why would some people object to discussing Yali's question?

"Yali's question" was, of course, the query posed to Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, by a New Guinean man when Diamond was on a research trip there. The question was, as Diamond tells it:

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [i.e., technology, manufactured goods, etc.] and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

Guns, Germs, and Steel is Diamond's answer to this question. But he recognizes that some might object to the terms of the question in the first place. He describes three questions that skeptics might raise. First, "[i]f we succeed in explaining how some people came to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination" or at least make it seem inevitable? He dismisses this concern as the result of a "common tendency to confuse an explanation" of cause with a "justification or acceptance of results." Second, he says that some might claim that "addressing Yali's question automatically involves a Eurocentric approach to history." He points out in response that most of his book deals with non-European sources and locates the sources of many European technological achievements outside of Europe. Finally, he asks whether his approach to "civilization" might not tend to denigrate people who do not possess some of its characteristics. He says that his book is actually intended to do the reverse, and observes as an aside that his experiences among hunter-gatherer societies around the world have left him questioning the supposed benefits of "civilization" in the first place.