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| Name: | Jared Diamond | |||
| Birth: | September 10 1937 | |||
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Jared Mason Diamond (born 10 September 1937) is an American scientist and nonfiction 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 books The Third Chimpanzee; Guns, Germs, and Steel; and Collapse.
Biography
Diamond was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Polish-Jewish family. His father was the physician Louis K. Diamond, and his mother a teacher, musician, and linguist. He attended the Roxbury Latin School, earning his A.B. degree 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 in New Guinea and nearby islands. In his fifties, Diamond gradually developed a third career in environmental history, and become a Professor of Geography at UCLA, his current position. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Westfield State College 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. Her book What Goes Around has sold many[quantify] copies.
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.
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, lingustics, 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 most recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), examines 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 culture-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. It won Diamond his third Royal Society Prize for Science Books (previously known as the Rhône-Poulenc and Aventis Prize).
