Jared Diamond

Jared Mason Diamond, born in 1937, is an American scientist, historian and author whose work examines how geography and environment have shaped the fates of human societies, including their adoption of agriculture. He was a professor of geography at UCLA until 2024, after training originally in biochemistry and physiology, and has published across anthropology, ecology and evolutionary biology. His best known book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), argues that the Eurasian domestication of plants and animals, together with the continent's east-west orientation that let crops and livestock spread easily along similar latitudes, gave Eurasian societies a decisive advantage in the outcomes of history, an argument that won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. His later books Collapse (2005) and The World Until Yesterday (2012) extend the same environmental and historical approach to societal decline and to lessons from traditional societies, though some anthropologists have criticized the work for underweighting cultural and social factors.