Jared Diamond
Quotes by Evolutionary Scientist (Biology, Ecology) Jared
Diamond
History followed different courses for different
peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because
of biological differences among peoples themselves.
Far more Native Americans and other non-European
peoples were killed by Eurasian germs than by Eurasian guns and steel weapons.
(Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, 1998)
Jared
Diamond Evolution Quotes
'Guns, Germs and Steel'
History before the emergence of writing around
3000BC receives brief treatment, although it constitutes 99.9% of the five
million year history of the human species. ..Humans diverged from the apes
around seven million years ago. ..13 000 years since the end of the last
Ice Age. (Diamond, Introduction)
Until the end of the last Ice Age, around 11
000 BC, all people on all continents were hunter-gatherers. Different rates
of development on different continents, from 11 000BC to 1500AD, were what
led to technological and political inequalities of 1500AD. While Aboriginal
Australians and many Native Americans remained hunter-gatherers, most of
Eurasia and much of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa gradually developed
agriculture, herding, metallurgy and complex political organisation. Parts
of Eurasia, and one area of the Americas, independently developed writing
as well. However, each of these new developments appeared earlier in Eurasia
than elsewhere. For instance, the mass production of bronze tools which was
just beginning in the South American Andes in the centuries before 1500AD,
was already established in Eurasia over 4000 years earlier. The stone technology
of the Tasmanians, when first encountered by European explorers in 1642AD,
was simpler than that prevalent in parts of the Upper Paleolithic Europe
tens of thousands of years earlier. (Diamond, p16)
The history of interactions among
disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics
and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not
died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some
of the world’s most troubled areas. (Diamond, p16)
If we succeed in explaining how some people came
to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination? Doesn’t
it seem to say that the outcome was inevitable, and that it would therefore
be futile to try to change the outcome today? This objection rests on a common
tendency to confuse an explanation of causes with a justification or acceptance
of results. What use one makes of a historical explanation is a question
separate from the explanation itself. Understanding is more often used to
try to alter an outcome than to repeat or perpetuate it. That’s why
psychologists try to understand the minds of murderers and rapists, why social
historians try to understand genocide, and why physicians try to understand
the causes of disease. Those investigators do not seek to justify murder,
rape, genocide and illness. Instead, they seek to use their understanding
of a chain of causes to interrupt the chain.
(Diamond, p17)
Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent
ones to escape those causes of high mortality (murder, chronic tribal warfare,
accidents, problems procuring food..) in traditional New Guinean societies.
However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional
European societies had little to do with intelligence, and instead involved
genetic resistance dependent on details of body chemistry. For example people
with blood type B or O have a greater genetic resistance to smallpox than
do people with blood group A. That is, natural selection promoting genes
for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in
more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection
for body chemistry was more potent. (Diamond, p21)
History followed different courses for different
people because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because
of biological differences among people themselves. (Diamond,
p.25)
Far more Native Americans and other non-European peoples were killed by Eurasian
germs than by Eurasian guns and steel weapons. (Diamond,
p29)
Up To The Starting Line
Our closest living relatives are the three surviving
species of great ape: the gorilla, the common chimpanzee and the pygmy chimpanzee
(bonobo). Their confinement to Africa, along with abundant fossil evidence,
indicates that the earliest stages of human evolution were also played out
in Africa. Around seven million years ago, a population of African apes broke
up into several populations, of which one evolved into modern gorillas, second
into the two modern chimps and the third into humans.
Fossils indicate that the evolutionary line leading
to us had achieved a substantially upright posture by around four million
years ago, then began to increase in body size and in relative brain size
around 2.5 million years ago.
These protohumans are generally known as Australopithecus africanus, Homo
habilis and Homo erectus, which apparently evolved into each other in that
sequence. Although Homo erectus, the stage reached around 1.7 million years
ago, was close to us modern humans in body size, its brain size was still
barely half of ours.
For the first 5 or 6 million years, after our
origins about 7 million years ago, protohumans remained confined to Africa.
The first human ancestor to spread beyond Africa was Homo erectus, as is
attested by fossils discovered on the Southeast Asian island of Java and
conventionally known as ‘Java man’. The oldest Java man fossils
have usually been assumed to date from about a million years ago. (Diamond,
p.36)
By about half a million years ago, human fossils
had diverged from older Homo erectus skeletons in their enlarged, rounder
and less angular skulls. African and European skulls of half a million years
ago were sufficiently similar to skulls of us moderns that they are classified
in our species, Homo sapiens. However these early Homo sapiens still differed
from us in skeletal details, had brains significantly smaller than ours,
and were grossly different from us in their artifacts and behaviour. Modern
stone tool making peoples would have scorned the stone tools of half a million
years ago as very crude. The only other significant addition to our ancestors’ cultural
repertoire that can be documented with confidence around that time was the
use of fire. (Diamond, p. 37-8)
After half a million years ago, the human populations
of Africa and western Eurasia proceeded to diverge from each other and from
East Asian populations in skeletal details. The population of Europe and
western Asia between 130 000 and 40 000 years ago is represented by especially
many skeletons, known as Neanderthals. Despite being depicted in innumerable
cartoons as apelike brutes living in caves, Neanderthals had brains slightly
bigger than our own, were the first humans to leave behind strong evidence
for buring their dead and caring for the sick. Their stone tools though were
still crude and not yet made in standardised diverse shapes, each with a
clearly recognisable function.
The few preserved African skeletal fragments
contemporary with the Neanderthals are more similar to our modern skeletons
than to Neanderthal skeletons. Even fewer preserved East Asian sketal fragments
are known, but they appear different again from both Africans and Neanderthals.
(Diamond, p.38)
Human history took off around 50 000 years ago.
The earliest definite signs of the Great Leap Forward come from East African
sites with standardised stone tools and the first preserved jewelry. Similar
developments soon appear in the Near East and in southeasten Europe, then
(some 40 000 years ago) in southwestern Europe, where abundant artifatcs
are associated with fully modern skeletons of people termed Cro-Magnons.
Cro-Magnon garbage heaps yield not only stone
tools but also tools of bone, whose suitability for shaping (i.e. fish hooks)
had apparently gone unrecognised by previous humans. Tools were produced
in diverse and distinctive shapes so modern that their functions as needles,
awls, engraving tools and so on are obvious to us. Multipiece tools also
made their appearance at Cro-Magnon sites, such as harpoons, spear-throwers
and eventually bows and arrows, the precursors of rifles. Those efficient
means of killing at a safe distance permitted the hunting of such dangerous
prey as rhinos and elephants, while the invention of rope for nets, lines
and snares allowed the addition of fish and birds to our diet. Remains of
houses and sewn clothing testify to a greatly improved ability to survive
in cold climates.
Of the Cro-Magnons’ products that have
been preserved, the best known are their artworks: their magnificent cave
paintings, statues and musical instruments, which we still appreciate as
art today. (Diamond, p. 39)
Obviously, some momentous change took place in
our ancestors capabilities between about 100 000 and 50 000 years ago. That
Great Leap Forward poses two major unresolved questions, regarding its triggering
causes and its geographic location. As for its cause, I argued in my book
The Third Chimpanzee for the perfection of the voice box and hence the anatomical
basis of modern language, on which the exercise of human creativity is so
dependent. Others have suggested instead that a change in brain organisation
around that time, without a change in brain size, made modern language possible.
As for the site of the Great Leap Forward, did it take place primarily in
one geographic area, in one group of humans, who were thereby enabled to
expand and replace the former human populations of other parts of the world?
Or did it occur parallel in different regions, in each of which the human
populations living there today would be descendants of the populations living
there before the leap?
The rather modern looking human skulls from Africa around 100 000 years ago
have been taken to support the former view, with the leap occurring specifically
in Africa. On the other hand, skulls of humans living in China and Indonesia
hundreds of thousands of years ago are considered by some physical anthropologists
to exhibit features still found in modern Chinese and in Aboriginal Australians
respectively. If true, that finding would suggest parallel evolution and
multiregional origins of modern humans, rather than origins in a single garden
of eden. The issue remains unresolved. (Diamond, p. 40)
The evidence for a localised origin of modern
humans, followed by their spread and then their replacement of other types
of humans elsewhere, seems strongest for Europe. Some 40 000 years ago, into
Europe came the Cro-Magnons, with their modern skeletons, superior weapons
and advanced cultural traits. Within a few thousand years there were no more
Neanderthals, who had been evolving as the sole occupants of Europe for hundreds
of thousands of years. (Diamond, p. 40)
The Great Leap Forward coincides with the first
proven major extension of human geographic range since our ancestors’ colonisation
of Eurasia. That extension consisted of the occupation of Australia and New
Guinea, joined at that time into a single continent. Many radiocarbon dated
sites attest to human presence in Australia/New Guinea between 40 000 and
30 000 years ago. Within a short time of that initial peopling, humans had
expanded over the whole continent and adapted to its diverse habitats. (Diamond,
p. 41)
During the Ice Ages, so much of the oceans waters
was locked up in glaciers that worldwide sea levels dropped hundreds of feet
below their present stand. As a result, what are now the shallow seas between
Asia and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Java and Bali became
dry land. The edge of the South east Asian mainland then lay 700 miles east
of its present location. Neverthless, central Indonesian islands between
Bali and Australia remained surrounded and separated by deep water channels.
To reach Australia / New Guinea from the Asian mainland at that time still
required crossing a mimimum of 8 channels, the broadest of which was 50 miles
wide. Most of these channels divided islands visible from each other, but
Australia itself was always invisible from even the nearest Indonesian islands,
Timor and Tanimbar. Thus the occupation of Australia / New Guinea is momentus
in that it demanded watercraft and provides by far the earliest evidence
of their use in history. Not until about 30 000 years later (13 000 years
ago) is there strong evidence of watercraft anywhere else in the world, from
the Mediterranean. (Diamond, p.41)
On the Evolution of Nature & Culture
Human, Society, Ecology, Life, The Environment & Universe
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"When
forced to summarize the general theory of relativity in one sentence: Time
and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter. ... Physical
objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended.
In this way the concept 'empty space' loses its meaning. ... The particle
can only appear as a limited region in space in which the field strength or
the energy density are particularly high. ...
