How Geography and Botony Determine World History In GGS, Diamond poses a simple set of related questions: What factors allowed Europeans to colonize so much of the world?
What factors contributed to wide disparities in technology and military capabilities? Why didn’t sub-Saharan Africans supplant the Native Europeans and bring millions of slaves from North America to work their farms? The book’s title gives away the proximate causes. Europeans had suffered from plague, smallpox, measles, TB, influenza, yellow fever, typhus and other diseases for centuries. With each wave of disease, the surviving Europeans produced a more resilient population through processes of natural selection. At the same time, viruses that killed off their hosts too quickly or at too high a rate failed to reproduce themselves. Diamond writes that, “why syphilis was first definitely recorded in 1495, its pustules often covered the body from the head to the knees, caused flesh to fall off of people’s faces, and led to death within a few months.” Hosts of this STD would, therefore, encounter a great deal of trouble trying to pass it on. “By 1546,” says Diamond, “it had evolved into t
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