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“... man, though well-behaved, is really but a monkey shaved’? Generally speaking, Jared Diamond believes that it is. He has a mass of up-to-date and well-presented evidence to support his views. The double helix of DNA is tough stuff. By boiling up together the DNA from different species and allowing the mixture to cool, a hybrid molecule ...”

“... why did some societies develop in size, complexity and, most of all, power, while others did not? Jared Diamond has written a book to answer this question. He is a remarkable man: as much a natural philosopher as a scientist, he has studied the digestive systems of Burmese pythons, described a new species of flightless bird, and written on the ...”

“... progress in recent centuries did that was not only not wrong, but may even have been right. Jared Diamond, a professor of geography in California, looks for answers to these big questions by examining the societies that collapsed. The body of his book contains accounts of four such societies: the Easter Islanders; the Anasazi; the Mayans; and the ...”

“... arrangements we take for granted are the contingent result of a unique historical conjuncture. Jared Diamond, ornithologist, evolutionary biologist and geographer, is best known as the author of Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, one of the most influential accounts of how most of us came to live in places ...”

“... worst something to put alongside climate change and the pathologies of the collapsed civilisations Jared Diamond writes about. Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life at the Wellcome Collection (until 31 August), which works on the instincts that make filth disgusting and cleanliness desirable, is not a comfortable exhibition. The desire to keep self ...”

“... to accept the limitations of climate and soil now threaten to repeat this on a global scale, as Jared Diamond argues in his new book, Collapse.* The fastest growing cities in the United States are in the desert; to someone flying over Phoenix, the bright green scars left on the Sonoran desert by the golf rush of the late 20th century are as shocking as ...”

“... Landes explains, this has not been the case; the answers have been more local. For Landes, as for Jared Diamond (whose history of the past 13,000 years, Guns, Germs and Steel, was reviewed in the LRB on 4 September last year), they lay at first in geography. What the Europeans came to call economic development started in the temperate zones and only ...”

“... enforced by sanctions, expulsions and executions of potential upstarts and free-riders. So, unlike Jared Diamond, who has suggested that human genocides are continuous with the murderous inter-group skirmishes of chimpanzees, Boehm sees a radical discontinuity between the hierarchical social organisation of the chimpanzees and the egalitarianism of human ...”

“... domestication in the Americas made Indigenous people less advanced than Europeans. More recently, Jared Diamond has speculated about the ‘cultural obstacles’ that prevented Indigenous peoples from domesticating animals and developing livestock farming. For Norton, however, animal domestication isn’t a stage of human development so much as a ...”

“... to measure genetic distances and put a date on times of evolutionary divergence between species), Jared Diamond approvingly recalls one geneticist saying: ‘Their results are The Revealed Truth, and you’d better believe it.’ DNA Revelation, in the case of the higher primates, preaches that humans and apes are closer to each other than either are to ...”

“... the hot alien from Star Trek: The Motion Picture; by day, more unfortunately, I resembled Jared Loughner of the Tucson shootings.) Euphoria set in, and I began to putter around the apartment singing Creed’s ‘With Arms Wide Open’ at the top of my lungs, placing special emphasis on the lyrics ‘Welcome to this place, I’ll show you ...”