple of principles. First, the principle that really
isolated groups are at a disadvantage, because most groups get most of their ideas and innovations from the
outside. Second, I also derive the principle of intermediate fragmentation: you don't want excessive unity and you
don't want excessive fragmentation; instead, you want your human society or business to be broken up into a
number of groups which compete with each other but which also maintain relatively free communication with each
other. And those I see as the overall principles of how to organize a business and get rich.

But, let me conclude by emphasizing some obvious restrictions. I'm sure all of you are already thinking to
yourselves, "But, but, but, he's forgot — but but but...."— Yes, let's go back to those but-but-buts. One restriction is,
I mentioned at the beginning, "all other things being equal". Obviously the best organization is not going to help
with an idiot as a CEO, and the success of Microsoft certainly depends, at least in part, on the unusual qualities of
Bill Gates, as well as on the unusual organization of Microsoft.

In addition, I've been talking about conditions to maximize productivity and creativity and moneymaking ability.
There are other considerations in organized human groups, and there are conditions under which productivity is not
the thing you're most interested in. There are conditions where more centralization may be appropriate. For
example, during a war, you do not want your air force, army, and navy to be fiercely competing with each other, but
instead you want during a war more centralized control than you do in peace time. And there are also human
groups for which productivity and differential money-making ability are not the overriding consideration. I don't want
you to go home tonight and each of you to say to your spouse or significant other, "Darling, I've just heard this guy
Jared Diamond, who says that within human groups competition is what spurs productivity and innovation, and so I
think we need to follow his advice in our household. For the next month let's see which of us earns a bigger
income, and at the end of the month the bigger income-producer will keep on with the job, and the one of us who
has lower income and is less efficient can turn to scrubbing the floors and shopping at the supermarkets." That just
illustrates: there are other considerations in a marriage than optimizing productivity.

Again, I don't want you to go home to your several children, and say, "Sweetie-pies, I heard this talk today by this
guy Jared Diamond who enunciated some principles that I think would be really good for rearing children. We're
going to see what your grades are at mid-term, and based on those grades, whichever one of you comes closer to
getting all A's, that one we will support to the hilt, private schools, college, whatever you need, whereas those of
you who get poor grades can start jobs as a shoe-shine boy or girl" — No! In a family, and in some other human
groups, productivity is not the appropriate consideration for judging the best organization of the group.

Nevertheless there are some human groups where productivity is indeed a significant consideration. And that
certainly includes businesses, industrial belts, and to a considerable degree, countries. In order to understand how
to organize these businesses, we could perform natural experiments. We could set up, if we were rich enough, a
hundred businesses, organized a hundred different ways, see which businesses went bankrupt, and after 20 years
figure that we now have the correct industrial organization. But that's an inefficient way to do it. We can instead
learn from the comparative approach, by looking to natural experiments of history. I hope that some of you will be
able to apply these lessons to acquiring the wealth that has so far eluded me.
Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000
Years?
A Talk By Jared Diamond
Introduction by John Brockman The biggest question that Jared Diamond is asking

himself is how to turn the study of history into a science. He notes the distinction

between the "hard sciences" such as physics, biology, and astronomy ?and what we

sometimes call the "social sciences," which includes history, economics, government.

The social sciences are often thought of as a pejorative. In particular many of the so-

called hard scientists such as physicists or biologists, don't consider history to be a

science. The situation is even more extreme because, he points out, even historians

themselves don't consider history to be a science. Historians don't get training in the

scientific methods; they don't get training in statistics; they don't get training in the

experimental method or problems of doing experiments on historical subjects; and they'll often say that history is not a science,

history is closer to an art.

Jared comes to this question as one who is accomplished in two scientific areas: physiology and evolutionary biology. The first

is a laboratory science; the second, is never far from history. "Biology is the science," he says. "Evolution is the concept that

makes biology unique."

In his new theories of human development, he brings together history and biology in presenting a global account of the rise of

civilization. In so doing he takes on race-based theories of human development.

"Most people are explicitly racists," he says. "In parts of the world ?so called educated, so-called western society ?we've

learned that it is not polite to be racist, and so often we don't express racist views, but nevertheless I've given lectures on this

subject, and members of the National Academy of Sciences come up to me afterwards and say, but native Australians, they're

so primitive. Racism is one of the big issues in the world today. Racism is the big social problem in the United States."

So why are people racists? According to Jared, racism involves the belief that other people are not capable of being educated.

Or being human ?that they're different from us, and they're less than human. It was through his work in New Guinea for the last

30 years that convinced him that it's not true. "'They' are smarter than we are," he says. But perhaps the main reason why

people resort to racist explanations, he notes, is that they don't have another answer. Until there's a convincing answer why

history really took the course that it did, people are going to fall back on the racist explanation. Jared believes that the big world

impact of his ideas may being in demolishing the basis for racist theories of history and racist views.

Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years?

A Talk By Jared Diamond

I've set myself the modest task of trying to explain the broad pattern of human history, on all the continents, for the last 13,000

years. Why did history take such different evolutionary courses for peoples of different continents? This problem has fascinated

me for a long time, but it's now ripe for a new synthesis because of recent advances in many fields seemingly remote from

history, including molecular biology, plant and animal genetics and biogeography, archaeology, and linguistics.
As we all know, Eurasians, especially peoples of Europe and eastern Asia, have spread around the globe, to dominate the

modern world in wealth and power. Other peoples, including most Africans, survived, and have thrown off European domination

but remain behind in wealth and power. Still other peoples, including the original inhabitants of Australia, the Americas, and

southern Africa, are no longer even masters of their own lands but have been decimated, subjugated, or exterminated by

European colonialists. Why did history turn out that way, instead of the opposite way? Why weren't Native Americans, Africans,

and Aboriginal Australians the ones who conquered or exterminated Europeans and Asians?

This big question can easily be pushed back one step further. By the year A.D. 1500, the approximate year when Europe's

overseas expansion was just beginning, peoples of the different continents already differed greatly in technology and political

organization. Much of Eurasia and North Africa was occupied then by Iron Age states and empires, some of them on the verge

of industrialization. Two Native American peoples, the Incas and Aztecs, ruled over empires with stone tools and were just

starting to experiment with bronze. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa were divided among small indigenous Iron Age states or

chiefdoms. But all peoples of Australia, New Guinea, and the Pacific islands, and many peoples of the Americas and sub-

Saharan Africa, were still living as farmers or even still as hunter/ gatherers with stone tools.

Obviously, those differences as of A.D. 1500 were the immediate cause of the modern world's inequalities. Empires with iron

tools conquered or exterminated tribes with stone tools. But how did the world evolve to be the way that it was in the year A.D.

1500?

This question, too can be easily pushed back a further step, with the help of written histories and archaeological discoveries.

Until the end of the last Ice Age around 11,000 B.C., all humans on all continents were still living as Stone Age hunter/gatherers.

Different rates of development on different continents, from 11,000 B.C. to A.D. 1500, were what produced the inequalities of

A.D. 1500. While Aboriginal Australians and many Native American peoples remained Stone Age hunter/gatherers, most

Eurasian peoples, and many peoples of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, gradually developed agriculture, herding,

metallurgy, and complex political organization. Parts of Eurasia, and one small area of the Americas, developed indigenous

writing as well. But each of these new developments appeared earlier in Eurasia than elsewhere.

So, we can finally rephrase our question about the evolution of the modern world's inequalities as follows. Why did human

development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years? Those differing rates constitute

the broadest pattern of history, the biggest unsolved problem of history, and my subject today.

Historians tend to avoid this subject like the plague, because of its apparently racist overtones. Many people, or even most

people, assume that the answer involves biological differences in average IQ among the world's populations, despite the fact

that there is no evidence for the existence of such IQ differences. Even to ask the question why different peoples had different

histories strikes some of us as evil, because it appears to be justifying what happened in history. In fact, we study the injustices

of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds of murderers

and rapists: not in order to justify history, genocide, murder, and rape, but instead to understand how those evil things came

about, and then to use that understanding so as to prevent their happening again. In case the stink of racism still makes you feel

uncomfortable about exploring this subject, just reflect on the underlying reason why so many people accept racist explanations

of history's broad pattern: we don't have a convincing alternative explanation. Until we do, people will continue to gravitate by

default to racist theories. That leaves us with a huge moral gap, which constitutes the strongest reason for tackling this

uncomfortable subject.
Let's proceed continent-by-continent. As our first continental comparison, let's consider the collision of the Old World and the

New World that began with Christopher Columbus's voyage in A.D. 1492, because the proximate factors involved in that

outcome are well understood. I'll now give you a summary and interpretation of the histories of North America, South America,

Europe, and Asia from my perspective as a biogeographer and evolutionary biologist ?all that in ten minutes; 2_ minutes per

continent. Here we go:

Most of us are familiar with the stories of how a few hundred Spaniards under Cort? and Pizarro overthrew the Aztec and Inca

Empires. The populations of each of those empires numbered tens of millions. We're also familiar with the gruesome details of

how other Europeans conquered other parts of the New World. The result is that Europeans came to settle and dominate most

of the New World, while the Native American population declined drastically from its level as of A.D. 1492. Why did it happen

that way? Why didn't it instead happen that the Emperors Montezuma or Atahuallpa led the Aztecs or Incas to conquer Europe?

The proximate reasons are obvious. Invading Europeans had steel swords, guns, and horses, while Native Americans had only

stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few

dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands.

Nevertheless, steel swords, guns, and horses weren't the sole proximate factors behind the European conquest of the New

World. Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in

advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World's Indian population. Those diseases were

endemic in Europe, and Europeans had had time to develop both genetic and immune resistance to them, but Indians initially

had no such resistance. That role played by infectious diseases in the European conquest of the New World was duplicated in

many other parts of the world, including Aboriginal Australia, southern Africa, and many Pacific islands.

Finally, there is still another set of proximate factors to consider. How is it that Pizarro and Cort? reached the New World at all,

before Aztec and Inca conquistadors could reach Europe? That outcome depended partly on technology in the form of

oceangoing ships. Europeans had such ships, while the Aztecs and Incas did not. Also, those European ships were backed by

the centralized political organization that enabled Spain and other European countries to build and staff the ships. Equally

crucial was the role of European writing in permitting the quick spread of accurate detailed information, including maps, sailing

directions, and accounts by earlier explorers, back to Europe, to motivate later explorers.

So far, we've identified a series of proximate factors behind European colonization of the New World: namely, ships, political

organization, and writing that brought Europeans to the New World; European germs that killed most Indians before they could

reach the battlefield; and guns, steel swords, and horses that gave Europeans a big advantage on the battlefield. Now, let's try

to push the chain of causation back further. Why did these proximate advantages go to the Old World rather than to the New

World? Theoretically, Native Americans might have been the ones to develop steel swords and guns first, to develop

oceangoing ships and empires and writing first, to be mounted on domestic animals more terrifying than horses, and to bear

germs worse than smallpox.

The part of that question that's easiest to answer concerns the reasons why Eurasia evolved the nastiest germs. It's striking that

Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic

diseases that Indians received from the Old World. There are two straightforward reasons for this gross imbalance. First, most

of our familiar epidemic diseases can sustain themselves only in large dense human populations concentrated into villages and

cities, which arose much earlier in the Old World than in the New World. Second, recent studies of microbes, by molecular

biologists, have shown that most human epidemic diseases evolved from similar epidemic diseases of the dense populations of
Old World domestic animals with which we came into close contact. For example, measles and TB evolved from diseases of our

cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native

domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.

Let's now push the chain of reasoning back one step further. Why were there far more species of domesticated animals in

Eurasia than in the Americas? The Americas harbor over a thousand native wild mammal species, so you might initially suppose

that the Americas offered plenty of starting material for domestication.

In fact, only a tiny fraction of wild mammal species has been successfully domesticated, because domestication requires that a

wild animal fulfill many prerequisites: the animal has to have a diet that humans can supply; a rapid growth rate; a willingness to

breed in captivity; a tractable disposition; a social structure involving submissive behavior towards dominant animals and

humans; and lack of a tendency to panic when fenced in. Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large

wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable

additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.

Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the

most wild species to begin with. That preexisting difference was magnified 13,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age, when

most of the large mammal species of North and South America became extinct, perhaps exterminated by the first arriving

Indians. As a result, Native Americans inherited far fewer species of big wild mammals than did Eurasians, leaving them only

with the llama and alpaca as a domesticate. Differences between the Old and New Worlds in domesticated plants, especially in

large-seeded cereals, are qualitatively similar to t hese differences in domesticated mammals, though the difference is not so

extreme.

Another reason for the higher local diversity of domesticated plants and animals in Eurasia than in the Americas is that Eurasia's

main axis is east/west, whereas the main axis of the Americas is north/south. Eurasia's east/west axis meant that species

domesticated in one part of Eurasia could easily spread thousands of miles at the same latitude, encountering the same day-

length and climate to which they were already adapted. As a result, chickens and citrus fruit domesticated in Southeast Asia

quickly spread westward to Europe; horses domesticated in the Ukraine quickly spread eastward to China; and the sheep,

goats, cattle, wheat, and barley of the Fertile Crescent quickly spread both west and east.

In contrast, the north/south axis of the Americas meant that species domesticated in one area couldn't spread far without

encountering day-lengths and climates to which they were not adapted. As a result, the turkey never spread from its site of

domestication in Mexico to the Andes; llamas and alpacas never spread from the Andes to Mexico, so that the Indian

civilizations of Central and North America remained entirely without pack animals; and it took thousands of years for the corn

that evolved in Mexico's climate to become modified into a corn adapted to the short growing season and seasonally changing

day-length of North America.

Eurasia's domesticated plants and animals were important for several other reasons besides letting Europeans develop nasty

germs. Domesticated plants and animals yield far more calories per acre than do wild habitats, in which most species are

inedible to humans. As a result, population densities of farmers and herders are typically ten to a hundred times greater than

those of hunter/gatherers. That fact alone explains why farmers and herders everywhere in the world have been able to push

hunter/gatherers out of land suitable for farming and herding. Domestic animals revolutionized land transport. They also

revolutionized agriculture, by letting one farmer plough and manure much more land than the farmer could till or manure by the

farmer's own efforts. Also, hunter/gatherer societies tend to be egalitarian and to have no political organization beyond the level
of the band or tribe, whereas the food surpluses and storage made possible by agriculture permitted the development of

stratified, politically centralized societies with governing elites. Those food surpluses also accelerated the development of

technology, by supporting craftspeople who didn't raise their own food and who could instead devote themselves to developing

metallurgy, writing, swords, and guns.

Thus, we began by identifying a series of proximate explanations ?guns, germs, and so on ?for the conquest of the Americas by

Europeans. Those proximate factors seem to me ultimately traceable in large part to the Old World's greater number of

domesticated plants, much greater number of domesticated animals, and east/west axis. The chain of causation is most direct

in explaining the Old World's advantages of horses and nasty germs. But domesticated plants and animals also led more

indirectly to Eurasia's advantage in guns, swords, oceangoing ships, political organization, and writing, all of which were

products of the large, dense, sedentary, stratified societies made possible by agriculture.

Let's next examine whether this scheme, derived from the collision of Europeans with Native Americans, helps us understand

the broadest pattern of African history, which I'll summarize in five minutes. I'll concentrate on the history of sub-Saharan Africa,

because it was much more isolated from Eurasia by distance and climate than was North Africa, whose history is closely linked

to Eurasia's history. Here we go again:

Just as we asked why Cort? invaded Mexico before Montezuma could invade Europe, we can similarly ask why Europeans

colonized sub-Saharan Africa before sub-Saharans could colonize Europe. The proximate factors were the same familiar ones

of guns, steel, oceangoing ships, political organization, and writing. But again, we can ask why guns and ships and so on ended

up being developed in Europe rather than in sub-Saharan Africa. To the student of human evolution, that question is particularly

puzzling, because humans have been evolving for millions of years longer in Africa than in Europe, and even anatomically

modern Homo sapiens may have reached Europe from Africa only within the last 50,000 years. If time were a critical factor in

the development of human societies, Africa should have enjoyed an enormous head start and advantage over Europe.

Again, that outcome largely reflects biogeographic differences in the availability of domesticable wild animal and plant species.

Taking first domestic animals, it's striking that the sole animal domesticated within sub-Saharan Africa was [you guess] a bird,

the Guinea fowl. All of Africa's mammalian domesticates ?cattle, sheep, goats, horses, even dogs ?entered sub-Saharan Africa

from the north, from Eurasia or North Africa. At first that sounds astonishing, since we now think of Africa as the continent of big

wild mammals. In fact, none of those famous big wild mammal species of Africa proved domesticable. They were all disqualified

by one or another problem such as: unsuitable social organization; intractable behavior; slow growth rate, and so on. Just think

what the course of world history might have been like if Africa's rhinos and hippos had lent themselves to domestication! If that

had been possible, African cavalry mounted on rhinos or hippos would have made mincemeat of European cavalry mounted on

horses. But it couldn't happen.

Instead, as I mentioned, the livestock adopted in Africa were Eurasian species that came in from the north. Africa's long axis,

like that of the Americas, is north/south rather than east/west. Those Eurasian domestic mammals spread southward very slowly

in Africa, because they had to adapt to different climate zones and different animal diseases.

The difficulties posed by a north/south axis to the spread of domesticated species are even more striking for African crops than

they are for livestock. Remember that the food staples of ancient Egypt were Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean crops like

wheat and barley, which require winter rains and seasonal variation in day length for their germination. Those crops couldn't

spread south in Africa beyond Ethiopia, beyond which the rains come in the summer and there's little or no seasonal variation in
day length. Instead, the development of agriculture in the sub-Sahara had to await the domestication of native African plant

species like sorghum and millet, adapted to Central Africa's summer rains and relatively constant day length.

Ironically, those crops of Central Africa were for the same reason then unable to spread south to the Mediterranean zone of

South Africa, where once again winter rains and big seasonal variations in day length prevailed. The southward advance of

native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn't grow ?with

enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa.

In short, a north/south axis, and a paucity of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication, were decisive in African

history, just as they were in Native American history. Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in

Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north. The resulting

advantages of Europeans in guns, ships, political organization, and writing permitted Europeans to colonize Africa, rather than

Africans to colonize Europe.

Let's now conclude our whirlwind tour around the globe by devoting five minutes to the last continent, Australia. Here we go

again, for the last time.

In modern times, Australia was the sole continent still inhabited only by hunter/gatherers. That makes Australia a critical test of

any theory about continental differences in the evolution of human societies. Native Australia had no farmers or herders, no

writing, no metal tools, and no political organization beyond the level of the tribe or band. Those, of course, are the reasons why

European guns and germs destroyed Aboriginal Australian society. But why had all Native Australians remained

hunter/gatherers?

There are three obvious reasons. First, even to this day no native Australian animal species and only one plant species (the

macadamia nut) have proved suitable for domestication. There still are no domestic kangaroos.

Second, Australia is the smallest continent, and most of it can support only small human populations because of low rainfall and

productivity. Hence the total number of Australian hunter/gatherers was only about 300,000.

Finally, Australia is the most isolated continent. The sole outside contacts of Aboriginal Australians were tenuous overwater

contacts with New Guineans and Indonesians.

To get an idea of the significance of that small population size and isolation for the pace of development in Australia, consider

the Australian island of Tasmania, which had the most extraordinary human society in the modern world. Tasmania is just an

island of modest size, but it was the most extreme outpost of the most extreme continent, and it illuminates a big issue in the

evolution of all human societies. Tasmania lies 130 miles southeast of Australia. When it was first visited by Europeans in 1642,

Tasmania was occupied by 4,000 hunter/gatherers related to mainland Australians, but with the simplest technology of any

recent people on Earth. Unlike mainland Aboriginal Australians, Tasmanians couldn't start a fire; they had no boomerangs, spear

throwers, or shields; they had no bone tools, no specialized stone tools, and no compound tools like an axe head mounted on a

handle; they couldn't cut down a tree or hollow out a canoe; they lacked sewing to make sewn clothing, despite Tasmania's cold

winter climate with snow; and, incredibly, though they lived mostly on the sea coast, the Tasmanians didn't catch or eat fish.

How did those enormous gaps in Tasmanian material culture arise?

The answer stems from the fact that Tasmania used to be joined to the southern Australian mainland at Pleistocene times of low

sea level, until that land bridge was severed by rising sea level 10,000 years ago. People walked out to Tasmania tens of
thousands of years ago, when it was still part of Australia. Once that land bridge was severed, though, there was absolutely no

further contact of Tasmanians with mainland Australians or with any other people on Earth until European arrival in 1642,

because both Tasmanians and mainland Australians lacked watercraft capable of crossing those 130-mile straits between

Tasmania and Australia. Tasmanian history is thus a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction ?namely,

complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years. Tasmania had the smallest and most isolated human population in the

world. If population size and isolation have any effect on accumulation of inventions, we should expect to see that effect in

Tasmania.

If all those technologies that I mentioned, absent from Tasmania but present on the opposite Australian mainland, were invented

by Australians within the last 10,000 years, we can surely conclude at least that Tasmania's tiny population didn't invent them

independently. Astonishingly, the archaeological record demonstrates something further: Tasmanians actually abandoned some

technologies that they brought with them from Australia and that persisted on the Australian mainland. For example, bone tools

and the practice of fishing were both present in Tasmania at the time that the land bridge was severed, and both disappeared

from Tasmania by around 1500 B.C. That represents the loss of valuable technologies: fish could have been smoked to provide

a winter food supply, and bone needles could have been used to sew warm clothes.

What sense can we make of these cultural losses?

The only interpretation that makes sense to me goes as follows. First, technology has to be invented or adopted. Human

societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation. Hence the higher the human population and

the more societies there are on an island or continent, the greater the chance of any given invention being conceived and

adopted somewhere there.

Second, for all human societies except those of totally-isolated Tasmania, most technological innovations diffuse in from the

outside, instead of being invented locally, so one expects the evolution of technology to proceed most rapidly in societies most

closely connected with outside societies.

Finally, technology not only has to be adopted; it also has to be maintained. All human societies go through fads in which they

temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use. Whenever such economically

senseless taboos arise in an area with many competing human societies, only some societies will adopt the taboo at a given

time. Other societies will retain the useful practice, and will either outcompete the societies that lost it, or else will be there as a

model for the societies with the taboos to repent their error and reacquire the practice. If Tasmanians had remained in contact

with mainland Australians, they could have rediscovered the value and techniques of fishing and making bone tools that they

had lost. But that couldn't happen in the complete isolation of Tasmania, where cultural losses became irreversible.

In short, the message of the differences between Tasmanian and mainland Australian societies seems to be the following. All

other things being equal, the rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, i n areas occupied by many

competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere. If this interpretation is correct, then it's likely

to be of much broader significance. It probably provides part of the explanation why native Australians, on the world's smallest

and most isolated continent, remained Stone Age hunter/ gatherers, while people of other continents were adopting agriculture

and metal. It's also likely to contribute to the differences that I already discussed between the farmers of sub-Saharan Africa, the

farmers of the much larger Americas, and the farmers of the still larger Eurasia.
Naturally, there are many important factors in world history that I haven't had time to discuss in 40 minutes, and that I do discuss

in my book. For example, I've said little or nothing about the distribution of domesticable plants (3 chapters); about the precise

way in which complex political institutions and the development of writing and technology and organized religion depend on

agriculture and herding; about the fascinating reasons for the differences within Eurasia between China, India, the Near East,

and Europe; and about the effects of individuals, and of cultural differences unrelated to the environment, on history. But it's now

time to summarize the overall meaning of this whirlwind tour through human history, with its unequally distributed guns and

germs.

The broadest pattern of history ?namely, the differences between human societies on different continents ?seems to me to be

attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to biological differences among peoples themselves. In

particular, the availability of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication, and the ease with which those species

could spread without encountering unsuitable climates, contributed decisively to the varying rates of rise of agriculture and

herding, which in turn contributed decisively to the rise of human population numbers, population densities, and food surpluses,

which in turn contributed decisively to the development of epidemic infectious diseases, writing, technology, and political

organization. In addition, the histories of Tasmania and Australia warn us that the differing areas and isolations of the continents,

by determining the number of competing societies, may have been another important factor in human development.

As a biologist practicing laboratory experimental science, I'm aware that some scientists may be inclined to dismiss these

historical interpretations as unprovable speculation, because they're not founded on replicated laboratory experiments. The

same objection can be raised against any of the historical sciences, including astronomy, evolutionary biology, geology, and

paleontology. The objection can of course be raised against the whole field of history, and most of the other social sciences.

That's the reason why we're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is

considered not quite scientific.

But remember that the word "science" isn't derived from the Latin word for "replicated laboratory experiment," but instead from

the Latin word "scientia" for "knowledge." In science, we seek knowledge by whatever methodologies are available and

appropriate. There are many fields that no one hesitates to consider sciences even though replicated laboratory experiments in

those fields would be immoral, illegal, or impossible. We can't manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls;

we can't start and stop ice ages, and we can't experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs. Nevertheless, we can still gain

considerable insight into these historical fields by other means. Then we should surely be able to understand human history,

because introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways

of past dinosaurs. For that reason I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest

patterns of human history.