Jared Diamond

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). He also 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 (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 technologically less advanced civilizations around the world. Diamond's quest is to explain why such technologically 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 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 that 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

 * 2005 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking Books. ISBN 1-58663-863-7.
 * 2003 Guns, Germs, and Steel Reader's Companion, ISBN 1-58663-863-7.
 * 2001 The Birds of Northern Melanesia: Speciation, Ecology, & Biogeography (with Ernst Mayr), ISBN 0-19-514170-9
 * 1997 Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0393061310
 * 1997 Why is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality, ISBN 0-465-03127-7
 * 1992 The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, ISBN 0-06-098403-1
 * 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
 * 1986 J. M. Diamond and T. J. Case. eds. Community Ecology. Harper and Row, New York
 * 1984 J. M. Diamond. The Avifaunas of Rennell and Bellona Islands. The Natural History of Rennell Islands, British Solomon Islands 8:127-168
 * 1979 J. M. Diamond and M. LeCroy. Birds of Karkar and Bagabag Islands, New Guinea. Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist. 164:469-531
 * 1975 M. L. Cody and J. M. Diamond, eds. Ecology and Evolution of Communities. Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
 * 1972 Avifauna of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea, Publications of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, No. 12, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 438.

Articles

 * Japanese Roots (June 1998) Discover
 * The Curse of QWERTY (April 1997) Discover
 * Curse and Blessing of the Ghetto (March 1991) Discover, pp.60-66
 * The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (May 1987) Discover pp. 64-66
 * Ethnic differences. Variation in human testis size. (April 1986) Nature 320(6062):488-489 PubMed.
 * Island Biogeography and the Design of Natural Reserves (1976), in Robert M. May's Theoretical Ecology: Principles and Applications, Blackwell Scientific Publications, pp. 163-186.

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

 * Editorial board, Skeptic Magazine, a publication of The Skeptics Society
 * Member, the American Philosophical Society
 * Member, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
 * Member, the National Academy of Sciences
 * US regional director of the World Wildlife Fund.

Awards & Honors

 * 1961-1965 Prize Fellowship in Physiology, Trinity College, Cambridge, England
 * 1968-1971 Lederle Medical Faculty Award
 * 1972 Distinguished Teaching Award, UCLA Medical Class
 * 1973 Distinguished Teaching Award, UCLA Medical Class
 * 1975 Distinguished Achievement Award, American Gastroenterological Association
 * 1976 Kaiser Permanente/Golden Apple Teaching Award
 * 1976 Nathaniel Bowditch Prize, American Physiological Society
 * 1978 American Ornithologists Union, elected fellow
 * 1979 Franklin L. Burr Award, National Geographic Society
 * 1985 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant
 * 1990 MacArthur Foundation Fellow
 * 1989 Archie Carr Medal
 * 1992 Tanner Lecturer, University of Utah and many other endowed lectureships
 * 1992 Royal Society Prizes for Science Books (Rhone-Poulenc Prize)
 * 1992 Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize
 * 1993 Zoological Society of San Diego Conservation Medal
 * 1994 Skeptics Society, Randi Award
 * 1995 Honorary doctor of literature, Sejong University, Korea
 * 1996 Faculty Research Lecturer, UCLA
 * 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Prize
 * 1998 Pulitzer Prize
 * 1998 Elliott Coues Award, American Ornithologists' Union
 * 1998 California Book Awards, Gold Medal in nonfiction
 * 1998 Royal Society Prizes for Science Books (Rhone-Poulenc Prize)
 * 2001 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement
 * 2006 Dickson Prize in Science

Family

 * Diamond's wife, Marie (nee Marie Nabel Cohen), is a granddaughter of Edward Werner, Polish vice-Finance Minister (pre-WWII). She is also a great-grandniece of Saint Raphael Kalinowski.
 * Diamond has twin sons, Josh and Max Diamond, who attend Duke University and Northwestern University respectively.

Miscellaneous

 * Diamond speaks a dozen languages, listed in the order learned: English, Latin, French, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Finnish, Fore (a New Guinea language), New Melanesian, Indonesian, and Italian.


 * Diamond's books rely on fields as diverse as molecular biology and archeology, 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".

Interviews

 * Video interview with Stephen Colbert May 21 2007
 * Jared Diamond Charlie Rose, 24 Jan. 2005

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