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We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.

Jared Diamond

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Jared Diamond
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: September 10
Biologist
Ecologist
Geographer
Ornithologist
Physiologist
Scientist
University Teacher
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Jared Mason Diamond
Jared M. Diamond
Would
Results
Vast
Qualified
Year
Scientific
Alas
Science
Scientist
Cruel
Replaceable
Reality
Fantasy
Achieved
Thereafter
Great
Discovery
Hadn
Uniquely
Something
Result
Scientists
Contributions
Years
Majority
Similar
Fantasies
Make
Soon
Contribution
Discoveries

More quotes by Jared Diamond

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[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.
Jared Diamond
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Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks... of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economic interdependence.
Jared Diamond
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One person making a wrong decision affects the whole country.
Jared Diamond
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History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
Jared Diamond
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I personally am not conscious of my accent.
Jared Diamond
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African cavalry mounted on rhinos or hippos would have made mincemeat of European cavalry mounted on horses. But it couldnt happen.
Jared Diamond
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I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book... and I began putting more work into environmental history.
Jared Diamond
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In the latter case it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it.
Jared Diamond
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Australia is the most isolated continent.
Jared Diamond
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Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.
Jared Diamond
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With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.
Jared Diamond
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Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.
Jared Diamond
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We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.
Jared Diamond
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The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.
Jared Diamond
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The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!
Jared Diamond
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Today Charles Darwin is best known for establishing the fact of evolution and for recognizing the major role of natural selection in driving it.
Jared Diamond
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In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions.
Jared Diamond
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Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with.
Jared Diamond
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Even to this day, no native Australian animal species and only one plant species-the macadamia nut-have proved suitable for domestication. There still are no domestic kangaroos.
Jared Diamond
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The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.
Jared Diamond