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Jared Diamond

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Jared Mason Diamond (b. 10 September, 1937) is an American evolutionary biologist, physiologist, biogeographer and nonfiction author. Diamond works as a professor of geography and physiology at UCLA. He is best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel (1998), which also won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999.

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.

Works

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

His best-known work is the non-fiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel (1998), 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 technologically less advanced civilizations around the world. Diamond's quest is to explain why Eurasian civilizations, as a whole, have survived and conquered others, while refuting the belief that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, genetic or moral superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies do not reflect cultural or racial differences, but rather originate in environmental differences powerfully amplified by various positive feedback loops, 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.

In his most recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Diamond examines a range of past civilizations and societies, attempting to identify why they collapsed into ruins or survived only in a massively reduced form. He considers what contemporary societies can learn from these societal collapses. As in Guns, Germs and Steel, he dismantles previous ethnocentric explanations for the collapses which he discusses, and focuses instead 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.

In Collapse, Diamond distances himself from the charges of "ecological or environmental determinism" that were leveled against him in Guns, Germs and Steel This is particularly evident in his chapter comparing Haiti and the Dominican Republic, two nations that share the same island (and similar environments) but which pursued notably different futures, primarily on the strength of their differing histories, cultures, and leaders.

Books

  • 1972 Avifauna of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea, Publications of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, No. 12, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 438.
  • 1975 M. L. Cody and J. M. Diamond, eds. Ecology and Evolution of Communities. Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
  • 1979 J. M. Diamond and M. LeCroy. Birds of Karkar and Bagabag Islands, New Guinea. Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist. 164:469-531
  • 1984 J. M. Diamond. The Avifaunas of Rennell and Bellona Islands. The Natural History of Rennell Islands, British Solomon Islands 8:127-168
  • 1986 J. M. Diamond and T. J. Case. eds. Community Ecology. Harper and Row, New York
  • 1986 B. Beehler, T. Pratt, D. Zimmerman, H. Bell, B. Finch, J. M. Diamond, and J. Coe. Birds of New Guinea. Princeton University Press,Princeton
  • 1992 The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, ISBN 0-060-98403-1
  • 1997 Why is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality, ISBN 0-465-03127-7
  • 1997 Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-06131-0
  • 2001 The Birds of Northern Melanesia: Speciation, Ecology, & Biogeography (with Ernst Mayr), ISBN 0-195-14170-9
  • 2003 Guns, Germs, and Steel Reader's Companion, ISBN 1-586-63863-7.
  • 2005 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking Books. ISBN 1-586-63863-7.

Selected Articles

Television

  • A three part, three hour 2005 PBS documentary called Guns, Germs and Steel based on his 1997 book of the same name originally aired between July 11-25, 2005.

Boards

Awards & Honors

Family

Miscellaneous

References

See also

External links

Interviews



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