People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
All of our current environmental problems are unanticipated harmful consequences of our existing technology. There is no basis for believing that technology… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us, something we can do nothing about. Instead, all the major… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem! — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalized religion brings two other important benefits to centralized societies. First, shared ideology or… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
Bird taxonomy is a difficult field because of the severe anatomical constraints imposed by flight. There are only so many ways to design a… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didnt have anthropologists. — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
“We come to conquer this land by his command, that all may come to a knowledge of God and of His Holy Catholic Faith;… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
“With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation. — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
No government is here forever. And there are other forces - the most potent force in our society, in fact, big business - doing… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
“Those parasites pass to a person from an eaten animal, but the virus causing laughing sickness (kuru) in the New Guinea highlands used to… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
“...invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland's cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human creativity and energy.… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
“Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
We study the injustices of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the… — Jared Diamond Copy Share Image
