Original Minds by Eleanor Wachtel

Author:Eleanor Wachtel [Wachtel, Eleanor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4434-0243-9
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2003-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

JARED DIAMOND

A few years ago, when Jared Diamond won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction for his ambitious analysis of the past thirteen thousand years, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what he was. I assumed he was some kind of evolutionary biologist. Then I read that he teaches physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine, with a specialty in membranes. At the same time, he’s an expert in bird ecology, studying bird fauna in New Guinea and other southwest Pacific islands. These are two completely unrelated fields, and only indirectly connected to his award-winning books—not only Guns, Germs and Steel, but also his earlier The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1992). Diamond is also the recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award—a multiyear fellowship, no strings, to encourage innovative work.

Then I realized I wasn’t alone. Anthropologist Mark Ridley describes Jared Diamond as a polymath, with a reputation for producing top-quality research papers at such a rate that “some suspect he is really a committee” [TLS]. Another critic termed Guns, Germs and Steel an “epochal work. Diamond has written a summary of human history that can be accounted … as Darwinian in its authority” [Thomas Disch, New Leader]. When Diamond recently gave a lecture sponsored by the Harvard Museum of Natural History, he drew a crowd of almost a thousand people who gave his talk a standing ovation.

Jared Diamond was born in Boston in 1937. His father, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard, was famous for establishing the postwar blood bank program of the American Red Cross and for pioneering the use of transfusions for infants with blood incompatible with their mothers’. He died at the age of ninety-seven. Diamond’s mother was a teacher, concert pianist and something of a language enthusiast. Diamond studied Latin and Greek at school; his mother then helped him learn German, and he later learned to read or speak Russian, French, Spanish, Finnish, Dutch, Italian, Neo-Melanesian and the New Guinea dialect Fore.

After Harvard and Cambridge, Jared Diamond began his career as a physiologist and then pursued a second career in bird ecology. For the last ten years or so—since The Third Chimpanzee—he’s also been a popularizer in the best sense of the word, eager to reach a general audience. Hence the tide of his 1997 book, Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution o/Human Sexuality. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond tackles the question why—as he put it—“Eurasians, especially peoples of Europe and eastern Asia, have spread around the globe, to dominate the modern world in wealth and power…. Why weren’t Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who conquered or exterminated Europeans and Asians?” Or, as the Economist irreverently headlined, “Geographical Determinism, [or] How white folks came to rule the world.”

Diamond says that this problem has fascinated him for a long time, but it’s only recently, through new advances in molecular biology, plant and animal genetics, biogeography, archaeology and linguistics, that he’s able to attempt a new synthesis.

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