Bence Hayvanlardan Tanrılara - Sapiens: İnsan Türünün Kısa Bir Tarihi kitabının pek çok sitede bilinçli ve kasıtlı bir biçimde sürekli indirime gidip raflardan hiç indirilmemesinin en büyük sebeplerinden birisi bu kitabın açık ve net bir kapitalist sistem propagandası içeriyor olmasıdır. İlgili kitaba yazdığım yorumda detaylarını ve gerekçelerini göreceksiniz.

Bu kitap Sapiens'e kıyasla kesinlikle daha kaliteli, daha tutarlı, daha kapsamlı ve bilimsel. Sadece kaynakçası 45 sayfa tutan bu kitabın raflarda sürekli yer almaması, her hafta indirime girmemesi, setler halinde satılmaması, kitapçılarda pohpohlanmaması, insanı yüceltip evrenin merkezine koyan antroposentrik bakış açısıyla yazılmadığından ve sürekli ve yoğun bir kapitalizm propagandası yapmadığındandır.

İlginç detaylardan birisi bu kitapta Sapiens kitabının ortaya sürdüğü fikirlerin hemen hepsinin -ve fazlasının- yer alıyor olması. İnsançocuğunun yayılmacılığı, orman katli, biyolojik evrimi, atom bombalarının korkutucu tehlikesi gibi konular bu kitapta da yer aldığı gibi Sapiens'te yer almayan yahut da yüzeysel olarak geçiştirilen:
-Tek ve çokeşlilik, homoseksüelite,
-Aldatma
-Menapoz
-Yumurtlama döneminin gizlenilmesi
-Eş seçimi
-Dilin evrimi ve dil ağaçlarının kökenleri
-Savaş ve saldırganlık
-Şempanzeler, bonobolar ve insan davranışlarının diğer hayvanlardaki kökenleri

Sapiens'te ağırlık verilen doğal seçilimde insanın kullandığı gibi, insanı da kullanan buğday gibi bitkilerden bu kitapta bahsedilmiyor. Aksine, Sapiens'te iddia edildiğinin aksine dünyanın her yerinde yalnızca buğday tarımda kullanılmamış. O kadar fazla evcil ve yabani bitki tarımda kullanılmış ki, bir Orta Doğu kökenli yazarın Orta Doğu'nun kullandığı buğdaya bu kadar ağırlık vermesi Sapiens'in bu kitabın yanında sönük kalmasının sebeplerinden bir diğeri.

Ben bu kitabı çok beğendim. Kesinlikle bu tip popüler bilim kitapları arasında okumaktan bu kadar çok keyif aldığım ve açık ara en fazla bilgiyi en az yorucu ve efor isteyecek şekilde aktaran başka bir kitap olmadı. Kitapta soykırımlar bölümünde, iddia edilen Ermeni Soykırımı ile ilgili olarak yayıncının düştüğü "ABD'nin yaptığı soykırımlar gözardı edilmiş kitabın tarafsızlığına gölge düşürmüş" şeklindeki saçma dipnot; yayıncının kitabın devamındaki neredeyse tamamen Batılı ve ABD'lilerin yaptığı soykırımlara dair bölümleri okumadığını gösteriyor. Yayıncının dipnotu son derece anlamsız ve absürd olmuş. Böyle bir dipnot düşmeden önce kitabı dikkatli okumak gerekir.

Rafımda olduğu için son derece mutlu olduğum "iyi ki satın almışım ve okumuşum" dediğim bir kitap olan Üçüncü Şempanze, yazarın diğer kitaplarını da okuma şevkimi artırdı.
Onları okumayı iple çekiyorum.

M. B.

This book was ok, just a bit different than I expected. With a name like The Third Chimpanzee and the initial chapter about the minimal genetic differences between ourselves and chimps, I thought he would actually talk about the distinction a little more - like how can chimps be *almost* human but not quite human, and how did humans become more advanced. I had a difficult time following the main thread, I kept thinking, "Wait, what to woodpeckers have to do with humans?" I suppose his argument was that there is some precedent in the animal kingdom for some of our particularly human traits, but as many other reviewers have said, some of his connections seemed a little far fetched and dubious. Granted, my grasp of evolution is sort of tenuous, but I didn't quite see how some of the traits seen in peacocks or woodpeckers could be connected to humans, yet these same traits are nowhere to be found in other primates.

I think he wanted it to be a bigger book than it was. In truth, it could have been at least 500 pages and might have been better. Toward the end he started to take a lot of liberty with connecting things together without giving much scientific backup, and it seemed like maybe he was trying to rush through and get in all his theories without taking up too many pages. Oh and how about in the epilogue where he suddenly in passing suggests that Neandertals were exterminated by Cro-Magnons via genocide?? Boy that certainly came out of nowhere!

There are a lot of things he seemed to ignore that I would've been interested to hear about. Like he kept focusing on the idea of nuclear weapons, but what about the rest of technology? I think in picking up this book, my interest was in the concept of how we could have gone so many thousands of years with the most rudimentary technology, and in the past century it seems like we've been expanding that knowledge exponentially. Where do we go from here? I like the idea that there never really was some magical golden age when all humans lived in harmony with the earth, but he doesn't at all address the difference between what a million Native Americans in the entire new world were capable of vs. 300 million people in the US alone. When I picked up the book I didn't realize it was written in 1992, and I feel like there have been so many developments since then that would be interesting to have addressed - life in a post-9/11 world, oil spills, the green movement, etc.

Wow! Long review. Anyway, to sum up, while being nowhere near comprehensive, this book was a good jumping off point for me, and opened up a lot of questions that I'd like to look into elsewhere. Maybe I should have been an anthropology major!

We are all 98% chimp. By that I mean that we share 98% of our genes with our closest animal ancestors. Diamond patiently explains what that means and explores what makes us human.

People say that humanity is differentiated by the use of tools and language, but also by murder and genocide. Actually the animal kingdom has examples of rudimentary tools, complex language, murder and genocide. Perhaps it is the degree to which we indulge that makes us human - no bonobo or aardvaark has a red button where, by pushing it, they could obliterate whole cities.

No penguin or gazelle lives in as diverse a range of habitats as humanity, nor do they bend nature to its will in quite the same way as we do.

So what does make us human. Diamond makes the case that language of increasing complexity and abstractness (this is a word?) is the prime suspect.

An interesting book, and thought provoking. I marked it down because I did not find this as compelling as the other books I have read by him. Perhaps this is because he invokes many of the same themes as other books, and I have lost the thrill of the new as far as Diamond is concerned.

By bizarre coincidence Diamond was on Desert Island Disks on BBC R4 on Friday. Must catch up with this.

I like it. It's really inspiring. Many arguments in the book changed what I used to believe in human beings. We are different from the animal but the differences aren't that huge.

The book of Jared Diamond (Pulitzer Prize (1998)) made me think deep about Darwin's theory of evolution and human development.

The novel gives a lot of unusual but real examples, such as; animals that breed another animals; animals that make alcohol; etc.. The book explains what is the meaning of the sexual and natural selections (in the evolutionary sense); why the human evolution has reached today's technological level; what are the social interactions between the primates (for example, are there soulmates?); what are the simple (not unusual) scientific reasons behind some of the mass-extinctions on Earth. The book tells us a story about the amazing worlds, tribes, and societies in New Guinea and describes quite a lot of interesting and curious facts and conclusions interrelated with the evolution of the species.

The Third Chimpanzee (1991) is a book that is easy to read (for its scientific level) and it is a real pleasure to read it.

Having been on a evolutionary biology and history trip of late, I couldn't resist revisiting this 1991 classic by Jared Diamond. It is a good introduction to his favorite subjects that get fuller treatment in Guns, Germs & Steel and Collapse.

Part One (Just Another Species of Big Mammal) focuses on the evolutions of primates and the split between apes and monkeys and the further splits down the line between gorillas, chimpanzees, and finally homo habilus, homo erectus, and homo sapiens. This is the strongest part of the book, discussing the incredibly similar genome between chimpanzees and humans, which share 98% of their DNA. It posits that the development of language triggered the Great Leap Forward that gave homo sapiens the edge against the larger, stronger Neanderthals in the struggle for survival, especially in their ability to collaborate in hunting and communicate complex plans and concepts.

Part Two (An Animal With a Strange Life Cycle) discusses the sexual behavior of humans from an evolutionary perspective. It dives into the previously taboo subject of the potential evolutionary rationale for adultery, as a means for males to spread their genes as far as possibly, while on the flip side women (mothers) seek a stable mate to provide sustenance for themselves and their children in a monogamous relationship, and the inevitable friction this causes in modern couples. It also discusses the seeming evolutionary disadvantages of humans vs other animals: female menopause, having only 1-2 babies at a time and only after reaching the teenage years, and living beyond a reproductive age. The answers are thought-provoking and well extrapolated.

Part Three (Uniquely Human) discusses the development of human language; the animal origins of art and its function in modern humans; the mixed blessings of adopting a sedentary, agrarian lifestyle rather than being roving hunter-gatherers; why human beings exhibit the seemingly self-destructive behavior of smoking, drinking alcohol, and taking drugs; and how likely we are to be alone in the universe. The section on the agriculture vs hunter-gathering is fascinating and gets much more detailed treatment in Guns, Germs & Steel.

Part Four (World Conquerors) is one of the most interesting sections, detailing the influence of environmental factors in the different rates of technological development among different cultures on different continents, which was the centerpiece of Guns, Germs & Steel. Here he discusses how the domestication of native edible grains and animals such as horses, pigs, cows, and sheep provided the nutrition and energy for Eurasian peoples to conquer and dominate other societies that lacked advanced weapons like guns and cannons, lacked horses to form cavalry, which afforded a massive advantage in warfare, and also the proximity to domesticated animals also exposed Eurasians to myriad animal diseases that then allowed them to develop immunities that New World people lacked, leading to disastrous epidemics after contact. This section also details the spread and dominance of Indo-European languages over other languages, which reflected the population movements over the past few millennia.

It also contains one of the most disturbing chapters in modern human history, the systematic extermination of the aboriginal blacks of Tasmania by Australian white settlers, and the various religious and cultural superiority beliefs that allowed them to justify genocide. The actual excuses provided for hunting down and killing natives that were viewed as barely human is pretty stomach-turning from a modern perspective, but is detailed without holding back. He then expands on the long and repeated ethnic genocides in human history during the 1492-1900 and 1900-1950 periods. I think this should be required study for high school or university students to remind us all the atrocities humans are capable of, and why we need to curb our worst instincts to demonize and dehumanize “others”.

Part Five (Reversing Our Progress Overnight) is another sobering chapter that is a precursor to his book Collapse. Diamond details in lucid and unblinking details the numerous waves of extinctions that have happened on the Earth over many eras including the dinosaurs, and then the waves of extinctions directly caused by the explosion in global human population and our destruction of animal habitats and spread across the planet. It also talks about our ability to destroy ourselves overnight via nuclear holocaust, and how on our present path we are likely to exhaust our resources and multiply till the point of ecological collapse. It’s pretty disturbing reading, but very convincing as well. Again, if all students could read this book, they would have a greater sense of urgency that we need to change the path of human civilization if we want to avoid disaster and collapse.


Recommended reading for evolutionary biology and historical anthropology:
1. The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The Ancestor's Tale, The Greatest Show on Earth - Richard Dawkins
2. The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
3. Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind - Yuval Noah Harari
4. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors - Nicholas Wade
5. The Human Instinct - Kenneth R. Miller

This came out in 1992, Diamond was doing his research in the 80s, so a lot of this is outdated. Not Diamond's fault I only got to it in 2019, but it made for a less interesting read. More academic and less stimulating for me than Guns, Germs and Steel (one of my top 5 books of all time).

Cuốn sách được xuất bản đã khá lâu (1991) nên nhiều thông tin không còn hữu ích lắm. Ngoài ra, tác giả nhồi nhét rất nhiều kiến thức vụn vặt, với cách viết khá lan man khiến người đọc cảm thấy như không có hồi kết. Những điều này làm cho độ dày của cuốn sách tăng lên đáng kể so với tính thiết thực của nó.

Ví dụ về chương 7 mà mình khá quan tâm là "Tại sao chúng ta lại già và chết đi", với chỉ một nội dung đơn giản là con người (và tất cả sinh vật) đều được tiến hóa để tối ưu cho mục đích sinh sản, tác giả đi lòng vòng hết chuyện xe hãng này sang xe hãng nọ một cách thừa thãi. Sẽ hữu ích hơn nếu tác giả có thể phân tích sâu hơn về mặt tế bào, cơ chế sinh học, gen hay các hóa chất ảnh hưởng điều đó. Vấn đề này cho tới ngày nay vẫn là một điều lý thú đối với các nhà khoa học.

Rồi đến chương 11 bàn về việc con người hút thuốc, uống rượu. Tác giả đưa ra một suy đoán và so sánh việc này tương tự như việc những con chim có bộ lông sặc sỡ như một cách thể hiện khả năng sinh tồn để thu hút con cái (mặc dù với con người thì nó chả có tác dụng như vậy). Cách so sánh này có vẻ khá khập khiễng và không thuyết phục. Con người tiêu thụ những thứ đó phần lớn là do tò mò và sau đó nghiện.

Nhìn chung thì tác giả đã cố đi quá rộng so với kiến thức của ông, khiến những luận điểm có những lỗ hổng và thiếu tính thuyết phục. Sẽ tốt hơn nếu ông chỉ cô đọng và tập trung vào một số vấn đề liên quan đến sự "tiến hóa của con người" (như tiêu đề của cuốn sách), điều mà tác giả chưa khiến người đọc thỏa mãn với những gì ông đem lại trong cuốn sách.

Cuốn sách này cũng tương tự như "Sapiens: Lược sử loài người", với mình thì cuốn sách của tác giả Yuval Noah Harari hữu ích và hấp dẫn hơn. Hi vọng những cuốn sách sau này của tác Jared Diamond sẽ có nhiều thú vị.

Diamond packs a lot of interesting information into this book & it flows well, but it's old (1992) so a lot of his information is outdated. Worse, his conclusions shouldn't be trusted. In several cases, I knew enough about the subject to catch him completely misunderstanding it & making his points based on cherry-picked data. That's bad science which he hides fairly well behind parts of conflicting views. Read this only for the interesting trivia (much of which is repetitive) but don't be swayed by his conclusions except perhaps in his actual fields which are geography & anthropology, I think.

Well narrated & interesting, but since I can't trust him, I can't give this a high mark. That's a shame. I'll put more comments after the various sections.

Table of Contents
Prologue
Diamond hit a sore spot with me almost immediately when he wrote "When Darwin intimated in 1859 that we had evolved from apes... I am so sick of reading & hearing that. Darwin never wrote or intimated any such thing! He wrote that we must have had a common ancestor. That's a huge difference & if someone doesn't understand it, everything that follows is drivel. Sigh. I know Diamond does, though. He gets on with the basic premise that we're actually just one of several hominid species & aren't as genetically distant from chimps as the white-eyed & red-eyed vireos are from each other. We share much with other mammals & what really makes us unique is our ability to communicate complex thoughts & our inventiveness.

Part 1 Just Another Species of Big Mammal
1 A Tale of Three Chimps
2 The Great Leap Forward

Diamond makes a great case for us just being another mammal from a biological perspective based on differences in DNA & early habits. He then shows how much we differ from other hominids including Neanderthals, but that also shows the age of this book. He sets an interesting lens to look through. He set my teeth on edge by using 'theory' rather than 'hypothesis'. If he's going to argue with science, he should be using the correct terms.

Part 2 An Animal with a Strange Life Cycle
3 The Evolution of Human Sexuality
4 The Science of Adultery
5 How We Pick Our Mates and Sex Partners
6 Sexual Selection, and the Origin of Human Races
7 Why Do We Grow Old and Die?

All really interesting, but I think he left out a lot to make his point. I'm not well enough informed to really pin down most of it. It just felt that way until I noticed that he was strictly arguing phenotypic evolution rather than the selfish gene theory. Again, lacking updated data like the genetic studies of Jews which was doing a wonderful job tracing their migrations until they cut off access when it was found that they, like the rest of us, have about a 15% adultery rate. Since they inherit through the paternal line, this was a big deal.

Part 3 Uniquely Human
8 Bridges to Human Language
9 Animal Origins of Art
10 Agriculture's Mixed Blessings
11 Why Do We Smoke, Drink, and Use Dangerous Drugs?
12 Alone in a Crowded Universe

Again, a lot of interesting stuff until the last chapter which was a train wreck. The only more idiotic treatment of the search for extraterrestrial life that I've ever heard has come from Young Earth Creationists & he barely cleared their low bar. For instance, he says we sent a message to another galaxy several decades ago & leaves the impression we should expect an answer. M13 is 21,000 light years away, so our message couldn't reach them until 23,000AD, but he never mentions that awkward fact. Instead, he tries to overwhelm the reality with a lot of other interesting facts, but all are very incomplete & twisted. The impression I've had that he's cherry-picking to make his points is confirmed. Yuck. He completely destroyed any remaining credibility he had.

Part 4 World Conquerors
13 The Last First Contacts
14 Accidental Conquerors
15 Horses, Hittites, and History
16 In Black and White

More about language than I would have expected, but I found it interesting. Much is a synopsis of his Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies which was great. He's quite pessimistic about us, even writing at one point something about 'modern nuclear warfare' leaving the impression we've dropped nuclear bombs fairly often while I'm shocked that only 2 have ever been deployed. That we made it through the Cold War & MAD days without one being being set off is incredibly hopeful, IMO.

The last chapter is primarily about genocide & he managed to bore me through sheer repetition of a handful of examples. There are plenty & he despairs of our race while not providing any actual numbers. We're changing fast & less people are dying from violence or most other causes but he's a pessimist. For instance, in 2012 (20 years after this book was published.) the total number of deaths worldwide were less than those in 1 battle of WWI.

Part 5 Reversing Our Progress Overnight
17 The Golden Age That Never Was
18 Blitzkrieg and Thanksgiving in the New World
19 The Second Cloud

He's right, we've never lived in harmony with nature when we had the power to take what we wanted. According to him, the first men on this continent wiped out almost all the large mammals & spread amazingly fast, but this book is 28 years old, so he's using 15,000-11,000 years ago for our invasion of the Americas. Lately I've read several articles that push that a lot earlier, probably at least twice as long ago which doesn't help his argument, although I haven't read a better one for the large mammal extermination. The same happened in Australia, too.

Epilogue: Nothing Learned, and Everything Forgotten?
Very pessimistic & he doesn't pay enough direct attention to economics. He writes We do not need novel, still-to-be invented technologies to solve our problems. We just need more governments to do many more of the same obvious things that some governments are already doing in some cases.

Again, I don't entirely agree. Energy makes the world go round & that means economics, too. A LOT of problems would be solved if we had something that produced portable, high power as the internal combustion engine does. Alternative energies are fine, but they're clunky & intermittent, so a better battery (Think Heinlein's Sun Stones.) would also help a lot. He also doesn't mention GMO crops to minimize climate change, invasive & ever adapting pests. Of course, this book was written before they became a big deal.

All in all, not a terrible read, but it was repetitive, old, & lacking depth in many areas. Very well narrated. I wouldn't bother reading it as there are many other books out there, but it's not a complete waste of time. Just don't drink his Kool Aid.

This marvelous book was written in 1992, so it seems I am reading my Jared Diamond books out of order; this is the first book he wrote, and the third I have read (having read Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1999) in January of 2000, and having read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005) just this February). As a precursor to some of the themes that he took up in the other books, it’s a fun read; and it’s a fun read on its own, in that it regards Homo Sapiens as genetically being closer to chimpanzees than to anything else; and as there are two existing species of chimpanzee already (common chimpanzees and pygmy chimpanzees), that would make us the third species of chimpanzee. (In the interests of full disclosure, I am a reasonable devout Roman Catholic who believes in the theory of evolution, in that evolution seems to be the most logical means for God to have given us both being and free will.)

The book is separated into five distinct parts. Part One is titled Just Another Species of Big Mammal, and the author presents his theory that what caused Homo Sapiens to quit being just another type of chimpanzee was the evolutionary gift of speech, which gave us not just an endless present, but a future and a past. Part Two is titled An Animal With A Strange Life Cycle, and covers sex (four chapters) and death (one chapter), which proves that sex is about four times more interesting than sex. (The one Jared Diamond book I have not yet read is Why Is Sex Fun? (1997).) Part Three is titled Uniquely Human, and covers language, art, agriculture (which the author regards as a mixed blessing, and mostly negative), and dangerous addictions. Part Four is World Conquerors, on the fact that our species is spread all over the globe, demonstrates how one can use world language history to backtrack to a proposed Indo-European language, that essentially overtook almost all other languages in Eurasia. Part Five is titled Reversing Our Progress Overnight, and covers the topics of how we got where we are ecologically, and pretty well establishes that unless forethought is taken, our species natural response to natural resources is to exploit said resources to the vanishing point.

However, we are not just murderous conquerors of the Earth and of each other. While language and our brains and technology have brought us so far, due to language we also have a past; and surely we have the capacity to learn from the past, and to try to halt overexploitation of the Earth before we ourselves render ourselves extinct.

I first became aware of Jared Diamond while having lunch in Tampere in the summer of 2001. I was there in Finland for a conference, and one of my lunch companions was raving about Guns, Germs, and Steel. A quick glance at other reviews indicates that's his most revered book; it seems to be an expansion of a single chapter in The Third Chimpanzee. Indeed many if not all of his subsequent books seem to expand on themes he first addressed here. That says a lot about the scope and ambition of Third Chimpanzee.

I was drawn to this book because of its focus on human origins. This is a subject about which I knew little, and I learned plenty here, which was gratifying. But I was surprised by how much more I found here, everything from ruminations on extraterrestrial life to an examination of genocide.

Diamond takes aim at the biggest questions of human existence, and attempts to explicate them with passion and honesty. Occasionally his reach exceeds his grasp, occasionally he doesn't seem to deliver the goods he promises — but only very occasionally. And honestly, if he's half-right about half the issues he takes on, it's still an impressive effort. I found his outlining of the questions at least as valuable as the answers he provides.

Utterly fascinating.

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.