Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond
Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books. Originally trained in biochemistry and physiology, Diamond is commonly referred to as a polymath, stemming from his knowledge in many fields including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. He is a professor of geography at UCLA.
In 2005, Diamond was ranked ninth on a poll by Prospect and Foreign Policy of the world's top 100 public intellectuals.
Early life and education
Diamond was born on September 10, 1937, in Boston, Massachusetts. Both of his parents were Ashkenazi Jewish. His father, Louis Diamond, was a physician who emigrated from Chișinău in present-day Moldova, then known as Bessarabia. His mother, Flora , was a teacher, linguist, and concert pianist. Diamond began studying piano at age six; years later, he would propose to his wife after playing Brahms' Intermezzo in A major for her.
By the age of seven he developed an interest in birdwatching. This became one of his major life passions and resulted in a number of works published in ornithology.
He attended the Roxbury Latin School and studied biochemical sciences at Harvard College, graduating in 1958. He obtained his PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1961, with a thesis on the physiology and biophysics of membranes in the gallbladder.
Career
After graduation from Cambridge, Diamond returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became a professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties he developed a second, parallel, career in ornithology and ecology, specialising in New Guinea and nearby islands, which he began visiting from 1964. Later, in his fifties, Diamond developed a third career in environmental history and became a professor of geography at UCLA, his position. He also teaches at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. He is a lecturer on the biodiversity management course at the European Institute of Innovation for Sustainability (EIIS) in Rome. He won the National Medal of Science in 1999.
Diamond originally specialized in salt absorption in the gall bladder. He has also published scholarly works in the fields of ecology and ornithology, but is arguably best known for authoring a number of popular-science books combining topics from diverse fields other than those he has formally studied. Because of this academic diversity, Diamond has been described as a polymath.
Popular science works
Diamond has written multiple popular science articles and books, notably The Third Chimpanzee (1991); Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Prize); Collapse (2005), The World Until Yesterday (2012), and Upheaval (2019). For a list, see .
The Third Chimpanzee (1991)
Diamond's first popular book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991), examines human evolution and its relevance to the modern world, incorporating evidence from anthropology, evolutionary biology, genetics, ecology, and linguistics. The book traces how humans evolved to be so different from other animals, despite sharing over 98% of our DNA with our closest animal relatives, the chimpanzees. The book also examines the animal origins of language, art, agriculture, smoking and drug use, and other apparently uniquely human attributes. It was well received by critics and won the 1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)
His second and best known popular science book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, was published in 1997. It asks why Eurasian peoples conquered or displaced Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of vice versa. It argues that this outcome was not due to genetic advantages of Eurasian peoples themselves but instead to features of the Eurasian continent, in particular, its high diversity of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication and its east/west major axis that favored the spread of those domesticates, people, technologies—and diseases—for long distances with little change in latitude.
The first part of the book focuses on reasons why only a few species of wild plants and animals proved suitable for domestication. The second part discusses how local food production based on those domesticates led to the development of dense and stratified human populations, writing, centralized political organization, and epidemic infectious diseases. The third part compares the development of food production and of human societies among different continents and world regions. Guns, Germs, and Steel became an international best-seller, was translated into 33 languages, and received several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, an Aventis Prize for Science Books and the 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. A television documentary series based on the book was produced by the National Geographic Society in 2005.
Why is Sex Fun? (1997)
In his third book, Why is Sex Fun?, also published in 1997, Diamond discusses evolutionary factors underlying features of human sexuality that are generally taken for granted but that are highly unusual among our animal relatives. Those features include a long-term pair relationship (marriage), coexistence of economically cooperating pairs within a shared communal territory, provision of parental care by fathers as well as by mothers, having sex in private rather than in public, concealed ovulation, female sexual receptivity encompassing most of the menstrual cycle (including days of infertility), female menopause, and distinctive secondary sexual characteristics.
Collapse (2005)
Diamond's next book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, published in 2005, examines a range of past societies in an attempt to identify why they either collapsed or continued to thrive and considers what contemporary societies can learn from these historical examples. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, he argues against explanations for the failure of past societies based primarily on cultural factors, instead focusing on ecology. Among the societies mentioned in the book are the Norse and Inuit of Greenland, the Maya, the Anasazi, the indigenous people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Japan, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and modern Montana.
The book concludes by asking why some societies make disastrous decisions, how big businesses affect the environment, what our principal environmental problems are today, and what individuals can do about those problems. Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse was translated into dozens of languages, became an international best-seller, and was the basis of a television documentary produced by the National Geographic Society. Collapse was also nominated for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. When it was nominated, Diamond was the only author to have won the award twice previously, though he did not win a third time.
Fifteen archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and historians from the American Anthropological Association criticized Diamond's methods and conclusions, working together with the larger association to publish the book Questioning Collapse as a counter to Diamond's claims. In response, Diamond, as an editor at the time for the journal Nature, published an official review in the journal negatively covering the book, without mentioning that the book was a critique of his own work. The authors and the publisher, Cambridge University Press, called out Diamond for his conflict of interest on the subject.
"Vengeance is Ours" controversy (2008)
In 2008, Diamond published an article in The New Yorker entitled "Vengeance Is Ours", describing the role of revenge in tribal warfare in Papua New Guinea. A year later, two indigenous people mentioned in the article filed a lawsuit against Diamond and The New Yorker, claiming the article defamed them. In 2013, The Observer reported that the lawsuit "was withdrawn by mutual consent after the sudden death of their lawyer."
Natural Experiments of History (2010)
In 2010, Diamond co-edited (with James Robinson) Natural Experiments of History, a collection of seven case studies illustrating the multidisciplinary and comparative approach to the study of history that he advocates. The book's title stems from the fact that it is not possible to study history by the preferred methods of the laboratory sciences, i.e., by controlled experiments comparing replicated human societies as if they were test tubes of bacteria. Instead, one must look at natural experiments in which human societies that are similar in many respects have been historically perturbed. The book's afterword classifies natural experiments, discusses the practical difficulties of studying them, and offers suggestions on how to address those difficulties.
The World Until Yesterday (2012)
In The World Until Yesterday, published in 2012, Diamond asks what the western world can learn from traditional societies. It surveys 39 traditional small-scale societies of farmers and hunter-gatherers with respect to how they deal with universal human problems. The problems discussed include dividing space, resolving disputes, bringing up children, treatment of elders, dealing with dangers, formulating religions, learning multiple languages, and remaining healthy. The book suggests that some practices of traditional societies could be usefully adopted in the modern industrial world today, either by individuals or else by society as a whole.
Upheaval (2019)
In Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change Diamond examines whether nations can find lessons during crises in a way like people do. The nations considered are Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the U.S. Diamond identifies four modern threats: nuclear weapons, climate change, limited resources, and extreme inequality.
Anand Giridharadas, reviewing for The New York Times, claimed the book contained many factual inaccuracies. Daniel Immerwahr, reviewing for The New Republic, reports that Diamond has "jettisoned statistical analysis" and the associated rigour, even by the standards of his earlier books, which have themselves sometimes been challenged on this basis.
Personal life
Diamond is married to Marie Cohen, granddaughter of Polish politician Edward Werner. They have twin sons, born in 1987.
Selected memberships
Editorial board of Skeptic, a magazine of The Skeptics Society
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Member of the National Academy of Sciences
Member of the American Philosophical Society
Board of Directors of the World Wildlife Fund
Selected honors
1992 Tanner Lecturer, University of Utah
1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books for The Third Chimpanzee
1997 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel
1998 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for Guns, Germs and Steel
1998 California Book Awards, Gold Medal in nonfiction for Guns, Germs and Steel
1998 Aventis Prize for Science Books for Guns, Germs and Steel
1998 International Cosmos Prize
1999 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction
1999 National Medal of Science
2001 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement
2002 Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science
2004 A foreign holder of honorary title of Academician in Academy of Finland
2005 Elected Honorary Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge, England
2006 Royal Society Prize for Science Books for Collapse (shortlisted)
2006 Dickson Prize in Science
2008 PhD Honoris Causa at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
2013 Wolf Prize in Agriculture
2016 American Humanist Association Humanist of the Year
Eastern long-beaked echidna Zaglossus bartoni diamondi was named in honor of Jared Diamond, as was the frog Austrochaperina adamantina.
Selected bibliography
1992: The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal
1993: "Ten Thousand Years of Solitude" Discover Magazine; March 1993
1997: Why Is Sex Fun?
1997: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Also published with the title Guns, germs and steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years
2005: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
2010: Natural Experiments of History, with James A. Robinson
2012: The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
2015: The Third Chimpanzee for Young People: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal
2019: Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change
See also
Assembly rules
Comparative history
Environmental determinism
List of important publications in anthropology
References
External links
Official website (JaredDiamond.org)
Diamond at UCLA Geography
Diamond at TED
Diamond at C-SPAN
Diamond at Edge.org
Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?
Diamond at UCLA Spotlight;
Guns, Germs, and Steel via PBS
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed via YouTube; from The Earth Institute, April 2007
The Evolution of Religions via YouTube; from Dornsife College, University of Southern California, October 2009;
Natural Experiments of History at New Books in History, January 2010; Archived January 4, 2013, at archive.today
Jared Diamond & John Long at Hammer Museum, March 2010
What can we learn from traditional societies? from the Royal Institution, October 2013;
Conversation With Jared Diamond: To Solve a Crisis, We Have to Acknowledge It First via YouTube; from the Berggruen Institute, July 2020
1937 births
20th-century American biologists
20th-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American biologists
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American writers
Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
American biophysicists
American geographers
American people of Moldovan-Jewish descent
American physiologists
American science writers
American skeptics
Evolutionary biologists
Harvard College alumni
Harvard Fellows
Human evolution theorists
Jewish biophysicists
Jewish American writers
Jewish American social scientists
Living people
MacArthur Fellows
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
National Medal of Science laureates
American non-fiction environmental writers
Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction winners
Roxbury Latin School alumni
Theorists on Western civilization
University of California, Los Angeles faculty
Wolf Prize in Agriculture laureates
Writers from Boston
Writers from California
21st-century American Jews
Members of the American Philosophical Society
Members of the National Academy of Medicine
Discover (magazine) people