Editor’s note: This is an article from the Fall 1998 issue of UCLA Magazine.
No matter how much you think you know — or how much you may in fact know — odds are that Jared Diamond knows much, much more. The UCLA School of Medicine professor of physiology’s breadth and depth of knowledge is enough to humble any reasonably intelligent person. Diamond is, by most any definition, a genius. The MacArthur Foundation gave him one of its genius awards in 1985. He has also won a Pulitzer (for Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies), the Coues Award (from the American Ornithologists Union) and an honorary doctorate from Sejong University in Korea (for contributions to the greater understanding of the Korean alphabet).
Diamond has dazzled colleagues and students with his expertise in wide-ranging fields of knowledge for decades; recently he’s begun to dazzle the world at large as well. Like Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman, Diamond is that rare scientist who can speak to laymen — and be understood. Diamond’s columns in the science magazines Discover, Nature and Natural History have brought his original thinking to a wider audience, and his books — The Third Chimpanzee; Guns, Germs, and Steel; and Why Is Sex Fun? — are allowing him to reach even further. Guns, Germs, and Steel, in fact, sold some 25,000 copies the week it was awarded the Pulitzer.
“It’s been doing very well, hovering on and off the best-seller lists,” Diamond says, adding dryly, “I have to be very grateful because this is not a book about near-death experiences.”
Though scientific literacy among the public at large remains lamentably low, it is the scientific community’s own tunnel vision that seems most worrisome to Diamond these days. “Most scientists cannot understand other areas of science,” he observes, “and most write in such a way that scientists in other fields can’t understand them.” He grabs a copy of Science magazine off his desk.
“Here is the publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Somewhere in here it says that the main goal is to enhance the public’s understanding of science. And yet, almost all of the articles cannot be understood even by a scientist outside the field; they’re just written so technically.”
Diamond’s own work draws upon knowledge of such seemingly unconnected topics as (to name but a few) the domestication of animals; the development of the Indo-European family of languages; the primitive tribes of New Guinea; the reason for menopause; the latitude-related features of climate; the history of China; and the origins of horsemanship.
The way Diamond weaves such threads together is most remarkable in Guns, Germs, and Steel. The idea for the book sprang from a simple question he was asked some 20 years ago by a New Guinean friend: Why did Europeans and Asians conquer the indigenous peoples of Africa, the New World, Australia and the South Pacific instead of being vanquished themselves? A key part of the answer, Diamond argues, was the availability of large, domesticable animals in Eurasia and the absence of them elsewhere (with minor exceptions like the llama in South America). This coincidence of zoology had a critical effect on the development — or the lack of it — of advanced civilization. In making his case, Diamond is masterful with small, illuminating bits of information: Zebras, superficially similar to horses, are actually much nastier, more agile at avoiding lassos and therefore impossible to tame; in fact, they injure more zookeepers each year than do tigers.
This polymath wisdom leads Diamond to conclusions that explode many of the more extreme assumptions of the American left and right. He makes the point in Guns, Germs, and Steel that “contrary to what white racists believe, advanced societies didn’t develop because of innate genetic ability but because of their luck of the draw in biogeography.” On the other hand, he eschews the tender-hearted contemporary view of aboriginal peoples as ecological saints. The reason that American Indians didn’t have horses until Spanish explorers brought them to the New World, Diamond explains in The Third Chimpanzee, is that their ancestors exterminated these animals along with a host of other North American species when they arrived here from Asia.
In fact, he has little patience with the idea that what’s “natural” is necessarily good. “Rape is natural! Murder is natural!” he exclaims. “What’s natural is often repulsive. One of the most important functions of human society — and the driving force behind most political institutions — is to prevent humans from doing what comes naturally.
“Having been born in 1937, I grew up with the view that the Nazis were unique,” he continues. “And yes, the efficiency of the Holocaust was indeed unique. But the effort behind it was totally mundane. All the groups I work with in New Guinea have their own stories of what they’ve done to someone else. Unfortunately, many people regard genocide as something that was done only by the Nazis. They don’t realize that the potential for genocide is widespread.”
In New Guinea, where he has done a great deal of field work, Diamond is removed from the fray of intertribal resentments. Nevertheless, he finds the place dangerous enough that he won’t allow his 11-year-old twin sons to accompany him on expeditions. “Every expedition has at least one close call,” he says. “Boat accidents, plane accidents. One of the closest [was] with the Indonesian military. They came in on a trumped-up excuse to plunder our cargo. Well, I know what it’s like with the Indonesian military, and I could just picture the message to my wife: ‘He attacked us, so we shot him in self-defense.’ It took us 45 minutes to talk our way out of it; it was pretty tense.”
Diamond’s close scrapes with human nature at its most primal are side effects to his research in another field altogether: the evolution and behavior of South Pacific birds. Over more than 30 years, he has led 17 ornithological expeditions to New Guinea and its neighboring islands. The first sojourn was inauspicious: Diamond was unable to locate even one jungle nest. But he persevered and on subsequent visits made considerable progress. Among his accomplishments in this part of the world, Diamond designed New Guinea’s national park system, learned Foré, a tribal language he found “deliciously complex,” and rediscovered the rare and mysterious yellow-fronted gardener bowerbird, previously known only from a few specimens in a 19th-century Paris feather shop. This important sighting led to field experiments with colored poker chips examining bird bower building (i.e., decorating choices) in general and, through insights gained from the study of bird evolution, to papers on the evolution of human diseases like Tay-Sachs and diabetes.
With its jagged mountains and deep, isolated valleys, New Guinea is home to a microcosmic variety of Stone Age tribes — most of which were unaware of even each other’s existence until first contact was made with the outside world in the 1930s. The rareness of that condition is illustrated in The Third Chimpanzee, when, after a day of traipsing through the jungle on a different Pacific Island, Diamond hears a woman’s voice. “My head whirled with fantasies of the beautiful, unspoilt, grass-skirted, bare-breasted Polynesian maiden who awaited me,” he writes.
“Bad enough that the lady proved to be fat and with her husband. What humiliated my self-image as intrepid explorer was the University of Wisconsin sweatshirt she wore.”
Yet New Guinea, in Diamond’s view, is “as good a model as we have left today of what much of the rest of the human world was once like.” A thousand different languages survive on the island, many as different from one another as English is from Japanese. Some have no apparent relationship to any other language on earth. Even the dauntless Diamond, who nearly chucked his scientific career to become a linguist when he was in graduate school, began to see his limits here. “I realized that, yes, it was great fun learning Foré,” he recalls, “but [I thought], ‘Jared, you can’t learn a new language every month — you’ve got to learn the lingua franca’” — Pidgin English for the eastern half of New Guinea and Indonesian for the western half. Diamond estimates he speaks about 12 languages, but only English and German with any fluency. He is probably being modest.
Serious and rather reserved, Diamond is not one of those people who constantly snap open their superior intellect like an umbrella. He is straightforward and seems to have a pretty casual attitude toward his own brain. His close friend Alan Grinnell, chairman of the Department of Physiological Science in the College of Letters and Science, recalls that when they were both undergraduates at Harvard, Diamond would carelessly leave his biochemistry exams lying around on hall tables — perfect 100 percent scores plus bonus points.
As a sophomore, Diamond discovered that Harvard had an annual Latin prize for the student who best translated a Latin poem by Horace into English. Diamond, who had prepped at the Roxbury Latin School outside Boston (after a birdwatching third-grade teacher had inspired him to become a fanatical birder by age 7) won the Harvard Latin Prize that year, then again the next year, and then again the next. “He’d probably have won it four years in a row if he’d known about it as a freshman,” Grinnell says. “You can imagine how the classics majors felt.”
Diamond’s father was a physician who specialized in the study of childhood genetic diseases. His mother was a teacher and silent movie accompanist; like her, Diamond is an accomplished pianist. As a child, Jared planned to become a doctor, but changed his goal to medical research by the time he reached Harvard. In addition to the work that has lately brought him to the attention of the public, Diamond continues his research in his original field, membrane biophysics and physiology, in particular the physiology of digestion. His postgraduate work at Cambridge, which described how water and solutes are transported across epithelial membranes, has stood as a model of its kind for 30 years.
The wall outside Diamond’s office, deep in the bowels of UCLA’s Center for the Health Sciences, is marked by a large poster of a Burmese python swallowing a rat. Diamond continues his lab work in the evolutionary physiology of digestion, using pythons as a model. A second major area of activity is his fieldwork on New Guinea birds and the impact of the Chevron oil field there. He’s also at work on his next big book, about the ecological collapse of various ancient civilizations.
Though the life of the mind occupies a large part of Diamond’s universe, at its center are his wife, children and home. His wife, Marie Cohen, is a clinical psychologist and professor at UCLA’s School of Medicine. What’s it like to live with a genius? “Besides everything else, he was a Harvard debating champion,” Cohen laughs. “But after a while, you learn that even a genius is human.”
Cohen makes periodic appearances in Diamond’s books — turning red with heat exhaustion on a trek through the Australian desert, for instance, or, in a Third Chimpanzee chapter illustrating how we tend to pick mates resembling ourselves (even in weird details like earlobe size or finger length) — inspiring her husband to produce something of a miniportrait of the scientist on a date:
“When my wife and I were introduced to each other ... I had a sense there was something about Marie that didn’t quite match my ideal, even though I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. Not until Marie and I first went to a ballet together did I solve the puzzle. I lent Marie my opera glasses, and when she passed them back to me, I found that she had pushed the eyepieces so close together that I couldn’t see through them until I had spread them apart again. I then realized that Marie has more close-set eyes than I do, and that most women I had pursued before had wide-set eyes like my own. Thanks to Marie’s earlobes and other merits, I’ve been able to make peace with my and her mismatched interocular distances.”
Cohen takes it in stride. “He makes observations about all kinds of things without malice aforethought,” she says. “For Jared, life is basically an unending series of New Guinea experiences; he applies those lessons over and over.”
Diamond acknowledges that his time in New Guinea is what most affects his way of seeing the world and that it has rendered him risk-averse. “I learned the heavy consequences of making mistakes,” he says, “and now I’m just a lot more careful about everything. I’m a careful driver, I’m careful with my children.” His sons, Max and Joshua, have grown up in a pretty quiet home — no Nintendo, no TV except for special events like the World Series. Diamond takes the twins on separate outings geared to their individual interests. Max likes snakes and salamanders and frogs, so Dad took him out to hunt for endangered newts. Joshua, a history buff, has traveled with his father to view Civil War battle sites. Diamond is concerned about what kind of world his boys will inherit. “The planet is really going to be an awful place,” he says, if, as according to some predictions, the tropical rain forest is destroyed by 2030, fossil fuels are nearly exhausted by 2040 and global warming happens by 2050. “So, particularly with my science writing I hope to alert people to the dangers.” Does he ever tire or grow bored? “No,” Diamond says happily. “There’s just too many interesting things out there.”
