Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond grew up in Boston and studied at Harvard, and later at Cambridge, where he obtained a doctorate in physiology. He taught physiology at UCLA for many years, while also pursuing his own interests in ornithology and ecology. Diamond published his first book in 1991: The Third Chimpanzee, on human evolution. Since the 90s, he’s published a series of successful books, few of which relate back to his academic field of study. His most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and is credited with popularizing the theory of geographic determinism: the idea that differences between civilizations have environmental causes. In the last decade, Diamond has been an important popular intellectual, penning articles on ecology, archaeology, and social science in many publications, and speaking at universities around the world.