Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond
Born	Jared Mason Diamond (1937-09-10) 10 September 1937 Boston, Massachusetts
Citizenship	American
Alma mater	Harvard College Cambridge University
Awards	Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science (1997) Royal Society Prize for Science Books (1992, 1998 & 2006) Pulitzer Prize (1998) National Medal of Science (1999)
Scientific career
Fields	Physiology Biophysics Ornithology Environmentalism Ecology Geography Evolutionary Biology Anthropology
Institutions	University of California, Los Angeles

Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist and author whose work draws from a variety of fields. He is currently Professor of Geography and Physiology at UCLA. He is best known for the award-winning popular science books The Third Chimpanzee; Guns, Germs, and Steel; and Collapse.

Biography

Diamond was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Bessarabian Jewish family. His father was the physician Louis K. Diamond, and his mother the teacher, musician, and linguist Flora Kaplan. He attended the Roxbury Latin School, earning his A.B. from Harvard College in 1958, and his Ph.D. in physiology and membrane biophysics from the University of Cambridge in 1961.

After graduating from Cambridge, he returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became Professor of Physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties, he also developed a second, parallel, career in the ornithology of New Guinea, and has since undertaken numerous research projects in New Guinea and nearby islands. In his fifties, Diamond gradually developed a third career in environmental history, and became Professor of Geography at UCLA, his current position. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Westfield State University in 2009.

He is married to Marie Diamond (née Marie Nabel Cohen), granddaughter of Polish politician Edward Werner, and has two adult sons named Josh and Max Diamond. In 1999, he was awarded the National Medal of Science. His sister Susan Diamond is a successful novelist. She wrote a book titled What Goes Around.

Diamond also has an aptitude for languages.

Work

As well as scholarly books and articles in the fields of ecology and ornithology, Diamond is the author of a number of popular science books, which are known for combining sources from a variety of fields other than those he has formally studied.

The first of these, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991), examined human evolution and its relevance to the modern world, incorporating insights from anthropology, evolutionary biology, genetics, ecology, and linguistics. It was well-received by critics, and won the 1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 1997, he followed this up with Why is Sex Fun?, which focused in on the evolution of human sexuality, again borrowing from anthropology, ecology, and evolutionary biology.

His third and best known popular science book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, was published in 1997. In it, Diamond seeks to explain Eurasian hegemony throughout history. Using evidence from ecology, archaeology, genetics, linguistics, and various historical case studies, he 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.

As a result, the geography of the Eurasian landmass gave its human inhabitants an inherent advantage over the societies on other continents, which they were able to dominate or conquer. Although certain examples in the book, and its alleged environmental determinism, have been criticised, it became a best-seller, and received numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, an Aventis Prize for Science Books (Diamond's second), and the 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. A television documentary based on the book was produced by the National Geographic Society in 2005.

Diamond's next book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), examined a range of past civilizations in an attempt to identify why they either collapsed or succeeded, and considers what contemporary societies can learn from these historical examples. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, he argues against traditional historical explanations for the failure of past societies, and instead focuses on ecological factors. Among the societies he considers are the Norse and Inuit of Greenland, the Maya, the Anasazi, the indigenous people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Japan, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and modern Montana.

While not as successful as Guns, Germs and Steel, Collapse was again both critically acclaimed and subject to accusations of environmental determinism and specific inaccuracies. "Collapse" was the third book written by Diamond that was nominated for Royal Society Prize for Science Books (previously known as the Rhône-Poulenc and Aventis Prize) but this time he did not win the prize, losing out to David Bodanis's Electric Universe.

Most recently Diamond co-edited Natural Experiments of History, a collection of essays illustrating the multidisciplinary and comparative approach to the study of history that he advocates.

Vengeance Is Ours (2008)

On 21 April 2009, Henep Isum Mandingo and Hup Daniel Wemp of Papua New Guinea filed a $10 million USD defamation lawsuit against Diamond over a 2008 New Yorker magazine article titled "Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?" The article is an account of feuds and vengeance killings among tribes in the New Guinea highlands which Mandingo and Wemp claim have been misrepresented and embellished by Diamond. The lawsuit came in the wake of an investigation by Rhonda Roland Shearer which alleged factual inaccuracies in the article, most notably that Mandingo, the alleged target of the feud who was said to have been rendered wheelchair-bound in the fighting recounted by Diamond, is fit and healthy.

Diamond and the New Yorker stand by the article. They maintain that it is a faithful account of the story related to Diamond by Wemp while they worked together in 2001 and in a formal interview in 2006, based on "detailed notes", and that both Diamond and the magazine did all they reasonably could to verify the story. Furthermore they claim that in a taped phone interview conducted in August 2008 between Daniel Wemp and Chris Jennings, a fact checker for the New Yorker, Wemp failed to raise any significant objections. Wemp contends he told Jennings the story was "inaccurate, inaccurate". Anthropologist Pauline Wiessner, an expert on tribal warfare in Papua New Guinea, points out that young men often exaggerate or make up entirely their exploits in tribal warfare, and that Diamond would be naïve to accept and publish Wemp's stories at face value.

Selected publications

Books

• 1972 Avifauna of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea, Publications of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, No. 12, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 438.[1]
• 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.
• 2006 [re-release] The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-060-84550-3.
• 2010 Natural Experiments of History (with James A. Robinson). ISBN 0674035577 ISBN 978-0674035577

Articles

• 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.
• Ethnic differences. Variation in human testis size. (April 1986) Nature 320(6062):488–489 PubMed.
• The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (May 1987) Discover pp. 64–66
• Japanese Roots (June 1998) Discover
• Curse and Blessing of the Ghetto (March 1991) Discover, pp. 60–66
• Race Without Color (November 1994) Discover
• The Curse of QWERTY (April 1997) Discover
• Kinship With The Stars (May 1997) Discover
• Japanese Roots (June 1998) Discover
• What’s Your Consumption Factor? (January 2, 2008) The New York Times
• Vengeance is Ours (April 2008) The New Yorker

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 Wide Fund for Nature (WWF/World Wildlife Fund)

Awards and 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
• 1989 Archie Carr Medal
• 1990 MacArthur Foundation Fellow
• 1992 Tanner Lecturer, University of Utah and many other endowed lectureships
• 1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books for The Third Chimphanzee
• 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 for Guns, Germs and Steel
• 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel
• 1998 Elliott Coues Award, American Ornithologists' Union
• 1998 California Book Awards, Gold Medal in nonfiction for Guns, Germs and Steel
• 1998 Aventis Prize for Science Books for Guns, Germs and Steel
• 1998 International Cosmos Prize
• 1999 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction
• 1999 National Medal of Science
• 2001 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement
• 2002 Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science
• 2006 Royal Society Prize for Science Books for Collapse
• 2006 Dickson Prize in Science
• 2008 Ph.D. Honoris Causa at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

See also

• Assembly rules

External links

• Diamond's page at the UCLA Department of Geography
• UCLA Spotlight – Jared Diamond
• Edge – Jared Diamond

Lectures and talks

• Why societies collapse at TED, 2003
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, April 2007
• The Evolution of Religions at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture, University of Southern California
• PBS – Guns, Germs and Steel (with full transcripts)

Interviews

• Hammer Conversation with Jared Diamond and John Long, March 16 2010
• Interview with Charlie Rose
• Interview with New Books in History