Jared Diamond

Jared Mason Diamond was born in Boston in 1937 and trained as a physiologist, taking a doctorate at Cambridge and spending the early part of his career on the biophysics of membranes.

His second career came from fieldwork. He began visiting New Guinea in 1964 to study bird ecology and evolution, returning repeatedly over decades, and that experience gave him both the material and the question that produced his best-known book. A New Guinean politician named Yali asked him why Europeans had so much cargo while his own people had so little, and Diamond spent years constructing an answer.

Guns, Germs, and Steel, published in 1997, argues that the uneven development of human societies came from geography and biology and not from anything about the people involved. Eurasia held more domesticable plants and animals and ran on an east-west axis along which they could spread at constant latitude, producing agricultural surplus, cities, technology, and the epidemic diseases that did most of the killing after 1492. It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1998 and has sold enormously.

The book was written explicitly against explanations of history that rest on assumptions about cultural or racial capacity, and it removes people from the causation entirely. Specialists have criticised it since publication for environmental determinism, for explaining poorly after roughly 1500 where institutions dominate, and for handling particular societies as illustrations of a thesis.

Collapse, published in 2005, examines societies that failed, and later books include The World Until Yesterday and Upheaval. He is a professor of geography at UCLA and has also published extensively in ornithology and physiology, which is a rare combination of careers.