Here is url of wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond
considerable bias
He is scientist and author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel ".
In this book, he write about why many of Europian and American are rich and many of south islands people are still poor.
He think this answer rely on where they lived in, so he think human race is not influence for our live and no ability gap among races.
Additional Exercises
1 - Choose one of the Race readings from the ELA reader for this semester.
Race without colors
2 - Conduct a Background Wikipedia search for ‘Race’ and check Wikipedia’s rating of the Race article.
wikiproject sociology,Anthropology, Ethnic groups Rated B-class, High-importance
3
- Identify the various different competing positions / views held by
experts in this area and the reasons why they hold these views.
Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee (1991/2004), Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005). Originally trained in physiology,
4 - Conduct a Biography search of the writer of the Race reading you chose.
An
interesting book, which tries to explain the emergence of western
civilization as the dominant culture in our times. Revealing though it
is; it failed to explain a lot that defied the views postulated. A great
read though. Collapse, Disciples of Fortune, The Third Chimpanzee are
other interesting books to read.
5 - Try to identify a Bias in that writer’s work.
In this book, he write about why many of Europian and American are rich and many of south islands people are still poor.
He
think this answer rely on where they lived in, so he think human race
is not influence for our live and no ability gap among races.
6 - Search for that writer’s articles and books on Amazon.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition by Jared Diamond (Jan 4, 2011)
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond (Dec 31, 2012)
7 - Read the reviews, endorsements and critiques of their work on the Amazon reviews.
322 of 347 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
I
think some of the reviewers here didn't read the book closely enough to
understand the context of some of Diamond's arguments. He never says
that biogeographical effects are the ONLY causes history. His main
purpose is the search for the ultimate, extremely general causes for the
broadest of trends in human history and prehistory.
By
the time the Mongols roared across Asia, or the Moguls invaded India,
many cultures around the world already changed so much that bioregional
factors, though seminal in the creation of these broadest trends,
weren't nearly as important as the political, religious and economic
ones. He is not ignoring religion and so on but, he states plainly
several times that isn't his focus. He is looking for ultimate
causes--before humans had extremely advanced mental concepts like
religion.
He
also wanted to point out the devastating influence of disease on
history. It was surely the European germs that did most of the
conquering of Native Americans. The guns and horses were almost
incidental. Later on, once Europeans had established themselves, then we
can focus on economic and political systems. But we can't ignore the
effects of the diseases unleashed on the Americas. These plagues gave
the Europeans a very lucky boost that catapulted them beyond the wealth
and power of China, India or the Middle East--long before the Industrial
Revolution made this gap obvious.
Another
thing that some people seem to be having trouble with is his assertions
about the native intelligence of tribal peoples around the world. (If
you read the book, you notice that he is not just saying this about the
New Guineans.)
He
takes pains to point out what he means by this. He not talking about
some mysterious genetic superiority of tribal peoples. It's all straight
up culture. Tribal culture forces people to be better generalists than
they'd have to be in literate civilizations. They can't rely on embedded
support structures like books for memory or experts for obscure fields.
They have to be pretty good at a lot things. Otherwise they die. They
have to be better at memorizing things because they can't count on
computers or books to remember things for them. Living in a dangerous,
wild environment makes them cautious and aware of all that is going on
around them. That was all he meant. The circumstance of tribal peoples
force them, only in very broad ways and only on an individual basis, to
be smarter and more curious than civilized people.
And
in the end it does them no good. Because civilized societies are
SMARTER than tribal societies. That is why tribal society has been
steadily disappearing over the millenia. They just can't compete.
Finally,
of course the book is repetitive. In fact he sums up his argument in
the preface of the book. You needn't even read the rest if you don't
want to. The rest of the book consists of him reiterating his points
from different angles to point out the objections he has managed to
answer and the many questions that still remain. He is just following
scholarly practice and exposition--just to make things clear that he has
thought about this.
He
knows that his theory can't explain everything. In the epilog he points
out that China, India and the Middle East are good counter examples to
his idea. They each had an expansionist rise to great power--a time when
they were unafraid to try new ideas and explore new ways of doing
things. If the highly complex forces of economics, politics, religion
had arrayed themselves differently. We might all be speaking Arabic now.
Or Cantonese. Europe was just lucky to be in the right place at the
right time for things to come together as they did.
8 - Do a google search of the article plus the word review and see what other results you can find.
We can find the below contents.
Imperial
Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and
class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling.
Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle
for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships
between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence,
domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism
within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.
9 - Read the article and put it in context using the results above.
In
modern world, society is fragile because all people become in trouble
when partial people become in trouble, and we should do anything to the
race problem we can one by one.
