Jared Diamond won a Pulitzer and a long quarrel with historians
Jared Diamond trained to study how the gallbladder absorbs salt. He then built a second career watching birds in New Guinea, and a third explaining world history. His book Guns, Germs, and Steel won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize and sold widely, while many historians and anthropologists attacked it for decades.
Born in Boston on 10 September 1937, the son of a physician who had left Chisinau after the Kishinev pogrom and a mother who was a teacher, linguist and concert pianist, Diamond began piano at six and birdwatching at seven. He studied biochemistry at Harvard, earned a Cambridge doctorate in 1961 on gallbladder membranes, and became a physiology professor at UCLA's medical school in 1968. From 1964 he was also travelling to New Guinea, publishing on its birds and ecology.
In his fifties he took up environmental history, eventually teaching geography at UCLA until he retired in 2024. His first popular book, The Third Chimpanzee in 1991, asked how humans came to differ so much from chimpanzees despite sharing over 98 percent of their DNA. Guns, Germs, and Steel followed in 1997, asking why Eurasians conquered peoples of the Americas, Australia and Africa rather than the reverse. His answer was geography, not genes: Eurasia had more wild species fit to domesticate and an east-west axis that helped crops, people, technology and disease spread.
Collapse, in 2005, compared societies that failed or survived, from the Norse and Inuit of Greenland to the Maya and Rapa Nui, again favouring ecological explanations over cultural ones. The World Until Yesterday in 2012 surveyed 39 small-scale societies for lessons on raising children, settling disputes and caring for elders.
Honours piled up, including a MacArthur grant in 1985 and the National Medal of Science in 1999. So did criticism. Dozens of specialists have catalogued what they see as factual and logical errors, and in 2003 the journal Antipode ran a symposium in which five researchers questioned his grasp of the subject; he replied that he found their quality very disappointing. When scholars published Questioning Collapse, Diamond reviewed it negatively in Nature without disclosing that it critiqued his own work, prompting complaints of a conflict of interest.
Source: Jared Diamond
