FEMALE SPEAKER: Please welcome Professor Jared Diamond.
[APPLAUSE]
JARED DIAMOND: It's a pleasure to be with you today,
even though my 26-year-old twin sons will laugh very hard when
they hear where I've been today, because they
know my total technological incompetence.
And so I feel obliged to warn you at the outset
that I am here under false pretenses
if you think that I'm capable of communicating
with you about technological matters.
But I can talk about books.
And the occasion for my being in New York
is the release of a young persons
edition for the first time of one of my books.
It's the first of my books, "The Third Chimpanzee," now being
released in a version aimed at high school
students and middle school students.
The background to my writing this book
and my writing subsequent books was somewhat indirect.
This book, the first of my books for a broad public,
was published when I was 55 years old,
so this came relatively late in life.
I got my PhD in the specialty of studying sodium transport
in the gall bladder.
I trained as a laboratory physiologist.
And I was hired by UCLA medical school
in 1966 to teach medical students about the physiology
of gall bladders, intestines, kidneys, and related organs.
This book clearly is not in the area of my research specialty.
At the same time, I had become a bird watcher, an amateur bird
watcher, when I was seven years old
and continued bird watching throughout high school,
college.
After I got my PhD, I was interested in gall bladder
research and the challenges of laboratory physiology.
But it dawned on me with growing horror
that I was expected to devote the rest of my life
to writing papers on gall bladders for the world's four
other gallbladder experts.
That seemed confining.
There are many other interesting things in the world.
In the course of the 1980s, I began writing articles
about subjects other than birds and gall bladders
for the weekly journals, first "Nature" and "Science."
And that led to my writing articles
for so-called popular science magazines, "Discover"
and "Natural History Magazine."
But I had still not thought of writing a book.
The triggering event for me was the birth
of my wife's and my twin sons in 1987,
when I was nearly 50 years old.
Until then, I had read the sorts of things
that I'm sure that all of you read about the things that
may happen by such and such a year if we continue
on our present course of exploiting world resources.
One reads that by 2050, the world's tropical rainforests
will essentially all be destroyed
outside of the Amazon basin and perhaps parts of the Congo
basin.
One reads that the world's fisheries
will have largely collapsed by 2040.
One reads that global warming will
have reached such and such temperature by 2060.
And until the birth of my sons, whenever
people talked about what would happen
in 2050, end of the rainforest, because I was born in 1937,
I'm not going to be around in 2050.
2050 was an arbitrary unreal date.
It might have been 2567.
I can't get very excited about things will happen in 2567.
And I also could not get excited about things
projected happen in 2050.
Then our sons were born.
And I realized with a jolt that 2050 is not an imaginary year
far off in the future.
My sons will be 63 years old in 2050 .
They will be at the peak of their lives,
even short of the peak of their lives.
They'll have decades ahead of them.
So 2050 is not an imaginary date.
It's instead a very real date for my children.
And yet my wife and I when our kids were born
began doing the things that parents
do when children are born, namely we drew up wills.
We did estate planning.
We bought life insurance.
And I realized that there was a disconnect.
What on earth are we doing drawing up wills
and buying life insurance and forming a trust
if the world in which my kids will find themselves
in the year 2050 is a world not worth living in,
if we've messed up the world?
It did not make sense for us to be devoting this effort
to these practical concerns of life insurance
if I was not also dealing with the big problems of the world
that might make the world of 2050
a world not worth being around in.
And so it was birth of my twin sons
that motivated me to start writing books
for a broad public to explain issues of science and issues
of the world to a public audience
and to try to motivate people to take seriously the issues
that the world faces, as well as to share
with people the excitement that I feel in understanding how
the world works, which is basically science.
And "The Third Chimpanzee" then was the first
of my books for a broad public.
It's about how humans became different from other animals.
The reality-- and it came out only in the 1990s,
It's been known for a long time, from the 1800s onwards,
that the animal species most closely related,
most similar to humans, is chimpanzees, the two
chimpanzee species of Africa, the so-called common chimp
and the bonobo or pygmy chimp.
But if one had asked a biologist in the 1970s and 1980s
how big is the genetic difference between chimpanzees
and humans, most of us would have guessed, well, maybe
humans and chimps, maybe we share 60%, 70% of our DNA,
because we're really very different.
And therefore, it was a big surprise
in the 1990s when DNA sequencing and comparison
techniques revealed that humans and chimpanzees are
98% identical in their DNA.
There's only a 2% difference.
So within some 2% of our DNA is the explanation
for why we are sitting here wearing clothes and talking
while our close relatives the chimpanzees
are in zoos, instead of chimpanzees being here
and us being in the zoos.
It's also the case that that 2% difference
of DNA between us and chimpanzees
must explain all the other interesting stuff.
In that 2% must be the explanation
for why we have language and the chimpanzees
don't have language.
There must be the explanation for why we have art and music
and sculpture and they don't have
art and music and sculpture.
There must also be the explanation
for why we make war on a large scale
and they don't make war on a large scale.
And yet humans and chimpanzees diverged only 6 million years
ago.
And until about it 80,000 years ago,
humans were not a very remarkable species.
Yes, we had a large brain.
But we weren't doing anything significant
with that large brain.
It's only that 70,000 years ago the first signs
of art and rapid technological innovation
show up in the fossil record.
What that means is that all the things
that we consider distinctively human,
such as art and music and language,
they must have developed very recently.
And that means that they must have animal precursors.
We ought to be able to recognize those animal precursors.
Well, we should be able to recognize what
in chimpanzees human art developed from.
And we should be able to recognize other animal
species that have carried art to greater lengths, much
greater length, than have chimpanzees.
And so this first book of mine, "The Third Chimpanzee,"
is about the evolution of humans from our animal ancestors
and about the animal origins of what's considered distinctively
human traits, including language, art, music, addiction
to drugs, and advanced technology.
I wrote my books to be understandable
to a wide public.
I've always been interested in understanding
things and explaining things.
I have one sibling, a younger sister, a year
and a half younger than I am.
And so as I grew up, I was always
explaining things to my younger sister.
When I began in the 1980s to write articles
about things other than gall bladders and birds,
they were things that were not in my area of specialty,
such as the development of language.
I had to ask the experts in these fields
to explain their subjects to me and to recommend
reading where I could learn about early forms
of human language.
In short, not only had I been explaining things to my sister,
but from the 1980s onwards I was spending
a lot of my time trying to explain to myself things
that were not my specialty.
And so my books developed as explaining to other people
complex subjects in the same way that I had learned
to explain those complex subjects to myself.
Initially, when I published "Third Chimpanzee,"
and then my subsequent books, "Guns, Germs, and Steel,"
about the long-term pattern of human history, "Why
is Sex Fun?" about human sexual evolution, "Collapse,"
about how societies succeed or fail
at managing their problems, most recently
"The World Until Yesterday," comparing
traditional tribal societies with modern state-level
societies, these books are about-- they're
longish books, most of them up to 500 pages,
except for "Why is Sex Fun?" which was only 167 pages,
because after 167 pages, I had to admit I didn't understand
why sex is fun in an evolutionary sense.
[LAUGHTER]
But the books are still about complex material.
And it did not occur to me that my books
might get read in schools.
And therefore, it surprised me in the 1990s
when I started giving talks on my books
to find that regularly in the audiences for my book tours
there would be school classes.
And the school classes, high school classes, middle school
classes, often were the most motivated of my listeners.
They would come up afterwards.
They would want books signed.
They would want photographs.
They would be very excited.
Some of them had made t-shirts with a picture of me
or with my name on the t-shirt.
And so I was discovering that school students find
these big questions as interesting as do adults.
Then came another wake-up event for me,
which again involved my sons.
By the time my sons were in the seventh grade, because they're
twins, they were at school together.
And one day my sons came home from school
and they were angry at me.
And I didn't know what I had done
to arouse their justified wrath that day.
So I asked them, what's the matter?
And they said, Daddy, your book has been assigned to our class
today.
And we haven't read it.
But we know without reading it that it's a bad book.
And worst of all, our teacher invited you in to give a talk
to our class.
And you accepted.
And that is so embarrassing.
You are going to humiliate us in front of our classmates
by showing the stupid things that you do and write about.
Well, I'd already accepted.
And so I came to my sons' seventh grade class.
My two sons were seated in the next to back row.
And I've never seen such a portrait of utter humiliation
and embarrassment.
They were sitting there averted.
Their faces were red.
They were all scrunched up, trying
to make themselves as invisible as possible,
because their father was about to start talking and showing
their classmates, talking to their classmates about things
that their classmates would utterly despise.
So I started talking about my book.
And my sons' classmates were sitting up.
And they were listening.
And they were beginning to smile.
And they were interested.
And they laughed at the appropriate places.
They began asking me questions.
They were really quite relaxed.
It became clear to my sons that their classmates
found these big questions as interesting as do adults.
And gradually my sons rotated around to face forwards.
And their bodies straightened up.
And smiles came on their face as they
saw that this was OK with their classmates.
And after that lecture, my sons have
become among the devoted backers of my books.
If my sons hear that I got a negative review
or that someone criticized some aspect of my book,
my sons immediately become indignant.
Well, that episode then brought home to me
that these big questions of science and history
and technology engage not only adults,
but that they also engage young people.
In retrospect, that's I think not surprising,
because the subjects of my book-- each book that I've
written has been about whatever at the time
seemed to me the most interesting unsolved problems
of human nature after the previous book of mine.
"Third Chimpanzee," then, about human evolution from animals.
Another big question that was the subject of "Guns, Germs,
and Steel," as I look out at you today,
it looks to me like the great majority of you
are of Old World origin, that's to say
of European or Asian or African background.
And yet if we could have been at this spot 500 years ago,
every person here would have been
of Native American origins.
Why did history turn out that way?
Why was it that Europeans came and occupied the New World?
Why was it not instead the case that Native Americans expanded
and occupied the Old World?
Or why didn't Aboriginal Australians, why were not they,
or why weren't Africans the ones to expand over the world?
That really is the biggest question of human history.
But historians have not answered that question for us.
And yet everybody in the United States walking
around can see the people around them.
And already children have to ask themselves,
so why is it this way?
But historians have not provided the answer.
And in the absence of an accepted answer to this biggest
question of history, why was it Europeans
who expanded around the world, in the absence of an accepted
answer, people have to come up, at least unconsciously
or without saying it, with an answer.
And everybody can see that people look different,
that people have different faces, hair color, skin
color, and eye color.
And therefore people assume that inside those different faces
lie different brains and the different brains are
the explanation for the broad pattern of human history,
although there is no evidence whatsoever to support
a hypothesis of genetic differences of intelligence
between peoples of different continents.
And indeed, there's evidence in the opposite direction.
So young people find these questions interesting
just as do older people.
Recently the first of my books, "The Third Chimpanzee,"
was prepared in a version addressed specifically
to young people, even though the adult version was already
being sold in schools and read in schools.
And I wondered, well, the adult version is already
being sold in schools.
What does one need a children's version for?
I saw the produced young people's version myself
for the first time, the finished version, the day
before yesterday.
And I must say it is very user-friendly, compared
to my adult books, which are 500 pages long and dense.
The young people's version contains the material
of the adult version.
It has 16 chapters.
The adult version as 19 chapter, so some of the material
has been compressed.
And the language is a little simpler.
The sentence structure is simpler.
I tend to write with a sentence structure of the German author
Thomas Mann, that's to say long sentences with many examples.
My wife, who is my first editor for all my books,
my wife always says when she sees a manuscript of my book,
her first response is always the same.
Jared, why do you have to wait until page five
to say what this chapter is about?
Say it on the first page.
Jared, why do you have to give 37 examples when
2 examples would suffice?
And so in the version of "The Third Chimpanzee"
for young people, those of the 37 examples
that survived my wife's comments have
been reduced to a couple of examples.
Technical terms are explained more carefully.
And the layout is a neater layout than my adult books.
My adult books, because there's lots of material,
the print goes towards the top and bottom of the page
and out towards the margins.
But you'll see that this young people's version has
a much more inviting, user-friendly layout.
An interesting story in this connection
is that my books have been translated
into many foreign languages.
And as any of you who speak a foreign language other
than English know the length of text or the length of speech
that it takes to say something in a foreign language
differs among languages.
For example, I'm just back from a lecture trip to Italy.
And in Italian it takes about 10%
more text to say something than in English.
In German, it takes about 30% more text
to say something than in English.
And a year ago, when my book "The World Until Yesterday"
came out in a German edition, I went to Germany
to do publicity for it.
And I was with my best friends in Germany.
My best friend said to me, Jared,
when you write your next book, could you
please make it shorter, because this book, 800 pages long,
it's so heavy that when we lie in bed at night
and would like to be reading it, it's
just too heavy to hold and read in bed.
So this young person's version is shorter.
But it's got the essence of the adult version.
Why does it make a difference for not just adults but also
young people, school people, to understand
these big questions of history and science and of the world?
Partly it's because these big questions
are as interesting to them as to us.
The other reason is that young people
are the ones who are going to be affected
by the consequences of what we are doing now.
Certainly I will not be around to see
the end of the tropical rainforests.
And many of you here will not be around to see
some of the things that are going
to happen in years like 2070.
But people who are in high school now
will be seeing what happens, will
be living with the consequences of what
the world is like in 2070.
So the present school generation,
they're the ones who will face the results of the decisions
that we're making now based on our understanding
or lack of understanding or scorn for science.
That's a strong reason for the engagement
of school people with these big issues of science and history.
Often I hear the question, when young people get
involved in these big questions of science and history, so
what can young people do to make the world a better world?
My estimate is that the chances are
about-- I would describe myself as a cautious optimist.
By that I mean that I rate the chances as about 51%
that the world after 2050 will be a world worth living in
with first world conditions, and the chance at 49% that it
will be irrevocably messed up.
Whether we have a happy landing or an unhappy landing
depends upon our own decisions.
So what can young people do to make the right decisions,
to motivate all of us to make the right decisions?
One thing that they can do is that pretty soon or already,
high school students are going to be able to vote.
So I always tell young people when they ask what can we do,
first thing I say is vote.
The United States has the lowest voter turnout
for elections of any major democracy.
Even presidential elections get only 60%
of Americans turning out.
The most recent election for mayor of Los Angeles,
my city Los Angeles, one of the largest,
most important cities in the United States, only 20%
of Los Angelenos could be bothered
to vote for mayor of their own city.
If government makes bad decisions,
we have only ourselves to blame for it,
for not getting engaged with elections, for not voting.
And so one thing I tell young people is vote
as soon as you're able to vote.
Not only vote, but also talk to your friends
and talk to other people and encourage them to vote.
And share your views with them.
Voting really makes a difference in the United States.
There are spectacular examples within the last 10 years
of important elections that got decided
by rather narrow margins.
Was it the 2000 presidential election, in effect
got decided by a margin of several 100 votes
in the state of Florida?
Or conversely, you can say it got decided
by one vote on the Supreme Court.
Some years ago, the election for governor of Washington
was decided by something like 167 votes.
That means that if 17 people who did not vote had voted
and each of them had talked to and persuaded
10 of their friends, that election for governor
of Washington could have been overturned.
So something that young people can do
is to vote and persuade their friends to vote.
Another thing that people in schools can do
is to talk to their parents.
Young people, having learned more recently,
may be more current about important issues
than are their parents.
Young people don't have such rigidified minds
as their parents do.
Talking in the business world, I have friends in Microsoft.
And I have friends in hedge funds.
And so I've talked a lot of people in the business world.
There are many people in the business world
who don't take environmental issues seriously.
There are also lots of people in the business world
who do take social and environmental issues seriously.
And I frequently hear reasons why
people in the business world started
to take environmental issues seriously.
It's that they came home and there
was their teenage son or daughter.
And the 14-year-old daughter asks her CEO mother or father,
Mommy or Daddy, what did you do in your business today?
And by the way, what do you think of the climate change?
And the mother or father responds, climate change.
What is that green nonsense that you are learning in school?
Climate change is the biggest hoax ever.
And I'm really disgusted that your school is wasting time
on these environmental matters.
Whereupon the 14-year-old breaks into tears, explodes in fury,
says, Mommy, you are loathsome, ignorant, and disgusting.
And I'm not going to talk to you until you educate yourself.
That really gets the attention of a parent.
And I have friends in the business world,
some high-placed friends whom I will not name,
who had a transformative experience
as a result of their teenage child telling them
what they should be learning, or had
a transformative experience, as did I, as a result of starting
to get concerned about the world that their children would
be launched into.
So in short, what can school children do?
Pretty soon they can vote.
They can encourage other people to vote.
They can talk to their parents.
If their parents' knowledge is 40 years out of date,
as is quite likely, they can provide their parents
with more up-to-date knowledge.
They have a pipeline to their parents
that their parents employees do not have.
They can really influence the views of their parents.
And then finally, there are many things, many active things
that people can do already when in schools.
The day before yesterday, while I was in Boston,
someone in an audience that I was talking to
explained to me that there is a program in Boston
for planting trees on a large-scale basis.
And the person being interviewed was a 15-year-old
who was involved in that tree planting program.
My own kids took part in a march on the UCLA campus
to call attention to problems of rainforests.
My kids in their kindergarten class
did that already when my kids were six years old.
Young people can start to get involved
in environmental movements and social movements, many of which
have a youth organization associated with it.
And pretty soon young people will start earning money.
When they earn money and when and if
they acquire some disposable money,
they can start donating their disposable money
to causes of their choice.
It may seem like a waste of effort.
Why should you give $100 to some environmental or social
organization?
What can $100 do for the world's problems?
Well, the reality is that effective environmental and
social organizations, like World Wildlife Fund and Conservation
International and others, they're
very good at attracting matching funds.
So typically, every $100 that ends up
as a donation to World Wildlife Fund gets parlayed into $700,
seven times as much, by attracting matching funds
from governments and from various nongovernmental
organizations.
So if you think that giving $100 isn't going to do any good,
think of it as giving $700.
And $700 is enough to launch an initial survey
of some primate species, some monkey species in Africa that
otherwise would not have an initial survey.
Those are then things that young people can do and can
motivate their parents to do.
All of that, then, is the background
to my pleasure at seeing a young people's edition of my book
"The Third Chimpanzee" coming out.
I hope that it will increase interest
in schools for these big questions of technology,
science, and history, even beyond the interest that there
is now.
Well, that's all that I wanted to say.
But I'm sure that many or most of you
have been young people recently or have
experience with young people, children of your own,
or impending children of your own.
And I'm sure that you also have thoughts about these subjects.
So let's use the rest of the time
today for your own thoughts and your own questions
about these matters.
I see there's a microphone there and a microphone here.
So any of you who would like to say something, please
feel free to come up to the microphone.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Jared.
So I recently came across your essay called something
like "The Worst Mistake in the History of Humanity."
You ended it on a pretty depressing note.
And I was wondering in the intervening years
if you think there's any hope for coming back from that
or fixing the problems that agriculture has created.
JARED DIAMOND: Yeah.
When one looks at the problems of the world,
certainly I go back and forth between being depressed
and being optimistic, or being cautiously optimistic,
or being very optimistic.
When I wrote that essay, I was in a pessimistic mood.
In the last several years-- so in the last several years
there are more and more people exercising
more and more destructive power.
But there have also been some developments for the good
in the last several years.
Three years ago most Americans did not
accept the reality of global climate change.
Now most Americans do accept the reality
of global climate change.
10 years ago large multinational corporations
tended to be dismissive of environmental concerns.
Now many big multinational organizations,
such as Walmart and Chevron and Coca-Cola,
are very concerned about environmental issues,
because they recognize that it is a life and death
matter for them, that it affects their bottom line.
Coca-Cola is mostly water.
And if Coca-Cola cannot get clean water in Tanzania
or in the 89 other countries of the world where Coca-Cola
bottles Coca-Cola, then Coca-Cola is out of business.
So that's why the chair of the board of World Wildlife Fund
now is the former CEO of Coca-Cola.
In short, in response to your question,
I wrote that essay at a time when I felt pessimistic
and there will I'm sure be other reasons in the future
to be pessimistic.
But at the moment, I'm cautiously optimistic.
As I say, my ratings now are 51%.
And I hope they'll go higher.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
JARED DIAMOND: Yes?
AUDIENCE: So thank you for your introduction
on why you wrote this book.
So I wonder about the 2% difference in genome.
Could you show examples of other species
that are at a 2% difference or less?
Because otherwise, I can't tell if 2% is significant or not.
JARED DIAMOND: Very good question.
Thank you for raising that.
I did not talk about it.
So what is the significance of a 2% difference?
A rule of thumb in birds and mammals is that, for example,
the most abundant forest bird in North America
is the Red-eyed Vireo.
And there's another abundant forest bird
called the White-eyed Vireo.
The Red-eyed Vireo and the White-eyed Vireo,
they're both Vireos that clown around in the treetops.
The genetic difference between Red- and White-eyed Vireo
is 2%.
The rule of thumb then is that 2% or even 1%,
the difference between the common chimpanzee
and the bonobo, the pygmy chimpanzee, in DNA
is about 1.5%.
So 2% is the difference between well-marked species.
But it's not a spectacularly big difference.
Again, to calibrate it, the difference
between humans and Neanderthals, modern humans and Neanderthals
is considerably less than 1%.
And it's now clear that humans and Neanderthals
hybridized to a limited extent.
Common chimps and pygmy chimps, about 1.5%.
Humans and both of those chimps, 2%.
Humans and gorillas about 2.5%.
Humans and orangutans, maybe 4% or 5%.
Humans and old world monkeys, maybe 9%.
So does that then calibrate these differences?
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
JARED DIAMOND: That's a very good question.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: We're at Google, so we really
respect like real-time data.
In your comment about how people accept global warming,
today the Gallup Poll released data
in their long-term consistent polling
on the subject of global warming.
And they discovered that the US population's concern
for global warming peaked in 2007.
It has since dropped significantly
from a 40% concern in 2007 to a 34% percent
of people being concerned about it today.
The interesting question would be why are we going backwards?
JARED DIAMOND: Why are we going backwards?
Good question.
Reasons that we are going backwards
are that we need more clear explanations of science.
The great majority of scientists don't make an effort
to communicate the results to the public.
Those few, that minority of scientists who do
try to explain science to the public often get flak
from other scientists for doing so.
The reaction of other scientists to so-called science
popularizers is he or she is writing for the public
because his or her research is washed up.
And there's nothing else to do, so that's
why he or she is writing for the public.
That's part of the problem.
Another part of the problem is that the science
of global climate change is really complicated.
At the end of January, I was asked
to give a talk to a hedge fund group on global climate change.
And I must say, I had to work for a couple of weeks
to understand the material, elementary things
such as global warming.
So on the average, the world's temperature is increasing.
Wouldn't you think that that would be good for the world,
because higher temperatures mean more crop growth,
so it ought to mean more food?
The reasons why higher temperatures
don't mean more food are complicated.
They include the fact that high temperatures mean faster growth
not only of wheat, but also of weeds.
And on the average, weeds benefit more
from higher temperatures than do the crops we're interested in.
In the case of wheat, which is the major food
crop of the world, higher temperatures
mean that the wheat matures earlier,
when there's less seed produced.
In short, the science involved is complicated.
And scientists haven't made the effort
that they should be making to explain the science.
And then there's politics.
There are people, there are businesses
that make money by doing things that
are bad for the environment, such as the fossil fuel,
such as segments of the fossil fuel industry.
And when there are things that are
bad for people's pocketbooks, that
influences what they believe to be the truth.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: Hi.
"The Third Chimpanzee," the original one,
was one of my favorite books.
And I already felt that it was very accessible.
Now, when I read "Guns, Germs, and Steel,"
that one was far less accessible.
But that one felt to me like it had an underlying
message of humans aren't so different.
Groups of humans are not necessarily better
than other humans.
That's not why, say, Europeans are
better than people from, say, South America.
What are reasons that you chose to make a young people
version of "The Third Chimpanzee"
instead of "Guns, Germs, and Steel," which
seems to have a little bit more social relevance?
JARED DIAMOND: Good question.
So why did I choose to make a young person's edition
of "Third Chimpanzee" and not of "Guns, Germs, and Steel?"
The answer is, I didn't choose.
Instead, it was proposed to me by Seven Stories Press
to do a young person's edition of "Third Chimpanzee."
Previously a school teacher, Boston school teacher
with experience in writing for young people,
had proposed to do a young person's edition of "Guns,
Germs, and Steel," but the rights to "Guns, Germs,
and Steel" are held by another publisher.
And the other publisher did not want a children's version,
because the other publisher was concerned that a children's
version would decrease rather than increase
sales of the adult version.
In the case of "Third Chimpanzee,"
it remains to be seen whether the young person's edition will
increase or decrease sales of the adult version.
So in short, it wasn't my choice.
As for what you said about "Guns, Germs, and Steel,"
I agree with you that "guns, Germs, and Steel"
is a more complicated book than "Third Chimpanzee,"
because it's dealing with more complicated questions,
the reasons why agriculture arose
in certain parts of the world but not
in other parts of the world.
They don't jump into your face.
So it's a more complicated book.
Also, I must say in retrospect that I
think "The Third Chimpanzee" is the most engagingly written
of my books.
And that's partly because in "Guns, Germs, and Steel"
and "Collapse," I had to work really hard
to explain complicated things.
And the result is a writing style more focused
on clarity of explanation, without as much
of the humor and liveliness that there is in "Third Chimpanzee."
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hey.
I'm a big fan of your books. "Guns, Germs and Steel"
question.
So I was wondering, a lot of the reasons
that there was disparity as described in "Guns, Germs,
and Steel" was due to like geography
or access to different agricultural techniques
and plants, et cetera.
Now that that's kind of disappeared with technology,
I still see a lot of disparity in the world.
Why isn't that going away more quickly, in your opinion?
JARED DIAMOND: Why hasn't disparity
in the world gone away when "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is
about the consequences of an initial disparity
10,000 years ago?
A short answer to your question would
be that the disparity in the origins of agriculture 10,000
years ago, which produced disparity
in the origins of technology, because the growth
of technology depended upon having enough food to feed lots
of people, and surplus food to feed people who would
sit in the village and play with dirt and fire
and eventually stumble on the idea,
stumble on the discovery of smelting copper.
The differences around the world in the origins of agriculture
had to do with the differences around the world
in domesticable wild plant and animal species.
The differences in wealth around the world today
are partly a historical legacy of those origins
of agriculture.
That's to say, those places that developed agriculture first
got a head start on areas that didn't develop agriculture,
or that developed less productive agriculture.
California, for example, the breadbasket of the United
States now, Native Americans in California
never developed agriculture for themselves,
even though California is obviously
a great place for agriculture.
The reason is that California is not home
to domesticable wild plant and animal species.
But once agriculture developed, first in the Fertile Crescent--
the area that today is Iraq, Iran, Syria and so on.
It developed there first because that's
was home to wild wheat and barley and pigs and sheep
and so on.
And once those plants and animals
had been domesticated and then spread out of the Fertile
Crescent, the Fertile Crescent then had no further advantage.
Its advantage had spread to Europe,
which is much more fertile land and richer
soil than the Fertile Crescent.
And so Europe rather quickly overtook the Fertile Crescent.
Reasons today why there are differences
in wealth around the world, why the world's richest
country, Norway and Luxembourg, has
a per capita income about 400 times
the per capita income of the world's poorest countries,
like Burundi, the differences are partly
differences in history, history giving different head
starts to different parts world.
Partly it's due to differences in geography.
The Tropics are just less productive
agriculturally than the temperate zones because
of thinner, less fertile soils and more soil pests,
more disease problems in the Tropics.
There's a big role of differences in institutions.
Countries that for one reason or another
are corrupt or have ineffective governments
or don't enforce contracts or don't obey the rule of law,
institutions-- I would say institutions provide about half
of the explanation.
And the other half of the explanation
for the differences in wealth around the modern world
are these effects of geography and history.
Does that address your question?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
We'll see.
I was also wondering about a prediction
of if it would disappear rather quickly soon,
or if it's going to be a slower process.
JARED DIAMOND: Good question.
Really important question.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JARED DIAMOND: Will those differences
in wealth around the world disappear?
Well, we see that within the last 50 years,
some countries that used to be very poor
have achieved first world standards.
South Korea was desperately poor 50 years ago.
Malaysia was poor.
So there are some countries that have gotten rich quickly.
China is in the process of increasing its living
standards.
And so economists talk now of a convergence economically,
opposed to the divergence in last centuries
as Europe got far ahead of the rest of the world.
But there are still big differences in wealth and power
around the world.
And they are important, because poor countries,
in poor countries we have who are desperate and don't
see any hope.
People in those countries will support-- they're angry.
They'll support terrorists.
And we're not going to have a world
worth living in 50 years from now unless on the one hand
we get control of our environmental problems
and on the other hand unless we succeed in reducing the wealth
gap between rich and poor countries,
because nowadays frustrated people in poor countries
have ways of venting their anger, as you in New York
know very well, at people in rich countries.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
JARED DIAMOND: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Yes, Professor.
Thank you so much for giving this talk, first of all.
I wanted to ask on your thoughts of over-population
essentially over the course of the next century,
in regards to whether society will
be a livable place over the next 50 years.
In the 20th century alone, the population
exploded at a rate that was unseen over the course
of human history.
And as other nations continue to industrialize,
it's only going to get-- there's only
going to be more of us until that trend tends
to reverse itself.
So I wanted to know what your thoughts are on that role,
and what we can do to at least work with that in such a way
through the next-- as we deal with climate change
and as we deal with all these other issues.
JARED DIAMOND: Very good question.
So the importance of population.
World population is now a little over seven billion.
The projections, if population increases
with the same first derivative and second derivatives
that it has at the moment, the estimates
are that world population may level off
at around nine billion.
But that's not something with which we should be satisfied,
because we're already, already in this world of seven
billion people, there are several billion
of those seven billion people who are starving.
As countries industrialize, the population growth rate
drops dramatically.
In fact, I think virtually all first world countries today,
with the possible exception of the United States,
have birth rates below the replacement level.
What's maintaining population growth in Europe
is immigration.
In the United States, population growth
is partly immigration, partly high birth rates.
But in Japan, the population has started to contract.
But it's correct that a large population
is a strain on the world's resources.
What can be done about it?
Here are two of the simplest things to do about it.
Examining what happens in countries around the world,
examining those countries that have succeeded
in decreasing their birth rate.
One of the best predictors of a decrease in birth rate
is the empowerment of women by enabling women
to have paying jobs.
For example, in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh, one of the poorer countries
of the world, Bangladesh incredibly
has reduced its population growth rate.
I think it's now something like 2.3% per year, which is barely
above the replacement level.
The reason is that there have been
lots of jobs, so-called sweatshop jobs,
available for women in Bangladesh.
And there were protests in the first world about the low wages
that they're paid.
But those low wages mean that the women
have the money themselves.
They don't need to get money from their husbands.
And one of the first things that Bangladesh women want
to do when they have money is to secure access
to family planning.
I've also seen this in New Guinea.
The New Guineans know about family planning.
But they don't have access to means.
So in answer to your question, the first thing
to do to halt population growth rate
would be to provide economic opportunities
for women in poor countries.
And the other thing is that one of the worst
offenders, possibly the worst single offender,
in dealing with the world's population problems
is the United States government and its policies.
The United States is not willing to provide foreign aid
to countries tied to family planning measures.
But family planning is a matter of sanity and survival.
And it is utterly insane for it to be a policy of the United
States government to interfere to prevent access of family
planning means to countries that want
to regulate their own population.
It's not that Americans are telling the women of Bangladesh
to have fewer children.
The women in Bangladesh know perfectly well
what's in their interest.
My New Guinea friends know perfectly well
what's in the interest.
And it is tragic for the United States
directly not to promote the spread of family planning
around the world.
It's no accident that a source of support for terrorism
is Pakistan, which is-- remember,
Pakistan was a single country until something like 1971
when it broke apart into East and West Pakistan.
And we now have a controlled experiment.
In Bangladesh, family planning was embraced.
In Pakistan, family planning has not been embraced.
And the result is the Bangladesh population growth
rate near the replacement level.
And in Pakistan, it's a couple times the replacement level.
Sorry.
That's a long-winded, passionate answer to your question.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
JARED DIAMOND: Yes?
AUDIENCE: Hi.
So you talk about the world worth living in in 2050.
And I haven't read your books.
But I picked up a book on eco-socialism once.
And it presented a sort of convincing argument
that the only chance we have at surviving
is, step one, socialism, step two, a massive planned
contraction of the world economy,
and then step three, sort of disposing
industrial civilization and no longer
kind of mass producing anything.
And I sort of bought the argument.
And I'm willing to give up a lot of things.
But I wouldn't be willing to give up computers and even
big data centers and stuff, because that's how I have fun.
And so to me, that wouldn't be a world worth living in either.
So I'm kind of interested in what
is the extent of sacrifice we have
to make to produce a sustainable society?
JARED DIAMOND: A big important question.
My view is essentially your view.
It's often felt-- and this may be
behind the thesis of the book that you're talking about.
People often say, there's no way that I'm
going to sacrifice my standard of living, especially
for those people out there in Somalia or Nepal.
I'm not willing to give up my computers and my access
to food and my ability to travel.
But we don't have to give up our standard of living.
Something like half of American energy consumption
is wasted energy consumption that does not
contribute to our standard of living.
A test of that is that the energy consumption per person
in Europe is about half that in the United States.
And yet by any reasonable measure, the standard
of living, the quality of life in Europe
is at least as high as that in the United States.
And it's because European countries
do a lot that in the United States
would be decried as socialistic, but which basically
is policies aimed at the public good and policies aimed
at preventing individuals from doing
bad things to the rest of the world.
So in short, the United States could easily
reduce its energy consumption, its consumption in general,
without lowering its standard of living, in fact,
I would say increasing its standard
of living to European levels.
You don't have to sacrifice.
AUDIENCE: Great.
JARED DIAMOND: Yes?
AUDIENCE: You spoke at the beginning about art
and sculpture and music and language being
I forget how many tens of thousands
of years, less than 100,000 years old.
But music and spoken language in particular
would leave no trace.
What do we know about how old they really could be?
JARED DIAMOND: Very good question.
Really interesting question.
What do we know?
What's the evidence for how old music and language and art are?
Let's leave language to the end, because that's
the most difficult.
Music.
People make musical instruments.
And musical instruments have been
found going back to about 40,000 years.
There are flutes carved of bone from Paleolithic Europe.
So our first evidence for music, musical instruments,
is 40,000 years ago.
There could have been, of course, music
that does not involve instruments that ended up
in the archaeological record.
As for art, the earliest evidence of preserved art
is roughly 70,000 or 80,000 years ago.
That art consists of ostrich eggs that
are perforated in Africa and colored stones and trade
in amber across Europe and then ochre, red pigment.
So the earliest evidence for art is about 70,000 years ago.
One can say, maybe there was art,
maybe there was music that did not leave preserved remains.
That's possible.
As for language, that's more difficult,
because language doesn't fossilize.
There's been discussion, debate about whether Neanderthals
had language.
With the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome recently,
there's much interest in the parts of the genome that
are associated with language.
The debate is still open about where Neanderthals
had complex language with grammar as do modern humans.
To me, the strongest piece of evidence
is that I would have thought-- this my hypothesis--
that once people get language and can start
talking and brainstorming and storehousing information,
you're going to get an explosion of invention and technology.
But the explosion of invention and technology
does not begin in the archaeological record
until within the last 100,000 years.
And so it's my guess that complex language also
emerged within the last 100,000 years.
But I would say that probably half of archaeologists
would disagree with me about that.
In short, the origins of language
and the time of the origins of language
is still a fascinating unresolved question.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
JARED DIAMOND: Yeah?
AUDIENCE: So I was raised with the idea
that many of the institutions that we have now in the United
States and in Europe came about or were made possible
through violent revolution.
Is this accurate in your view?
And do you see a role, helpful or not helpful,
for violent revolution in bringing
about the change necessary to have a livable world 100
years from now?
JARED DIAMOND: The reason that I began
smiling as you formulated your question was that I'm now
working on a new book, for which I was reading material
this morning.
And one of the questions in the new book
is about the relative importance or frequency
of violent revolution on the one hand
and peaceful evolution on the other hand.
My a new book will look at countries around the world that
underwent change, and is asking the question
about the relative importance of violent revolution
and peaceful evolution.
Preliminarily I can say there are cases of each.
The United States did have a revolution 1776 onwards.
The United States also made a major change
in the 1930s, the New Deal, that did not
involve violent revolution.
Britain changed greatly from 1945 onwards,
adopting a social welfare state, dismantling its fleet.
That did not involve violent revolution.
Chile changed massively in 1972.
That did involve violent revolution
of a particularly horrible sort.
Indonesia achieved independence in 1948.
That required, that involved violence against the Dutch.
Indonesia then had its own revolution in 1966,
when Indonesians killed about two million other Indonesians.
That was a violent revolution.
Since 1966, Indonesia has changed greatly.
But there has not been a violent revolution
So a short answer to your question
is I can find examples on both sides.
And if you could ask me that question four years from now
when I've finished my book, I'll be
able to tell you whether I discern any pattern.
At the moment, I've not yet discerned a pattern.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: This question goes back
to the 2% difference between chimpanzees and humans
in the genes.
I'm wondering if this is the right metric,
because as an analogy, take any large computer
program that we have here.
I can change very few bits here and there
to make it behave like something completely different.
And it's the same thing, if I understand correctly,
we have something epigenetics that deals
with how you control these genes that are getting
triggered on and off so you could
have the exact same genes, but they
could behave very different people
with just a few bits of information and they changed.
So the question is, then are we looking at the right metric
to say, you could have much smaller differences
in the genes itself, but if the differences are
of the right kind, then you could
have completely different behaviors exhibited by them.
So how then-- do we have a better explanation
for the differences that we see between chimpanzees and humans
other than that, well, it's a scalar 2% number?
JARED DIAMOND: You are correct.
2% is a crude metric for the overall difference in DNA.
But different segments of DNA do different things.
And one might expect that a change in the DNA that
control the structure of the voice box
and the language processing areas of the brain
would have much heavier consequences
than a change in DNA for the length of one's fingernail
or for the amount of hair on top of one's head.
One of the major efforts in molecular genetics
now is in effect the approach that you are talking about,
not being satisfied with saying that there's a 2% difference--
all right, we knew that, we learned
that 20 years ago-- but trying to find out where the 2% is
and what of the 2% is significant.
Lots of DNA is thought to be junk.
If 90% of DNA is junk, then the salient differences
between us and chimpanzees aren't in 2% of our DNA.
They're in 0.2% percent of our DNA.
And almost every month now or every couple months now,
one sees a paper in "Nature" or in "Science"
focusing on particular areas of human DNA or Neanderthal DNA
and trying to understand what are
the differences between human and Neanderthal DNA,
or what are the differences between human and chimpanzee
DNA.
So yes, you are correct.
And that's a major research program at the moment.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Regarding of violent revolution specifically
in Chile, I just finished "Shock Doctrine."
I don't know if you've read it.
But it has a lot to say about the nature
of violent revolutions, and sometimes that violence
has something to do with people coming
to power that want to have economic programs
such as radical capitalism, for example, that leaves
the vast majority of people out of wealth and prosperity
and then it requires violence in order to enforce those ideas.
So I was just going to recommend "Shock Doctrine" to you.
That's all.
JARED DIAMOND: Again, an interesting question
on which I'm going to reserve judgment for several years
until I've looked at more of a database.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: Can I cheat and get a second one?
This is data again.
And I'd like to speak against the need
for violent revolution.
This year in New York City the winter air
is cleaner than it has been in 50 years.
50 years.
It turns out that it only took three years, the last three
years, to get it to that point.
What happened was that it was discovered
that 1% of the buildings in the city
were producing as much pollution as all the cars
and trucks in the entire city.
Yet, every one of those buildings
could actually save money by using cleaner methods.
So what we did was we went to those buildings and we said,
look.
You can save money by being cleaner.
And we got the law changed.
It was easy to get the law changed,
because once you could tell the mayor, Bloomberg at the time,
and the City Council that you're forcing people to save money,
they changed the law.
And now it's illegal in New York City-- well,
there are a couple buildings until 2015
can do it-- to burn what's called number six fuel oil.
The air is cleaner today than it's been in '50 years.
Totally quiet.
Nobody knows about it.
Didn't even raise a noise.
There was no violence involved.
But we've accomplished big things.
If one goes through the problems we have,
yeah, you do have choices.
You can have violent revolution.
But the other approach, and I think
you'll discover this if you look carefully,
is that most of the problems we have have profitable solutions.
What we have to do is we have to have the courage, the balls,
and the persistence to go out and find
the profitable solutions and to encourage
people to do those things.
To a great extent, we don't need sacrifice
to solve these problems.
What we need is we need wisdom and we need courage.
JARED DIAMOND: That's a very good way to put it.
I like your term profitable solutions.
And I'll give you an example of it.
On the board of Conservation International,
the international environmental organization
that I'm involved with, on the board
is the son of the founder of Walmart.
So profitable solutions for Walmart.
Walmart 10 years ago was not at all concerned
about environmental matters.
And then Walmart woke up a really elementary fact,
namely that Walmart has the largest private fleet
of trucks in the United States.
I think it's second only to the US government fleet of trucks.
And the fuel efficiency of Walmart trucks
was rather bad, six miles per gallon.
Walmart was not getting any benefit
from having these lousy fuel-burning trucks.
In fact, they were wasting a lot of money on it.
And so Walmart embarked on a program
to increase the fuel efficiency of its trucks
to 18 miles per gallon, which means a profitable solution,
saving 2/3 of their expenditure for truck fuel.
Some of the solutions were simple.
Truckers, truck drivers have to pull over
every 10 hours or so by law.
And if they're not near a motel, they
pull over in the truck by the side of the road.
And if it's hot out or if it's cold out,
they turn on the heater or the air conditioner.
Well, until relatively recently, Walmart trucks
in the cabin, heated or air conditioned
by leaving the motor of the truck running.
Walmart got the elementary idea, we
can put a space heater or a space air conditioner
in the cabin and not keep running the motor just
in order to keep the cabin warm or cold.
And then Walmart has been working
on developing hybrid trucks, so these are like Priuses,
but they're gigantic, these 18-wheeler Priuses,
hybrid trucks.
Walmart has also been-- it has some trucks
running on biofuels, namely the chicken drippings that come off
of fried chicken in supermarkets and department stores.
Those drippings get converted into fuel.
And so Walmart has biofuel trucks
running on in effect processed chicken drippings.
What this boils down to is this is another example
of profitable solutions.
Walmart is reducing fossil fuel consumption.
But they're saving money in the process.
And one of the reasons why I'm cautiously optimistic, rather
than pessimistic, one of the reasons why I'm not
going to tell you let's all go outside
and commit a mass suicide, a reason for my cautious optimism
is that within the last decade lots of increasing
numbers of big companies have discovered, as you say,
possible solutions.
I like your term.
Perhaps that's a good upbeat note
on which to end the formal part of the discussion.
Any of you want books signed, I'm
happy to sign books afterwards.
[APPLAUSE]