Diamond's major themes dealt with why history unfolded in the way that it did, with Europeans colonizing and expanding to control the wealth and power of the world's economy. He compares the resources and organization of the people, and looks behind them to see how the unbalance came to be. Evolutionary biology backs up his claims, showing why the Eurasians were able to domesticate animals and spread their advancements relatively quickly on their continent. They had a large enough population and a similar enough climate throughout their landmass to support the rapid advancement. These advancements, including the political and social growth that was enabled through them, gave them the advantage when they encountered other populations which consisted mainly of stone age hunter/gatherers.
The most important factors of success for the Eurasian society revolve the ability of the society to adapt and innovate, as well as spread those adaptations to neighboring societies. Size alone, and the variety that comes with it, were a large determining factor. Geographic alignment, the East-West dominant axis, as opposed to the North-South arrangement of Africa and the Americas, played a role in the ability to spread innovations, such as domesticated flora and fauna. This orientation allowed for quick travel since the similar longitude of the new territory provided similar climate and length of day for crops and livestock sensitive to changes in those aspects. Additionally, there were more animals that were suitable for domestication on the Eurasian continent. These animals alone were a large determining factor in the success of the people. They transferred sickness to people, so the population evolved to withstand germs that other populations could not handle. The animals encouraged social change, allowing people to specialize in fields outside of food production.
In today's world, at least ideally, it is no longer a competition between parts of the world for domination, colonization, or outright superiority. Some of this competition exists, however, we can use the principles learned from the history described by Diamond to see that even today, our innovations must be shared with other cultures to gain the most progress. We cannot consider ourselves an isolated system, but rather use the technologies we have to work with our neighboring societies to create new innovations. However, in this case, neighboring societies does not mean the physical proximity, but rather the entire globe, neighboring through use of high speed transportation, and electronic communication. We learn from what helped the Eurasians to develop more quickly, in order to develop as a single global society more rapidly than segregated individual societies ever could.
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