Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond
Jared Mason Diamondis an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee; Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse; and The World Until Yesterday. Originally trained in physiology, Diamond is known for drawing from a variety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography and evolutionary biology. As of 2013, he is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles...
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth10 September 1937
CityBoston, MA
age age-and-aging american-author continents humans ice last living stone until
Until the end of the last Ice Age around 11,000 B.C., all humans on all continents were still living as Stone Age hunter/gatherers.
australia isolated continents
Australia is the most isolated continent.
thinking space islands
Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks... of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economic interdependence.
responsibility people moral
Some people have much more pull than other people. But when I say that the public has ultimate responsibility, I'm not saying it in a moral sense. I'm just saying it in the sense of what is it that's really going to bring change.
gorillas way chimpanzees
Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.
white people black
Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?
love beautiful sexy
Think of all the human suffering caused by the sad truth that beautiful sexy women or handsome Porsche-owning men often prove to have miserable genes for other traits
sex sibling opposites
Throughout history, adultery has had few rivals as a cause of murder and human misery. The reason we tend to resemble our mates is that many of us are looking for someone who reminds us of our parent or sibling of the opposite sex, who in turn resembles us.
stars ice design
We can't manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can't start and stop ice ages, and we can't experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs.
lying long historical
One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.
science reality discovery
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
mean technology today
Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today.
home civilization conquest
Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.
children real heart
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.