Jared Diamond Quotes

Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.

Technology has to be invented or adopted.

Why you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little? (asked Yali)

Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.

Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, written

He waited until 1896 to build the first truck.

Yes, world history is indeed such an onion!

Sex is flagrantly separated from reproduction in a few species, including bonobos and dolphins.

big-bang reproduction, or semelparity: a single reproductive effort, followed by preprogrammed death.

Sex in social mammals is generally carried out in public, before the gazes of other members of the troop.

All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.

History as well as life itself is complicated
neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

But receive much less social support from friendships

Australia is the most isolated continent.

In parts of Montana, salt concentrations in soil water, have reached those double those of seawater.

What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didnt have anthropologists.

I personally am not conscious of my accent.

Proposed as appropriate compensation. This reminds me

Recent discoveries about apes suggest, however, that a gorilla or common chimp stands at least as good a chance being murdered as the average human.

We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.

Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology.

or just inventing a new letter (as our medieval ancestors did when they created the new letters j, u, and w).

A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves.

Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.

My own health legacy of New Guinea has been a year of malaria and a year of dysentery.

Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference. So,

Recreational sex is thus supposed to function as the glue holding a human couple together while they cooperate in rearing their helpless baby.

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

Each year, the United States issues about 70,000 patents, only a few of which ultimately reach the stage of commercial production.

Who today remembers that gasoline, the fuel of modern civilization, originated as yet another invention in search of a use?

1,000 out of the world's 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas,

In the latter case it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it.

Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.

The King's 28 letters have been described by scholars as the world's best alphabet and the most scientific system of writing.

The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.

Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years?

Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation.

Lima beans, watermelons, potatoes, eggplants, and cabbages are among the many other familiar crops whose wild ancestors were bitter or poisonous, and

Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.

Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.

half of its carbon 14 content decays into nitrogen 14 every 5,700 years, until

African cavalry mounted on rhinos or hippos would have made mincemeat of European cavalry mounted on horses. But it couldnt happen.

I'd rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun.

Today Charles Darwin is best known for establishing the fact of evolution and for recognizing the major role of natural selection in driving it.