This one looks at humans as animals and compares them to our wild counterparts. It looks at evolution, culture, genocide, language, sex, art, and more. It also looks at how we are affecting the planet and other species.

This might be my favourite Diamond book. I think the closer look at other species is what did that for me. I listened to the audio.

Brilliant with some flaws

After the spectacular success of UCLA geography Professor Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. (1997) and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or to Succeed (2005), Harper Perennial has reissued this splendid book originally published in 1992. I'm glad they did. In this ambitious work, Diamond attempts to define human nature in evolutionary terms and to warn us of the dangers ahead. He is particularly worried about the two clouds he sees as hanging over our heads, nuclear warfare and an environmental holocaust. (p. 350)

In the early chapters, Diamond examines our nature and shows how we are similar to and differ from the common chimpanzee and the bonobo (AKA "the pygmy chimp" or as lately seen on TV, "the sexy chimp"). His expertise is nothing less than stunning. Even though this book is nearly 15 years old, most of what he writes needs no update. In the later chapters he concentrates on a variety of themes, genocide, the "noble savage," environmental loss, species extinction, etc. Here we can see the tentative ideas that later became the books mentioned above.

In chapter one, Diamond compares the three chimps. In chapter two he documents the so-called "great leap forward" about 40,000 years ago in which humans became truly human as evidenced by cave art, better tools and the ability to improve upon previous tool design. He attributes this leap to the development of symbolic language. In chapters three through six, he examines human sexuality and reproduction. In chapter seven he explains why we grow old and die. Chapters eight and nine explore language and art and their expression in other animals. In chapter ten, "Agriculture's Mixed Blessings," one of the best chapters in the book, Diamond shows us that life as a hunter-gatherer was preferable to life as one of the early agriculturists. With agriculture came the possibility of civilization and everything that civilization brings, which includes--in addition to art, technology and the massive harnessing of energy--herd diseases, malnutrition from monoculture farming, overpopulation, and hard and long work hours for most people. Average human height actually decreased following the birth of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.

In chapter eleven Diamond begins to stray from what he really knows to what he thinks he knows. He posits here that we drink and use "dangerous drugs" because of a macho need to show how fit we are. He takes Amotz Zahavi's famous handicap principle and applies it to the Marlboro man. But the advertising for cigarettes and alcohol that Diamond sees as appealing to fitness are better seen as appealing to a false sense of glamour or adventure. Actually we use drugs because they alter our consciousness or deaden it; and we continue to use them because we become psychologically dependent on them. A way of looking at drug use that is consistent with evolutionary principles is to see drug use as a relationship between species, between plant (producer of, e.g., nicotine, tetrahydrocannibinol) and human, or between yeast (alcohol) and human which has not yet reached a true symbiosis.

Another error that I think Diamond makes is his idea that intelligent species throughout the universe are unlikely. He uses the argument that intelligence arose only once on this planet and that if it was something that evolution could easily develop it would have arisen in other species, but hasn't. He even recalls an analogy that I've read elsewhere from woodpeckers. Noting that there are no native woodpeckers in Australia, it is postulated that although woodpecking is a fine subsistence niche, it requires such exacting skills that its evolution almost didn't happen on this planet. The same may be said for intelligence as an evolutionary skill. But the fact that woodpeckers already exist in the Americas and the Old World tends to preclude the evolution of other birds into woodpeckers. And who's to say what intelligent creatures might have evolved had we not come along (e.g., the Neanderthal)? And who's to say just how intelligent some dinosaurs were before they were wiped out? And who's to say what a colony of ants or bees ("swarm intelligence") may become after we are gone?

I also think Diamond is missing something when he declares that "advanced extraterrestrials who discovered us would surely treat us in the same" barbaric way we have treated other primates (or indeed other peoples). (p. 214) For one thing those little green men, considering the vastness of interstellar space, would have a hard time getting here, and any that did arrive here would be light years in advance of us not only technologically but probably morally as well.

A recurring theme throughout the book is the human propensity to kill and our hypocrisy about that killing. From the mastodons to the children of the Middle East, humans have always killed while maintaining that killing is evil. Diamond does a nice job of explaining just how this Orwellian doublethink works. The main mental trick is to see those we want to kill as different and separate from ourselves. The taboo against killing humans, Diamond reveals, is really just a taboo against killing members of our own family and tribe. Once we are able to see others as outsiders, we can demonize them and trivialize them, turn them into subhuman objects and get on with the slaughter. Diamond considers how those of us on the sidelines, those of us who have not demonized the victims, can let this happen. His conclusion is that human nature can stand only so much blood-splattered horror before we become numb to the killing and turn away.

Although Diamond waxes hopeful near the end of the book as he thinks of his children and grandchildren, the overall impression I got is that humans are probably not going to be able to prevent the twin nuclear and environmental holocausts to come.~

--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”

I originally read this book (not this edition, GR wont let me CHOOSE the edition I own) back at uni. It was good, complex and informative.

This time I listening to the audiobook (which GR won't let me choose unless I switch from the paperback) it is well narrated.





Whatever Goodreads is doing at the moment is #%$^& annoying; I originally read this book in an edition it refuses to admit exists. I am now listening to the audiobook version; but apparently I can't review a paperback and audiobook separately, I can only choose one. Not the one I have, because according to GR there were only 20 publications in 1991 and none of them were in English *eye roll* Not even any point in giving them feedback as they clearly dont give a rats.

1) "The gorilla must have branched off from our family tree slightly before we separated from the common and pygmy chimpanzees. The chimpanzees, not the gorilla, are our closest relatives. Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans."

2) "[The] most hotly debated problem in the evolution of human reproduction is to explain why we ended up with concealed ovulation, and what good all our mistimed copulations do for us. For scientists, it's no answer just to say that sex is fun. Sure, it's fun, but evolution made it that way. If we weren't getting big benefits from our mistimed copulations, mutant humans who had evolved not to enjoy sex would have taken over the world."

3) "We wouldn't mourn the shrinking cultural diversity of the modern world if it only meant the end of self-mutilation and child suicide. But the societies whose cultural practices have now become dominant were selected just for economic and military success. Those qualities aren't necessarily the ones that foster happiness or promote long-term human survival. Our consumerism and our environmental exploitation serve us well at present but bode ill for the future. Features of American society that already rate as disasters in anyone's book include our treatment of old people, adolescent turmoil, abuse of psychotropic chemicals, and gross inequality. For each of these problem areas, there are (or were before first contact) many New Guinea societies that found far better solutions to the same issue."

4) "Our inherited [proto-Indo-European] roots tend to be for human universals that people surely were already naming thousands of years ago: words for the numbers and human relationships; words for body parts and functions; and ubiquitous objects or concepts like 'sky,' 'night,' 'summer,' and 'cold.' Among the human universals thus reconstructed are such homely acts as 'to break wind,' with two distinct roots in PIE depending on whether one does it loudly or softly."

5) "Although we usually think of the Cro-Magnons as the first bearers of our noblest traits, they also bore the two traits that lie at the root of our current problems: our propensities to murder each other en masse and to destroy our environment. Even before Cro-Magnon times, fossil human skulls punctured by sharp objects and cracked to extract the brains bear witness to murder and cannibalism. The suddenness with which Neanderthals disappeared after Cro-Magnon arrived hints that genocide had now become efficient. Our efficiency at destroying our own resource base is suggested by extinctions of almost all large Australian animals following our colonization of Australia fifty thousand years ago, and of some large Eurasian and African mammals as our hunting technology improved. If the seeds of self-destruction have been so closely linked with the rise of advanced civilizations in other solar systems as well, it becomes easy to understand why we have not been visited by any flying saucers."

Truly a must-read for anyone interested in human evolution, our uniqueness as a species, and the problems that we have created for ourselves.

I picked this up without checking the publication date. Oops. Very decent reasoning and a wonderful synthetic approach, but no exhilarating new ideas for anyone interested in sociobiology/evolutionary psychology circa 2014. Still, a solid and readable work and some clear insights, despite a few unnecessary repetitions.

A nicely researched and well explained book.
The book discusses various issues in human evolution and social evolution and tries to explain how man evolved to what he is and what chances does he have to continue to survive.

Most of the issues in the book I have read in other books (one by the same author)

It is a matter of timing. If this would be my first book on the subject I would consider it an amazing book and praise it. However I have read a few books and most of the information in this book I have read in other books.

A look at how much we are like our fellow animals, as well as how we differ from them. His perspective gives interesting insight into our society, attitudes, and self-destructive behaviors. It also offers some possible solutions.

A very interesting book on how some of the behaviour that we attribute only to humans, from art and language to drug abuse and genocide, has parallels in the animal world. Some of the themes in this book were later explored and further developed in Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel". Worth a read!

There are two types of books on evolution: hard and soft. Soft evolutions books are more moderate and less preachy on the nature of evolution, it has the nonchalant and professional attitude a scientist or a scholar have. On the other hand, authors of hard evolution books wrote on top a pedestal, believing that their field of study has an eventual moral over-arching conclusion.

Being a someone who professed a religion, I certainly am aware with the abyss between evolution and creationism. But I certainly don’t see my rivals as someone who are intellectually or even morally inferior than me. I just want to have a good read on how we arrived to the current level of civilisation, step by step from the very beginning. Facts from anthropology and evolutionary biology certainly does not inherently include moral preachings as part of the package, they are essentially different in nature. A good scholar, I think is somebody who can separate objectivity and subjective aesthetic feelings.

For an example, there is a clear difference between a paleontologist who discovered a humanoid fossil with a crusader kept repeating at every occasion how we are no different than the apes. And from the book itself, what I learned is that while humans is different from all aspects (a large aspects of things that define us a human could be seen in other species such as birds rather than our supposedly cousin, the apes) from the apes, the author still drew a conclusion that we are the same because the genetic differences is only 1 percent.

When an anti-vac presented to me all pseudo-researches he read and trying to get me to acknowledge him to have the knowledge of a legitimate medical professional, the only conclusion I can get is that he could be anything except a medical professional. The only similarity he has with a medical professional is that both of them are humans. But nothing can stop me from thinking that he is the farthest person from being a doctor. The anti-vac eat the same food (but perhaps under a more restricted range of food he consumed), and has the same physiological processes as the doctor. But then, when I went to the zoo and saw the chimps have the same things. Despite the anti-vac intelligence, I still can safely conclude that he and the chimps are different, despite having the same physiological process (and perhaps not too much of a difference in intellect, anyway).

So, the author must supply me a legit argument that is specific in relating humans and apes. He recounted that a chimp can now vocalise at least 4 specific words and its meanings, but how’s that any different in demonstrating associative function with a chicken who learned Pavlovian reinforcement techniques? Are we descended from chickens, then? Of yeah I forgot, according to them, we separated from chickens a number of millions ago, so maybe we’re part chickens too? Maybe, I guess? By adopting this kind of thinking, without any concrete proof (such as intermediary fossils), the hardcore evolutionists are no different from the Freudian psychotherapists who can easily won an argument by saying that his opponents have some kind of repression. You have something against me? Your mother must have spanked you a tad too much. You have something against evolution? Then you must be inherently intellectually inferior.

Then where do we draw the line between the anti-vac, the doctor and the chimps? And between the (I assume) homo sapiens evolutionists? You cannot simply draw a hypothetical scenario where the Martians visited the Earth and saw homo sapiens in the cage next to his ape cousins and weaved a story about the Martians could not tell any difference between them except the sparse hair, the upright posture, the linguistic ability, the civilisational attributes that men have (which essentially almost everything exclusive to man) and expect me to accept. (But the author really started the book with a fairytale, gosh, I thought it was only the religious who likes “fairytales”!) The author has to furnish positive proof, not mere molecular clock. Molecular clock could only show that all organisms in Earth are derived from molecules brought from stars et cetera, not directly proving that we essentially derived from apes. What’s stopping us from saying that we are descended from meteors anyway if that’s the case?

Positive biological proofs, in terms of intermediary species must be furnished to prove his points. His argument is that despite everything that separates men from apes, we belonged to the same ancestors because of our genetic similarities. The level of faith the author clung to this axiom stands not too much different from the religious people he despised. Again, biological proof must be furnished which I guess he has none. The only proof he could muster to remain firm in his stance is his ironical leap of faith and also in the aesthetics realm, where he somehow got a kick contemplating on how he was once a horse or something like that. But hey, we live in a progressive society. Whatever that rocks your boat, man.

Thus end my rambling. The rest of the book was quite good minus the Rousseau-esque lamentation of the men in nature and his environmentalist stance. I just crafted the above paragraphs in the same dismissing and shallow argument the evolutionists threw to the creationists. Both size refused to study the opposite’s teaching, only to demean them with aggrandised arguments, which cheerfully reminded to me the author bringing up New Guineans’ massive phalocarp to intimidate other people.

The book covered an ambition scope: from explaining men’s natural propensities by observing animals to the theory of recent explosions of technology and warfare post-agricultural revolutions. The part where the author tried to delineate man’s natural instincts such as reproduction and arts, while very informative, failed to convince me that man originated from apes. The author after all, effectively pointed out that the almost-universal social monogamy (with occasional premarital sex) practiced by human being is more similar to the practices of animals such as the albatross and grey wolves instead of the love-fest practiced by promiscuous chimps and bonobos. The author, ironically and indirectly has proven that the natural faculties of men reflected that of nature; that man itself is a microcosm, an individual containing the universe within.

Regarding the difference between the civilisations in the Old and New World, the author insisted that the reasons were geographical rather than genetic. Resources set by geographical factors were the driving factors that propels the civilisations of the Old World. For an instance, despite numerous choices of animals, we are limited to only a handful of animals successfully domesticated. These short lists of animals are mostly unique to the Old World, and those animals were successfully domesticated only because they satisfy strict conditions. Thus, the failure of the Aborigines to invade other countries while riding on kangaroos was not because they were intellectually inferior, it was simply because their geography did not provide them with suitable animal for breeding. The rest of the book consists of succinct summary of his other works such as Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse.

Originally published in 1993, The Third Chimpanzee is in many regards, a precursor to Jared Diamond’s much acclaimed Guns, Germs and Steel. In fact, Guns is basically an expansion of Chapter 14 of this book, “Accidental Conquerors”; I am also predicting that Diamond’s newest book, Collapse is an expansion of Chapter 17, “The Golden Age That Never Was”. Anyway, where Guns deals with the human race as societies, Chimpanzee deals with it on an anthropological and sociological level. The book details the various theories about our ancestral heritage, explains the evolutionary origins of our biological makeup and how our unique qualities as animals will shape our future as a species.

Much of the first half of the book revolves around the scientific discovery that we share 98.4% of our DNA with chimpanzees, and it is that miniscule disparity that somehow made possible the Great Leap Forward. Through careful explanation of biological history and visual aids, Diamond illustrates the various hominids that make up our evolutionary genealogy. He asks and attempts to answer questions such as, what happened to Neanderthals? Were they a separate species of man, a split in the evolutionary chain or simply a different race? How do we explain the emergence of key skills and traits for which we have no fossil imprints, such as why we feed our young for decades, why we developed an ubiquitous monogamy, why women go through menopause, and why did we develop writing and language when we did?

This book definitely changes how one views humanity. Not only does it break down our idea of being human to a series of biological impulses, but it highlights the exponential rate at which we have evolved. He continually mentions the idea of an Outer Space Anthropologist visiting our planet at various stages of our development and what he would think. At every point in which he comes across a characteristic that one would assume as uniquely human, he immediately brings up an unlikely animal that shares that trait.

Much like Guns, Diamond loses steam about 2/3 of the way into the book. Up until this point, I was thrilled with what I was reading. The idea that the size ratio between sexes of a given species largely determines their degree of polygamy was fascinating. The book also did a lot to answer the question of why human babies are so helpless, while the offspring of cattle or a wild rhinoceros seems capable of so much from its first hour in the world. I also enjoyed his breakdown of our criteria for mate selection and how pathetic it sounds when compared to our survival imperatives. I was hoping that he would venture into predicting how our bodies would continue to evolve, but I was not spoiled with such a chapter in this book.

But again, the last third isn’t as compelling. Too early in the book, Diamond brings up ethical issues that fight with his scientific themes for attention. They come back at the end in the form of doomsday warnings and a laundry list of all the atrocities that humanity has committed both towards each other and to the environment, which slowed down the pace. But Diamond earnestly loves humanity and its rich history – but not as much as he loves New Guinea – and this book does the animal justice.

Diamond je Harari, ktorý menej špekuluje. V tejto knihe z roku 1991 píše, ako šokujúco blízko máme k ľudoopom (máme zhodných 98 percent DNA), no zároveň ako ďaleko sme ich presiahli civilizačne. Kniha je plná zaujímavých faktov o ľudstve samotnom. Len ma utvrdila, že všetci ľudia sú rovnakí a záleží len na tom, v akom prostredí vyrastajú. Európa tak rýchlo pokročila, lebo sme mali plodiny a zvieratá vhodnejšie na domestifikáciu ako iné kontinenty. Neboli sme bystrejší. A všetky svetové jazyky sú rovnako komplexné, je jedno či kdesi na opustenom ostrove v Tichom oceáne alebo v centre Londýna.
Na knihe ma rušilo jedine to, že je z roku 1991 a niektoré poznatky už nemusia byť aktuálne. Inak vrelo odporúčam!