Quotes from Jared Diamond

Already, though, I hope to have convinced you, the reader, that history is not just one damn fact after another, as a cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.

The statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try to catch on to His coattails as He marches past.

Scientists used to quote a phrase of Thomas Hobbes's in order to characterize the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers as "nasty, brutish, and short." They seemed to have to work hard, to be driven by the daily quest for food, often to be close to starvation, to lack such elementary material comforts as soft beds and adequate clothing, and to die young.

the Indian population of Hispaniola declined from around 8 million, when Columbus arrived in A.D. 1492, to zero by 1535.

in the winter of 1902 a dysentery epidemic brought by a sailor on the whaling ship Active killed 51 out of the 56 Sadlermiut Eskimos, a very isolated band of people living on Southampton Island in the Canadian Arctic.

Knowledge brings power. Hence writing brings power to modern societies, by making it possible to transmit knowledge with far greater accuracy and in far greater quantity and detail, from more distant lands and more remote times. Of

Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population. The

Writing marched together with weapons, microbes, and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest.

My own impression, from having divided my life between United States cities and New Guinea villages, is that the so-called blessings of civilization are mixed. For example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span, but receive much less social support from friendships and extended families.

Quite a few inventions do conform to this commonsense view of necessity as invention's mother.

For instance, today almost all Japanese and Scandinavians are literate but most Iraqis are not: why did writing nevertheless arise nearly four thousand years earlier in Iraq?

It turns out that, in addition to China's eight 'big' languages—Mandarin and its seven close relatives (often referred to collectively simply as 'Chinese'), with between 11 million and 800 million speakers each—China also has over 130 'little' languages, many of them with just a few thousand speakers.

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 gained over hunter-gatherer tribes.

This trait has direct animal precursors – namely, the contests between competing individuals and groups that, in many species besides our own, may be resolved by murder.

By comparison with high population densities in Japan and Java and China, Australia looked empty and attractive to Asian invasion—so thought the prime minister, but Asians themselves did not think that way.

shared among all of those types of crisis, whatever their cause, is the sense that something important about one's current approach to life isn't working, and that one has to find a new approach.

Thus, part—not all, but part—of the reason for Japan initiating World War Two against such hopeless odds was that young army leaders of the 1930's lacked the knowledge base and historical experience necessary for honest, realistic, cautious self-appraisal. The result was disastrous for Japan.

proposed as appropriate compensation. This reminds me

Two million years ago, several proto-human lineages had coexisted side by side until a shake-up left only one. It now appears that a similar shake-up occurred within the last 60,000 years, and that all of us alive in the world today are descended from the winner of that upheaval. What was the last missing ingredient whose acquisition helped our ancestor to win?

That was part of the reason why my 1959 crisis was so traumatic to me: it was my first acute life crisis. By comparison, my 1980 and 2000 professional crises were un-traumatic. I did eventually switch career directions from membrane physiology to evolutionary physiology around 1980, and from physiology to geography after 2000. But those decisions weren't painful, because I had come to assume from my previous experience that things would probably turn out OK.

In reality, Japanese women face many societal barriers to equality. Of course, the barriers that I'll now describe also exist in countries other than Japan. But those barriers are stronger—and the gender gap in health, education, and participation in the workforce and in politics is greater—in Japan than in any other rich industrialized nation except South Korea.

Japan's male/female pay differential for full-time employees is the third highest (exceeded only by South Korea and Estonia) among 35 rich industrial countries. A Japanese woman employee is paid on average only 73% of a man employee at the same level, compared to 85% for the average rich industrial country, ranging up to 94% for New Zealand.

An alternative way of expressing births is by what's called the total fertility rate: i.e., the total number of babies born to an average woman over her lifetime. For the whole world that number averages 2.5 babies; for the First World countries with the biggest economies, it varies between 1.3 and 2.0 babies (e.g., 1.9 for the U.S.). The number for Japan is only 1.27 babies, at the low end of the spectrum; South Korea and Poland are among the few countries with lower values.

Table 1.2. Factors related to the outcomes of national crises 1. National consensus that one's nation is in crisis 2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and financial help from other nations 5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems 6. National identity