A fascinating and essential book on the nature of human progress I didn’t read Jared Diamond’s Germs, Guns, and Steel when it was first published in 1997. The author and his 500-page tome had won so many prizes (a Pulitzer and a MacArthur “genius” grant, to name a few), and garnered such glowing praise, I managed to convince myself I’d absorbed the book’s argument without actually having read the thing. Let’s see: successful societies get that way because their members have created more sophisticated technologies and built up better resistance to epidemic diseases. Well, yes, but not so fast or easy. Germs, Guns, and Steel is a fascinating, difficult, and essential book.

Diamond’s titular thesis is less important to the work than his greater question: Why did only certain cultures develop such strengths? Or, to borrow his own examples, why did the Incas surrender to the Spanish invaders, rather than the Spanish capitulating to the Incas? Why didn’t West African slave traders raid the coasts of England and Portugal for captives, rather than vice versa?

After examining millennia of history, Diamond concludes that the continent of Eurasia was, for reasons of geography, climate and natural selection, more suited than Africa or the Americas to farming, large mammal domestication, and (therefore) the development of settled and subsequently inventive populations. In conclusion: Eurasians and their descendants have maintained power for most of human history because their ancestors happened to be born near tameable wild horses and nourishing wheat, rather than violent rhinoceri and protein-poor corn.

Those of us who were cognizant way back in the dark ages of the mid 90′s remember The Bell Curve, a book that posited a theory of individual success based in part on IQ differences between different kinds of people, most notably blacks and whites. Throughout Germs, Guns, and Steel, Diamond repeatedly maintains that the inequalities of human progress and, therefore, material and cultural success have nothing to do with race, skin color or skin color. Germs and The Bell Curve were first published within a few years of each other, and Diamond was, in part, delivering a fierce polemic against such racist claims.

As I listened to Diamond’s repeated assertions that human progress has more to do with the viability of certain large-grained cereal crops than the farmers’ complexions, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much the discourse has changed in the brief time since the book’s publication — and Diamond may claim some credit for that. However, Germs is no less important now. In many ways, as the speed of globalization increases exponentially, this book feels more relevant than ever.