PrologueKey Terms/Ideas: Yali Question: Why did some parts of the world develop and change at a much faster rate than other parts of the world? Why did Europeans end up with all the weapons, germs and steel that allowed them to conquer the world? Ultimate factors: things that were naturally found in a place, environmental factors. Proximate Factors: Things that were derived or created because of ultimate factors. Arguments: The reason Jared Diamond wrote this book was to answer Yali's question. Yali's initial question was: "Why did you white people develop so many goods and bring them to New Guinea, when we black people had few goods of our own?" » (14). The author approached this question in a more general sense, wanting to discover what factors contributed to certain areas becoming more developed and complex than others. Diamond believes that the answer to this question is not as simple as one might think. He argues that biological differences are not a factor, because people living in places like New Guinea are actually more intelligent than those living in societies where a person survives because they are immune to a disease. In New Guinea, more intelligent people are more likely to survive and people have more active childhoods, making New Guineans genetically superior to more populous and advanced societies. Because Diamond believes that the common theories that attempt to answer Yali's question are invalid, he believes that there is no correct common answer to the question and feels the need to write this book. Diamond's short sentence (a sentence that sums up the entire book) is: "History has taken different courses among peoples because of differences in people's environments, not because of biological differences... ... middle of paper ...... (several types of plants they contain) rather than monoculture as found in the Old World. .So why have we been able to completely change and domesticate some crops (like the almond tree) while others (like the acorn) remain undomesticated to this day? Well, according to Diamond, oak trees grow slowly, have evolved to be squirrel-friendly, and their bitterness is controlled by several genes. Critical Analysis: Diamond seems to take an unnecessarily long time to get to the point of his argument. It's almost as if Diamond is trying to show off his knowledge rather than getting straight to the point, which makes the book unnecessarily long and boring when it's actually an interesting topic. However, it is probably good that he supports his argument with facts. I think what Diamond says is actually quite interesting, but it would be more compelling if it wasn't so long..