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A Pulitzer Prize-winning author who argues that the key to human evolution is environmental  factors, not biological differences, will present the fall Charter Lecture Oct. 24.
Jared Diamond, whose 1997 book Guns, Germs and Steel won worldwide acclaim as one of the most definitive studies on the development of human history, will speak at 4 p.m. in the Chapel. His talk, titled “Why Did Human History Unfold Differently on Different Continents for the Last 13,000 Years?” is open free to the public.
Diamond will address one of the enduring mysteries of human history: why peoples of Europe and Asia were able centuries ago to spread across the globe, conquering and ruling inhabitants of other continents and establishing a dominance that continues today in some countries.
Though humans had lived in Africa, Australia and parts of the Americas much longer, and in some ways were more advanced, they were easily overpowered in the 16th and 17th centuries by European and Asian invaders who had developed superior technology, social patterns, communication skills and political organization.
“Those differing rates [of development] constitute the broadest pattern of history, and the biggest unsolved problem of history,” says Diamond, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and recipient of the 1999 National Medal of Science.
He argues that Europe and Asia had distinct environmental advantages over the Americas, Africa and Australia, including less isolation from other land masses and an east-west axis that produced weather more favorable to plant and animal growth and diversity.
Those environmental differences, he believes, were crucial in helping Europeans and Asians learn to create superior weapons, build ships, domesticate animals and plants, and record and convey knowledge through writing. European diseases such as smallpox and measles, which killed many thousands in the New World, were another major environmental factor.
Diamond’s lecture will be based on his 800-page book, which has been translated into 11 languages and won both the Pulitzer and Britain’s Science Book Prize. It also won the 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Prize in the science category.
Though he holds a faculty position as a professor of physiology at the UCLA Medical School, Diamond has devoted much of his research to evolutionary studies and ecological research on species diversity and population biology. Over the past 32 years he has led 18 expeditions to study bird communities in New Guinea and other tropical Pacific islands. He has also conducted research in Peru, Bosnia and Indonesia.
Among his other six books is The Third Chimpanzee, which traces the development of human traits from animal precursors and predicts that risks to civilization’s survival may reach a crisis level in the next 50 years. That book also won Britain’s Science Book Prize.
Diamond is a member of the board of directors and a consultant to the World Wildlife Fund, and is a research associate in ornithology to the American Museum of Natural History and the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.
His other research honors include Japan’s International Cosmos Prize; awards from the National Geographic Society, the American Ornithologists Union and the American Physiological Society; and conservation medals from the Zoological Society of San Diego.
In addition to the National Academy of Sciences, Diamond has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and he is a Scientific Fellow of the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Since 1977, Diamond has focused much of his effort on science writing for popular journals. He writes bi-monthly articles for Nature magazine and Discover magazine, for which he is a contributing editor, and he has written 33 articles for Natural History magazine.
The Charter Lecture was started in 1988 to honor the high ideals expressed in the 1785 charter that founded the University of Georgia as the first chartered state university in America. The series brings to campus speakers who discuss ideas of general importance to a free society.
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