Structurally, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a novel humanistic masterpiece that has pioneered a discipline of historical research.

On many questions, Diamond gave reasoned answers and analyses to many historical events with his genius ideas.

But there are actually many mistakes in this book, especially in the description of the East, he is obviously guided by many mistakes, or in other words, he simply analyzes history with the central idea of Western superiority.

Therefore, in Zhou Nan's view, in addition to the novelty of this book, the academic achievement is not high.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is a major advance in understanding human society, documenting the causes of the modern world and its many inequalities. It is a book of surprising new discoveries that will strongly captivate the reader even when challenging conventional views.

Why did it be the Eurasian people who conquered, drove away, or killed Indians, Australians, and Africans en masse, and not the other way around? Why are wheat and corn, cattle and pigs, and some of the other "remarkable" crops and livestock of the modern world present in these particular regions and not in other regions?

Agriculture and grazing occur in local areas, and this is only part of the explanation for the different fates of different ethnic groups. The rate at which food production travels outward from these earliest centres varies, much to do with other climatic and geographical characteristics, such as the different sizes, locations and even shapes of the continents. Societies that developed beyond the hunter-gatherer stage were more likely to develop writing, technology, government, organized religion – and at the same time more likely to develop vicious germs and powerful weapons of war.

It is some of these ethnic groups that venture out on the sea and land, expanding into new homes at the expense of other peoples. The most familiar example is the European conquest of non-European peoples over the past 500 years.

What began as a search for precious metals and spices by sea often led to invasions of indigenous lands and the mass extermination of indigenous populations through massacres and diseases.

But before that, similar population replacement, which is not familiar to many, had begun much earlier in Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and other landowners around the world.

Throughout history, there has been one question that all researchers cannot avoid: why does the West dominate the world?

In fact, there was no market for this idea before the eighteenth century, and before 1750, even Europeans still believed that the center of the world was in Asia, in China.

Before 1750, the world's population was only one billion, but most of it was in Asia, in East Asia centered on ancient China, and radiated to the major peninsulas and archipelagos of Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.

How many people are there in Europe? There are less than 100 million people in full fights. But why did the smaller Europeans end up at the top of human society?

This history is the result of a comprehensive analysis of the politics, culture, and economy of the two places by historians who have analyzed this history. There are two schools of thought that have been at odds, namely the long-term destination theory and the short-term contingent theory.

At the present time in 1947, it is mainly the world of the long-term destined theorists.

Beginning in 1750, the West, which had received the resources of Africa and the Americas, gradually moved to the front of the East because of its industrial and technological development.

Even though World War II has almost turned Europe into ruins, there is no fault line in the knowledge system for human beings, and they still look down on Asia with a sense of superiority if modern civilization is desert.

The long-term doomists believe that since prehistoric times, a key factor has made the East and the West distinct, and thus determined that the Industrial Revolution must have taken place in the West.

As to what this key factor is, and how it is starting to play a role, there is a fierce disagreement within the long-term faction. Such as material factors such as climate, topography, natural resources. and intangible factors such as culture, politics or religion. People who emphasize material factors tend to look at the time it takes for factors to come into play

One of the most famous versions is that Europeans possessed unparalleled cultural superiority, even down to the Bible.

The intellectuals of the 18th century rediscovered a source, arguing that two thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks had created a culture characterized by reason, innovation and freedom that had set Europeans apart.

They admit that the Oriental people have their own culture, but the traditions of the East are disorderly, conservative and hierarchical, and cannot match the ideas of the West. From this, their answer is because they have a superior culture.

This distinction between Western rationality and Eastern sensibility was the main reason for the final victory of the West.

By 1900, Eastern intellectuals struggling with the economic and military superiority of the West were often the last to accept this argument.

Today, in 1947, this doctrine has monopolized the entire academic world.

But Zhou Nan is different, he has a mind that transcends this world for seventy years.

In the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, the rise of Japan, China, and South Korea, and the development of Asian countries no longer seem to fit the long-term doomed model.

The academic community has raised a new question, not why the West dominates, but whether the West dominates. If the answer is no, the long-term doomed theory is a search for an ancient explanation for the non-existent dominance of the West.

One consequence of this uncertainty is that some well-known historians have developed a whole new set of theories to explain why the West, which once dominated the world, has now lost its dominance.

This is the short-term contingency theorists.

They are more complex than the long-term doomed theory, and there are serious divisions within this camp. But there is one thing they agree on, that is, almost all the ideas of the long-term doomed theory are wrong.

The West did not establish global dominance during the years of the Great Famine, and it was not until the 19th century, on the eve of the Opium Wars, that the West temporarily took the lead over the East, and even this was largely accidental.

In later generations, the long-term destined and short-term contingency schools have been at loggerheads, and although there are many differences within the two theoretical schools, the battle line between them has divided two distinct and-for-tat theories about how the world works.

Some long-termists believe that short-termists are simply peddling shoddy, politically correct pseudo-scholarship. The short-termists responded, and the long-termists were pro-Western apologists, even racists.

Zhou Nan's attempt to promote the doctrine of short-term contingency in this era and break the monopoly of Western scholarship on historical deconstruction is tantamount to digging into the corners of the West from the roots.

The original academic achievement of the book "Guns, Germs and Steel" certainly did not meet this standard, and the original author, Jared Diamond, was himself a long-time destined theorist.

He comprehensively constructs the evolution of human beings from the perspective of biological evolution and technological development, but because he belongs to the supremacy of the West, he is vague in many analyses.

However, he cannot deny the influence of oriental cultures and species on the world, and the whole book must be deconstructed from the first civilizations born in the latitude zone of China and the Mediterranean, which ultimately makes the book a new book with new ideas but old bottles of new wine.

If Zhou Nan wants to write such a book, he must break this shackle. But he didn't want to become a thorn in the side of the academic circles of the Western world, because in this era, if he dared to say that Western civilization was inferior to Eastern civilization, no one would support him.

Don't say that Westerners, even Easterners will not support him.

In the past few decades, even the Orientals have recognized the theory of long-term destination, and this warning that everyone is drunk and sober will only make him the target of public criticism.

Therefore, even if he wanted to write, he would only take the method of Jared Diamond and write his own book. However, on the basis of the whole scholarship, he will definitely not adopt the theory of Western supremacy, but will implicitly write the theory of equality between the East and the West.

Holm, a biology professor, couldn't understand Zhou Nan's theories at all, and he didn't even understand what kind of book Zhou Nan was going to write.

The only thing he knew was that the biological data he had collected would bring detailed theoretical data to the book.

On the contrary, Schweitzer only listened for a while in his leisure time to guide Audrey, and then he figured out Zhou Nan's thoughts. Although he didn't know what Zhou Nan meant, he also knew that deconstructing history from the perspective of biological development would bring a new direction to historical research.

Of course, Zhou Nan will never confess this, he just sows a seed, and when it comes to the future, it will naturally grow slowly. Maybe fifty years, maybe seventy years later, when the short-term contingent faction develops, he will admit his idea.

He doesn't have the courage to go against the whole world!

Originally, Holm was still in high spirits, thinking of playing an active role in Zhou Nan's writing process. But now he can't even grasp Zhou Nan's thoughts, and he doesn't even know what kind of book to write, so how can he help?

On Monday, Zhou Nan put Schweitzer on the train to Geneva. The establishment of the foundation also needs an experienced expert like him.

Although this foundation is named after Zhou Nan, he has to avoid suspicion and it is inconvenient for him to participate in the preparatory stage. With Schweitzer in it, Zhou Nan is not afraid of the deterioration of this foundation.

What's more, now that this foundation has become a chicken that lays golden eggs by relying on the best-selling of "Humanitarianism", there are many people staring at it, and Zhou Nan is not afraid of the Red Cross doing ghosts in it at all.

In essence, the Red Cross is still a trustworthy organization, and this non-profit organization has received supervision from all sides, and even the United Nations has been unable to do anything to co-opt it, which shows that they are standing on their own and have not been caught in the sore foot.

Holm stayed at Jonas Farm for three days, but eventually offered to leave, as he realized that he had no room for use in the book's writing.

Zhou Nan also promised him that he would spend a few months to take a good look at the information he had collected, and when he began to write, he would ask him for help.

In any case, he has contributed to this, and he deserves to enjoy the glory of this book.

Next, it was time for Zhou Nan to look for another collaborator.

(The theory is really hard to write, I feel like I'm always thankless, I add more today, and the third one is a little later)