Book Review: Jared Diamond

I thought that sometimes there isn't much point in talking a single book in isolation, but rather, it makes more sense to talk about books written by a single author, as I am trying to do here with Jared Diamond. He is the author of 3 wonderful books, and they are shown left to right, in the order they are published.

There is a perhaps, a sequence in the way he has written these books. The third chimpanzee was about the way humans are different and also similar with the other apes. And yes, the third chimpanzee refers to homo sapiens, and the first and second chimps are the chimps themselves and the bonobos.

It was fascinating in the way it talks about the evolutionary psychology and sexual selection, in particular, the differences in the sexual behaviour between the other great apes and human beings. To cut the long story short, there is this balls-to-body-mass ratio which seems to be the key. Gorillas have small ratios, which means that a single dominant male does not face sexual competition and practises polygamy (harems), while chimps have large ratios, which means well, the males are kinda promiscuous, but it also means that there is tremendous sexual comeptition, hence the large balls to dominate the competition. And humans have ratios somewhere in between that of chimps and gorillas, which means, that monogamy with affairs might be deemed to be a middle point between chimps and gorillas. At least thats one way of looking at it.

Then, having tackled the origins of the behaviour of people, Jared Diamond then takes on something much bigger - the progress of humanity since then. Jared Diamond examines the development of civilisation in various parts of the world, and examines why is it that Europeans and their descendants ended up dominating the world. First of all, he examines why Mesopotamia was the centre of the world's first civilisation - due to the diversity in tameable animals and abundance in grains. And then there is the whole part about the dominance of Europe - because of the competition due to the rise of different nation-states which originates from their geographical boundaries whereas in China, a centralised ruler could easily stifled innovation.

In other words, Jared Diamond has tried to bring natural history - geology and the environment, into the study of human history.

Collapse, then is about the various case studies into how different civilisations have interacted with the environment, some for better, and some for worse, and seeks to explain how and why. There is the example of the Easter Islanders, about how they unsustainably destroyed the forests of Easter Island in their construction of the stone statues, and points out to other South Pacific islands where islanders have lived in resouce-scarce areas for much linger time eras. The overall message is clear: there is really no determinism in the environment that says that people will either fail or succeed. Bad choices even in a resource-rich area will lead to collapse eventually. But good choices in a resource-poor area can still allow for a sustainable society.

Taking these 3 works combined, you could say that third chimp was about the basis of humanity, and GGS was about how the present came from the past, and Collapse is evidently about the future.

Jared Diamond is one of those synthetic thinkers that puts various different ideas together into a coherent whole. Evolutionary psychology explains perhaps, the basis of political power, and perhaps the environmental factors manifest those political power, be it the centralised form of power in ancient China or the competition between different states in Europe. And how these different forms of politics can either lead to the downfall or success of a civilisation. To tackle these immense problems, you probably need a mind as immense as Jared Diamond.

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