Interesting study of how much we have in common with our nearest relatives, and how much we don’t. And how it all came to be. A good read, but I will always measure Diamond by guns germs and steel, a book that I was absolutely affected to the core by. ( )

An important environmental perspective of our species. It reminded me a lot of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel. I hope as a species we can learn from our past and reign in our destructive powers to prevent our demise. ( )

This one looks at humans as animals and compares them to our wild counterparts. It looks at evolution, culture, genocide, language, sex, art, and more. It also looks at how we are affecting the planet and other species.

This might be my favourite Diamond book. I think the closer look at other species is what did that for me. I listened to the audio. ( )

The roots in our evolution of what we can be proud of as a species and of what we should be ashamed of as a species.

I found the first part rather heavy going, partly because I suspect at least some of has been outdated by discoveries in the field of genetics since the book was written in 1990. The author has explored many of the themes of the rest of the book in greater detail in his other popular works, though his overview of the history of genocide was new to me. Given his knife-edge between optimism and pessimism about our species's future in the epilogue, there seem to be depressingly more grounds for pessimism looking back at the 30 years since then. ( )

Very early on Diamond sets his stall. He's not interested in intricate molecular insights, but an overarching evolutionary basis for human lifecycle and behaviour. Sometimes he digresses, like when he talks for no obvious purpose about how the relatively large size of the male penis is unexplained, when really it might just be chance: there may be no direct impact to passing one's seed and it's really not a driver of natural selection.

Ageing, bizarrely in my view, is described as many unconnected factors (deteriorating senses, brittle bones, weakening heart) converging over time so that they fail optimally around the same time. Why maintain one feature when others are failing? More likely, shortening telomeres at the ends of our chromosomes cause most if not all these conditions. The notion that one underlying cause can be expressed in many different ways is dismissed offhandedly.

Language gets some treatment. I feel as though Diamond makes too much of minor aspects such as word order. Apparently, subject-verb-object is the "natural" order of human language, yet many precursors to English such as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit (the last especially) have no such restriction. There's too much emphasis on how Old English got to English, when really we should looking at how these more ancient languages developed.

Diamond believes races exist due to sexual selection rather than natural selection. In other words, natural selection explains only some variation in skin colour across climates. A much more potent driver, according to Diamond, is people are attracted to those who look like people they are raised around. I'm not sure about this. I wouldn't put it beyond ancient humans to want to keep genes in tight communities for other purposes, e.g. trust within a clan when sharing resources. Diamond does, however, give a convincing explanation for maladaptive traits, e.g. a peacock who is fast even with a plethora of useless but eye-catching tail feathers is deemed attractive to peahens.

One point where I agree wholeheartedly with Diamond is the importance of multi-generational knowledge, made possible (via a positive feedback loop?) by improved life expectancy, in advancing a preliterate society. There's no archaeological evidence for this, but Diamond's own experience living with "traditional" New Guinean societies adds colour and indicates the importance of studying these traditional societies today to understand better our distant past.

The last third is an accessible overview of Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse. If you have the time or interest to read only one or a couple of Diamond's books, choose these over The Third Chimpanzee as they cover Diamond's views on natural history and chance driving society in greater depth. ( )