Jared Diamond

American scientist and author whose Guns, Germs, and Steel offers an environmental theory of why some civilizations dominated others, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

Jared Diamond trained as an evolutionary biologist and physiologist and spent years doing field research in New Guinea before turning to the big questions of human history. Guns, Germs, and Steel, published in 1997, asks a question posed to Diamond by a New Guinean politician: why did Europeans end up dominating other peoples rather than the reverse? Diamond’s answer is environmental and geographical rather than racial or cultural — the uneven distribution of domesticable plants and animals, continental orientation, and disease exposure created self-reinforcing advantages that had nothing to do with intelligence or virtue.

The book’s ambition is enormous, and its central argument is genuinely important: it systematically refutes racial and cultural explanations for global inequality by locating the divergence in contingent geographic facts. For many readers, Guns, Germs, and Steel was the first book that gave them a coherent framework for world history, and that pedagogical impact has been lasting.

The book has also attracted sustained criticism from historians and anthropologists who argue that Diamond oversimplifies, that his environmental determinism leaves too little room for human agency and cultural factors, and that his treatment of New Guinea in particular is problematic. Some of his specific claims about technology transmission have also been disputed. These are significant criticisms that readers should not ignore. Diamond is better read as a stimulating provocateur with a powerful thesis than as the final word on any of these questions.