Jared Diamond

Jared Mason Diamond was born in Boston, Massachusetts on September 10, 1937. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard in 1958. He also got a PhD on the physiology and biophysics of the gall bladder in 1961  from University of Cambridge. In 1968 he became a teacher on physiology at UCLA medical school and later on became  a teacher of geography at UCLA. He has learned many fields of knowledge including physiology, biophysics, ornithology, environmentalism, history, ecology, geography, evolutionary biology,  and anthropology. He has received many awards for his work including Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science in 1997,Royal Society Prize for Science Books in 1992, 1998, and in 2006, Pulitzer Prize in 1998, and National Medal of Science in 1999. He has written many books relating to science. Some of his famous ones are The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies was one of his most famous books. He published it in 1997. This book talks why some societies succeed and others fail. In this book he talks about how advanced a society is in technology can help it succeed or fail.  He also talks about how the location of the society can help it greatly in trying to succeed. The  book tries to address the questions, Why is it that white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own? This question is talking about why some societies have more material things then other societies. This question is talked about throughout the story.