ABSTRACT
Jared Diamond frames the core question of Guns, Germs, and Steel in terms of a question put to him by a New Guinean named Yali, a friend of Diamond's and a local politician. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond writes that he sets his own argument against those based, like Ellsworth Huntington's, on racial pseudo-science- non-scientific arguments that adopt the language of science. "Probably the commonest explanation" for the different levels of development between Europe and the rest of the world, he writes, "involves implicitly or explicitly assuming biological differences among peoples". Immanuel Wallerstein's "world systems theory" was one of the key explanations of different levels of development. "In the geo-economically peripheral areas of the emerging world-economy", he continued, "there were two principal activities: mines and agriculture". Resources from these mines and plantations were forcibly transported back to the core nations.
