What do you think of Jared Diamond?

I say give him a second chance. I agree that the phrase "Great Leap Forward" is historically tasteless. And since Third Chimp was written about a decade and a half ago, the paleoanthropology is out of date. But the evolutionary approaches to human biology and behavior that make up most of the book have a lot of good ideas in them, and the follow up books Guns, Germs & Steel and Collapse have even more useful ideas and observations.

I haven't read Diamond myself, but from reviews I've read, it seems that he's sorely lacking in the department of social sciences, and tends to attribute most things to purely "natural" factors. For instance, he considers booming populations in poor countries as a real plague, without considering that their poverty is mostly a side-effect of a given political system. He seems to lean in favour of strictly restricting immigration from these countries into richer ones. Of course, I can't certify that this is a 100% accurate summary of his views. But if it's correct, the I think they're flawed.

Collapse in as instructive but lengthy and repetitive read - needs editing to stop losing-the-will-to-live setting in.

I found the 3rd chimp to be the weakest of his books (that I've read) by someway.I gave him a second chance when in need of holiday reading material I grabbed collapse in the airport. I'm midway through Guns, germs and Steel. I think its important to take the last 2 for what they are which is books explaining complicated and wide-reaching concepts to a non-scientific audience and doing so well.

A history teacher friend of mine out here often gives Guns, Germs and Steel to his more inquisitive schoolkids with apparently good results. I will also say that when on form Diamond can produce (IMO) some of the most moving writing in his genre (his accounts of the Tasman genocide or the Easter Island collapse for example).

I've received both Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel as gifts lately but haven't read either yet. I've heard very good things about both. But my main knowledge of Diamond comes from reading The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen. Having never studied ecology in any depth, I didn't know about his role in the remaking of ecology and the connection with biogeography. That's one of my favorite books of all time, and he was a major character, so that's reason enough to read some of his work, IMO.

The only book of his that I have read is 'Guns, Germs and Steel', which I enjoyed and found to be interesting. I wasn't necessarily 100% convinced by all of his arguments, but I agree with tai haku when they say that he takes a complicated and wide-ranging concept and puts it across well to a non-scientific audience.

Would I say that he was one of the greatest ecologists of all time though? Probably not. That sort of praise seems a little excessive.

I wouldn't call him the greatest ecologist of all time, either. However, I found "G,G&S" to be a fascinating synthesis and would highly recommend it to all. I enjoyed what I read of "Collapse" but I'll agree with Peter McGrath in that it was repetitive.

Diamond did important work on competitive exclusion and ecological community assembly, helping to launch the latter area of study. Greatest ecologist, though? No way. Think Whittaker, MacArthur, Hutchinson, May, etc. Diamond's papers are still read by grad students, though, and his maps have found their way into textbooks.

I find Jared Diamond fascinating - a physiologist by training, he has made important contributions in ecology and evolutionary biology, and has written important books in popular science.

Certainly, his work on human society has been criticised by social scientists. What he has done is apply ecological and evolutionary thinking to human society. Much like Wilson was when he ventured into social sciences with Sociobiology, I think a lot of the rejection was more ideological than academic. We'll see in 20 years :)

GG&S was a great work of popular science. I would highly recommend it. I read it cover to cover in a couple days, back when it first came out. If nothing else, it provides a great way to answer racists.

With regards to the question of whether he is one of the greatest ecologists - I can't say for sure. But he made some very important contributions to ecology. He has worked on Pacific birds (especially New Guinea) since the late 60s or early 70s. More important though was his work on biogeography, an area in which he co-authored papers with both Robert May and Ernst Mayr. He played an important role in the transition in the 1970s which transformed ecology from a fairly soft science into a much harder one. While many of his specific conclusions have been challenged, the way he framed his questions changed ecology, and his key papers continue to be cited regularly 30 years later.

Try reading "Collapse". It might be better. I enjoyed it. But he seems like more of a popular writer than a scientist sometimes.

I read Guns, Germs, and Steel when it came out. He starts out the book with the story of Francisco Pizarro and a small number of Spaniards kidnapping Atahualpa, the ruler of the Inca empire, and says the point of the book is to ask: Why was it the Spaniards who sailed across the ocean with superior technology and conquered the Incans, rather than the other way around?

What follows is hundreds of pages full of tables and charts about seeds and plants and animals that he uses to argue that the basic answer is: luck. Diamond argues that geographical constrains and the availability of easy-to-domesticate plants and animals essentially accounts for the difference in rates of technological progress. Meanwhile, he downplays the role of culture and genetic differences in human populations as explanatory factors.

At least that's what I took away from the book. I haven't read it in a long time, but that's what I remember. And I didn't buy most of his arguments.

I've only read 'Collapse' and parts of 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' and like them a lot. I'm not sure I would call him an ecologist ... he's a geographer/historian (at least that's what he is in the books I've read).

Christophe Thill,

You have been misinformed. I don't recall anything in his works that I've read that are for or against modern immigration policies. (There is a lot in it about the history of migrations, but that is something different!)

Melanie,

The books in question are written for a general audience. His technical work is indeed technical.

IanR,

My read, too (and having talked with social scientists about it) is that many of the main objections they have with him are ideological: they object to an evolutionary biologist playing in "their domain."

In general,

Third Chimpanzee is the oldest, and arguably the weakest, of the three. Its main contributions are introducing a general audience to the literature on (real, not pop) evolutionary biological interpretations of such phenomena as menopause and longevity, mating patterns, xenophobia, etc. Additionally, it helps introduce a general audience to historical linguistics and other large-scale issues of history.

GGS is (in my opinion) the best of the lot. It goes over the biology of domestication of plants and animals, the evolutionary biology of disease and pathogens, the origin of writing and other technologies, the development of different complexity of social systems, etc. It is also one of the few easily-accessible sources you can go to in search of the broad patterns of culture and migration (based on archaeology, linguistics, etc.) in sub-Saharan Africa, SE Asia, Australasia, Polynesia, and early China. It is not liked at all by people who promote a view of Western exceptionalism (in the sense that they think "Western peoples" have some inherent genetic superiority or destiny relative to other cultures.)

Collapse is the most focused of all of them in terms of subject, although (as noted) the most rambling in terms of specifics. That is, it is centered solely on an examination of the factors that have produced (and are producing) the collapse of historic and modern societies on all scales (tiny islands on up), but within these discussions there can be a LOT of details. Diamond himself points out that he gets flak from the environmentalist side (because he occasionally consults for corporations and feels that there are methods by which corporations can be useful in maintaining wild resources and habitats) and from the corporations (because he recognizes that we need to do a LOT more in setting aside certain areas for protection and because he suggests that there needs to be global regulatory systems for defense of wild resources and habitats).

Just a brief note that the idea of the "great leap forward" wasn't coined by Diamond, but has been around for a while. For those of us social scientists trying to marry evolution, genetics, and neurology with our social science, it's a short hand way of talking about what appears in the archeological record to be a huge leap in human capabilities, especially the appearance of art, burial rituals, and what appears to be evidence of full-blown language. Like Thomas Holtz said above, the main benefit of Third Chimpanzee is that it introduces these concepts to non-specialists (I have used it with social science and humanities undergrads successfully, which says a lot, given the usual social scientific resistance to biological thinking as 'deterministic').

G,G&S is awesome, fascinating, in-depth and well thought out and researched. There's room for debate on the topics contained within, but Diamond does a fantastic job making his case. Moreover, when I read it, it changed the way I thought about just about everything. (society and history) I really recommend G,G&S. I read 3rd Chimp and I don't remember it. Collapse was interesting but not compelling.

Thanks for the comments so far, everyone.

Todd; I hadn't come across the term prior to reading Diamond, but that probably says more about my reading material than anything else. I still have some issues with the overall concept (and especially the name), but I appreciate the clarification.

On the topic of G,G,&S, I haven't read it but understand that Diamond didn't discuss China in the book. Is this true? How does the omission affect the book?

Guns Germs & Steel definitely discusses China -- basically, China is consistent with his theory of east-west dissemination of agriculture leading to power, because China was the leading technological society until ~500 years ago. He ascribes the relative rise of power in Western Europe to greater political competition, whereas China (and Japan) were united/isolated...

Thanks for comment, Morgan. That's just one criticism that I had heard from a friend who had read it, but I guess I'll just have to eventually check it out for myself!

I am appalled by the ignorance expressed in the original post and most of the comments (Holtz and a couple others excepted). This, to me, is the worst aspect of the internet: it's just so easy to broadcast opinions that are backed with zero knowledge. If you have to begin your post with "I haven't read it but..." or even "I never finished it but..." then you are better off, in every case, not posting. And statements like "I didn't buy his arguments" and "I have issues with the concepts" are pointless and irritating unless you give us a freakin clue about WHY.

Look. Diamond's reputation as an ecologist has NOTHING TO DO with his popular books. He spent decades doing boots-on-the-ground fieldwork in New Guinean jungles and has published huge piles of both rock-solid primary science on the biogeography of birds and well-regarded and controversial secondary work on conservation biology. He really is one of the finest community ecologists of recent times, and that's empirical, not opinion.
What makes that even more remarkable is that he accomplished all that during time off from his real job as a membrane physiologist at the UCLA medical school; NIH funding, lab full of postdocs (including several friends of mine), the whole nine yards. He's published a completely independent huge pile of of rock-solid primary science on the physiology of excretory and digestive epithelial function, including the still-current model of how water is absorbed across epithelia despite the absence of a specific active water-transport protein.
He retired recently from physiology and his present academic affiliation is in the Geography Dept. at UCLA, and now he spends his time writing books. I've read them; Holtz's opinions above seem accurate to me. Some of The Third Chimp irritated me when I read it years ago (the chapter on drug use as a handicap signal comes to mind; he ignores the fact that taking alot of psychoactive drugs is just plain fun). But you can't help but be impressed with the sheer breadth and amount of disparate material he collates. Synthesis like that is rare and difficult, no matter your opinion of his conclusions.

Finally, I know Diamond--he used to come to some of our graduate seminars when I was in grad school at UCLA, I attended some of his lab meetings when a good friend was his postdoc, and I once spent 4 hours alone in a car with him while we chatted and he drove like a freakin maniac. He's the only person I ever met who talks EXACTLY like he writes (including stuff like "That could be done as follows:...). And one thing of which I am absolutely 100% certain: no matter who you are reading this, Jared Diamond is smarter than you are.

I like his books. 3rd Chimpanzee could be seen as "The Naked Ape" of the 90s, explaining current theories about all the odd aspects of human ecology to a general public. Things move on and maybe a revised edition would be no bad thing.

"Why Is Sex Fun?" basically consists of the chapters on human sexuality from 3ed Chimpanzee in a separate volume.

G,G&S does the same for the broad sweep of human civilisation. I loved it, and consider it the best of the four books I've read.

Collapse does drag, and gods is it depressing. I don't think you could write a book like that without it having that effect. But its a book that should be read by an awful lot of people.

As for "The Great Leap Forward" I never thought of it in comparison to that. But then scientists talk about "design" in the technical literature all the time, and they're not hinting at the existence of an actual designer (much as the DI might wish). Its not a particularly good shorthanded metaphor to describe what we're looking at, but spelling it out every time? No thanks.

Sven; I don't normally delete comments or ban commentors as a rule, but in your case I'll make an exception and you can consider this your warning.

If you actually read what I said I wanted to find out more about whether what Diamond has to say is important/significant, or not. I read one book and thought much of it was junk, but because I know he's popular I wanted to find out more. I put a call out for opinions and I don't see anything wrong with that. Likewise, I knew nothing of Diamond's empirical work and haven't heard his name mentioned in that context at all, so I wanted to find out more about what he's done. I simply framed how I arrived at these questions within the personal event that triggered them, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I'll keep it short; I don't care whether you agree with me or not, but there is no reason to show up in the comment acting arrogant. You could've made your main points and not been a troll about it, and I'm only letting the comment stand as it is because I haven't given you a prior warning.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is a incredibly good popular science book on the topic of biologic factors effecting human social development.

For the brief period I was contemplating pursuing grad work in Political Science (which I did not in the end pursue) this book served as a great treasure trove of sources (got to love them biblographies). I was going to examine how diseases and plagues had a direct effect on the change and transition in Chinese society between 1200-1600 through the impacts on military infrustructure.

Diamond's coverage of the overarching events in China due to these factors is the best I've encountered outside of an academic context.

When you're right you're right. I apologize for that first paragraph.

(by the way, there's a big difference between arrogance, to which I plead regrettably guilty-on-occasion, and being a a "troll." Those opinions, for which I have just apologized, were honest reactions and not posted merely to stir up trouble)

Good, good. Apology accepted and I (in turn) apologize for throwing the dreaded t-word out there. I'll write up something more substantial about my thoughts on the GLF when I can; I just want to go back and read the relevant parts and do a bit more research so (as you suggest) I can have a better-formed idea of what's being discussed.

I am still reading The Third Chimpanzee (I started it, had to put it down, then picked it up again) and realize that his information is dated; however, I think it's a serviceable introduction for a non-scientist like me to certain concepts regarding sexual selection, language development, possible evolution of drug abuse, etc. I'm not fond of phrase The Great Leap Forward either, and I am finding myself restating or "correcting" (hopefully) his phrases in my mind too much. At times, he seems to portray certain characteristics such as hidden estrus in human females as voluntarily evolved "in order to" do this or that. However, I have not yet read GG&S or Collapse. I think Diamond was very helpful in introducing me to some concepts which will be refined upon reading the works of other authors.

I haven't read The Third Chimpanzee, but GS&S and Collapse are wonderful examples of informed science journalism, on a par with John McPhee's New Yorker essays collected in Annals of the Former World.

You may not agree with every conclusion presented by Diamond and McPhee, but they have read the source material and spent time with scientists you most likely will never meet, as some of them are now deceased.

Carl Zimmer and David Quammen are part of a new generation of science writers who try to write sensibly about modern science; we need more writers like this in the current American anti-science climate, in which ID and woo-medicine proponents are able to garner the attention of the media.

I'm a big fan of many of the ScienceBlogs sites, but sometimes I think the emphasis on atheism might be off-putting to potential readers.

I appreciate Diamond's ability to reach some audiences with important information. I support that effort, in general and in principle.

Like some other commenters I didn't enjoy Guns n' Germs, and therefore I haven't yet tried Collapse. But I encounter people who have learned important lessons from Collapse -- stuff that they don't seem to want to hear from me. The outcome of more informed audiences is more important to me than my personal enjoyment of one or two books. So I support his effort in principle.

My personal Diamond favorite is a somewhat obscure article from about 20 years ago which addresses a great discontinuity in human history. Unfortunately copies seem to have disappeared from the web. Doh!

Most models are wrong, but some are useful. Diamond seems to be reaching wide audiences with useful models. I give him credit for that.

Cheers

I would hardly call him one of the world's greatest ecologists. He may be one of the best popularizers of ecology, anthropology, and natural history in recent memory, though.

I also call shenanigans on the "poor taste" of the phrase 'great leap forward' - I fail to see why it should be forever anathema just because some lunatic once named his disastrous cultural improvement program that. The phrase is older than that, and refers to genuinely sudden and dramatic effects. That's what Mao believed his program was going to create. Why discard a useful term for a real phenomenon?

As you have a certain expertise in your field, I can certainly see why you'd be less than impressed with the oldest attempt to explain its complexities to the general public, but your opinion of Diamond is too low. I don't assert that you should be enamored with his writing or his work, but I think your negative evaluation of him is undeserved.

(additional): His science articles were frequently interesting, and far above the quality we now find in most 'science' magazines. His popular work consists of more than just books.

I've not met Diamond, but heard him speak at a symposium one time. I've read a good number of his popular articles, and think him a much better writer than Gould was. One of my students, some years back, went over to the library and printed out his bibliography. It was about a half inch thick on fan-fold computer paper. As said above, he is a person who has lived at least three fairly high-powered professional lives: physiologist, ecologist, and general thinker and writer about things human. My only quibble with his popular writings, Third Chimpanzee being a good example, is that he cites and uses the latest hypotheses uncritically. I thought GG&S got it about right. Think about life in the New World without draft animals other than dogs and llamas. One could write an interesting alternative-history time travel story. Suppose someone from the future went back to, say, 1000 BC and established horses, cattle, sheep, goats, wheat, barley, and rice in the New World.

Godfrey,
I didn't find Collapse depressing. I'm delighted that someone (JD) put it out there in compelling fashion. I knew the Mayan history and collapse from boots on the ground reports but the Easter Island is most revealing of folly. I've stolen the "last tree on Easter Island" imagery several times. The really 'final' scene is that of the native of EI who wanted wood.

As far as I know, his technical work is solid. I too found The Third Chimpanzee unreadable, but I loved Guns Germs & Steel and Collapse, so I'm writing off T3C as a rough start on writing for the masses.

His one page Nature paper, "Did Komodo dragons evolve to eat pygmy elephants?", has one of the great titles of all time. The goods on that one: Nature 326:832, 30 April 1987.

I loved Guns, Germs and Steel. I *liked* that it stripped away the matters of culture just to show you that there were physical, nutritional reasons WHY technologies were or weren't developed in specific regions. It's a great book to shake up people who've bought one of the roots of racism-- "people X are better/smarter than people Y, because otherwise we wouldn't have out-developed and defeated them".
And while he's throwing huge amounts of information at you, he keeps it well organized and interesting. I haven't read his other books, so maybe he did blow it, but G, G, S is a really novel and compelling way to look at history.

Sven and Laelaps, glad you got that patched up, because Sven's post after the words "Spent the..." are just great.

I'll just add as an aside that I recently saw Jared Diamond speak and he is one of those rare speakers who seemed to never falter, or use "umm" or any other speaking detritus; he was remarkably well-spoken (though I only saw him speak in English and have no sense of how well-spoken he is in the other 11 languages he knows) and handled the content of his talk masterfully. Seeing him speak was edifying.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is one of the few popular science books that I've enjoyed enough to read through twice; I also thought Collapse was excellent. IMO, the short reviews that Jared Diamond has published in Nature are even better than his popular books (one such review was mentioned by a previous commenter).

I agree with the content of Sven's post, if not with the first paragraph (and he did apologize), and I think it brings up some very important points in a well-written manner. Without adopting a "kids these days" tone (and I mean that, because I think scientists of all ages contribute to the trend), I'd say that there is a disturbing trend to ignore the past accomplishments and publications of scientists like Diamond, in the quest to produce a blog post or a pithy, snarky criticism. I'm not talking about reining in criticism of a scientist who has made racist remarks, or become a Young Earth Creationist, but rather being aware of peer-reviewed publication records and the histories of training and encouraging other scientists.

It's much, much easier to research these accomplishments now, with web-based CVs, PubMed, and Google Scholar. One's failure to do a little background research and to gain perspective does not make the seminal publications disappear, nor does it reduce the scientific reputation or accomplishments of the author (or the opinions of other scientists familiar with those publications and accomplishments). Off-hand criticism and summary dismissal of popular science writing are quite common in the blogosphere, and I'm not convinced that's a Good Thing. And it's rather cheeky to bemoan the lack of editing of a science book, when one's own writing is in dire need of same (and I'm not referring to you, Laelaps).

Skeptic8:
I found Collapse depressing because it demonstrates on a variety of scales, civilisations' repeated and suicidal capacity to completely screw up their environment, and then fall apart in unpleasant ways. It didn't leave me with much hope for our future, put it that way. ;)

Its an excellent book, but I didn't enjoy like I did G,G&S or 3rd Chimp (which I read while studying Palaeoanthropology only a few years after it was published.)

I agree with Peter Mc Graith. The two books from Diamond I have read are instructive and entertaining, but too repetitive. I have also read reviews claiming that he ignores completely cultural and social aspects in his accountings, yet I would not agree one hundred percent with this. I remember he makes frequent reference to sociological literature, of course interpreting it under his own ecologist point of view. In Collapse, I found his accounts of the Rwandese Genocide quite well presented.