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eeebd64
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the values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.
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Jared Diamond |
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dee7bcc
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Animal populations that for one reason or another escaped control by predators and parasites have in some cases also escaped their own internal controls on their numbers, multiplied until they damaged their resource base, and occasionally have eaten their way into extinction.
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Jared Diamond |
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1ab0182
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Another one, popular with inhabitants of northern Europe, invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland's cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human creativity and energy. Perhaps the seasonally variable climate at high latitudes poses more diverse challenges than does a seasonally constant tropical climate. Perhaps cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive,..
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Jared Diamond |
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1940e06
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For example, missionary linguists are working on modified Roman alphabets for hundreds of New Guinea and Native American languages. Government linguists devised the modified Roman alphabet adopted in 1928 by Turkey for writing Turkish, as well as the modified Cyrillic alphabets designed for many tribal languages of Russia. In a few cases, we also know something about the individuals who designed writing systems by blueprint copying in the r..
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Jared Diamond |
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9e0d716
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A striking example from the history of writing is the origin of the syllabary devised in Arkansas around 1820 by a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah, for writing the Cherokee language. Sequoyah observed that white people made marks on paper, and that they derived great advantage by using those marks to record and repeat lengthy speeches. However, the detailed operations of those marks remained a mystery to him, since (like most Cherokees befor..
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Jared Diamond |
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b721f29
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Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. The visitor might illustrate the results of his digs by a twenty-four-hour clock on which one hour of clock-time represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole..
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Jared Diamond |
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156c37d
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Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed for us a stage where we made one of the most crucial decisions in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population growth or trying to increase food production, we opted for the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. The same choice faces us today, with the difference that we now can learn from the past.
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Jared Diamond |
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fc4b009
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INVENTING A WRITING system from scratch must have been incomparably more difficult than borrowing and adapting one. The first scribes had to settle on basic principles that we now take for granted. For example, they had to figure out how to decompose a continuous utterance into speech units, regardless of whether those units were taken as words, syllables, or phonemes. They
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Jared Diamond |
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dd9fc6a
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these we killed, and others we killed--but what of that? It was in accordance with our custom.
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Jared Diamond |
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cac77d4
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people with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A.
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Jared Diamond |
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c73b051
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A hunter-gatherer mother who is shifting camp can carry only one child, along with her few possessions. She cannot afford to bear her next child until the previous toddler can walk fast enough to keep up with the tribe and not hold it back. In practice, nomadic hunter-gatherers space their children about four years apart by means of lactational amenorrhea, sexual abstinence, infanticide, and abortion. By contrast, sedentary people, unconstr..
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Jared Diamond |
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f74edfc
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That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent. Besides
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Jared Diamond |
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7344251
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The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau speculated that states are formed by a social contract, a rational decision reached when people calculated their self-interest, came to the agreement that they would be better off in a state than in simpler societies, and voluntarily did away with their simpler societies. But
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Jared Diamond |
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55b9733
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Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be relatively egalitarian, to lack full-time bureaucrats and hereditary chiefs, and to have small-scale political organization at the level of the band or tribe. That's because all able-bodied hunter-gatherers are obliged to devote much of their time to acquiring food.
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Jared Diamond |
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52d4e03
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Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives - to talk of a society's birth, growth, peak, senescence, and death - and to assume that the long period of senescence that most of us traverse between our peak years and our deaths also applies to societies.
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society
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Jared Diamond |
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23aeeee
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Besides Sumerian cuneiform, the other certain instance of independent origins of writing in human history comes from Native American societies of Mesoamerica, probably southern Mexico. Mesoamerican
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Jared Diamond |
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e7e0e8a
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For any ranked society, whether a chiefdom or a state, one thus has to ask, why do the commoners tolerate the transfer of the fruits of their hard labor to kleptocrats? This question raised by political theorists from Plato to Marx are raised anew by voters in every modern election. Kleptocracies with little public support run the risk of being overthrown, either by downtrodden commoners, or by upstart would be replacement kleptocrats seeki..
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taxes
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Jared Diamond |
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4574718
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our cognitive abilities as adults are heavily influenced by the social environment that we experienced during childhood, making it hard to discern any influence of preexisting genetic differences.
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Jared Diamond |
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200eea4
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Archaeologists often distinguish calibrated from uncalibrated dates by writing the former in upper-case letters and the latter in lower-case letters (for example, 3000 B.C. vs. 3000 B.C., respectively).
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Jared Diamond |
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bcf36b1
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plant domestication is not a matter of hunter-gatherers' domesticating a single plant and otherwise carrying on unchanged with their nomadic lifestyle.
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Jared Diamond |
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bdedd92
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If our ethical code makes a purely arbitrary distinction between humans and all other species, then we have a code based on naked selfishness devoid of any higher principle.
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evolution
humanity
science
animal-welfare
biology
research
morals
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Jared Diamond |
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a55f65a
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One of the conclusions that we saw emerging from our discussion of Maya kings, Greenland Norse chieftains, and Easter Island chiefs is that, in the long run, rich people do not secure their own interests and those of their children if they rule over a collapsing society and merely buy themselves the privilege of being the last to starve or die.
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Jared Diamond |
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18531ee
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Oral traditions of the islanders are obsessed with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth."
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Jared Diamond |
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8ef08d5
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Despite being depicted in innumerable cartoons as apelike brutes living in caves, Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own.
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Jared Diamond |
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64e0d9a
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transhumance--i.e., moving livestock seasonally between different altitudes in order to follow the growth of grass at higher elevations as the season advances.
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Jared Diamond |
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624f553
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For example, the great Italian Jewish author Primo Levi, who did survive Auschwitz, said afterwards, "The experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away whatever legacies of my religious education that I had retained. There is Auschwitz, therefore God cannot exist. I haven't found a solution to that dilemma."
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Jared Diamond |
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dc5d53a
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why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history's broadest pattern and my book's subject. While this book is thus ultimately
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Jared Diamond |
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d09a279
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success is not guaranteed to well-intentioned decent people, nor necessarily denied to evil people.
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Jared Diamond |
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ea1b61d
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Yet we promise developing countries that, if they will only adopt good policies, like honest government and free market economies, they too can become like the First World today. That promise is utterly impossible, a cruel hoax. We are already having difficulty supporting a First World lifestyle even now, when only 1 billion people out of the world's 7.5 billion people enjoy it.
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Jared Diamond |
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2ca2f54
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and went on to colonize the next island again. It was a hitherto unprecedented
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Jared Diamond |
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feab184
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explanation of causes
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Jared Diamond |
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4039c37
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The table gives major crops, of five crop classes, from early agricultural sites in various parts of the world. Square brackets enclose names of crops first domesticated elsewhere; names not enclosed in brackets refer to local domesticates. Omitted are crops that arrived or became important only later, such as bananas in Africa, corn and beans in the eastern United States, and sweet potato in New Guinea. Cottons are four species of the genu..
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Jared Diamond |
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d81a2e5
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By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 percent of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more edible calories per acre. As a result, one acre can feed many more herders and farmers--typically, 10 to 100 times more--than hunter-gatherers. That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gaine..
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Jared Diamond |
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f13b9a7
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The humans who domesticated animals were the first to fall victim to the newly evolved germs, but those humans then evolved substantial resistance to the new diseases. When such partly immune people came into contact with others who had had no previous exposure to the germs, epidemics resulted in which up to 99 percent of the previously unexposed population was killed. Germs thus acquired ultimately from domestic animals played decisive rol..
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Jared Diamond |
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59c7921
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In short, plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much denser human populations. The resulting food surpluses, and (in some areas) the animal-based means of transporting those surpluses, were a prerequisite for the development of settled, politically centralized, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies. Hence the availability of domestic plants and animals ultimately explains why..
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Jared Diamond |
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6f163f8
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Pleistocene
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Jared Diamond |
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7858df0
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Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world's actual food producers, aren't necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers. Time budget studies show that they may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers do.
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hunter-gatherer
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Jared Diamond |
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d0ea392
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Sex in social mammals is generally carried out in public, before the gazes of other members of the troop.
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sex
public-sex
mating-ritual
mating
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Jared Diamond |
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36333a7
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Sex is flagrantly separated from reproduction in a few species, including bonobos and dolphins.
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sex
dolphin
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Jared Diamond |
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ee421a3
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big-bang reproduction, or semelparity: a single reproductive effort, followed by preprogrammed death.
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sex
mating-ritual
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Jared Diamond |
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936e9ce
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The daddy-at-home theory posits that concealed ovulation evolved to promote monogamy, to force the man to stay home, and thus to bolster his certainty about his paternity of his wife's children. The many-fathers theory instead posits that concealed ovulation evolved to give the women access to many sex partners and thus to leave many men uncertain as to whether they sired her children.
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sex
ovulation
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Jared Diamond |
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b5e6943
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throughout human history farmers have tended to despise hunter-gatherers as primitive, hunter-gatherers have despised farmers as ignorant, and herders have despised both.
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Jared Diamond |
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75d86a3
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Thus, Taiwan Strait may have served as the training ground where mainland Chinese developed the open-water maritime skills that would permit them to expand over the Pacific.
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Jared Diamond |
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11aafc2
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climate. Perhaps
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Jared Diamond |