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]
