A confrontation with the often forgotten stations of incarnation.

The author tackles a variety of topics in his first work and shows similarities with human norms in the animal kingdom in state formation, social and sexual behavior, drug use and rudimentary agriculture by using evolutionary development. The origins and history of communication, xenophobia, art, and warfare are also illuminated in detail.

The influence of environmental conditions can be well explained by the differences between bonobos and chimpanzees. Separated by the insurmountable Congo, the peaceful, matriarchal life of the bonobos developed in an environment of sufficient and comfortable living conditions, while the habitat of the hierarchically structured and highly violent chimpanzees was rather barren and inhospitable. Thus, the thesis comes up: Adverse environmental conditions would require stricter rankings and an evolution promoting aggressive behavior. On the other hand, the wealth of resources enables the bonobos to cooperate socially and peacefully without the necessity of aggression.

In contradiction to this, however, there are both other animal species and specialized groups of people, who still treat each other friendly in the most adverse conditions. To start directly and just with the assumption of the necessity of a more brutal mentality would be too far-fetched and simplified. There are for instance the inexplicable, for the own group sometimes even harmful, behavioral patterns of chimpanzees such as senseless violence, incitement, and persecution of individual group members and genocides in conquest campaigns including cannibalism, which all together already gives a pretty good description of modern humans.

Moreover, bonobos are threatened of extinction because they are defenseless against organized animal attacks or rather raids organized by the chimpanzees, which can be described as an animal precursor to genocide. This shows impressively and sadly that the mentality of humankind awoke long before our rise to power.

It is close to impudence how often Diamond has used parts of this book for his other, later published books. Thus, portions of the chapter on the conquerors of the world were included in the book "Guns Germs and Steel" and sections on the meaning of the habitat are found in "Collapse: Why Societies Survive or Perish."

In the case of personal interest, the reading of the detailed descriptions of both works is, in any case, an option if the relatively short explanations of this work have made one curious.
There are few arguments against the preference to blame humans as the most likely cause of past species extinction and as a secondary cause of climate change, given the apparent archaeological evidence. It may well be that the evolution of ice and warm periods in specific regions had stronger influences, but especially in the always relatively moderate climates, this argument does not withstand because of the adaptability of most animals.
It is argued by skeptics that the finding of fossils is a random gamble that does not allow serious estimates of numbers. Only if one finds excessively many bones of extinct animals in the sediment layers coinciding with human migrations, this should be a clear indication.

At the end of the book, Diamond asks people to avoid the always same mistakes and the cycles of expansion, species extinction, and environmental degradation and at least not do more damage. It is a noble concern because it must be incredibly frustrating, especially from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist, to observe over decades how habitats, that are still to be explored, are irreversibly destroyed right in front of one's nose.

A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real-life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_e...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_D...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thi...

The book is breathtaking in scope and has great nuggets of totally new information everywhere. Philosophically, it is not easy to answer how a human being is different from the nearest primate. The answer is attempted on dimensions as diverse as genes, human promiscuity, genocide or ability to speak. At every stage, the author throws light upon interesting new everyday questions that few may have ever thought of. And as a result, the disjointed book provides a fascinating tale of what makes us.

This will probably be my go-to recommendation for human evolution from now on. The anthropological view, unlike the biological one covered by Dawkins, keeps things interesting by addressing questions related to our every day lives, yet still having a scientific foundation to provide scaffolding for the content. If you've read Diamond's GG&S prior to this, as I'm sure many will have, there may be a few chapters you can skip, but the content remains as fascinating as when you read it the first time.

I cannot say that I enjoyed this book. It was tedious and something that doesn't interest me. However, I found it very interesting and have a lot of respect for the knowledge and delivery of Diamond.
Unfortunately, in my naivety, I cannot question anything in this book.
It certainly wasn't a regretful read. It was a learning experience.

Sve što nas čini ljudima i na što smo tako ponosni naslijedili smo od predaka. Da li je poljoprivreda bila baš takva sreća kakvom nas uče? Bave li se životinje umjetnošću? koja je veza između djetlića i NLO-a? pročitajte pa ćete saznati.

This is the third "textbook" I have read by Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs, and Steel continues as a must read for anyone remotely interested in the history of mankind. The Third Chimpanzee refers to Diamond's views that Homo Sapiens evolved from chimpanzees some 6 million years ago. The other "two" chimpanzees refer to a not well understood "third man" and robust australopithecines. In any event, homo sapiens first emerged as homo erectus 1.7 million years ago and evolved into homo sapiens about 500,000 years ago. The other two chimpanzees did not "survive".

What was most intriguing for me is Diamond's unique writing style (I can understand him!) and the logical progression he outlines in the "Third Chimpanzee". Perhaps the most important event in the history of man is Diamond's portrayal of "The Great Leap Forward". This Leap is likely the bridge in our evolution to human language for which, due to its nature, archaeological evidence is very difficult to find and age.

Other topics he covers are the substantially unique human elements of:

sexuality,
why we grow old and die,
origins of art,
agriculture (and its mixed blessings),
domestication of animals
why humans smoke, drink and use dangerous drugs (even though they know it is stupid to do so), whether we are alone in the universe,
history of first contacts,
accidental conquerors (hard to summarize but interesting),
racial discrimination, and
genocide.

Diamond closes with his views of two clouds hanging over us. Until our own generation, no one had grounds to worry whether the next human generation would survive or enjoy a planet worth living on. That is no longer the case. First is the cloud of nuclear holocaust. If it occurs, it will be bad of us and might even kill us all. The risk shapes much of current world diplomacy.

The second cloud is environmental holocaust. As early as 1992 (when The Third Chimpanzee is published), Diamond succinctly summarizes this risk. His epilogue is "Nothing Learned, and Everything Forgotten? We should pay attention to everything he has to say.

Original review: The audience called for an encore and Jared obliged. The rewind was not as much fun.

Update:

The Homosexual Chimpanzee?

However, this book has some great explanations on human sexuality but does not address one which I was not able to find a satisfactory explanation for, evolutionarily speaking: Homosexuality.

The following is an explanatory excerpt from The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins. I am adding this here for my own reference, but I am sure you will find it damn interesting too.

"Consider human male homosexuality as a more serious example. On the face of it, the existence of a substantial minority of men who prefer sexual relations with their own sex rather than with the opposite sex constitutes a problem for any simple Darwinian theory. The rather discursive title of a privately circulated homosexualist pamphlet, which the author was kind enough to send me, summarizes the problem: 'Why are there "gays" at all? Why hasn't evolution eliminated "gayness" millions of years ago?' The author, incidentally, thinks the problem so important that it seriously undermines the whole Darwinian view of life. Trivers (1974), Wilson (1975, 1978), and especially Weinrich (1976) have considered various versions of the possibility that homosexuals may, at some time in history, have been functionally equivalent to sterile workers, foregoing personal reproduction the better to care for other relatives. I do not find this idea particularly plausible (Ridley & Dawkins in press), certainly no more so than a 'sneaky male' hypothesis. According to this latter idea, homosexuality represents an 'alternative male tactic' for obtaining matings with females. In a society with harem defence by dominant males, a male who is known to be homosexual is more likely to be tolerated by a dominant male than a known heterosexual male, and an otherwise subordinate male may be able, by virtue of this, to obtain clandestine copulations with females.

But I raise the 'sneaky male' hypothesis not as a plausible possibility so much as a way of dramatizing how easy and inconclusive it is to dream up explanations of this kind (Lewontin, 1979, used the same didactic trick in discussing apparent homosexuality in Drosophila). The main point I wish to make is quite different and much more important. It is again the point about how we characterize the phenotypic feature that we are trying to explain.

Homosexuality is, of course, a problem for Darwinians only if there is a genetic component to the difference between homosexual and heterosexual individuals. While the evidence is controversial (Weinrich 1976), let us assume for the sake of argument that this is the case. Now the question arises, what does it mean to say there is a genetic component to the difference, in common parlance that there is a gene (or genes) 'for' homosexuality? It is a fundamental truism, of logic more than of genetics, that the phenotypic 'effect' of a gene is a concept that has meaning only if the context of environmental influences is specified, environment being understood to include all the other genes in the genome. A gene 'for' A in environment X may well turn out to be a gene for B in environment Y. It is simply meaningless to speak of an absolute, context-free, phenotypic effect of a given gene.

Even if there are genes which, in today's environment, produce a homosexual phenotype, this does not mean that in another environment, say that of our Pleistocene ancestors, they would have had the same phenotypic effect. A gene for homosexuality in our modern environment might have been a gene for something utterly different in the Pleistocene. So, we have the possibility of a special kind of 'time-lag effect' here. It may be that the phenotype which we are trying to explain did not even exist in some earlier environment, even though the gene did then exist."


Yes, this is inconclusive, but it does point out some interesting directions in which we can direct our evolutionary reasoning. Don't you think?

Kitabın çerçevesi daha adından başlayarak sağlam oturtulmuş. Dünya üzerindeki diğer canlılardan gerçekten farklı mıyız? Bu sorunun peşine bizleri düşüren yazarın bize mantıklı argümanlarla ilettiği çıkış noktasına göre; bir uzaylı dünyadaki yaşamları incelese muhtemelen bizi diğer iki şempanze türüne çok benzeyen üçüncü bir şempanze türü olarak çok ayrıcalıklı olmayacak bir yere oturturdu muhtemelen.

Ama baktığımızda biz diğer canlıların yapmadığı bir çok şeyi yapmaktayız. Sanat mesela, ya da soykırımlar. Ama gerçekte böyle mi? Yoksa en insani saydığımız karakteristiklerin dahi doğada kökenleri mi var? Diamond elindeki verileri ortaya dökerek bu meseleyi açıklığa kavuşturuyor. Elbette her zaman olduğu gibi bazı soruların kesin yanıtları yok.

Sonuç olarak; insanlık tarihinin doğaya dokunan temeller üzerinde yükselişine tanıklık etmek maksadıyla okunabilecek bir kitap Üçüncü Şempanze.

This book describes the history of humans from an evolutionary perspective, and talks about where we're likely to end up on our current path (spoiler alert: extinct).

I'm glad I read this - It's easy to simplify evolution as "survival of the fittest", but there's so much more to it. Humans are a unique species, yes, but it was fascinating to learn the animal roots/evolutionary benefits of some of our peculiar behaviours (monogamy, addiction, genocide etc.)

What I loved:
1. The author's tone and pace: reading the book almost felt like listening to a very patient professor taking great pains to explain a complicated concept, in as interesting a manner as possible

2. The photos and illustrations, especially the 1-2 page deep dive examples: Kudos to the co-author for making it so easy to connect to what the main author describes using words!

Jared Diamond writes lucidly and engagingly about the rise of the human race as the dominant species on the planet, as he documents the contribution of our animal heritage towards what we consider uniquely human achievements like language, art, agriculture and use of tools.

He also pointedly argues for us as a species to change our ways as he paints a vivid picture of our fall from grace, demonstrating how easy it is to reverse our hardwon progress - through our destruction of our environment, our willful abuse of the earth's resources and our lack of regard towards the ever-dwindling numbers of other species we share this planet with.

It is a timely warning and one we must heed. It is in Nature that we evolved our gifts, and it is in Nature that we lose them just as easily, and history is littered with examples of erstwhile successful species and populations brought low by their thoughtless actions that laid waste their resources.

Earth is the only home we have and it's time we stopped acting like we have a spare. We've been lucky so far, but we must learn from our past mistakes or like the chilling example of Ozymandias in the desert, we too will die out, our past glories half buried under the restless sands of time and no one to remember our names.

Για όσους φοβούνται τα βιβλια-κτήνη του Diamond, το παρόν βιβλίο ειναι η απόλυτη επιλογή σε μια hardcover εικονογραφημένη έκδοση.
Συγκλονιστικό ανάγνωσμα όπως πάντα.

Were you a visitor to Earth from outer space, you'd want a handbook about the dominant kind of life on the planet. The Third Chimpanzee would be perfect for you!

Jared Diamond has published several books, all of them a pleasure to read. In this one he first presents the themes that he develops in the others. You hear about the factors that favored Europeans in their rise to domination of other people which is greatly expanded upon in Guns, Germs and Steel. You also learn of the common human social characteristic of continuing to follow the same path even when it leads to the destruction of a way of life, which is greatly expanded upon in Collapse.

The Third Chimpanzee takes a wide view of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, explaining where we came from (having a common ancestor with the chimps), our patterns of social and sexual behavior contrasted with other animals, the most important being language. He writes of our place in the universe, and why we may be alone though others might have gone before elsewhere. Intelligence brings the ability to manipulate the physical world in dangerous ways and responsibility does not necessarily develop with brain power.

Upon finishing the book, the reader can't help but acknowledge that humans are not the perfection of life on earth, but rather are creatures with positive and negative qualities that, because of our explosive population growth, must be controlled if we are to survive. A bountiful earth has given us the illusion that there are no limits, but the lives most of us spend in completely artificial creations, our cities, keep the changes our consumption makes in the natural world from notice. Diamond wants us to think of ourselves based on our real behavior and the consequences to be expected from it, not upon lofty mythological tales of what it is to be a human with a divine sanction to do as we please.

The most intriguing topic is our sudden great leap forward about 40,000 years ago, long after our large brain had evolved. Diamond believes it was the development of language that allowed us to plan with each other and to pass knowledge from one generation to the next that did the trick, but how did that come about? Other animals are intelligent but lack the physical apparatus to speak as we do. Another amazing fact is that since humanity emerged in Africa a million years ago, until about 15,000 years ago there was not a single human being living in North or South America.

It has been more than 20 years since this book was first published. I had read it then and put it on the shelf to read again. This second reading was not a disappointment, it has aged very well, but leaves me curious to find out what further information has been found since 1991.