Amazon subtitle: ‘Interesting, informative and entertaining’ 5/5
2006 Harper Perennial reissue of 1st edition (1992), 368 pages
This is another of the twenty books Charlie Munger recommends in the second edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack (which I recommend very strongly you get and read). Two of Jared Diamond’s books make it on to the list (this one plus Guns, Germs and Steel), so I had high hopes for his first book, The Third Chimpanzee. I wasn’t disappointed.
A big theme in Poor Charlie’s Almanack is the importance of multi-disciplinary learning. Munger believes that many/most academic disciplines suffer from ‘man with a hammer syndrome’: if your only tool is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail. Jared Diamond is a man who comes equipped with a full tool kit: he started off in medical research, then pursued a parallel second career in bird ecology, evolution and biogeography and is learning his twelfth language.
The first part of this book is about where we came from and how we have become so different to all of the other animals, when, for example, only 1.6% of our DNA differs from that of a chimpanzee. The second part is about our likely future as evidenced by our relatively recent past (though these broad headings are actually subdivided into five sections by the author).
The book is full of interesting facts and surprising (and well argued) theories. The evidence that he discusses when looking at whether we ever lived in harmony with nature and how far back and regularly our human genocidal tendencies manifested themselves is rather disquieting. It suggests strongly, for example, that my own laissez faire attitude towards the environment is emphatically not justified by human history. The difference between us and the Easter Islanders or Anasazi Indians is that we have a global resource base to compromise before we run into serious trouble.
Diamond also has a theory of how the plant and animal species available for domestication may well have proved the decisive factor in determining which of our societies spread and became dominant. I had not come across it before at all and I found it extremely interesting – it is a prime example of how broadening the information under review may lead to completely different and unusual conclusions.
The Third Chimpanzee is an excellent and interesting book and I have already purchased his next book Guns, Germs and Steel. (I particularly recommend the 2006 Harper Perennial reissue as it contains an interesting addendum at the back with information about Diamond, some recommended further reading, and, most importantly he also discusses new scientific discoveries made since the original 1992 edition.)
2006 Harper Perennial reissue of 1st edition (1992), 368 pages
This is another of the twenty books Charlie Munger recommends in the second edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack (which I recommend very strongly you get and read). Two of Jared Diamond’s books make it on to the list (this one plus Guns, Germs and Steel), so I had high hopes for his first book, The Third Chimpanzee. I wasn’t disappointed.
A big theme in Poor Charlie’s Almanack is the importance of multi-disciplinary learning. Munger believes that many/most academic disciplines suffer from ‘man with a hammer syndrome’: if your only tool is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail. Jared Diamond is a man who comes equipped with a full tool kit: he started off in medical research, then pursued a parallel second career in bird ecology, evolution and biogeography and is learning his twelfth language.
The first part of this book is about where we came from and how we have become so different to all of the other animals, when, for example, only 1.6% of our DNA differs from that of a chimpanzee. The second part is about our likely future as evidenced by our relatively recent past (though these broad headings are actually subdivided into five sections by the author).
The book is full of interesting facts and surprising (and well argued) theories. The evidence that he discusses when looking at whether we ever lived in harmony with nature and how far back and regularly our human genocidal tendencies manifested themselves is rather disquieting. It suggests strongly, for example, that my own laissez faire attitude towards the environment is emphatically not justified by human history. The difference between us and the Easter Islanders or Anasazi Indians is that we have a global resource base to compromise before we run into serious trouble.
Diamond also has a theory of how the plant and animal species available for domestication may well have proved the decisive factor in determining which of our societies spread and became dominant. I had not come across it before at all and I found it extremely interesting – it is a prime example of how broadening the information under review may lead to completely different and unusual conclusions.
The Third Chimpanzee is an excellent and interesting book and I have already purchased his next book Guns, Germs and Steel. (I particularly recommend the 2006 Harper Perennial reissue as it contains an interesting addendum at the back with information about Diamond, some recommended further reading, and, most importantly he also discusses new scientific discoveries made since the original 1992 edition.)
