ABSTRACT
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel is unlikely to continue being influential in itself- the arguments are not generally taken seriously by other anthropologists or sociologists, who consider it to be either mistaken in its facts, or mistaken in its overall mission to do history as science. Diamond has written increasingly about culture and methodology. The classical historian Ian Morris, however, has written two books recently that push the Guns, Germs, and Steel hypothesis forward. His book Why the West Rules- For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future attempts to bridge the gap between long- and short-term approaches to global history. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel was both a timely and a controversial book. He aimed to present a view of history that went beyond simple, obvious explanations of why the world is the way it is- and particularly why "the West" is so powerful.
