|
92630f4
|
Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.
|
|
evolution
decisions
|
Jared Diamond |
|
58380de
|
History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
11e1e7e
|
In short, Europe's colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography--in particular, to the continents' different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
77d875d
|
Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.
|
|
war
history
possession
|
Jared Diamond |
|
70ec402
|
T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.
|
|
stubbornness
values
|
Jared Diamond |
|
5edd0cd
|
In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions.
|
|
foresight
wealthy
environment
civilization
realization
rich
isolation
consequences
insight
|
Jared Diamond |
|
bc9b18e
|
Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it's a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, hence in how they shape our thoughts. There's no single purpose "best" language; instead, different languages are better suited for different purposes. For instance, i..
|
|
language
thought
|
Jared Diamond |
|
d62922a
|
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean -- once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
|
|
escape
preservation
environment
help
society
isolation
|
Jared Diamond |
|
681f430
|
With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
b30aad7
|
Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives.
|
|
history
success
reconsideration
society
planning
values
|
Jared Diamond |
|
5c6e259
|
W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.
|
|
war
death
radicalism
fanaticism
|
Jared Diamond |
|
d364080
|
People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!"
|
|
population
error
misguidedness
problems
|
Jared Diamond |
|
662ef37
|
History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
|
|
history
life
simplicity
|
Jared Diamond |
|
02f1717
|
To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclusion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the past. Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require dif..
|
|
politics
public
economics
power
|
Jared Diamond |
|
8860bc4
|
Science is often misrepresented as 'the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.' Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.
|
|
science
knowledge
|
Jared Diamond |
|
be19cb6
|
It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.
|
|
evolution
native-americans
epidemics
|
Jared Diamond |
|
0172391
|
Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative.... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunt..
|
|
history
|
Jared Diamond |
|
87ba25a
|
Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
630a8df
|
Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.
|
|
history
disease
|
Jared Diamond |
|
84dff39
|
Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke historical assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to justify treating them fairly. ... By invoking this assumption [i.e., that they were/are better environmental stewards than other peoples or parts of contemporary society] to justify fair treatment of native peoples, we imply that it would be OK to mistreat them if that assumption could be refuted. ..
|
|
equality
morality
dispossession
extermination
subjugation
native-americans
environment
suppression
values
|
Jared Diamond |
|
7200006
|
Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation, as did Easter Island and the Greenland Norse in the past. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote ... can cause trouble for prosperous societies on other continents and is also subject to their influence (whether helpful or destabilizing). For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline. But we also are the first to enjoy the oppo..
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
77ebc09
|
We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
b76f94b
|
The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.
|
|
war
history
interaction
genocide
peoples
epidemics
|
Jared Diamond |
|
e7c2aa5
|
In contrast [to trees and fish], oil, metals, and coal are not renewable; they don't reproduce, sprout, or have sex to produce baby oil droplets or coal nuggets.
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
e474299
|
My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
2bd9eda
|
Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today.
|
|
problems
power
technology
|
Jared Diamond |
|
24a1ab6
|
One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
69a6d73
|
The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
d2145e0
|
neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
89e15fe
|
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
|
|
history
environmental-determinism
societies
environment
|
Jared Diamond |
|
836681b
|
It logical to suppose that history's pattern reflects innate differences among people themselves. Of course, we're taught that it's not polite to say so in public. We see in our daily lives that some of the conquered peoples continue to form an underclass, centuries after the conquests or slave imports took place. We're told that this too is to be attributed not to any biological shortcomings but to social disadvantages and limited opport..
|
|
inspirational
|
Jared Diamond |
|
cec4476
|
All human societies contain inventive people. It's just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do other environments.
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
c8b92d2
|
I have often asked myself, "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" Like modern loggers, did he shout "Jobs, not trees!"? Or: "Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we'll find a substitute for wood"? Or: "We don't have proof that there aren't palms somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering"? Similar questi..
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
2b234bd
|
On the beginning of the mid-1990s' genocidal war in Rwanda:) Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda's total population, had been killed.
|
|
war
tutsi
genocide
rwanda
|
Jared Diamond |
|
7f7fc66
|
Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalized religion brings two other important benefits to centralized societies. First, shared ideology or religion helps solve the problem of how unrelated individuals are to live together without killing each other--by providing them with a bond not based on kinship. Second, it gives people a motive, other than genetic self-interest, for sacrificing their lives on behalf of..
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
a3d5c36
|
Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding.
|
|
struggle
history
learning
past
success
solutions
problems
failure
|
Jared Diamond |
|
e095c08
|
The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s.
|
|
anasazi
buildings
construction
skyscrapers
|
Jared Diamond |
|
8df8c6b
|
When you have seen the errors in which you live, you will understand the good that we have done you by coming to your land by order of his Majesty the King of Spain. Our Lord permitted that your pride should be brought low and that no Indian should be able to offend a Christian.
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
3d15735
|
Despite being depicted in innumerable cartoons as apelike brutes living in caves, Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own. They were also the first humans to leave behind strong evidence of burying their dead and caring for their sick.
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
5e883da
|
There is nothing new about prophecies to the effect that the end of the world is near if we do not repent. What is new is that such a prophecy is now true, for two obvious reasons. First, nuclear weapons give us the means to wipe ourselves out quickly: no humans possessed this means before. Second, we already appropriate about forty per cent of the Earth's net productivity (that is, the net energy captured from sunlight). With the world's h..
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
6c0b27a
|
Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues.
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
c83c20e
|
Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses, with 20--25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source ..
|
|
history
|
Jared Diamond |
|
dcba922
|
It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |
|
2ffd98d
|
Yes, world history is indeed such an onion!
|
|
|
Jared Diamond |