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Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond Biography

Scientist

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“Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives – to talk of a society's birth, growth, peak, senescence, and death – and to assume that the long period of senescence that most of us traverse between our peak years and our deaths also applies to societies.”

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Book:Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
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“Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it's a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, hence in how they shape our thoughts. There's no single purpose "best" language; instead, different languages are better suited for different purposes. For instance, it may not have been an accident that Plato and Aristotle wrote in Greek, while Kant wrote in German. The grammatical particles of those two languages, plus their ease in forming compound words, may have helped make them the preeminent languages of western philosophy. Another example, familiar to all of us who studied Latin, is that highly inflected languages (ones in which word endings suffice to indicate sentence structure) can use variations of word order to convey nuances impossible with English. Our English word order is severely constrained by having to serve as the main clue to sentence structure. If English becomes a world language, that won't be because English was necessarily the best language for diplomacy.”

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Book:The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal
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“When you look at a map you’ll be struck by the fact that Chile is the longest and thinnest country in the world. While averaging only slightly more than 100 miles wide from west to east, it’s nearly 3,000 miles long from north to south: almost as long as the U.S. is wide. Geographically, Chile is isolated from other countries by the high chain of the Andes in the east separating it from Argentina, and by the world’s most barren desert in the north separating it from Bolivia and Peru.”

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Book:Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis
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“Todas las historias militares que glorifican a los grandes generales simplifican en exceso la prosaica verdad: los vencedores de las guerras del pasado no fueron siempre los ejércitos que disponían de los mejores generales y las mejores armas, sino que a menudo fueron simplemente aquellos que portaban los gérmenes más desagradables para transmitirlos a sus enemigos.”

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Book:Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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“Los principales elementos mortíferos para la humanidad en nuestra historia reciente -la viruela, la gripe, la tuberculosis, la malaria, la peste, el sarampión y el cólera- son enfermedades contagiosas que evolucionaron a partir de enfermedades de los animales, aún cuando la mayoría de los microbios responsables de nuestras enfermedades epidémicas estén ahora, paradójicamente, casi limitados a los seres humanos.”

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Book:Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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“In fact, one of the main lessons to be learned from the collapses of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and those other past societies (as well as from the recent collapse of the Soviet Union) is that a society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth, and power. In that respect, the trajectories of the societies that we have discussed are unlike the usual courses of individual human lives, which decline in a prolonged senescence. The reason is simple: maximum population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum environmental impact, approaching the limit where impact outstrips resources. On reflection, it's no surprise that declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks.”

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Book:Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
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“Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding.”

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Book:Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
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“Het is niet verrassend dat de inheemse bevolking van Hawaii en de Maori's niet staan de juichen als paleontologen hun vertellen dat hun voorouders de helft van all e vogelsoorten die op Hawaii en Nieuw-Zeeland waren geëvolueerd hebben uitgeroeid, en evenmin vinden de Indianen het leuk als archeologen hun vertellen dat de Anasazi delen van de zuidwestelijke Verenigde Staten hebben ontbost. De veronderstelde ontdekkingen van paleontologen en archeologen klinken voor sommige toehoorders als het zoveelste racistische voorwendsel dat blanken naar voor brengen om inheemse volkeren van hun grond te verjagen. Het lijkt alsof wetenschappers zeggen:'Jullie voorouders waren slechte rentmeesters van hun land, dus ze verdienden het om te worden verdreven.' Sommige blanke Amerikanen en Australiërs die verontwaardigd zijn over de betalingen door de overheid en het teruggeven van land an de Indianen en aboriginals, grijpen inderdaad naar zulke ontdekkingen om dat argument naar voor te brengen.”

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Author:Jared Diamond
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“Livestock adopted in Africa were Eurasian species that came in from the north. Africa's long axis, like that of the Americas, is north/south rather than east/west. Those Eurasian domestic mammals spread southward very slowly in Africa, because they had to adapt to different climate zones and different animal diseases.”

LongDifferentAnimalDiseaseWestSouthClimateSpeciesSpreadEastZoneAdoptedMammalsAxesLivestockNorth AfricaDifferent Animals
Author:Jared Diamond
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“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.”

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Book:Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition
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“Bird taxonomy is a difficult field because of the severe anatomical constraints imposed by flight. There are only so many ways to design a bird capable, say, of catching insects in mid-air, with the result that birds of similar habitats tend to have very similar anatomies, whatever their ancestry. For example, American vultures look and behave much like Old World vultures, but biologists have come to realize that the former are related to storks, the latter to hawks, and that their resemblances result from their common lifestyle.”

WorldWayLooksDifficultRealizingResultsCommonAirExampleDesignFieldsEvolutionCapableBirdLifestyleFlightFormerBehaveRelatedLatterSevereInsectsCatchingConstraintsAncestryAnatomyResemblanceHawksBiologistHabitatOld WorldVultureTaxonomyStorks
Author:Jared Diamond
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“To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our Earth is not the center of the universe, but merely one of nine planets circling one of billions of stars. From biology we learned that humans were not specially created by God but evolved along with tens of millions of other species.”

HumansSelfEarthUniverseStarsMillionsTaughtPlanetsSpeciesBillionsAstronomyNineDramaticBiologyTaught UsCenter Of The UniverseDramatic Change
Author:Jared Diamond
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“In fact, everywhere in the world there has been a flux between big and small societies. Big political units are constantly being formed, later to fragment. The individual pieces try to pull apart, and then they join together again. One sees that in Europe: There have been unifications and then dissolutions and reunifications. So in the long run, it's 10,000 steps toward amalgamation offsetting 9,999 steps toward falling apart again. In businesses and industries, I would guess that's also true.”

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Author:Jared Diamond
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“In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.”

DifferentRealDifferencesWhiteAnimalParticularEuropeAreasAssumingPlantHistoricalSpeciesDuesAccidentsRacistContinentsStemEstatesGeographyTrajectoryColonizationAxesPlants And Animals
Author:Jared Diamond
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“Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative.... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture.”

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Author:Jared Diamond
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“The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.”

PeopleIfsWorldWayHelpingAbleEarthTroublePlanetsOceanEnvironmentalMetaphorObviousRuinsIslandsIsolationIsolatedHelplessEcologyEasterAnthropologyPacificPlanet EarthPacific OceanEaster Island
Author:Jared Diamond
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“People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!”

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Book:Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition
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“Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives.”

LongHas BeensTwoSeemsValuesChoicesIndividualTermRolesTypeReflectionVariousCorePlanningLong TermOutcomesWillingnessCrucialCore ValuesSuccess Or FailureTippingIndividual LifeTwo ChoicesTowards Success
Author:Jared Diamond
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“For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.”

HumansProblemDifferencesResponseEnvironmentalMaking A DifferenceRepublicCollapseAntidoteHuman SocietyHaitiCaricaturesDeterminismConstrainEnvironmental ProblemsEnvironmental HistoryDominican Republic
Book:Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition
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“[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.”

OrderReligiousNumbersAcceptingEnemyDangerousOpponentsCrushHatsPatrioticWillingnessFanaticsFractionsInfidelReligious FanaticsPatriotic Religious
Book:Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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