Jeremy ’s Reviews > Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years > Status Update

Many germs have had to evolve tricks to let them spread between potential victims, and many of those tricks are what we experience as “symptoms of disease.” We’ve evolved counter-tricks of our own, to which the germs have responded by involving counter – counter tricks. We and our pathogens are now locked in an escalating of illusionary contests.

The lethal gift of livestock.
The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history-smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, making diseases decisive shapers of history.

Chapter on Zebras and unhappy marriages outlines why some bigger mammals weren’t ever domesticated. Reasons are: The animals diet, growth rate, mating habits, disposition, tendency to panic, and several distinct features of social organization.

Other things that affected the evolution of wild plants into crops include the wild mechanisms for the dispersal of seeds.
Farmers selected from among individual plants on the basis not only of perceptible qualities like size and taste, but also of invisible features like seed dispersal mechanisms, germination inhibition ( mutant seeds ) and reproductive biology.

Occasional individual almond trees have a mutation in a single gene that prevents them from synthesizing the bitter – tasting amygdalin.
And that’s the only reason almonds could be eaten and harvested. Wow

Human latrines, like those of aardvarks, may have been a testing ground of the first unconscious crop breeders. The trains are merely one of the many places where we accidentally sew the seeds of wild plants that we eat. Thus, our spittoons and garbage dumps joined our latrines to form the first agricultural research laboratories.

While some plant species have seeds adapted for being carried by the wind or for floating on water, many others to trick an animal into carrying their seeds, by wrapping the seed in a tasty fruit and advertising the fruits ripeness by its color or smell. The hungry animal plucks and swallows the fruit, walks or flies off, and then spits out or defecates the seed somewhere far from its parent tree.

Plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence denser human populations. This lead to the development of settled, politically centralized, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies. Thus empires, literacy, and steel weapons developed earliest in Eurasia. Military uses of horses and camels, killing power of animal-derived germs.

Summary of this book: history followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.