Jared Diamond Totally Explained

Everything about Jared Diamond totally explained

Jared Mason Diamond (b. 10 September, 1937) is an American evolutionary biologist, physiologist, biogeographer, lecturer, 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), which also won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. He 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 an AB degree from Harvard in 1958 and his Ph.D. 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 Guns, Germs, and Steel (1998), 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 Eurasian civilizations, as a whole, have survived and conquered others, while refuting the belief that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, genetic, or moral superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies don't reflect cultural or racial differences, but rather originate in environmental differences powerfully amplified by various positive feedback loops, 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.
   In his following book, (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 which he discusses, and focuses instead on ecological factors. He contends that most plants and animals can't be domesticated and that the movement of people which succeeded has tended to be in an east-west direction at nearly the same latitude. 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 contribute 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 (External Link

). 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

1972 Avifauna of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea, Publications of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, No. 12, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 438.(External Link)
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, 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 . New York: Viking Books. ISBN 1-586-63863-7.
2006 . New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-060-84550-3.

Selected 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

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

Japanese Roots (June 1998) Discover

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.(External Link

)

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)

1999 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction

2001 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement

2002 Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science

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-World War II). She is also a great-grandniece of Saint Raphael Kalinowski. (External Link

)

Diamond has twin sons, Josh and Max Diamond, who attend Duke University (External Link

) 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.(External Link

)

Diamond's books rely on fields as diverse as molecular biology, linguistics, physiology, 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 isn't a single person, but instead "is really a committee."Further Information

Get more info on 'Jared Diamond'.

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