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Guns Germs And Steel Discussion Questions

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Guns, Germs, & Steel questions 1. Yali’s question is “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” In this statement, Yali is questioning why different races and civilizations developed differently. He is curious to see if one races intelligence is superior to the others, and if perhaps that explains why technology was introduced to europeans faster than others. (14) 2. Three main objections to answering Yali’s question are its justification to domination, the eurocentric approach to history, and conveys the idea that civilization is crucial for human happiness. (18) 3. Eurocentric means focused on european life. 4. Diamond’s theory that New Guineans are more innately intelligent than Europeans stems from the idea that they are more in tune with their surroundings. They have a natural alertness and interest that many europeans lack. These people also did not live in densely populated areas, which disease could easily become rampant, opposed to Europeans who did. Europeans in turn were developing genes that protected their bodies versus genes that enhanced the mind. Also, in the past 100 years or so, Western society has been using passive entertainment to please the mind. Diamond believes this could correlate to intelligent rate. He believes this because many westerners end up not conversing with other people and don’t understand human nature as well as a New Guinean, who does not have passive entertainment, might. (20) …show more content…

An example of passive entertainment is watching TV. Americans have a better opportunity to experience passive entertainment because we are surrounded by it constantly. We have easy access to it, therefore we use it much more

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