John Diamond Robert WrightEvolution of Societies
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Motivation and Competition
When we look at today's global happenings between nations, the way transportation and communications have made every country in close proximity to all cultures sharing this planet, many of our boarders appear in many parts of the world to be in a constant state of flux. So what makes one society more productive than another even today?
Diamond, estimates that most people's answer to Yali's question is either innate biological differences (basic racist theory i.e. "white superiority") or evolutionary Darwinism: the most advanced people have developed from natural selectionmore primitive people are "evolutionary vestiges" leftovers and dead-ends. His belief is that all people and nations have the same innate potential for economic development and success, but the timing and degree of development has been affected/altered by such diverse elements as the size and shape of continents, climatic variations, biodiversity, the availability of animals and crops for domestication, the opportunity for cultural exchange, etc.
As Diamond summarizes at the end of Part 2, He states "the faster spread of Eurasian agriculture, played a rolein the more rapid diffusion of Eurasian writing, metallurgy, technology and empires." He then proceeds to use that premise as a springboard for developing the "Guns, Germs, and Steel portion of his book. Which acknowledges the effects of the close geographical proximity of vying empires within Europe.
The part of all this which is much less touched upon in the single chapter (Yali's Question, from guns germs and steel) is the human motivation factor...