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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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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
Uncomfortable
Scientific
Considered
Quite
Literature
History
Science
Classified
Social
Considering
More quotes by Jared Diamond
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
Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?
Jared Diamond
People often ask, What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today? A flip answer would be, The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!
Jared Diamond
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.
Jared Diamond
The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!
Jared Diamond
Think of all the human suffering caused by the sad truth that beautiful sexy women or handsome Porsche-owning men often prove to have miserable genes for other traits
Jared Diamond
Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands.
Jared Diamond
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
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
African cavalry mounted on rhinos or hippos would have made mincemeat of European cavalry mounted on horses. But it couldnt happen.
Jared Diamond
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
The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.
Jared Diamond
Starbucks goes to a great effort, and pays twice as much for its coffee as its competitors do, and is very careful to help coffee producers in developing countries grow coffee without pesticides and in ways that preserve forest structure.
Jared Diamond
When you have seen the errors in which you live, you will understand the good that we have done you by coming to your land by order of his Majesty the King of Spain. Our Lord permitted that your pride should be brought low and that no Indian should be able to offend a Christian.
Jared Diamond
Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.
Jared Diamond
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
Jared Diamond
Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.
Jared Diamond
The United States has long thought of itself as the land of infinite plenty, and historically we did have abundant resources. But now we are gradually exhausting our fisheries, our topsoil, our water. On top of that, we're coming to the end of world resources.
Jared Diamond
Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.
Jared Diamond
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