How accurate or supported is Jared Diamond's “Guns, Germs, and Steel”?

Question

Jared Diamond wrote a fascinating book that purports to explain, in a very broad way, the development of civilization. It has several explanations for the development of Eurasian civilization rather than American civilization.

Domesticated Animals: In Eurasia, there were several large domesticated animals, including the cow and horse. This had advantage for animal-powered farming and transportation, as well as infecting the Eurasians with numerous diseases the Americans had no resistance to. Diamond places great importance on diseases in human development, and likens the results of making contact with a more diseased civilization to being digested.

Direction of Expansion It's easier for a civilization to expand in a roughly east-west direction than a north-south direction, since climate is more similar east-to-west (an example would be the lack of horses in South Africa until imported by sea, since they couldn't go by land through the tse-tse fly zone). Eurasia extends more east-west, and America more north-south, as does Africa.

Food Production Wheat is a better grain than corn, in terms of nutrition supplied per unit effort.

There are other factors, but it's at least a well-written book, and superficially plausible.

How accurate, well-supported, and well-regarded is this book?

Answer 1

I'm not an expert but I thought it was a bit uncritical.
Yes it's a popular account but it did have an air of 'here's my theory, here are only examples that support it'

The disease bit works both ways, both sides meeting get exposed to some interesting new diseases. The various medieval plagues came to europe from China, it wasn't only europeans taking diseases to the new world.

There are barriers to east-west trade and migration as well. It's not like there is a continual strip of identical farms and villages from Spain to China. Getting a spice caravan west-east across the Sarah or Arabia is no easier than getting one north-south to sub-Saharan africa. If you can trade silk and spices between Britain and China in the middle ages I don't see how it's impossible to do the same between New Mexico and central America.

IIRC the book doesn't give much importance to sea travel. Perhaps it was the number of protected and easily sailed waters between civilisations around the Mediterranean, and Arabian gulf and later the North sea that boosted trade. Perhaps the Incas,Astecs and North American tribes had less access to the sea, and less friendly oceans to sail on

Answer 2

The Wikipedia entry on the book is pretty thorough. Guns, Germs, and Steel is definitely controversial, because Diamond is writing from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist, and essentially is arguing that history is if not wholly determined by geography, at least heavily influenced by it.

From the Wikipedia entry:

Guns, Germs and Steel met with a wide range of response, ranging from generally favorable to rejection of its approach. In 1998 it won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, in recognition of its powerful synthesis of many disciplines, and the Royal Society's Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books. The National Geographic Society produced a documentary by the same title based on the book, and it was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.