阅读贾里德·戴蒙德 Jared Diamond在百家争鸣的作品!!! | |||
Biography
Diamond was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Bessarabian Jewish family. His father was the physician Louis K. Diamond, and his mother the teacher, musician, and linguist Flora Kaplan. He attended the Roxbury Latin School, earning his A.B. from Harvard College in 1958, and his Ph.D. in physiology and membrane biophysics from the University of Cambridge in 1961.
After graduating from Cambridge, he returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became Professor of Physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties, he also developed a second, parallel, career in the ornithology of New Guinea, and has since undertaken numerous research projects in New Guinea and nearby islands. In his fifties, Diamond gradually developed a third career in environmental history, and became Professor of Geography at UCLA, his current position. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Westfield State University in 2009.
He is married to Marie Diamond (née Marie Nabel Cohen), granddaughter of Polish politician Edward Werner, and has two adult sons named Josh and Max Diamond. In 1999, he was awarded the National Medal of Science. His sister Susan Diamond is a successful novelist. She wrote a book titled What Goes Around."
Diamond also has an aptitude for languages.
[edit]Work
As well as scholarly books and articles in the fields of ecology and ornithology, Diamond is the author of a number of popular science books, which are known for combining sources from a variety of fields other than those he has formally studied.
The first of these, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991), examined human evolution and its relevance to the modern world, incorporating insights from anthropology, evolutionary biology, genetics, ecology, and linguistics. It was well-received by critics, and won the 1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 1997, he followed this up with Why is Sex Fun?, which focused in on the evolution of human sexuality, again borrowing from anthropology, ecology, and evolutionary biology.
His third and best known popular science book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, was published in 1997. In it, Diamond seeks to explain Eurasian hegemony throughout history. Using evidence from ecology, archaeology, genetics, linguistics, and various historical case studies, he argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies do not reflect cultural or racial differences, but rather originate in environmental differences powerfully amplified by various positive feedback loops.
As a result, the geography of the Eurasian landmass gave its human inhabitants an inherent advantage over the societies on other continents, which they were able to dominate or conquer. Although certain examples in the book, and its alleged environmental determinism, have been criticised, it became a best-seller, and received numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, an Aventis Prize for Science Books (Diamond's second), and the 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. A television documentary based on the book was produced by the National Geographic Society in 2005.
Diamond's next book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), examined a range of past civilizations in an attempt to identify why they either collapsed or succeeded, and considers what contemporary societies can learn from these historical examples. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, he argues against traditional historical explanations for the failure of past societies, and instead focuses on ecological factors. Among the societies he considers are the Norse and Inuit of Greenland, the Maya, the Anasazi, the indigenous people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Japan, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and modern Montana.
While not as successful as Guns, Germs and Steel, Collapse was again both critically acclaimed and subject to accusations of environmental determinism and specific inaccuracies. "Collapse" was the third book written by Diamond that was nominated for Royal Society Prize for Science Books (previously known as the Rhône-Poulenc and Aventis Prize) but this time he did not win the prize, losing out to David Bodanis's Electric Universe.
Most recently Diamond co-edited Natural Experiments of History, a collection of essays illustrating the multidisciplinary and comparative approach to the study of history that he advocates.
[edit]Vengeance Is Ours (2008)
On 21 April 2009, Henep Isum Mandingo and Hup Daniel Wemp of Papua New Guinea filed a $10 million USD defamation lawsuit against Diamond over a 2008 New Yorker magazine article titled Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even? The article is an account of feuds and vengeance killings among tribes in the New Guinea highlands which Mandingo and Wemp claim have been misrepresented and embellished by Diamond. The lawsuit came in the wake of an investigation by Rhonda Roland Shearer which alleged factual inaccuracies in the article, most notably that Mandingo, the alleged target of the feud who was said to have been rendered wheelchair-bound in the fighting recounted by Diamond, is fit and healthy.
Diamond and the New Yorker stand by the article. They maintain that it is a faithful account of the story related to Diamond by Wemp while they worked together in 2001 and in a formal interview in 2006, based on "detailed notes", and that both Diamond and the magazine did all they reasonably could to verify the story. Furthermore they claim that in a taped phone interview conducted in August 2008 between Daniel Wemp and Chris Jennings, a fact checker for the New Yorker, Wemp failed to raise any significant objections. Wemp contends he told Jennings the story was "inaccurate, inaccurate". Anthropologist Pauline Wiessner, an expert on tribal warfare in Papua New Guinea, points out that young men often exaggerate or make up entirely their exploits in tribal warfare, and that Diamond would be naïve to accept and publish Wemp's stories at face value.
[edit]Selected publications
[edit]Books
1972 Avifauna of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea, Publications of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, No. 12, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 438.
1975 M. L. Cody and J. M. Diamond, eds. Ecology and Evolution of Communities. Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
1979 J. M. Diamond and M. LeCroy. Birds of Karkar and Bagabag Islands, New Guinea. Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist. 164:469–531
1984 J. M. Diamond. The Avifaunas of Rennell and Bellona Islands. The Natural History of Rennell Islands, British Solomon Islands 8:127–168
1986 J. M. Diamond and T. J. Case. eds. Community Ecology. Harper and Row, New York
1986 B. Beehler, T. Pratt, D. Zimmerman, H. Bell, B. Finch, J. M. Diamond, and J. Coe. Birds of New Guinea. Princeton University Press,Princeton
1992 The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, ISBN 0-060-98403-1
1997 Why is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality, ISBN 0-465-03127-7
1997 Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-06131-0
2001 The Birds of Northern Melanesia: Speciation, Ecology, & Biogeography (with Ernst Mayr), ISBN 0-195-14170-9
2003 Guns, Germs, and Steel Reader's Companion, ISBN 1-586-63863-7.
2005 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking Books. ISBN 1-586-63863-7.
2006 [re-release] The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-060-84550-3.
2010 Natural Experiments of History (with James A. Robinson). ISBN 0674035577 ISBN 978-0674035577
[edit]Articles
Island Biogeography and the Design of Natural Reserves (1976), in Robert M. May's Theoretical Ecology: Principles and Applications, Blackwell Scientific Publications, pp. 163–186.
Ethnic differences. Variation in human testis size. (April 1986) Nature 320(6062):488–489 PubMed.
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (May 1987) Discover pp. 64–66
Japanese Roots (June 1998) Discover
Curse and Blessing of the Ghetto (March 1991) Discover, pp. 60–66
Race Without Color (November 1994) Discover
The Curse of QWERTY (April 1997) Discover
Kinship With The Stars (May 1997) Discover
Japanese Roots (June 1998) Discover
What’s Your Consumption Factor? (January 2, 2008) The New York Times
Vengeance is Ours (April 2008) The New Yorker
[edit]Boards
Editorial board, Skeptic Magazine, a publication of The Skeptics Society
Member, the American Philosophical Society
Member, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Member, the National Academy of Sciences
US regional director of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF/World Wildlife Fund)
[edit]Awards and honors
1961–1965 Prize Fellowship in Physiology, Trinity College, Cambridge, England
1968–1971 Lederle Medical Faculty Award
1972 Distinguished Teaching Award, UCLA Medical Class
1973 Distinguished Teaching Award, UCLA Medical Class
1975 Distinguished Achievement Award, American Gastroenterological Association
1976 Kaiser Permanente/Golden Apple Teaching Award
1976 Nathaniel Bowditch Prize, American Physiological Society
1978 American Ornithologists Union, elected fellow
1979 Franklin L. Burr Award, National Geographic Society
1985 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant
1989 Archie Carr Medal
1990 MacArthur Foundation Fellow
1992 Tanner Lecturer, University of Utah and many other endowed lectureships
1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books for The Third Chimphanzee
1992 Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize
1993 Zoological Society of San Diego Conservation Medal
1994 Skeptics Society, Randi Award
1995 Honorary doctor of literature, Sejong University, Korea
1996 Faculty Research Lecturer, UCLA
1997 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel
1998 Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel
1998 Elliott Coues Award, American Ornithologists' Union
1998 California Book Awards, Gold Medal in nonfiction for Guns, Germs and Steel
1998 Aventis Prize for Science Books for Guns, Germs and Steel
1998 International Cosmos Prize
1999 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction
1999 National Medal of Science
2001 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement
2002 Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science
2006 Royal Society Prize for Science Books for Collapse
2006 Dickson Prize in Science
2008 Ph.D. Honoris Causa at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium