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Diamond is not a historian and lacks Landes's mastery of traditional historiography and economic thought. But Diamond's interdisciplinarity is impressive as he explores the recent work of anthropologists, linguists, evolutionary biologists, geologists, and geneticists. At the outset, Diamond and Landes appear to be in fundamental agreement. For both, geography matters! But while both recognize the importance of geography (and, by extension, climate and environment), they treat its influence differently. For Landes, geography provides the fundamental backdrop for the human drama; whereas for Diamond, geography is far more deterministic, as implied by his use of the word fates in his subtitle.
To be sure, Landes sees a clear link between geography and inequalities in the development of societies: geography conveys "an unpleasant truth[:] … nature like life is unfair, unequal in its favors[;] … nature's unfairness is not easily remedied." What distinguishes the two approaches is how significant factors other than geography enter into consideration. Landes places far more importance on the influence of culture and individual human agency on historical development. While it should not be dismissed as simple geographic determinism, Diamond's environmental-evolutionary focus does minimize the roles of culture and individual human agency in history. Diamond believes that scholars, especially historians, have failed to address the important question of the overall pattern of history.
At their best, historians deal with only the proximate factors underlying the broadest patterns of history: guns, germs, and steel (Diamond's shorthand for such things as military and maritime technology, political organization, writing, and epidemic diseases). Diamond's goal is to use his expertise in a variety of scientific disciplines to shed light on the deeper factors underlying human history. In a word, his key to understanding the sweep of the past is the environment. "History followed different courses for different peoples," Diamond contends, "because of differences among people's environments, not because of biological differences among the peoples themselves." All peoples have basically the same ability to confront nature, but nature has not dealt all peoples equal environments.
Diamond emphasizes four crucial environmental variables that have shaped history: (1) the number of wild plants and animals available for domestication into crops and livestock, (2) the rates of intra-continental technological diffusion, (3) the rates of inter-continental technological diffusion, and (4) the difference in total population size and geographic area amongst the continents.
Food production was indirectly the prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel. Consequently, geographic/environmental variations determined whether or when peoples of different continents became farmers and herders rather than hunter-gatherers. That development explains to a large extent their contrasting fates. Domestication of wild plant and animal species was fundamental for dense human populations and settled existence. It permitted food surpluses, which sustained non-food-producing specialists like kings, bureaucrats, and professional soldiers. In short, farmers "tend to breathe out nastier germs, to own better weapons and armor, to own more-powerful technology … , and to live under centralized governments with literate elites better able to wage wars of conquest."
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