Diamond, Jared (1937–)

Jared Diamond is a well-known physiologist and evolutionary biologist. In addition to his research in these fields and in conservation ecology and anthropology, Diamond has published a variety of works on biogeography and human geography. He has been a professor of physiology in the medical school at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) since 1986 and professor of geography in the department of geography at UCLA since 2001. Diamond also serves on the boards of directors of World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International.

Diamond has conducted more than two dozen expeditions since the 1960s to research biological diversity in New Guinea. Recently, he led National Geographic Society and World Wildlife Fund projects to survey the distribution and spatial characteristics of bird species in Papua New Guinea. Notable among his resulting publications is The Birds of Northern Melanesia: Speciation, Ecology, and Biogeography, coauthored with Ernst Mayr. This tome compiles and updates more than a century of taxonomic data and uses these data to address questions about oceanic avian speciation and, more generally, island biogeography. Diamond's ongoing surveys in this region are part of a broader conservation effort to curb loss of biodiversity; he has also contributed to the design and implementation of conservation parks in the Southwest Pacific.

Diamond is best known for his studies of human geography, particularly his global-scale studies of historical, cultural, and environmental geography. These include attempts to answer major disciplinary questions in the fields of archaeology and anthropology, history, and sociology through geographical surveys of the human present and past. His 1997 tour-de-force work is Guns, Germs, and Steel, which examines the historical contingencies of human biological variability at a worldwide scale. Diamond uses biogeographical and environmental patterns to account for the cultural-historical trajectories of the New World versus Old World. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and is hailed as an unparalleled, global reexamination of human geography spanning the past 14,000 years. In a similar vein, his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed examines the historical geography of societal disintegration through a wide survey of ancient and modern case studies. Here, he links social collapse to human decision making in the context of ecological and geographical patterns. Parallel to his work in New Guinea, Collapse ultimately addresses modern conditions and future prospects, outlining ecological management, environmental stewardship, and other social solutions to future global crises.

Diamond regularly contributes popular articles on topics ranging from evolutionary biology and the origins and spread of human disease to commentaries on current discoveries and research in Nature and other scientific journals. He has received numerous prestigious awards, most notably a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1985), the President's National Medal of Science (1999), the Cosmos Prize (1998), and the Alfred Russell Wallace Award by the International Biogeography Society in 2007.