Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Guns Germs and Steel


Jared Diamond, professor at UCLA in biology.  He also likes to study birds.  He makes regular trips to Papua New Guinea, he is a regular bird expert of the island. He also takes interest in the people and their lives, he learned several of their languages and learned most about the birds from them. People have been living there for 40,000 years. A man asked him "why you white men have so much cargo and we new Guineans have so little?" Diamond did not know how to answer. But the question is, why are they still " stuck in the past" while the rest of the world is moving forward? They have the intelligence and skill, they are very clever and self sufficient.  One reason might be that they just don’t have a lot of the tools to do what they need.