Germs make us “sick” in order to pass themselves from one host to another for example, coughing is a strategy by which a germ can transfer through the air to a new host. This leads to a key question: why was the exchange of nasty germs between Europe and the Americas so unequal? To answer this, Diamond considers why some microbes make us sick and others don’t, why many diseases run in epidemics, and how diseases pass from humans to animals. This third section will explore how the ultimate cause, food production, led to more proximate causes such as germs, literacy, technology, and centralized government.ĭiseases were a crucial proximate cause of domination by one society over another in the majority of wars, most deaths were caused not by warfare itself but by the exchange of diseases. The advantages that do distinguish these men come from factors related to their differing strategies for food production: societies with agriculture have denser populations, breathe out nastier germs, own better weapons, and live in centralized governments with elites who can wage war. If a farmer and a hunter-gatherer fought each other one-on-one and naked, for example, neither one would have a large advantage over the other. It is only an ultimate cause, or a basic prerequisite for certain other factors that directly determined modern differences. However, food production is not a proximate cause. In the second section, Diamond explained the ways in which food production contributed to differences in ancient societies.
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