Jared Diamond Quotes

Religious values tend to be especially deeply held and hence frequent cause of disastrous behaviour. [...] The modern world provides us with abundant secular examples of admirable values to which we cling under conditions where those values no longer make sense [...] It appears to me that much of the rigid opposition to environmental concerns in the First World nowadays involves values acquired early in life and never again reexamined [...].

[..] the values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.

Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping their outcomes towards success or failure: long-term planning, and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection, we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives.

People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental/population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!"

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

Physiologists and molecular biologists regularly fall into the trap of overlooking this distinction, which is fundamental to biology, history, and human behavior. Physiology and molecular biology can do no more than identify proximate mechanisms; only evolutionary biology can provide ultimate causal explanations.

Behavior evolves through natural selection, just as anatomy does. Hence if sex is enjoyable, natural selection must have been responsible for that outcome.

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

Our sex is ultimately laid down by our genes.

Though seemingly remote from human sexuality, shorebird sexuality is instructive because it illustrates the main message of this book: a species’ sexuality is molded by other aspects of the species’ biology. It’s easier for us to acknowledge this conclusion about shorebirds, to which we don’t apply moral standards, than about ourselves.

In particular, while natural selection favors both males and females that leave many offspring, the best strategy for doing so may be different for fathers and mothers. That generates a built-in conflict between the parents, a conclusion that all too many humans don’t need scientists to reveal to them. We make jokes about the battle of the sexes, but the battle is neither a joke nor an aberrant accident of how individual fathers or mothers behave on particular occasions. It is indeed perfectly true that behavior that is in a male’s genetic interests may not necessarily be in the interests of his female co-parent, and vice versa. That cruel fact is one of the fundamental causes of human misery.

How can we explain simultaneously this general pattern of female parental care and also its numerous exceptions?
The answer comes from the realization that genes for behavior, as well as for malaria resistance and teeth, are subject to natural selection.

The details of which candidate said what during a single televised debate in October 1960 could have given the electoral victory to Nixon instead of to Kennedy, but no details of who said what could have blocked the European conquest of Native Americans.

Compressing 13,000 years of history on all continents into a 400-page book works out to an average of about one page per continent per 150 years, making brevity and simplification inevitable. Yet the compression brings a compensating benefit: long-term comparisons of regions yield insights that cannot be won from short-term studies of single societies.

The infectious diseases that regularly visited crowded Eurasian societies, and to which many Eurasians consequently developed immune or genetic resistance, included all of history's most lethal killers: smallpox, measles, influenza, plague, tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, malaria, and others.