Jared Diamond, the New Guinea birdwatcher who turned one islander’s question into Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond

Photo: Aude / CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 10, 1937 Boston
Occupation	Physiologist
Awards	Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement · National Medal of Science · Groeneveld Award

The question that shaped Jared Diamond’s career came from a New Guinean politician named Yali, on a beach, in the early nineteen-seventies: why had white people developed so much “cargo” and brought it to New Guinea, while New Guineans had so little of their own? Diamond, an American physiologist who had gone to the island to watch birds, spent the next quarter of a century turning that question into Guns, Germs, and Steel, the book that made him one of the most widely read nonfiction writers of his generation, and one of the most argued with.

He has not stopped asking big questions. In early September, days before his eighty-ninth birthday, Mariner Books in the United States and Penguin in Britain published Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter?, a study of the moments when one person really does change the outcome. Its cast runs from Seretse Khama, the founding president of Botswana, to the UCLA basketball coach John Wooden and the American football coach Bill Belichick. The publicity tour that followed, from Tyler Cowen’s interview series to The Joe Rogan Experience, put him in front of listeners who were not born when his best-known book appeared.

Jared Mason Diamond was born in Boston on September 10, 1937. His father, Louis Diamond, was a physician from a Bessarabian Jewish family that had left Chișinău; his mother, Flora Kaplan, was a teacher, a linguist and a concert pianist. He went to Roxbury Latin School, graduated from Harvard in biochemical sciences in 1958 and earned a PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1961 with a thesis on the physiology of membranes in the gallbladder. By every reasonable expectation that career should have produced laboratory papers, not bestsellers. He became a professor of physiology at UCLA’s medical school in 1968 and stayed at the university for more than five decades, later as a professor of geography.

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The second career began in 1964, when he made his first field trip to New Guinea and its neighboring islands to study birds. The ornithology was serious: The Birds of Northern Melanesia, written with the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, appeared in 2001. Those years in villages and forest camps gave the later books their texture. Diamond writes like a scientist who has slept in the places he describes. A MacArthur Fellowship in 1985 gave him room to widen the frame.

The Third Chimpanzee, published in 1991, was the first attempt. Starting from how much DNA humans share with chimpanzees, it asked how one more ape came to invent language, art and agriculture, and also genocide and mass extinction. It won the Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Why Is Sex Fun? followed in 1997, a short, cheerful tour of the evolution of human sexuality, from concealed ovulation to menopause to the question of why men do not breastfeed.

The same year brought Guns, Germs, and Steel. Its argument was simple to state and enormous in reach: the gap between the societies that conquered and those that were conquered was not about race or intelligence but about geography. Eurasia had more domesticable plants and large animals, and its long east-west axis let crops, livestock and inventions travel across similar climates. Dense farming populations produced writing, states, steel and the epidemic diseases that their descendants carried to the Americas. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1998 and the same science book prize he had already won for The Third Chimpanzee, and in 2005 National Geographic turned it into a documentary series broadcast on PBS. A young Yuval Noah Harari read it as a doctoral student at Oxford and later described the experience as a kind of epiphany.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, in 2005, flipped the question from rise to fall. Easter Island, the Norse settlements in Greenland, the Classic Maya and the Ancestral Puebloans became case studies in deforestation, soil loss, climate shifts, hostile neighbors and failing trade, set beside modern Montana. Its core claim, that collapse is often a choice rather than a fate, made it a fixture in environmental courses. Honors accumulated around these books: the National Medal of Science in 1999, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 2001 and the Wolf Prize in Agriculture in 2013.

So did the critics. Geographers gathered in the journal Antipode to accuse Guns, Germs, and Steel of environmental determinism, and in 2009 a group of anthropologists published Questioning Collapse, a volume of rebuttals to his readings of Easter Island and other cases. Reviewers of Upheaval, in 2019, pointed to errors and thin statistics. The habit that specialists distrust, reducing centuries to a handful of variables, is the same one that makes lay readers feel they finally understand how the world got this way.

The later books turned more personal and comparative. Natural Experiments of History, a 2010 volume he edited with the economist James A. Robinson, argued that history can borrow the methods of the lab by comparing places with shared starting points. The World Until Yesterday, in 2012, went back to New Guinea to ask what traditional societies can teach modern ones about raising children, caring for the elderly, settling disputes and taking everyday risks seriously, a habit he called constructive paranoia. Upheaval borrowed the tools of crisis therapy to examine how Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia and the United States came through national turning points.

That arc explains why he still matters. The shelf of big-picture history books that now fills airport bookshops grew out of the space Diamond opened, and his central bet, that geography and environment set the odds for whole societies, is still argued over in classrooms. His newest book approaches it from the other side, asking when a single leader can beat those odds. Diamond, who is married to Marie Cohen and has twin sons, remains what he was on that New Guinea beach: a scientist who cannot leave a good question alone.

Tags: writers, Yuval Noah Harari, Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, The Third Chimpanzee, The World Until Yesterday

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