TheThirdChimpanzee

The Third Chimpanzee (Jared Diamond)

  • Decent. Seems like a summary of his other books.
  • Its obvious that humans are unlike all animals. Its also obvious that were a species of big mammal, down to the minutest details of our anatomy and our molecules. That contradiction is the most fascinating feature of the human species.
  • A zoologist from Outer Space would immediately classify us as just a third species of chimpanzee, along with the pygmy chimp of Zaire and the common chimp of the rest of tropical Africa. The chimps, not the gorilla, are our closest relatives.
  • My particular interests of the human life cycle, human geography, human impacts on the environment, and humans as animals. Those subjects are central to human evolution.

  • Its obvious that

    • we feed our children after the age of weaning
    • most adult men and women associate in couples
    • most fathers care for their children
    • man people live long enough to experience grandchildren
    • women undergo menopause.

    To us these are the norm, but by the standards of our closest animal relatives they are bizarre.

    We are also unusual in having sex mainly in private and for fun, rather than mainly in public and only when the female is able to conceive. Ape females advertise the time when they are ovulating; human females conceal it even from themselves.

  • Stone tools remained very crude for 100s of thousands of years after we had undergone most of our expansion of brain size.
  • Life originated on earth several billion years ago. the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago. 6-10 million years ago that our ancestors became distinct from chimps.
  • Neanderthals died somewhat after 40k years ago.
  • The visible geographic variability of the races arose mainly through sexual selection. The case for natural selection of skin color seems weak, for hair and eye color is nonexistent. There are no consistent correlations with climate, and no plausible theories for the supposed advantage of the color types.

  • Given knowledge of how an animal feeds, a biologist can often predict the animals mating system and genital anatomy. Among polygynous mammals, average harem size increases with the ratio of the male's to the female's body size. The bigger the harem, the fiercer the competition among males and the more important male size is.

    Polygynous species also tend to have more marked differences between males and females

  • The theory of testes size is one of the triumphs of modern physical anthropology. When fertilization is a competitive lottery, large testes enable a male to enter more sperm in the lottery.
  • From this triumph of scientific explanation we descend to a glaring failure: the inability of 20C science to formulate an adequate theory of penis length. Seems like the human penis is a waste, could get away with a much smaller one.
  • Our concealed ovulation, constant receptivity, and brief fertile period ensures that most copulations by humans are at the wrong time for conception.
  • 10% of human babies are the fruits of adultery.
  • The best game strategy differs between males and females of the same species. This is a result of differences between the reproductive biology of M vs F. and the minimum necessary reproductive effort, and in the risk of being cuckolded.
  • A man stands to gain much more form polygamy than does a woman.
  • Natural selection would never permit us to deteriorate through a single mechanism with one simple cure.
  • While some peoples in the world retained primitive tools, none retained primitive language.
  • The domestication of corn, usually considered to among the New Worlds blessings, actually proved to be a public-health disaster. The farmers gained cheap calories at the expense of poor nutrition.
  • Forced to choose between limiting population growth and trying to increase food production, we opted for the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
  • Xenophobia comes especially naturally to our species, because so much of our behavior is cultural rather than genetically specified, and because cultural difference among human populations are so marked. Those features make it easy for us, unlike wolves and chimps, to recognize members of other groups at a glance.
  • Societies wholes cultural practices have now become dominant were selected just for economic and military success. Those qualities aren't necessarily the ones that foster happiness or promote long-term human survival.
  • Human populations are impeded by freely mixing by linguistic and cultural barriers far stronger than in other animals.
  • At some point within the last decade of the 20C we can expect the last first contact.
  • Our accelerating cultural homogenization is one of the chief grounds for hope that we wont destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons.
  • Argues that continental differences in level of civilization arose from geography's effect on the development of our culture, not from human genetics (a la Guns, Germs, Steel)
  • Dense populations were prerequisite to the rise of centralized states. Dense populations also promoted the evolution of infectious diseases, to which exposed populations then evolved some level of resistance. All these factors determined who conquered whom.
  • By around 4000 BC west Eurasia already had its "Big Five" domestic livestock: Cows, pigs, sheep, horses and goats.
  • Our failure to domesticate deer is striking since there are few other wild animals with which humans have been so closely associated for 10s of thousands of years.
  • Finnish is one of Europe's few non-Indo-European languages.
  • Why was Europe overrun with speakers of the Indo-European languages, and not the other way around ? This is the most famous problem of historical linguistics.
  • Wherever you find the same language or related languages spoken over a wide area you know that the clock of language evolution must have been restarted recently. Languages replace about 20% of their basic vocabulary every 1000 years.

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