This book makes the point that geography is important, and that also living in large communities and cities is also important. This is true.What Jared has missed is natural selection... that 5,000 years of living in a more complex social environment has meant that the Europeans advanced genetically as their environment advanced. The europeans who survived, were the more intelligent, the more social, more politically machaivellian and the more immune ones.It is a chicken-and-egg situation. Jared refuse to aknowledge that other racial groups (such as africans) stopped evolving because their culture and environment stayed the same and didn't drive change.Or, to put it another way, Africans today are just as stupid as europeans were 5,000 years ago. But European society kept changing and this has forced people to advance too.This book is politically correct half-truths and polemic that is tedious to read and fails to follow through to its logical conclusions.