Jared Diamond

Jared Mason Diamond (born 10 September, 1937) is a American evolutionary biologist, physiologist, biogeographer and nonfiction author. He is best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997).

Biography

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.

Works

Diamond is renowned as the author of a number of popular science works that combine anthropology, biology, linguistics, genetics, and history. While Diamond became a staunch opponent of the use of genetic and racial arguments to account for the differences in technological sophistication, in 1986 he wrote a commentary entitled "Ethnic differences: Variation in human testis size," in which he commented on possible relations between testis size, hormone levels, and rates of dizygotic twinning in various ethnic groups.

His best-known work is 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 colonial civilizations developed only in Eurasia, and to do so in ways that do not appeal to ethnocentric myths, but do away with them. 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 supersede other Eurasian civilizations after 1800.

In his most recent book, 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.

Books

How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), ISBN 0670033375.
Guns, Germs, and Steel Reader's Companion (2003), ISBN 1586638637.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), ISBN 0393317552.
Why is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997), ISBN 0465031277.
The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1992), ISBN 0060984031.
The Birds of Northern Melanesia: Speciation, Ecology, & Biogeography (with Ernst Mayr, 2001), ISBN 0195141709.
Avifauna of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea, Publications of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, No. 12, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 438 (1972).

Articles

Curse and Blessing of the Ghetto (March 1991) Discover, pp.60-66
Japanese Roots (June 1998) Discover
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (May 1987) Discover pp. 64-66
Ethnic differences. Variation in human testis size. (April 1986) Nature 320(6062):488-489 PubMed.
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.

Miscellany

Diamond speaks a dozen languages, and his books rely on fields as diverse as molecular biology and archaeology, 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 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. He is also a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Diamond is US regional director of the World Wildlife Fund. He was the recipient of the 1998 International Cosmos Prize.

Diamond's wife, Marie, is a granddaughter of Edward Werner, Polish vice-Finance Minister (pre-WWII). She is also a great-grandniece of Saint Raphael Kalinowski. ^*

He has two sons, Josh and Max Diamond, who attend Duke University and Northwestern University respectively.