Civilizations have progressed by propagating knowledge....

I am reading a book called: Guns, Germs & Steel (A short history of humans in last 10,000 years) by Jared Diamond. The author is an evolutionary biologist who wrote this pulitzer winning book about world history..

I hav read 60% & i must say im impressed! While typical books on history provide just data, Diamond actually discusses the mechanism of evolution & its implications. Being a landscape architect, the part about plant evolution due to introduction is most intriguing for me.

But there's more, especially something that will have Thomas Friedman (a personal favorite) running for his money! Diamond has deduced that the world over, the civilizations that invented writing & allowed it to filter to the common people were the ones that progressed faster. When he talks about relative rates of evolution among peoples of the world, he discusses the advent of farming (as crop science), the advent of society (as social structure), the advent of writing (as knowledge dissemination) and finally politics (as a method of super-hierarchical governance).

Using these tools, and their comparative analysis across various peoples, he tries to find evolution rates. Now, we all know that Gutenberg can be partially congratulated for the Renaissance explosion of science, but Diamond goes much further into prehistory to unravel how the West Asians had much geographical advantage which led to their societal structure. This in turn allowed innovation.

Writing was invented independantly in 3-4 places, but none had the same effect as that in Eurasia. This is because, in Eurasia, writing was used by the common man (at a later date), as compared to other cultures, where it stayed in the hands of the elite. Writing allowed ease of learning & dissemination of knowledge. Diamond points out an important fact that no invention has been undertaken by one person only. He goes on to list 19th century inventions like steam engine, automobile & aeroplane, where the now credited inventors learned tremendously from the research of their peers & elders. This is an important point, stressing the dissemination of knowledge.

More importantly, Diamond goes on to show that when knowledge was available freely, the rate of growth of civilizations was phenomenal compared to other civilizations (im comparing decades versus centuries here!!!). For example, grammar was polished in a few centuries in Eurasia, whereas it took thousands of years to develop in Mesoamerica, and most of their original script still stayed primitive in grammatical proficiency. West Asia also obtained written accounts of inventions from east & west both, and used it to their advantage, such that the Islamic world was at the fore of invention, knowledge & military strength from crusades till the 14th century (after which Europe took over).

I have still not finished the book, but i need not write more. I think this is definitely a collector's edition!