Jared Diamond is author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel.

A question posed by a native of New Guinea sent author Jared Diamond on a Pulitzer Prize-winning quest to better understand the nature of human development. The result of his labors is the extraordinary book Guns, Germs, and Steel, on which this conversation is based. In this program, as in the book, Diamond condemns racist explanations of the differing fates of societies and explains how biogenetic advantages made the disparities occur.