The most engaging of Jared Diamonds books, and also his first. Many of the ideas he initially explores in these chapters become expanded upon in his later books. I found the chapter lengths to be less intimidating and more broadly appealing than later books. A great and provocative read!

Funny that I read this book in Mexico, a country where more people believe in creation than evolution. For the record, I think we evolved from apes. For the record, that doesn't bother me in the least.

I am going to do two things, first, I will talk about what I learned from this book, secondly I am going to go on a rant about anthropology. While this book was interesting, there were parts where the author stepped far beyond his area of expertise, leading to some very weak chapters. Further, this was written almost 20 years ago, and it is simply amazing how quickly scientific knowledge has advanced. Some parts were outdated, which I found remarkable. Scientific facts seem to have a very quick expiration date.

This book details defining characters of human society - symbolic language, art, agriculture, war, drug abuse and environmental destruction - and presents our evolutionary precursors to these traits. He covers some excellently, and others with not as much conviction. He begins by discussing the unique aspects of the human body both genetically and our life cycle. This part was quite interesting. I learned that we share a whopping 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, which is pretty cool if you ask me.

It was interesting to see how our prolonged life cycle and the unique characteristic of females menopause has influenced human life. Those two things allowed us to transmit lots of information (because old folks would be the story tellers and survival experts when shit hit the fan) and allowed women to also live a bit after having children. It's quite dangerous to have children, let us recall. So menopause was a great thing for women, evolutionarily speaking. Interesting to learn that genetic changes took thousands of years to develop, but once they developed than cultural evolution exploded and since has outpaced biological evolution. Evolution slowly brought us to the place where we had the tools to really start running with it.

One thing that stands out from this book is that a large part of our progress was heavily dependant on the environment and our genes. Rarely do we stop and thank water for being there, or acknowledge how certain geographical features shaped us as humans. Perhaps we should do this more often.

At points, the author stepped outside of his area of expertise to strengthen his argument via other disciplines. I admire the approach and feel it's best to cover one subject through as many routes of knowledge as possible. The tricky thing is, you just have to make good arguments in those other fields. There were two chapters which I shook my head more often than I nodded it, they covered art and astronomy.

The author, in discussing what makes humans unique tries to find precedent in other animals as to how this evolved in humans. Art proves tricky. Art, which I would define as the soul expressing itself in reality, is a uniquely human endeavor. Diamond makes the claim that chimpanzees and elephants have produced art in captivity. He quotes an abstract expressionist painter and critic and a psychologist as his authorities. However, the issue is that other animal art is not a spontaneous creation. They were provided the tools in captivity, it's much more likely that they pick up paintbrush and smoosh paint to gain the approval of their handlers and earn extra attention than it is an undeniable expression of their soul. Also, the category of "art" that Diamond holds up as his "see, they can produce art" in fact defines itself as "anti-figurative aesthetic," meaning art that tries to look like nothing in order to symbolize emotion. So yes, chimps splashing paint fits into this very specific category, but that doesn't make it art outside of that interpretation. Show me more realistic art, art that holds the mirror to reality with a bit more clarity and then show me another animal spontaneously producing that, then we'll talk. This author simply does not understand art, which is fine, but which also means you should steer far clear of it while making a case.

However, the chapter that blew my mind more than any other was one chapter on our place within the universe. This chapter came from left field, was almost entirely speculative and had very little to do with the central thesis. I have no idea why the editor didn't cut it. Suddenly he begins to explain the immense size of the universe, accurately. Then he suddenly declares that there are no planets that can support life (incorrect), we're the only one with life (speculative), period. I was shocked, and I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt only because we have learned very much about the abundance of habitable planets in the universe since 1992. That is the only thing that can possible explain this chapter, because after factually stating how immense the universe is, he then is completely incorrect scientifically about the abundance of planets and finally 100% speculative about there being no other life. The crappy part is he tries to present it all as factual, when in reality just his first stand of evidence was. Ugh. What the hell.

Now, time to rant, this book embodied a perspective on life that I am coming to disdain - anthropology, or 21st century intellectualized racial awwwing at the primitive people who are just so interesting! Primitive people make great facebook photo albums. Let me explain. The author did a lot of research on New Guinea, and talks extensively about it. Due to the terrain, there were many different societies who lived close to one another but remained isolated. Each pocked was a unique culture, with unique traditions and all that. For example, apparently round them parts the cool thing to do is wear basically a codpeice or penis stick. Some tribes painted them yellow, some green, some had flowers, some feathers, dudes had multiple and some were special occasion ones, etc. You getting the picture (if so what color is your penis stick, haha)? Lots of penis sticks, no shoes, native instruments, so cute right? None of the influence from evil modern society and satan incarnate aka the white man. Only within the last 40 years or so did these tribes begin to modernize, trade, get modern goods and all.

The author fondly recalls one of his strolls through the jungle back in the good old days where he came up to a tribe banging on drums and they were so amazed to see him, a white man. About 20 years later he goes back to visit the tribe, with I'm sure his notebooks to do "observations" on them, fancy camera, maybe a computer, etc and to his horror hears them listening to pop music and sees a few wearing Reeboks. Gasp, they were so much cuter, so much more useful to the purpose of my research paper, when they didn't have Reeboks.

What I find appalling about this perspective is it completely ignores the desires of the native people and it ignores the benefits that one is able to obtain from modern society. The very system that allowed the author to think in this way, be educated, and write a book is the one he wants to hold back from cultures because he would rather see the variety of penis ornaments. What if these people want to be modernized? Is it such a horrible thing that they learn about medicine and their infant mortality rate plummets? Is it a bad thing that their life expectancy is over 40 now? What if they want to wear Nikes? Is it such a bad thing to see a world map, understand it's a big place, learn that there are about 7 billion other humans out there?

What I simply do not understand about the "awww, look at and study the primitive people" perspective is the lack of consideration for the desires, wishes, or well being of the culture in question. It's like they feel guilty about being white and going to good prep schools. So they'll write academic papers about those cute jungle people, and take photos and all that, but it's like they want that to remain the way it is. Don't modernize, I just got grant money to study you! It's like their vacation from reality, and I think it's frankly insulting to the people being photographed and studied as if they were animals.

Breathe. Anyway, I thought this book was going to be excellent, instead it was average. Perhaps a new edition would really go a long way in improving it. I learned some interesting statistics, but am not very inspired to continue reading Diamond.

It has also proved possible to work out a calibration between genetic distance and elapsed time, and thereby get an approximate answer to the question of when we and chimps split apart from our common ancestor. That turns out to be somewhere around seven million years ago, give or take a few million years. 12

If our ethical code makes a purely arbitrary distinction between humans and all other species, then we have a code based on naked selfishness devoid of any higher principle. If our code instead makes distinctions based on our superior intelligence, social relationships, and capacity for feeling pain, then it becomes difficult to defend an all or nothing code that draws a line between all humans and all animals. 30

The emergence of Homo sapiens illustrates the paradox discussed in the previous chapter; that our rise to humanity was not directly proportional to the changes in our genes. 37

Those of us accustomed to getting our information from the printed page or television will find it hard to appreciate how important even just one or two old people are in a preliterate society...one such person in a preliterate society can thus spell the difference between death and survival for the whole society. 50

Cro-Manon Neanderthal transition was a harbinger of what was to come, when the victors' descendants began squabbling among themselves. It may at first seem paradoxical that Cro-Magnons prevailed over the more muscular Neanderthals, but weaponry rather than strength would have been decisive. Similarly, it's not gorillas that are now threatening to exterminate humans in central Africa, but vice versa. People with huge muscles require lots of food, and they thereby gain no advantage if slimmer, smarter people can use tools to do the same work. 52

Until the great leap forward, human culture had developed at a snail's pace for millions of years. that pace was dictated by the slow pace of genetic change. After the leap, cultural development no longer depended on genetic change. Despite negligible changes in our anatomy, there has been far more cultural evolution in the past forty thousand years than in the millions of years before. 56

Our mean duration of coitus (about four minutes for Americans) is much longer than for gorillas (one minute), pygmy chimps (fifteen seconds), or common chimps (seven seconds), but shorter than for orangutans (fifteen minutes) and lightning fast compared to the twelve hour long copulations of marsupial mice. 75

In these days of growing human over population, one of the most ironic tragedies is the catholic church's claim that human copulation has conception as its natural purpose, and that the rhythm method is the only proper means of birth control. The rhythm method would be terrific for gorillas and most other mammal species, but not for us. In no species besides humans has the purpose of copulation become so unrelated to conception, or the rhythm method so unsuited for contraception. 78

How does one decide whether recognizably distinct animal populations from different localities constitute different species, or belong instead to the same special and just constitute different races (also known as subspecies)?...The distinction is based on interbreeding under normal circumstances,: members of the same species may interbreed normally if given the opportunity, while members of different species don't. 112

The longer life span of modern humans as compared to that of apes does not rest only on cultural adaptations, such as tools to acquire food and deter predators. It also rests on the biological advantage of menopause and increased investment in self-repair. Whether those biological adaptations developed especially at the time of the great leap forward or earlier, they rank among the life-history changes that permitted the rise of the third chimpanzee to humanity. 135

Up to half the words in typical human speech are purely grammatical items, with no referent that one can point to. 153

Most of today's leading infectious diseases and parasites of mankind could not become established until after the transition to agriculture. These killers persist only in societies of crowded, malnourished, sedentary people constantly reinfected by each other and by their own sewage. 187

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming brought another curse to humanity:class divisions. 187

[Discussing dangerous behaviors, such as smoking or tattoos] Males of many more species have bright colors, loud songs, or conspicuous displays that attract predators. Why should a male advertise such an impediment, and why should a female like it? Zahavi's theory goes to the heart of this paradox. According to his theory, those deleterious structures and behaviors constitute valid indicators that the animal is being honest in its claim of superiority, precisely because those traits themselves impose handicaps. 197

Continental differences in level of civilization arose from geography's effect on the development of our cultural hallmarks, not from human genetics. Continents differed in the resources on which civilization depended - especially in the wild animal and plan species that proved useful for domestication. 236

Plants and animals spread quickly and easily within a climate zone to which they've already adapted. To spread out of this zone, they have to develop new varieties with different climate tolerances. A glance at the map of the old world shows how species could shift long distances without encountering a change of climate. 245

These calculations, which belong to a science called glottochronology ( = chronology of languages), yield the rule of thumb that languages replace about 20 percent of their basic vocabulary every one thousand years. 262

The steppe itself reaches its western limit in the plains of Hungary. That's where all subsequent steppe invaders of Europe, like the Mongols, stopped. To spread further, steppe society had to adopt to the forested landscape of western Europe - by adopting intense agricultural or by taking over existing European societies and hybridizing with their peoples. Most of the genes of the resulting hybrid societies may have been the genes of old europe. 271

Chimpanzee behavior suggests that a major reason for our human hallmark of group living was defense against other human groups, especially once we acquired weapons and a large enough brain to plan ambushes. If this reasoning is correct, then anthropologist's traditional emphasis on "man the hunter" as the driving force of human evolution might be valid after all - with the difference that we ourselves were our own prey as well as the predator that forced us into group living. 294

Our power threatens our own existence. 311

Book is in serious need of an update. It’s age is definitely showing and if anything recent advancements substantiate the claims made even further.

Jared Diamond is a mostly sensible anthropologist. However, he's a lousy evolutionary biologist.

For example, he presents multiple theories of the reason for homo sapiens concealed ovulation. These are presented with false balance i.e. he doesn't share the consensus view, or the quality (and lack thereof) for each theory. Some have laughably low plausibility, in my opinion. He should have done the research and presented the reader with the likely truth, not a list of mostly bad ideas. Worst of all, he presents issues of natural and sexual selection from the species and even the group point of view. Group selection isn't a thing. Individual selection isn't a thing. Gene selection is the only thing. Come on, man! Read some Dawkins! There's yet more false balance and lack of scientific scruples when discussing skin pigmentation. And race. And aging.

He also has this cooky theory that drug and alcohol addiction is a sort of "status symbol" of fitness gone amok. I think this is bogus. Heroin isn't sexy. Alcohol and tobacco can be sexy when they make you look older (and thus allowed to legally buy it). But drug addiction didn't evolve in humans. All animal that has a basal-ganglia-to-limbic loop can become addicted. Our propensity to become drug and alcohol addicted stems only from our access to drugs and alcohol.

While I'm picking knits, he claims that the ancient practice of taking an alcoholic beverage as enema would bypass the liver. It actually bypasses the stomach, wherein enzymes would begin to break down the alcohol. Ethanol delivered into the blood stream via the lower gastrointestinal tract goes strait into the blood but does eventually arrive at the liver. Safe to say, it's not advised.

Another thing Diamond gets wrong is SETI. For some reason, hopefully not a personal one, he insists on calling the Drake equation the "Greene Bank Formula" which nobody else does. Diamond seems perplexed by the question, where are all the flying saucers? This is essentially the Fermi Paradox. The answer Drake himself gave me when I posed the question to him at a SETI convention in 2011 is that space travel is expensive. ET isn't going to visit us in a flying saucer. They'll send robotic probes, and maybe even colonize multiple star systems. But they won't waste time abducting cows. Diamond doesn't adequately illustrate the degree to which we've barely started looking for SETI signals. He claims we've looked, but the silence is deafening. This is just wrong. We've not looked at a millionth of the stars in the milky way at all, and looked at no single star for longer than a year. SETI will take immense patience.

He uses the wood pecker to make some point about how convergent evolution may not be universal, implying that radio capable civilizations might be super duper rare. This is bogus. Convergent evolution is not intimidate. But you better believe that a hundred million years from now, something will be picking bugs out of trees. Maybe descendants of birds. Maybe not. But something will fill the niche.

Diamond dedicates the last chapter to anthropogenic mass extinction without using the word "Holocene", which I found strange. He suggests that humans might be dead men walking, that we're all doomed like the Easter Island civilization. But Easter Island had people on it when it was re-discovered. Small population, but humans didn't go extinct on Easter Island. I think Diamond plays the doom and gloom card to heavily. There is plenty to say about how we can conserve biodiversity. He talks about some conservation efforts in Indonesia. But it's clear he's playing the Silent Spring card. Probably a great political tool, just not very skeptical.

I will show below why I think Jared doesn't know what he is talking about, why he is an abysmal science writer, and why he is as much of a drama queen as Gladwell.

Firstly, most people would put this book on the "evolutionary biology" shelf. So Jared better know something about evolution and biology. He does. But not nearly enough. For example, I noticed at least five times where he had used group selection, by which a gene propagates because it's beneficial to the group rather than to the individual, to explain some evolved traits. It's quite wrong. I get it that it's easy to fall for this unless being constantly on the guard. But he fell for it more than five times. Maybe he didn't get it how natural selection really works after all. Considering the book was published in the 90s, when group theory had been out of favor for decades and was becoming pretty much as laughable as Lamarckism. Oh Jared, quo vadis?

Secondly, he is a really annoying smart alec. It was the worst when he used Zahavi's handicap principle to explain drug addictions of people. The theory could work very well for why peacocks have big showy tails and male deers have big antlers. But it's really stretching to say that people are showing off their health when doing hard drugs. When I was reading it, page after page, I was like this was so implausible there's no way he actually believed what he wrote. And lo and behold, he proved me correct himself! On the last page of that not so short of a chapter, he admitted his explanations didn't really work for our case and that's actually what made us uniquely human. Then why have you just wasted dozens of good pages on this nonsense. This is a ridiculous level of pedantry. To have the balls to waste the reader's time and trees like this on an irrelevant theory that obviously does not explain the question proposed. He devoted about 90% of the chapter to this non-answer.

And later, he literally flipped out when listing the risks we were running when beaming radio signals to potential alien overlords out there. I think it's a valid concern and caution is warranted. But I don't think the concern could only be conveyed to the reader by showing your lid literally flying off as you are tying and head banging on desk and all. Did you forget to take your pills again, Jared?

Obviously, this is all my opinion, but I judge Jared to be a frivolous pulp science writer. Avoid if you want true intellectual stimulation.

A few weeks ago, a bunch of us were talking about the origins of our species, Homo sapiens and I was astonished at how little my friends and I knew about our ancestors. Going back to the roots of our development can provide a lot of insights into our present. So after scouting around for some recommendations, I picked up this brilliant book to learn more about our past, present, and future.

The book begins with the deviation of homo sapiens and our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, and the bonobos from our common ancestor, the great ape, about 3 million years ago. The book then proceeds to trace our evolution through hallmark human characteristics and how these characteristics might eventually spell disaster for our species. The author Jared Diamond draws a lot of his observations from his frequent trips to the Pacific Islands, that until recently were isolated pockets of land with no contact to the outside world. These observations span the domains of biology, anthropology, culture, history, and language. It is hard to gain an unbiased outsider’s perspective of the evolution of our species, and the author attempts to do this from time to time by invoking a neutral alien observer who would comment on our development. Since this book was written in 1991, a part of the book that is based on conjecture about the genetics of human evolution. These theories have primarily been proved/disproved ever since sequencing technologies have evolved rapidly.

I also couldn’t help but notice how natural selection has played a significant role not only in genetic evolution but also in cultural development. The author remarks how genetic differences between humans 40,000 years ago and now are very minimal. The author argues, that if humans of 40,000 years ago were to be born today, they would be able to use the latest technology with dexterity. The author in his chapters of sexuality and the human life cycle very wonderfully brings out how this cultural evolution has superseded genetic evolution in various aspects of our lifecycle such as our choice for a mate, concealed ovulation, clandestine copulation. The traits mentioned above, have been carried forward over generations because they enable us to perform more efficiently.

It was a revelation to see how the modern plagues of society, xenophobia, violence, environmental destruction, etc. are rooted deeply in our evolutionary history. We, humans, were responsible not only for the extermination of large species such as the woolly mammoths, sabertooths and giant sloths that roamed the planet until recently. We were also responsible for the extinction of a part of our OWN species, such as the Tasmanian aboriginals, all 50,000 of whom were killed by colonists. The list of species we have driven to extinction is a lot larger than I would have ever imagined. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that we continue to act in our evolutionarily wired ways and continue to decimate our environment and species around us. But being rooted deep in our evolutionary history doesn’t warrant justifying such acts. To quote the author, “The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.” We were oblivious to the damage we were causing to the environment a few centuries ago, but now we are aware of the consequences and aware of the fact that these consequences are much more substantial due to our large population. The period of “willful bliss” will soon transform into a period of "irrevocable despair" if we continue to use lack of awareness as a pretext to cause environmental damage further.

The last few chapters of the book, take on an apocalyptic tone and very rightly so. Even though the author profoundly believes our end is near, if we don’t reform our ways, he remains “cautiously optimistic” in the epilogue of the book. A lot of the events that helped our species flourish throughout the planet were mere coincidences, and we’re collectively abusing that luck. Reading about our origins was deeply humbling and puts all the other "problems" that pique our capitalistic, material world today into perspective. I would highly recommend this book to EVERYONE, irrespective of age, interests, and beliefs.

Insightful.

The content of the book (how human behaviors can be seen as derived from animal behaviors) and the thesis provided early on (humans are at risk from nuclear war/environmental disaster) are both interesting, but it didn't feel like the book did what the author thought it was going to do. It had some very good chapters on language, drug use, and genocide, but the book as a whole felt a bit scattered and hodgepodge. A good book if you're looking for some broad anthropology, but it left me a bit disappointed.

If one has recently read Guns, Germs and Steel and also Collapse from Jared Diamond, one will instantly recognize a lot of the themes that both books cover here in The Third Chimpanzee. One will then realize that The 3rd Chimp was published years before both of these more well-known books, so it will come as no surprise that a lot of these themes were more fleshed out in each subsequent book. As it is, The 3rd Chimp covers a lot of ground, from early human evolution to broad coverage of a lot of topics in Anthropology to Diamonds well founded concerns about habitat & species destruction at the hands of homo sapiens. It’s a good book throughout but if you’ve already come across his more well-known books it might not be an essential read.

At first one may be unimpressed by Diamond's unassuming style, but it will soon become apparent that as always he's tackling some of our history's most important and tough questions. How monogamous are we really? Why do we prefer to have sex in private? Who were the people who brought proto Indo European language to Europe, and how do we know that?

The chapter on languages alone could be a book into itself very much worth reading...

Love this author.

The title sums up the provocative proposal that Jared Diamond advances in this book. Why think of humans in any other way than as another chimpanzee? The argument is very well presented - the evidence for the classification of our species in the same branch of the common chimpanzee and the bonobo. What this allows is too escape the trap (we are usually in) of human exceptionalism and, instead, look at our species with some degree of sobriety and equanimity.

The author goes on a brave attempt to investigate the history of our species and our potential for future survival. This is an interesting exercize. We are, so far, the only species we know that is self-aware. But we frequently are unable to do these exercizes where we include ourselves in the planet's tree of life. This book is not an heretic gratuitous provocation, using a device just for shock value or to get media attention and sell more. It is a serious effort to restore humanity to its most precious place: nature. And by that effort, to give us a better perspective of where we are and where our future might take us.

Not quite on the level of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. There are some great chapters, like the one about genocide and the "no golden age", but most of the ideas I knew previously.

What I particularly disliked in the book was that it made a great deal to explain the similarities between the humans and the other apes, but neglected nevertheless the obvious question: Why are humans so different? Jared Diamond seems to indicate that most of the achievements of humans do have precursors in animal behaviour. He explains how this is true for language, for art, for genocide. I do agree with this thesis, but I find it as rather moving the goal post. The important question (for me at least) is why did humans evolve so differently? What triggered the change? Technology for sure cannot be the answer.

Let's take for example the phenomenon of speech. Jared Diamond argues, correctly, that there are indicators of language in other primates. He goes to great length to explain why this is the case. He also argues (possibly correctly, but with no hope of proof) that very finely tuned changes in the human vocal apparatus gave the Homo Sapiens a distinct advantage. However, he doesn't explain why this evolutionary leap has occurred. One explanation, which is rather facile from an intellectual standpoint, is that this leap has occurred by chance. However it feels less than satisfactory. We could argue that everything happened by chance, in the end, and thus avoid all responsibility.

I am not sure if I have given the book justice. I guess it was far above its time when it was published. It is simply a subjective review after all, so that is the best that I could come up with.