GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL is nothing less than an enquiry into the reasonswhy Europe and the Near East became the cradle of modern societies- eventually giving rise to capitalism and science, the dominant forces in our contemporary world-and why,until modern times. Africa, Australasia and the Americas lagged behind in technological sophistication and in political and military power. The native peoplesof those continents are still suffering the consequences. Diamond shows definitively that the origins of this inequality in human fortunes cannot be laid at the door of race or inherent features of the people themselves. He argues that the inequality stems instaed from the differing natural resources available to the people of each continent.

'A riveting and illuminating tour of how nations deal with crises - which might hopefully help humanity as a whole deal with our present global crisis' YUVAL NOAH HARARI, author of SAPIENS ** NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** Author of the landmark international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond has transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, at a time when crises are erupting around the world, he explores what makes certain nations resilient, and reveals the factors that influence how nations and individuals can respond to enormous challenges. In a riveting journey into the recent past, he traces how six distinctive modern nations - Finland, Chile, Indonesia, Japan, Germany and Australia - have survived defining catastrophes, and identifies patterns in their recovery. Looking ahead, he investigates the risk that the United States and other countries, faced by grave threat, are set on a course towards catastrophe. Adding a rich psychological dimension to the in-depth history, geography, biology and anthropology that underpin all of Diamond's writing, Upheaval is epic in scope, but also his most personal book yet. 'Fascinating ... I finished the book even more optimistic about our ability to solve problems than I started' BILL GATES 'Jared Diamond does it again: another rich, original and fascinating chapter in the human saga - with vital lessons for our difficult times' STEVEN PINKER

Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, a classic of our time, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond dismantles racist theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for its broadest patterns. The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and other areas gave peoples of those regions a head start at a new way of life. But the localized origins of farming and herding proved to be only part of the explanation for their differing fates. The unequal rates at which food production spread from those initial centers were influenced by other features of climate and geography, including the disparate sizes, locations, and even shapes of the continents. Only societies that moved away from the hunter-gatherer stage went on to develop writing, technology, government, and organized religions as well as deadly germs and potent weapons of war. It was those societies, adventuring on sea and land, that invaded others, decimating native inhabitants through slaughter and the spread of disease. A major landmark in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way in which the modern world, and its inequalities, came to be.

The Third Chimpanzee was first published in 1991 and has been in print ever since. This new, illustrated edition is aimed at a young readership. In it, Jared Diamond explores what makes us human and poses fascinating questions. If we share more than 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, how is it that we can write, read, talk, build telescopes and bombs, while we put our speechless and bomb-less close relatives in cages and zoos? What can woodpeckers teach us about spacecraft? Is genocide a human invention? Why does extinction matter? Why are we destroying the natural resources on which we depend for survival? What hope is there for future generations? Not only is The Third Chimpanzee a mind-boggling survey of how we came to be, but it is also a plea to the next generation to "make better decisions than their parents and get us out of the mess we're in."

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. This is Jared Diamond's haunting account of visiting the mysterious stone statues of Easter Island, showing how a remote civilization destroyed itself by exploiting its own natural resources - and why we must heed this warning. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

'A riveting and illuminating tour of how nations deal with crises - which might hopefully help humanity as a whole deal with our present global crisis' YUVAL NOAH HARARI, author of SAPIENS ** NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** Author of the landmark international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond has transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, at a time when crises are erupting around the world, heexplores what makes certain nations resilient, and reveals the factors that influence how nations and individuals can respond to enormous challenges. In a riveting journey into the recent past, he traces how six distinctive modern nations - Finland, Chile, Indonesia, Japan, Germany and Australia - have survived defining catastrophes, and identifies patterns in their recovery. Looking ahead, he investigates the risk that the United States and other countries, faced by grave threat, are set on a course towards catastrophe. Adding a rich psychological dimension to the in-depth history, geography, biology and anthropology that underpin all of Diamond's writing, Upheaval is epic in scope, but also his most personal book yet. 'Fascinating ... I finished the book even more optimistic about our ability to solve problems than I started' BILL GATES 'Jared Diamond does it again: another rich, original and fascinating chapter in the human saga - with vital lessons for our difficult times' STEVEN PINKER

Some central questions in the natural and social sciences can't be answered by controlled laboratory experiments, often considered to be the hallmark of the scientific method. This impossibility holds for any science concerned with the past. In addition, many manipulative experiments, while possible, would be considered immoral or illegal. One has to devise other methods of observing, describing, and explaining the world.

In the historical disciplines, a fruitful approach has been to use natural experiments or the comparative method. This book consists of eight comparative studies drawn from history, archeology, economics, economic history, geography, and political science. The studies cover a spectrum of approaches, ranging from a non-quantitative narrative style in the early chapters to quantitative statistical analyses in the later chapters. The studies range from a simple two-way comparison of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, to comparisons of 81 Pacific islands and 233 areas of India. The societies discussed are contemporary ones, literate societies of recent centuries, and non-literate past societies. Geographically, they include the United States, Mexico, Brazil, western Europe, tropical Africa, India, Siberia, Australia, New Zealand, and other Pacific islands.

In an Afterword, the editors discuss how to cope with methodological problems common to these and other natural experiments of history.

Read this specially designed new edition of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer-prize winning exploration of what makes us human. Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel remains a groundbreaking and humane work of popular science. PATTERNS OF LIFE: SPECIAL EDITIONS OF GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE BOOKS

Merging the rigor of the scientific method with the technologies of GIS GIS for Science, Volume 2: Applying Mapping and Spatial Analytics brings to life a continuing collection of current, real-world examples of scientists using geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial data science to expand our understand of the world. Co-edited by Esri Chief Scientist Dawn Wright and Esri Technology Writer and Information Designer Christian Harder and with a foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond, these case studies are part of a global effort to find ways to sustain a livable environment for all life on this planet. The contributors of GIS for Science, Volume 2: Applying Mapping and Spatial Analytics represent a cross section of scientists who employ data gathered from satellites, aircraft, ships, drones, and myriad other remote-sensing and on-site technologies. This collected data is brought to life with GIS and the broader realm of spatial data science to study a range of issues relevant to our understanding of planet Earth-including epidemiology in light of the COVID-19 pandemic; sustainable precision agriculture; predicting geological processes below the surface of the earth; leveraging GIS near-realtime disaster response, recovery, resilience and reporting; the latest innovations in monitoring air quality; and more. Their stories also show in very practical terms how ArcGIS software and the ArcGIS Online cloud-based system work as a comprehensive geospatial platform to support research, collaboration, spatial analysis, and science communication across many settings and communities. A rich supplementary web site-gisforscience.com-includes actual data along with additional maps, videos, web apps, story maps, workflows and snippets of computer code, including Python notebooks, for readers curious to learn more. Written for professional scientists, the swelling ranks of citizen scientists, and anyone interested in science and geography, GIS for Science, Volume 2: Applying Mapping and Spatial Analytics offers wonderful examples of our impulse to dream, discover, and understand, as coupled with the rigor and discipline of the scientific method and the foundation of geography. See how scientists from a variety of disciplines are solving some of the world's most pressing problems using geographic information systems-GIS.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. This edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn from the television series. Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological differences. He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers.

Hedge fund managers who survived and profited through the 2008 financial crisis share their secrets

In light of the colossal losses and amidst the resulting confusion that still lingers, it is time to rethink money management in the broadest of terms. Drastic changes still need to be made, and managers who actually made money during 2008 make for a logical starting place.

This updated and revised edition of "The Invisible Hands" provides investors and traders with the latest thinking from some of the best and the most successful players in money management, highlighting the specific risk and return objectives of each, and discussing the evolution of certain styles and beliefs in money management.Divulges how top financial professionals are looking forward by thinking clearly, managing risk, and seeking a new paradigm of profit making opportunities in the post-crisis worldOutlines investments and strategies for the rocky road aheadGives guidance on how traditional investors such as pensions, endowments, foundations and family offices should rethink how they approach asset allocation and portfolio constructionWritten by respected industry expert Steven Drobny

Page by page, the professionals found in this book reveal their own approaches to markets, risk, and the broader world in which we live, as well as their advice on how investors should be approaching money management in today's uncertain world.

A fascinating insight into how human sexuality came to be the way it is now - Jared Diamond explains why we are different from the animal kingdom. Why are humans one of the few species to have sex in private? Why do humans have sex any day of the month or year, including when the female is pregnant, beyond her reproductive years, or between her fertile cycles? Why are human females one of the few mammals to go through menopause? Human sexuality seems normal to us but it is bizarre by the standards of other animals. Jared Diamond argues that our strange sex lives were as crucial to our rise to human status as were our large brains. He also describes the battle of the sexes in the human and animal world over parental care, and why sex differences in the genetic value of parental care provide a biological basis for the all-too-familiar different attitudes of men and women towards extramarital sex.

In Jared Diamond's follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning "Guns, Germs and Steel," the author explores how climate change, the population explosion and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization
Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe, and weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Collapse moves from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society's apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana.
Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?

From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations. Now in a revised edition with a new afterword, Jared Diamond's Collapse uncovers the secret behind why some societies flourish, while others founder - and what this means for our future. What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Jared Diamond's Collapse also shows how - unlike our ancestors - we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors. 'A grand sweep from a master storyteller of the human race' - Daily Mail 'Riveting, superb, terrifying' - Observer 'Gripping ... the book fulfils its huge ambition, and Diamond is the only man who could have written it' - Economis 'This book shines like all Diamond's work' - Sunday Times

The bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel surveys the history of human societies to answer the question: What can we learn from traditional societies that can make the world a better place for all of us? "As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book." Bookpage Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday-in evolutionary time-when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years-a past that has mostly vanished-and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today. This is Jared Diamond's most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn't romanticize traditional societies-after all, we are shocked by some of their practices-but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. Provocative, enlightening, and entertaining, The World Until Yesterday is an essential and fascinating read.

More than 98% of human genes are shared with two species of chimpanzee. This is a survey of man's life-cycle, culture, sexuality and destructive urges - both towards ourselves and the planet - which explores the ways in which we are uniquely human, yet still influenced by our animal origins.

The no. 1 bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel explores the profound lessons that traditional societies offer us today Over the past 500 years, the West achieved global dominance, but do Westerners necessarily have better ideas about how to raise children, care for the elderly, or simply live well? In this epic journey into our past, Jared Diamond reveals that traditional societies around the world offer an extraordinary window into how our ancestors lived for the majority of human history - until virtually yesterday, in evolutionary terms. Drawing on decades of his own fieldwork, Diamond explores how tribal people approach essential human problems, from health and diet to conflict resolution and language, and discovers they have much to teach us. Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the seminal million-copy-bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was named one of TIME's best non-fiction books of all time, and Collapse, a #1 international bestseller. A professor of geography at UCLA and noted polymath, Diamond's work has been influential in the fields of anthropology, biology, ornithology, ecology and history, among others.

This conference represents the first time in my life when I felt it was a misfor tune, rather than a major cause of my happiness, that I do conservation work in New Guinea. Yes, it is true that New Guinea is a fascinating microcosm, it has fascinating birds and people, and it has large expanses of undisturbed rainforest. In the course of my work there, helping the Indonesian government and World Wildlife Fund set up a comprehensive national park system, I have been able to study animals in areas without any human population. But New Guinea has one serious drawback: it has no primates, except for humans. Thus, I come to this conference on primate conservation as an underprivileged and emotionally deprived observer, rather than as an involved participant. Nevertheless, it is easy for anyone to become interested in primate conserva tion. The public cares about primates. More specifically, to state things more realistically, many people care some of the time about some primates. Primates are rivaled only by birds, pandas, and the big cats in their public appeal. For some other groups of animals, the best we can say is that few people care about them, infrequently. For most groups of animals, no one cares about them, ever.

In recent times, the science of ecology has been rejuvenated and has moved to a central position in biology. This volume contains eighteen original, major contributions by leaders in the field, all associates of the late Robert MacArthur, whose work has stimulated many of the recent developments in ecology. The intellectual ferment of the field is reflected in these papers, which offer new models for ecological processes, new applications of theoretical and quantitative techniques, and new methods for analyzing and interpreting a wide variety of empirical data. The first five chapters explore the evolution of species abundance and diversity (R. Levins, E. Leigh, J. MacArthur, R. May, and M. Rosenzweig). The theory of loop analysis is newly applied to understanding stability of species communities under both mendelian and group selection. Species abundance relations, population fluctuations, and continental patterns of species diversity are illustrated and interpreted theoretically. The next section examines the competitive strategies of optimal resource allocation variously employed in plant life histories (W. Schaffer and M. Gadgil), bird diets and foraging techniques (H. Hespenheide), butterfly seasonal flights (A. Shapiro), and forest succession examined by the theory of Markov processes (H. Horn). The seven chapters of the third section study the structure of species communities, by comparing different natural communities in similar habitats (M. Cody, J. Karr and F. James, E. Pianka, J. Brown, J. Diamond), or by manipulating field situations experimentally (R. Patrick, J. Connell). The analyses are of communities of species as diverse as freshwater stream organisms, desert lizards and rodents, birds, invertebrates, and plants. These studies yield insights into the assembly of continental and insular communities, convergent evolution of morphology and of ecological structure, and the relative roles of predation, competition, and harsh physical conditions in limiting species ranges. Finally, the two remaining chapters illustrate how ecological advances depend on interaction of theory with field and laboratory observations (G. E. Hutchinson), and how ecological studies such as those of this volume may find practical application to conservation problems posed by man's accelerating modification of the natural world (E. Wilson and E. Willis).

Birds have long held a unique dual role as a model group for scientists and as the focus of birders' passionate quests. Despite centuries of observation, each year brings the discovery and description of several entirely new avian species and hundreds of other taxonomic "splits" or "lumps" based on DNA data. In this arena of continual and increasing taxonomic change, The Clements Checklist presents the most up-to-date and most widely endorsed compendium of the more than 9800 species of birds recognized by the scientific and birding communities.

This completely revised sixth edition is current as of January 1, 2007, and incorporates hundreds of updates since the last edition. In taxonomic sequence, it provides the scientific and English name of each species and a description of the worldwide range of each species and subspecies.

The most established resource on the taxonomy and biogeography of birds for the world birding community, The Clements Checklist is the official world checklist of the American Birding Association (ABA) and is used as the authoritative reference in the birding competitions and listing activities of this preeminent North American organization for serious birders.

Features of The Clements Checklist include:

*comprehensive indexes with all taxa listed by English and scientific names;

*tables and maps showing the world distribution of total bird species and endemics by geographic area, which will be of special interest to conservationists; and

*space to record the location and date of individual sightings, providing the user with a personalized ornithological journal.

The checklist is being continually updated by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. These updates are being posted to the Lab's website evey three months and will eventually be incorporated into the next edition of The Clements Checklist.