Jared Diamond Quotes - Page 3

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• Bird taxonomy is a difficult field because of the severe anatomical constraints imposed by flight. There are only so many ways to design a bird capable, say, of catching insects in mid-air, with the result that birds of similar habitats tend to have very similar anatomies, whatever their ancestry. For example, American vultures look and behave much like Old World vultures, but biologists have come to realize that the former are related to storks, the latter to hawks, and that their resemblances result from their common lifestyle.

  Jared Diamond

  Air, Bird, Design

  12 Copy quote

• Eurasia's main axis is east/west, whereas the main axis of the Americas is north/south. Eurasia's east/west axis meant that species domesticated in one part of Eurasia could easily spread thousands of miles at the same latitude, encountering the same day-length and climate to which they were already adapted.

  Jared Diamond

  Axes, Climate, East

  6 Copy quote

• All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product.

  Jared Diamond

  Improvement, Invention, Made

  Jared Diamond (2017). “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies”, p.214, W. W. Norton & Company

  7 Copy quote

• Ahead of me lies the familiar litany: weakening of the heart, hardening of the arteries, increasing brittleness of bones, decreases in kidney filtration rates, lower resistance of the immune system, and loss of memory. The list could be extended almost indefinitely. Evolution seems indeed to have arranged things so that all our systems deteriorate, and that we invest in repair only as much as we are worth.

  Jared Diamond

  Life, Memories, Lying

  Jared Diamond (2013). “The Rise And Fall Of The Third Chimpanzee”, p.118, Random House

  6 Copy quote

• The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan.

  Jared Diamond

  Book, Media, Iraq

  56 Copy quote

• We can't manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can't start and stop ice ages, and we can't experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs.

  Jared Diamond

  Stars, Ice, Design

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jared Diamond

  Differences, Environmental, Making A Difference

  Jared Diamond (2011). “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition”, p.308, Penguin

  12 Copy quote

• Even to this day, no native Australian animal species and only one plant species-the macadamia nut-have proved suitable for domestication. There still are no domestic kangaroos.

  Jared Diamond

  Animal, Nuts, Kangaroos

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jared Diamond

  Native American, Epidemics, Giving

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jared Diamond

  Acquisition, World, Body

  Jared Diamond (2011). “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition”, p.26, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jared Diamond

  America, Chicago, Steel

  Jared Diamond (2011). “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition”, p.131, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

• The United States has long thought of itself as the land of infinite plenty, and historically we did have abundant resources. But now we are gradually exhausting our fisheries, our topsoil, our water. On top of that, we're coming to the end of world resources.

  Jared Diamond

  Land, Long, Water

  7 Copy quote

• Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

  Jared Diamond

  White, People, Black

  Jared Diamond (2017). “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies”, p.9, W. W. Norton & Company

  5 Copy quote

• Today Charles Darwin is best known for establishing the fact of evolution and for recognizing the major role of natural selection in driving it.

  Jared Diamond

  Roles, Today, Facts

  4 Copy quote

• In the latter case it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it.

  Jared Diamond

  Government, Religion, Latter

  Jared Diamond (2017). “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies”, p.233, W. W. Norton & Company

  7 Copy quote

• What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didnt have anthropologists.

  Jared Diamond

  Easter, Tree, Lasts

  4 Copy quote

• AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.

  Jared Diamond

  Iraq, Issues, Cost

  26 Copy quote

• We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.

  Jared Diamond

  Science, Reality, Discovery

  4 Copy quote

• No government is here forever. And there are other forces - the most potent force in our society, in fact, big business - doing good for the environment.

  Jared Diamond

  Government, Forever, Literature

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Lying, Long, Historical

  Jared Diamond (2017). “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies”, p.393, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jared Diamond

  Mean, Technology, Literature

  4 Copy quote

• In fact, everywhere in the world there has been a flux between big and small societies. Big political units are constantly being formed, later to fragment. The individual pieces try to pull apart, and then they join together again. One sees that in Europe: There have been unifications and then dissolutions and reunifications. So in the long run, it's 10,000 steps toward amalgamation offsetting 9,999 steps toward falling apart again. In businesses and industries, I would guess that's also true.

  Jared Diamond

  Running, Fall, Long

  Source: www.strategy-business.com

  6 Copy quote

• The King's 28 letters have been described by scholars as the world's best alphabet and the most scientific system of writing.

  Jared Diamond

  Kings, Writing, Korea

  6 Copy quote

• Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.

  Jared Diamond

  Optimistic, Writing, Past

  "The New Humanists: Science at the Edge" by John Brockman, Barnes & Noble Publishing, (p. 31), 2003.

  8 Copy quote

• Why were there far more species of domesticated animals in Eurasia than in the Americas? The Americas harbor over a thousand native wild mammal species, so you might initially suppose that the Americas offered plenty of starting material for domestication.

  Jared Diamond

  Animal, Mammals, Might

  4 Copy quote

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