Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist, historian, and author. He has written hundreds of scientific and popular articles and books, most notably Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), which received multiple awards, including the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. In 2005, Diamond was ranked ninth on a poll by Prospect and Foreign Policy of the world's top 100 public intellectuals.
Originally trained in biochemistry and physiology, Diamond has published in many fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. In 1985, he received a MacArthur Genius Grant and in 1999, the National Medal of Science, an honor bestowed by the President of the United States and the National Science Foundation. He was a professor of geography at UCLA until his retirement in 2024.
Despite widespread popularity in the pop science market, for decades his work has been harshly criticized by working researchers in the topics he publishes on. Dozens of historians, anthropologists, and geographers such as the noted environmental historian Andrew Sluyter have published extensive analysis of many basic factual and logical errors in Diamond's work, and discussing the harm they believe he has done to the public understanding of history and anthropology. In November 2003, the human geography journal Antipode published a review symposium on Guns, Germs, and Steel from five researchers, all of whom questioned Diamond's basic understanding of the topic. The review also included Diamond's reply, though he did not respond analytically to any criticisms, rather stating he "found their quality very disappointing", and directing readers instead to read positive reviews of the book.
Diamond was born on September 10, 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts, to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, Louis Diamond, was a Bessarabian Jewish physician who emigrated to the United States from Chișinău, in the Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire (now in Moldova), following the Kishinev pogrom. His mother, Flora (née Kaplan), was a teacher, linguist, and concert pianist. Diamond began studying piano at age six; years later, he would propose to his wife after playing Brahms' Intermezzo in A major for her.
By the age of seven he developed an interest in birdwatching. This became one of his major life passions and resulted in a number of works published in ornithology. He attended the Roxbury Latin School and studied biochemical sciences at Harvard College, graduating in 1958. He later studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and graduated from Cambridge with a Ph.D. in 1961; his thesis was on the physiology and biophysics of membranes in the gallbladder.
After graduation from Cambridge, Diamond returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became a professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties he developed a second, parallel, career in ornithology and ecology, specialising in New Guinea and nearby islands, which he began visiting from 1964. Later, in his fifties, Diamond developed a third career in environmental history and became a professor of geography at UCLA, his current position. He also teaches at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. He is a lecturer on the biodiversity management course at the European Institute of Innovation for Sustainability (EIIS) in Rome. He won the National Medal of Science in 1999. He joined Richard J. Evans to discuss "History as Science" on In Our Time. He gave two TED talks, "Why do societies collapse" (2008), and "How societies can grow old better (2013).
Diamond originally specialized in salt absorption in the gallbladder. He has also published scholarly works in the fields of ecology and ornithology, but is arguably best known for authoring a number of popular science and history books combining topics from diverse fields other than those he has formally studied. Because of this academic diversity, Diamond has been described as a polymath.
Diamond has written scores of academic peer-reviewed articles for publications such as the scientific journal Nature. He has also written scores of popular science articles in publications such as Discover, as well as several bestselling popular books, notably The Third Chimpanzee (1991); Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Prize); Collapse (2005), The World Until Yesterday (2012), and Upheaval (2019). For a full list, see Jared Diamond bibliography § Books.
Diamond's first popular book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991), examines human evolution and its relevance to the modern world, incorporating evidence from anthropology, evolutionary biology, genetics, ecology, and linguistics. The book traces how humans evolved to be so different from other animals, despite sharing over 98% of our DNA with our closest animal relatives, the chimpanzees. The book also examines the animal origins of language, art, agriculture, smoking and drug use, and other apparently uniquely human attributes. It was well received by non-scientific critics and won the 1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
His second and best known popular science book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, was published in 1997. It asks why Eurasian peoples conquered or displaced Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, and not the other way around. It argues that this outcome was not due to genetic advantages of Eurasian peoples themselves but instead to features of the Eurasian continent, in particular, its high diversity of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication and its east/west major axis that favored the spread of those domesticates, people, technologies—and diseases—for long distances with little change in latitude.
The first part of the book focuses on reasons why only a few species of wild plants and animals proved suitable for domestication. The second part discusses how local food production based on those domesticates led to the development of dense and stratified human populations, writing, centralized political organization, and epidemic infectious diseases. The third part compares the development of food production and of human societies among different continents and world regions. Guns, Germs, and Steel became an international best-seller, was translated into 33 languages, and received several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, an Aventis Prize for Science Books and the 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. A television documentary series based on the book was produced by the National Geographic Society in 2005.
The book has received criticism from some scholars in anthropology, human history, and environmental geography. In 2003, the geography journal Antipode published series of review articles on the book, written by researchers in specific subdisciplines of geography relevant to Diamond's claims. All were critical of the claims and logical consistency of the book. Diamond's reply to the articles was also included in the issue, in which he stated he did not understand the criticisms and "found their quality very disappointing", suggesting people purchase the new (in 2003) edition and read positive reviews of the book instead.
In his third book, Why is Sex Fun?, also published in 1997, Diamond discusses evolutionary factors underlying features of human sexuality that are generally taken for granted but that are highly unusual among our animal relatives. Those features include a long-term pair relationship (marriage), coexistence of economically cooperating pairs within a shared communal territory, provision of parental care by fathers as well as by mothers, having sex in private rather than in public, concealed ovulation, female sexual receptivity encompassing most of the menstrual cycle (including days of infertility), female menopause, and distinctive secondary sexual characteristics.
Diamond's next book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, published in 2005, examines a range of past societies in an attempt to identify why they either collapsed or continued to thrive and considers what contemporary societies can learn from these historical examples. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, he argues against explanations for the failure of past societies based primarily on cultural factors, instead focusing on ecology. Among the societies mentioned in the book are the Norse and Inuit of Greenland, the Maya, the Anasazi, the indigenous people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Japan, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and modern Montana.