Nature & Animals Quote by Jared Diamond

"Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with"

Jared Diamond, Author

About this Quote

Diamond’s line is doing something sneakier than a geography lesson: it’s smuggling an argument about power into the seemingly neutral language of biology. By pointing to Eurasia’s sheer size and “offered” abundance of wild species, he frames domestication as a kind of historical lottery with stacked odds, not a civilizational virtue badge. The intent is corrective: to pull readers away from the lazy story that some societies “advanced” because they were smarter, harder-working, or more innovative, and toward a story where the starting conditions mattered brutally.

The subtext is an implicit rebuke to triumphalist narratives of Western dominance. If Eurasia had more candidates for domestication, then food surpluses, dense settlements, specialized labor, and eventually armies and bureaucracies are downstream effects of ecology. That’s why the sentence keeps its tone cool and quantitative. It invites you to feel the explanatory relief of a clean, systemic cause, while quietly detonating the moral comfort of “they deserved to win.”

Context matters because this is Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel mode: broad, accessible, almost stubbornly materialist. The phrasing “ended up with” is key. It downplays agency without erasing it, positioning history as constrained choice rather than pure accident. Critics often flag this move as edging toward determinism, flattening local ingenuity and political contingency. But rhetorically, the simplification is the point: Diamond wants a big lever that can move a very large narrative, turning conquest from a story of inherent superiority into a story of uneven resources and cascading consequences.

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About the Author

Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is a Author from USA.

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