Jared Diamond

Categories: American writers | Science writers | Pulitzer Prize winners | California writers | MacArthur Fellows | Geographers | Race and intelligence controversy | 1937 births | Jewish scientists | Prospect - Foreign Policy Top 100 Public Intellectuals

Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American author, evolutionary biologist, physiologist, and biogeographer. He is best known for the 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 simpler civilizations around the world. Diamond's quest is to explain why such advanced civilzations developed only in Eurasia, and to do so in ways that do not appeal to ethnocentric myths, but do away with them. Most significantly, although it identifies the main processes and factors of civilizational development that were present in Eurasia, but not elsewhere, it does so by tracing commonalities between Eurasian civilizations, leaving the question open of why Europe came to supercede other Eurasian civilizations after 1800.

Diamond was born in Boston 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 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 he has led numerous trips to explore New Guinea and nearby islands. In his fifties, Diamond gradually developed a third career in environmental history, becoming professor of geography and of environmental health sciences at UCLA, his current position.

Diamond is renowned as the author of a number of popular science works that combine anthropology, biology, linguistics, genetics, and history. While Diamond is a staunch opponent of genetic arguments to account for the different levels of technological sophistication among the races, his early work included a paper entitled "Ethnic differences: Variation in human testis size", in which he investigated correlations between possible racial variations in testicular size and hormone levels and argued that testicular size and hormone levels were highest among African populations and lowest in East Asian, with Caucasian populations falling between the two.

In his most recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2004), Diamond examines what caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin and considers what contemporary society can learn from their fates.

Diamond speaks a dozen languages, and his books rely on fields as diverse as molecular biology and archaeology, as well as obscure knowledge about everything from typewriter design to feudal Japan. Because of his broad expertise and the large number of articles credited to him, it has been suggested jokingly by Mark Ridley that "Jared Diamond" is not a single person, but instead "is really a committee".

Diamond is on the editorial board of Skeptic Magazine, a publication of The Skeptics Society.

Diamond is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Contents

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Works

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Books

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Articles

  • 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
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External links

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