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.

It is useful to reflect on the basic message. Around 6 million years ago we split from our nearest ape like ancestors, but today chimpanzees are more closely related to us than they are to monkeys.
Then in what ways are we different and what effects has this led to?
Why do some gorillas have six wives and Elephant seals 48. Why do female chimps display ovulation and sexual availability but human females hide it. Why are chimp balls four times as large as human but men still have the largest penis size.

This book is full of interesting topics and information about the origin of our species and why we have developed in our individual way. Written in 1991 we now have the hindsight of 30 years of further scientific discovery. We now know for example, that Neanderthal DNA did infact merge heavily within the human genome. But the basic message is perhaps much more powerful in reflection - we must change our ways or we reign devastation beyond what any of us can imagine.

The chapter on human language and the theory of the Indo-European spread was particularly interesting. When horses are domesticated and the wheel is invented, human society spreads.
The chapter on human genocide is perhaps the most valuable reminder of our chimp like tendency to xenophobic division of the classes 'us and them'. This has led to endless murder and destruction.
Human destruction of the environment is not limited to our modern era. The Clovis invaders of the Americans did it, the Maori did it, the Indonesian invaders of Madagascar did it. Petra suffered a catastrophic ecological breakdown as did ancient Greece and the Petra Kingdom of what is now Jordan.

When we consider that we have destroyed much of the beauty of our unique planet and murder, massacre and eradication unbeknown to justice has been the norm, we are still empowered to ask why, and still try to seek a better world. Education is a key and never before has the world had more of an opportunity to learn and to communicate. Let's have hope and to strive more than ever for our brave salvation.

Overall, I was disappointed with the lack of continuity across chapters. I wished the author would've focused more on the connection between humans' and other animals' behavior rather than wandering so much. The most redeemable section, I thought, was the chapter on the evolution of language, which I found very interesting. Otherwise, I thought sometimes the author was way too theoretical without enough evidence for his stance.

In this book Jared diamond tells us how closely related humans are to chimpanzees and what makes us different. The book is easy to read and includes interesting stories. I found it more relatable and engaging than Guns, Germs and Steel

I enjoyed this book, but it's obvious that quite a bit of the scientific information is a little out of date. Gene sequencing and our understanding of DNA is very different now than it was in 1992 when this book was published. That being said, the anthropological studies are fascinating (as always with Jared Diamond) and I did find some value in reading this book. I'd recommend that most people just go with the slightly later Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies if they want to read something by Diamond.

I so like other books Jared Diamond has written I listened to this one his first, written in 1991. I can see where the ideas he develops in later works come from. In this book he looks at Homosapian’s as though we were another species of Ape (which we are). The arguments were their own and could not easily be put into a comfortable box. At some points he is highly romantic in the Rousseauian sense, and later explicitly rejects such romanticism about our ancestors.

His writing around evolutionary psychology of human sexuality has not changed much or been bettered since he wrote this. They still hold water and seem the best explanation of how we choose our sexual partners. He identifies the discrete estrus leading to female choice in sexual selection of mates as the mechanism to spur rapid evolution, along with the development of speech, art, co-operative hunting.

We (Homosapians) commit genocide and evolutionary behaviour naturally. Not committing mass murder and learning to live within our environment is a learned behaviour and a product of civilisation. This is where Diamond is most Hobbesian. We are far from Roussesu’s noble savage. It agrees with Freud’s hypothesis expressed in Civilisation and it’s Discontents that the purpose of civilisation is not to bring utopia and happiness to all, but to protect ourselves from the worst aspects of ourselves. Diamond is not optimistic and give several examples of genocide and ecological destruction. If we do not understand our nature, we will not develop our tools to transcend ourselves, and save ourselves from ourselves (more about this when I review A Natural History of Rape: Biological Basics of Sexual Coercion – Randy Thornhill & Craig Palmer). Our ability to transcend our own nature is a vital imperative in our age of nuclear weapons and global pandemics.

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."

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.

Another great book from Jared Diamond. I found this to be just as engaging as Guns, Germs, and Steel, and also an easier read. I find that his books have so much information that it is helpful for me to outline them as I go. Here are my favorite bullet points from The Third Chimpanzee. Not at all a comprehensive outline, but may be of interest to some people.



Chapter 1
- Our ancestors diverged from other apes around 7 million years ago.
- We share 98.4% of DNA with common chimps.
- Chimps are more closely related to humans than to gorillas. We are really a third kind of chimp.

Chapter 2
- We descended from Cro-Magnons, not Neanderthals.
- Hunter-gatherers were probably poor hunters.
- Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals co-existed 100,000 years ago (from 130,000 years ago until 40,000 years ago).
- The Great Leap Forward occurred 40,000 years ago with the emergence of spoken language. Progress no longer depended on genetic evolution but cultural evolution.

Chapter 3
- Across primate species, degree of polygyny is correlated with sexual dimorphism in body size and other physical features, and also testis size of males.
- Humans have exceptionally large penises and breasts for our body sizes.

Chapter 4
- Roughly 10% of babies are adulterously conceived.
- Unlike most mammals, human ovulation is concealed and sex is done in private.
- Also unlike most mammals, humans have sex all the time and it's purpose is largely social rather than merely for reproduction.

Chapter 5
- Couples tend to have a high degree of correlation (+.9) in religion, ethnicity, race, socioeconomic status, age, and political views; (+.4) for personality and IQ; (+.2) for physical traits; (+.61) for middle finger length.
- Incest taboo is probably genetic rather than cultural. We avoid people we grew up with between birth and 6 years, but then as adults we seek out partners similar to those people.

Chapter 6
- Racial variation can be explained only partly by natural selection (correlation between skin pigmentation and latitude - which is nevertheless noisy); but it is also probably due largely to sexual selection which results from the mating preferences reviewed in the previous chapter.

Chapter 7
- Body is like a car. Scheduled maintenance and unscheduled repair. When do you scrap it? When everything breaks at once. But it's not a conscious decision to scrap it. The evolutionary reasoning is this: the body is only as strong as the weakest part. So given that it's going to fail, it's ideal/optimal if they all fail at the same time.
- If you are likely to get in a crash that totals the car in the near future, then it's not worth investing in a lot of repair and maintenance.
- Rate of aging across species is correlated with age of first reproduction.
- Turtles live long because it's worth repairing their bodies because they have good protection (shell) and so are unlikely to die a sudden violent death.
- Menopause is a solution to the risk taking behavior of having more kids. Human childbirth is particularly dangerous. Having a fourth kid could kill the mom and put the other three at risk.

Chapter 8
- Most sophisticated animal "language" studied to date is the vocalizations of vervet monkeys.
- Vervets have at least ten "words": "leopard", "snake", "unfamiliar human", etc. They are truly words, not just stimulus-response grunts, because they sometimes use them in a lie to confuse rival troops.
- There is no correlation between linguistic and social complexity. (Really?)
- Children in a community of pidgin-speaking parents spontaneously add grammar to make the next generation a full creole language.
- Chomsky said we have universal grammar, with switches that can be set for different word orders and specifics; Bickerton went further to say those switches have a default value (a default word order that emerges spontaneously unless overridden by the linguistic environment).
- Babies start to say single words; then at two they can make multi-word phrases; then at four they can make complete sentences. That stage may have enabled the Great Leap Forward.

Chapter 9
- First human (Cro-Magnon) art emerged around the Great Leap Forward 40,000 years ago in the form of cave paintings and flutes.
- Bowerbirds use their art to woo mates. It is as if women put each of their suitors in sequence through a weight-lifting contest, sewing contest, chess tournament, eye test, and boxing tournament, and finally went to bed with the winner.
- In humans, dance and music and poetry are common preludes to sex.
- In summary, art is about sex. And now that we have lots of free time, our art can get very elaborate and serve other functions (such as aesthetics) as well.

Chapter 10
- No other primate practices agriculture. Closest thing is ants, which grow fungus and use insects such as aphids like cattle, drinking their honeydew.
- Hunter-gatherers are taller, work as many hours or fewer than farmers, have healthier bones, fewer diseases, fewer cavities, have a more diverse diet, are better nourished, are less susceptible to famine because of the diverse diet, and have lower rates of mortality at every age.
- Today just three plants - wheat, rice, and corn - provide more than 50% of calories consumed by the human species.
- American and European civilized society are elites, and their lives are better in large part because of oil and other resources. The elite became healthier, but at the expense of the majority who became worse off.
- Agriculture allowed for specialists and for class divisions.
- Agriculture allowed for birth intervals to shorten from 4 years to 2 years, and increased calories per unit area of land tenfold, thus dramatically increasing population density.
- Agriculture was not a conscious choice. It spread largely because it could support a population density 10x of hunter-gatherers, and 10 malnourished warriors can still beat 1 healthy bushman.

Chapter 11
- We drink and use drugs as a sexual advertisement that says, look how much of a handicap I can give myself and still be superior. Like birds of paradise with long tails that make it susceptible to attack. It says, look how long and heavy my tail is but I can still get away from predators.
- but in humans drugs and alcohol are addicting and also genuinely harm the user.

Chapter 12
- An important consideration in guessing whether intelligent life exists elsewhere is the degree of convergent evolution (inevitably).
- Woodpeckers exploited an extremely rewarding niche, but only evolved once. On the other hand, eyes and flight evolved multiple times independently.

Chapter 13
- Europe has about 50 languages, but New Guinea has one hundredth of the population but 1,000 languages.
- New Guinea included lots of small societies completely isolated from one another by the terrain.
- We are becoming culturally homogenized; there are very few places where alternative models for society can exist.

Chapter 14
- Of the many plants and animals available as candidates for domestication, only a few are actually domesticable, and those happened to be in Europe and the Near East.
- In addition to that head start, the east-west axis of Eurasia allowed the spread of farming more easily than the north-south axis of the Americas did.
- Rise of civilization brought disease and the people evolved immunity; but not hunter-gatherers.

Chapter 15
- Language evolves over time, and languages diverge to become mutually unintelligible when a group becomes isolated, just like speciation.
- Glottochronology is like a genetic clock; languages replace 20% of their words every one thousand years, but it's noisy.
- Invention of wheel about 3,000 BC (or about 5,000 years ago).
- Domestication of horses about 4,000 BC (6,000 years ago).
- Indo-European languages probably had a common ancestor around 3,000 BC north of the Black Sea. The package of agriculture and technology there allowed rapid waves of expansion, then another expansion into the Americas, and now half the world speaks Indo-European languages.

Chapter 16
- Chimps are xenophobic. They recognize members of other bands and treat them differently. They practice genocide.
- Many species practice murder, and some genocide.
- Stalin and Hitler were better at genocide because of technology, communications, and high population density.
- Humans practice a dual standard of behavior: strong inhibitions about killing one of "us", but a green light to kill "them".
- Our early American heroes were outspoken supporters of Native American genocide.

Chapter 17
- Tells the story of three ancient civilizations that collapsed due to environmental exhaustion: Easter Island, Anasazi, and Petra.
- Humans basically live in harmony with nature when conditions are stable, but sudden changes such as acquisition of a new technology or discovery of a new island realizes conditions for species extermination and environmental collapse.
- "While courses in the history of civilization often dwell on kings and barbarian invasions, deforestation and erosion may in the long run have been more important shapers of human history."

Chapter 18
- To get to the Americas, you gotta cross Siberia, then Bering Straight, then coast-to-coast ice sheet of Canada. Humans crossed the latter during an opening 12,000 years ago.
- Those early people are called Clovis people. They reached Tierra del Fuego within 1,000 years.
- Clovis people probably killed all the large mammals except bison.
- The Clovis culture then rapidly changed to the Folsom culture about 11,000 years ago, with different spear tips optimized for bison.

Chapter 19
- Four mechanisms of species extermination: overhunting, species introduction, habitat destruction, and ripple effects.
- "Dismissing the extinction crisis on the grounds that extinction is natural would be just like dismissing genocide on the grounds that death is the natural fate of all humans."

Hmmm. This one is a bit dated and he goes off on some not terribly impressive tangents. But also a lot of interesting stuff.

Here is an outline of the book:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...

And here is a great critical review
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...

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.

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