Guns Germs And Steel

I mentioned The ForestPeople and The MountainPeople to my manager: they are listed in the bibliography of ExtremeProgrammingExplainedEmbraceChange. He told me that Guns, Germs and Steel was a book that he would read from time to time and found it thought provoking. Has anyone read this book? Is there any applicability to XP?

-- JohnMerk

Any applicability to Xp I'll leave to others, but I have read the book and found it fascinating. What has interested me most is not so much the book itself, but responses to it from left-wing culture-studies types. The thesis of GGS is that "civilization" took hold in the Levant first, then spread and developed most rapidly in Eurasia largely because of geographical and ecological co-incidences; dumb luck, in other words. And having received this bounty, the populations there made the most of it through straightforward biological drives.

This irks a large number of people who have made a living over the last thirty years by suggesting that, for example, it was Europeans that took over large chunks of Africa, and not vice versa, because we (speaking as a white male European) are just evil imperialists.

This is a horrible strawman. On one hand, people who criticize imperialism fully understand that there were technological and social inequities that made it possible. And on the other hand, Diamond only attempts to explain the inequities, which is not the same thing as justifying their results. I suspect the irked people you describe don't actually exist.

Political overtones apart, there are some concepts explained in the book that could perhaps be of some significance for the programming community. The first is that European and Asian civilizations evolved at a faster rate because they could communicate, so that new inventions could spread from one to the others (some kind of network effect). The second is connected to the different evolution of mechanical arts in Europe and in China: in China, where there has been a central government for centuries, new inventions were more susceptible to censure (for example, clockworks were banned for religious reasons). In Europe, where there were many, small, different states, such censure was much harder to implement. When thinkers incurred the ire of a king, they could flee and seek refuge in other kingdoms. When Columbus was denied founds for his travel by the Portugal king, he went to Spain (and had the king of Spain been uninterested, there were France, England, Holland, etc.); in China, when an Emperor decided that overseas exploration was not to be funded, they stopped doing it. That means that diversity is good.

The point is that it is intended to be the opposite of a political book. It explains why, for simple, material, geographical reasons why farming (and then technology) took off in some places and not in others. I, for one, found it a profoundly liberating book. It explains why social orders ended up as they are - nothing to do with inequality of races, just inequality of geography.

For me the main theme of the book is that major technological innovations (such as farming) are not planned or even envisioned. They arise spontaneously over time from a lot of small decisions made by individuals. Farming took almost two thousand years to invent. Most plant species are surprisingly unsuitable for domestication. Plant breeding began unintentionally on the dung heaps of hunter-gatherer tribes. Yet farming brought about massive changes to human society -- the house, the village, social stratification, etc. Even population rates changed since settled families could breed faster (didn't need to carry the tots around anymore).

The implication for software is that similar evolutionary forces are at work. Huge changes are likely, and they cannot be controlled (by governments, M$, etc).

There's 3 different instances of this listed on Amazon. ISBN 0393317552 is the paperback one.

Which are different again to that listed on Amazon UK (ISBN 0099302780 )

CategoryBook