Talk:Jared Diamond

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Capitalist?

I just read collapse, and am curious to Diamond's economic views...The books seems like an excellent source to cite for defending capitalism as not the source of societal destruction.

Diamond is a scientist. One thing which many laypeople don't seem to realize is that scientists often (though certainly not always) try to base opinions on the evidence, rather than trying to fit the evidence to their opinions. He's a friend of Paul Erlich, which might seem to back of claims of Diamond as an environmental determinist.

He frequently disclaims that in his book though, and from his descriptions of his views I'd say that he fits into a group, which Wikipedia calls fiscal environmentalism or green economics. (I call it new enviromentalism or environmental pragmatism, but lables are arbitary anyways.) --71.192.116.13 04:36, 18 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Evolutionary biologist

I tried to post the link in the article history but it truncated. I will link to the Scientific American article, instead. In the article, Michael Shermer refers to Diamond as an evolutionary biolgist. According to the Edge Foundation, Diamond's field work includes "...17 expeditions to New Guinea and neighboring islands, to study ecology and evolution of birds; rediscovery of New Guinea's long-lost goldenfronted bowerbird; other field projects in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia." [1] --Viriditas | Talk 23:11, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

---Diamond isn't an opponet of 'genetic arguments to account for racial differences'. He's an opponent of explaing the relative sophisication achieved by the races via arguments of genetic racial superiority. The previous wording suggested that Diamond's didn't think genes played any difference in racial varaiance at all. Clearly, Diamond is aware that skin color and other racial-specific features (nose shape, type of hair, general body size) are caused by genes. I may have made a run-on sentence, however. 69.250.25.213

---Regarding "Ethnic differences: Variation in human testis size": Diamond's 1986 commentary in Nature was not an "early work"-- he has papers going back to at least 1966 (Science 151:1102-1104). The only trait for which there was a trend from high to low in frequency among Africans, Caucasians, and East Asians was dizygotic twinning rate. Diamond speculated that dizygotic twinning rate might be correlated with testis size and female hormone levels, but noted that data were insufficient to address the question. It doesn't seem to me that Diamond's commentary is in the least contradictory to his later work, nor does it have an important bearing on his more recent books. The whole sentence would not survive a proper rewrite of the article. 131.210.4.95 28 xi.2005

Photograph

Is it acceptable to scan a photo from my copy of a book?

Probably not as it is copyrighted.Bkkeim2000 23:42, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Can we take a photograph from flickr.com? There are a couple of suitable ones there, e.g. [2], which has the Creative Commons "non-commercial attribution" license. -- Ngio 11:12, 13 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Racists

I think every hick member of the National Alliance should read Guns, Germs and Steel. Then, white supremacy would cease to exist. Seriously. Bookmastaflex 21:18, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

They'd have to be taught how to read. 202.47.247.156 18:47, 8 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Right on. Bookmastaflex 02:10, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Funny how if someone had said the opposite it would have been deleted outright.

Why couldn't Africans domesticate the Zebra? Oh they didn't have the right geographical location to develop these. Europeans used magic and luck to get create everything they have.

Guns, Germs and Steel

The description is far too truncated and does damage to the sense of his arguments. For one, nowhere does he say advanced civilization which overtook simpler ones only arose in Eurasia. That would be an absurd claim. The article leaves out any of the major mechanics he describes which gave certain regions developmental advantages over others.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dutchsatyr (talk • contribs) 19:01, 4 July 2006.

There is a separate article on Guns, Germs, and Steel, so the description here should not be very lengthy. -- bcasterline • talk 22:10, 4 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle"

This is where I really began to understand his main line of argument. I did not grew up on a farm or any other agricultural setting and so I had a little trouble following his arguments about plants. But I grew up having a keen interest in animals and loving animals (and I still do for that matter!) and so I easily followed his arguments about them.

He quotes Tolstoy, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," and he applies this to animals you can domesticate relatively easily and animals you really can't. And at times it's almost comical. Okay, the grizzly bear is a good hearty animal, good meat production, growing from cub to almost full grown in five or six years, not a fussy eater, but on the contrary able to eat a wide range of food, all in all seemingly a great animal to domesticate, except . . . except for those four inch claws and that irascible disposition!

Then he goes through other animals. Some animals are too nervous and would continually throw themselves against a fence if confined. Other animals are very, very difficult to bred in captivity.

(This is my summary, he puts the above and the part about grizzly bears a little differently.)

Then he brings up things I did not immediately think of. For example, with farm animals, it's very helpful if they have a gentle hierarchy in which the animals follow an alpha animal and all walk in a row, like cows do. For then a human can take the place of the alpha animal.

And so, his main argument is that the peoples who first developed agriculture and/or animal husbandry were not necessarily smarter or more industrious, but mostly just luckier. FriendlyRiverOtter 01:21, 9 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Bibliography

I have been an avid reader of Discover magazine since the early 80's, and I recall Diamond as a frequent contributor to the magazine, so I was surprised when only three of his articles were listed. This bibliography is incomplete, but I am unsure of the proper procedure to do so. Am I correct in assuming Wikipedia uses APA style? --William Moates 18:20, 24 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Speaks a dozen languages?

The miscellaneous section says that Diamond speaks a dozen languages. I find this extremely hard to believe. Is it more accurate to say he has a familiarity with a dozen languages? This information needs to be cited. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 216.12.16.176 (talk) 00:51, 5 May 2007 (UTC).[reply]

Yeah, that kind of caught my eye, too! Maybe some people have a real facility for language, or start learning several when they’re very young and that really helps them start developing the skill. In any case, this is the kind of thing that I also agree would be good to include a citation. FriendlyRiverOtter 05:26, 11 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It is not odd at all, though it is slightly unusual for the average human. If I were to learn Manx Gaelic to an excellent level of fluency, it would be extremely simple at that point to learn Irish and Scottish forms of Gaelic. This is a generic rule that can be applied to other language families; Italianate, Germanic, and so on.

Another point to consider is that it is not our place to judge his claim. This is an encyclopaedia, not a debate forum. At best, it is appropriate to cite sources for and against his reputed facility for learning and using languages.

75.180.34.240 05:46, 11 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Gaelic is not a language family, so it's not valid to compare it with the Romance or Germanic language families. I speak English and I certainly didn't find it "extremely simple" to learn German; I doubt a French speaker would find it simple to learn, say, Romanian or Portuguese either. We really need to know what those 12 languages of Diamond's are for the claim to have any meaning at all. Lfh 15:49, 13 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

We typically lived in very small groups

“Bands are the tiniest societies, consisting typically of 5 to 80 people, most or all of them close relatives by birth or by marriage. In effect, a band is an extended family or several related extended families.” (GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES, Jared Diamond, New York, London: Norton, page 267.)

Jared divides human societies into four main categories: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. And bands are how we lived for most of human history, pretty much the entire time we were hunters-gatherers. As I understand it, we have been just as smart as we are right now for at least the last 150,000 years, we just lived differently. FriendlyRiverOtter 05:26, 11 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]