Jared Diamond

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Jared Mason Diamond (born 10 September 1937) is an American evolutionary biologist, physiologist, biogeographer and nonfiction author. He is best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). He also received the National Medal of Science in 1999.

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[edit] Biography

Diamond was born in Boston of Polish-Jewish heritage, to a physician father and a teacher/musician/linguist mother. After attending The Roxbury Latin School, he earned a BA degree from Harvard in 1958 and his PhD in physiology and membrane biophysics from Cambridge University in 1961. During 1962-1966, he returned to Harvard as a junior Fellow. He became a professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School in 1966. While in his twenties, he also developed a second, parallel, career in the ecology and evolution of New Guinea birds, and has since led numerous trips to explore New Guinea and nearby islands. In his fifties, Diamond gradually developed a third career in environmental history, becoming a professor of geography and of environmental health sciences at UCLA, his current position.

[edit] Works

Diamond is renowned as the author of a number of popular science works that combine anthropology, biology, linguistics, genetics, and history.

His best-known work is the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), which asserts that the main international issues of our time are legacies of processes that began during the early-modern period, in which civilizations that had experienced an extensive amount of "human development" began to intrude upon simpler civilizations around the world. Diamond's quest is to explain why such advanced colonial civilizations developed only in Eurasia, and to do so in ways that do not appeal to ethnocentric myths, but do away with them. He claims that ecological factors account for the development of civilizations and technologies, and fills the book with examples throughout history. He identifies the main processes and factors of civilizational development that were present in Eurasia, from the origin of human beings in Africa to the proliferation of agriculture and technology. He posits, for instance, that agricultural development and complexity are a function of climate. Ultimately, the explanation does not center on humanity itself, but rather the resources at human disposal relative to geography, climate, and the availability of food and shelter.

In his most recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Diamond examines what caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin and considers what contemporary society can learn from their fates. As in Guns, Germs and Steel, he dismantles previous ethnocentric explanations for the collapse of the civilizations he discusses, and focuses on ecological factors. He pays particular attention to the Norse settlements in Greenland, which vanished as the climate got colder, while the surrounding Inuit culture thrived. He also has chapters on the collapse of the Maya, Anasazi, and Easter Island civilizations, among others. He cites five factors that often contributed to a collapse, but shows how the one factor that all had in common was mismanagement of natural resources. He follows this with chapters on prospering civilizations that managed their resources very well, such as Tikopia Island and Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate.

[edit] Books

[edit] Articles

[edit] Miscellany

  • Diamond speaks a dozen languages, and his books rely on fields as diverse as molecular biology and archaeology, as well as knowledge about typewriter design and feudal Japan. Because of his broad expertise and the large number of articles credited to him, Mark Ridley has suggested jokingly that Jared Diamond is not a single person, but instead "is really a committee".

[edit] External links

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