243 Quotes by Jared Diamond

Sex is flagrantly separated from reproduction in a few species, including bonobos and dolphins.

big-bang reproduction, or semelparity: a single reproductive effort, followed by preprogrammed death.

But the largest number of primate species--thirty-four--have a promiscuous system in which females routinely associate and copulate with multiple males.

History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.

...neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.

For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.