The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (P.S.)

by Jared Diamond

book data

1,217 ratings, 4.00 average rating, 150 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		29%
4		44%
3		22%
2		2%
1		0%

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published

January 1st 2006 (first published 1991) by Harper Perennial

binding

Paperback, 432 pages

literary awards

Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1992)

isbn

0060845503 (isbn13: 9780060845506)

description

Jared Diamond states the theme of his book up-front: "How the human species changed, within a short time, from just another species of big mammal...more

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12/28/07

DJ rated it:

bookshelves: great-ideas

Read in April, 2008

recommends it for: anyone interested in evolution, history, or science

Jared Diamond's broad overview of human history and evolution offers intelligent evolutionary explanations for everything from menopause to aging to smoking and peacock feathers. On the way, he introduces readers to his ideas on environmental responsibility and geography that form the basis of this other two books, 'Collapse' and 'Guns, Germs, and Steel', respectively.

General Themes:
-Differences can be used to mark evolutionary divergence.
-Aging is an evolutionary accide...more

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06/28/07

Helga Mohammed el-Salami rated it:

Read in August, 2005

Dr. Diamond’s first book for which he won nothing but the admiration of some pathetic, lifeless losers like yours truly. But he should have. It was excellent. True that Chimpanzee is the Salieri to Guns’ Mozart, but what it lacks in breadth it makes up in simplicity and erudition. I breezed through this book with nary a trip to Wikipedia unlike GGS, which sent me there virtually every day. And yet I still learned a ton.

The chapter titled “The Golden Age That Never Was” was a...more

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11/24/07

Victor rated it:

bookshelves: history, science

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in May, 2008

Good book but not quite as good as Guns, Germs, and Steel. This book was written before that one and you can tell that Jared Diamond becomes a more polished and focused writer. The Third Chimpanzee focuses on how many of the characteristics the we consider uniquely "human" (language, art, murder) really aren't as unique as we think. He makes good arguments but maybe takes on more than he should. Still, it sets the stage for Diamond's later works (including Collapse which I still hav...more

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06/12/09

Juliet Wilson rated it:

Read in June, 2008

This is a fascinating book that looks at human evolution and searches for how it is similar to and how it differs from animal evolution. So there are chapters devoted to searching for the animal precursors of speech (eg chimpanzee vocalisations) and art (eg bowerbirds bowers), the overall intention being to determine how we became so different from the chimpanzees with whom we share most of our genetic information. Its not just positive attributes that are studied either, there are chapters devo...more

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05/20/09

Travis Struchen rated it:

Read in February, 2009

2/25/2009
The Third Chimpanzee – Jarod Diamond cc1992

A highly evolutionist book, after skipping the first section (60pages) the book got more interesting with Diamond’s take on why humans are attracted to each other, why we engage in acts such as adultery and drug abuse (and even genocide).
We are attracted to the opposite sex that share are characteristics usually, from space between the eyes all the way down to length of forefingers. If we choose mates purely for s...more 2/25/2009
The Third Chimpanzee – Jarod Diamond cc1992

A highly evolutionist book, after skipping the first section (60pages) the book got more interesting with Diamond’s take on why humans are attracted to each other, why we engage in acts such as adultery and drug abuse (and even genocide).
We are attracted to the opposite sex that share are characteristics usually, from space between the eyes all the way down to length of forefingers. If we choose mates purely for sexual reasons the correlation is even greater, but when personality traits and stability are taken into account for monogamous, child rearing relationships the correlations weakens a bit. A study on extramarital relationships and married couples supported this theory.

Our addiction and abuse of drugs was described as a way to show superior genes that has gone wrong from our animal ancestors. Certain male animals like peacocks have a huge hindering plume that show a female, “look at this handicap I bear and yet I still manage to stay alive and thrive, surely I must have some bomb genes” this has gone wrong in the human psyche and deep down on a subconscious level men that abuse drugs are trying to say, look I can take this drugs and still survivor, but yet they are harmful and usually people can’t thrive while on them. Also shown, in the kung fu masters of New Guinea (where author did much research and takes many of his stories from) that will drink a cup of kerosene to show that they still are strong and in control of their discipline.

Male monkey have the largest testicles because of their frequent copulation and gorilla have the smallest of the primates because they seldom do, men, although much smaller in size have much larger penis and larger testicles then gorillas, as function of their sexual habits but also because of their machismo (like a male peacock).

The Golden Age as people talk about in human society when man was at peace with nature and his environment is a myth. People say that until the industrial revolution of the 1800s people were doing no noticeable harm to the environment. Such posits are absurd if you look at fossils from continents where the first human remains can be found. Indians that came through the Americas left a blitzkrieg of animal destruction in their path, mainly of big mammals with no aversion to humans due to lack of contact. Wooly mammoths and saber tooth tigers are just a few. Australia had big mammals as well and so did Tasmania. New Zealand has some huge bird species like giant ostrichs that went extinct when the first people came there too. Also islands serve as great examples like Christmas island that supported a much greater civilization then has been recorded at one time as evidenced by the great stone faces, archaeology suggests that the forests had been cut by people until it was so bad that eventually every last tree of felled and the forest didn’t have a chance at replenishing, so the population died out. (to make canoes and rollers to move the stones)

We are in a trouble unless people can learn from the mistakes of the past and make a change now to aver t certain doom of over population, natural resource scarcity, nuclear weapons, and pollution. Nothing learned and everything forgotten? Hopefully not.

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03/28/08

Kenny rated it:

Read in March, 2008

Diamond's first book has the beginnings of what he later explores in his subsequent books in greater depth. The topics of man's propensity to exterminate each other, and to destroy our own habitat. I would like to say that I share Diamond's optimism about our own future, he believes that we can reverse the effects of what we've begun to do. However, I fear that our destructiveness may be too tied in to our own humanity, and that we will not be able to escape it. I hope I am wrong.

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03/23/07

Fatemeh rated it:

bookshelves: wish-list

Read in February, 2008

So easy to enjoy this book. If you don't have a scientific background about evolution, just like me, "The Third Chimpanzee" gives you the basic ideas and lots of amazing examples.
I liked the way he starts each chapter with an interesting question and during the chapter he presents possible answers.
However, I found some parts of it hard to believe (like the unpublished statistics of children of adultery), and for some of his theories, I was looking for more evidence to acc...more

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10/02/08

Djiezes rated it:

bookshelves: eclectic, non-fiction

Read in November, 2008

recommends it for: all members of the species homo sapiens

An excellent read.
Jared Diamond gives a broad overview of the history of homo sapiens, its biological and cultural origins..
He focuses on the human history, traces its evolutionary origins and treats topics such as the rise and fall of civilizations, the role of language, domestication of animals and plants, ecology, geography, extinctions of other species and the role humans played in all these domains.
A must-read for members of the species.

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9 comments

01/25/09

Nick rated it:

This was an interesting book. I had already read Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, so reading this book was kind of a trip back in time to read Diamond's original thesis. It was interesting to see all of the ideas from these other books presented together. I think that Diamond did a good job of explaining what makes humans so much like the other two chimpanzees and what makes us uniquely human.

My only real complaint about the book has to do with Diamond's writing style. The think ...more

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01/20/09

Atenea-Nike rated it:

bookshelves: abandoned

Read in January, 2009

So far it's not really doing anything much for me. For one thing it incurs in one of my pet peeves: the author talks about evolution in a misleading way that can make the layman believe that evolution happens with a design in mind, so to speak, thus substituting the designing God of creationism with an unknown force of nature called Evolution that does exactly the same. Evolution does not have a design in mind - mutations happen, some of thsoe mutations are better at leaving copies of themselves...more

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03/08/09

Ben rated it:

bookshelves: non-fiction

Read in April, 2009

Having previously read Jared Diamond's more famous Guns Germs and Steel, I can't help but reflect on this book in comparison. I gave that book five stars and this book three, but that may say more about the order in which I read them than the books themselves, for in truth they're remarkably similar. The Third Chimpanzee starts out in a slightly different vein, talking more about early human evolution and our divergence from common and pygmy chimps (making us the third chimp species), then shi...more

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05/21/09

Ryan Murphy rated it:

bookshelves: anthropology, biology, bottom-up-systems, history

Read in May, 2009

I didn't like this one nearly as much as Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond's more famous work. I thought the evolutionary explanations of seemingly everything in human society to be incredibly myopic. His conclusions were generally interesting, but he wasn't very convincing. He's also put himself on the list of environmentalists who have made doomsday predictions that have been completely and utterly falsified (yes, the time line he gave was fifty years, but I think it's safe to say seventeen year...more

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10/23/08

Joe rated it:

Read in November, 2008

recommends it for: chimpanzees, hittites, ghosts of tazmanians

Let's agree this book serves as the map of Jared Diamond's career as a popular science author. It's the salt flats, the test kitchen, the proving ground for the ideas that appear more completely in Collapse; Guns, Germs and Steel; and Why is Sex Fun? The sections in The Third Chimpanzee that broach the ideas he explores in those books are, predictably, excellent.

As I see it, there are a couple of depths tested in this book that are as-yet un-plumbed. He ought to plumb one, and leave...more Let's agree this book serves as the map of Jared Diamond's career as a popular science author. It's the salt flats, the test kitchen, the proving ground for the ideas that appear more completely in Collapse; Guns, Germs and Steel; and Why is Sex Fun? The sections in The Third Chimpanzee that broach the ideas he explores in those books are, predictably, excellent.

As I see it, there are a couple of depths tested in this book that are as-yet un-plumbed. He ought to plumb one, and leave the other stopped up. He explores the origins and development of the language, in primates, and then in Cro-Magnon-and-beyond human societies. That section of the book is really intreguing: he tracks the development of Proto-Indo European langauge deftly and quickly through thousands of years. It's fascinating, complex stuff that's delivered cogently and cleverly, like the best of his writing.

On the other hand, there are a few chapters in middle of this book, under the section "Uniquely Human" that deal with moving the gulf between supposedly distinctively human characteristics: art, drug use, agriculture. In these sections Diamond is embarassingly glib and presumptuous-- it's really the worst of what I thought was a pretty unimpeachable author. For example, to answer the claim that humans alone make art simply for aesthetic pleasure, Diamond writes: We can't ask bowerbirds whether they get pleasure ot of their art, and I suspect that many humans who claim to do so are just putting on cultural affectations." That's the entirity of his refutation of what Orwell called "the aesthetic impulse," in "Why I Write." It's just a little wave-of-the-hand dismissive for my liking. Diamond is usually pretty good about deferring to experts to make the case for him. On the topic of creative impulse, and the production of great art, I'd defer to someone like Orwell (or any artist, for that matter-- he talks to none) over Jared Diamond.

There are a few presumptuous passages in this middle section that almost made me put down the book (his explanation of drug use boils down in its entirety to a demonstration of virility, for instance). (He's also a little too cheeky in this section-- he passes the point a once or twice that separates pithy from snotty.) But, if you can move from the very good primate passages in the first third and onto the later chapters, like "Last First Contact" and "Horses, Hittites, and History", you'll once again be amazed by his ability to present vast rethinkings of humanity's history and prehistory convincingly in such small spaces. (less)

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01/03/09

Lauren rated it:

bookshelves: 2009, hours-i-never-get-back, truth

Read in March, 2009

I can't honestly put this book on the "read" shelf, but that's where it will have to live until I can bear to pick it up again. That time may never come. This pop science jibber-jabber had me sailing along with it, going along with the egregious jumps over nuanced scientific discovery in the name of calling it "pop." Typical of books of this genre - the complex data is always glossed over and we're left with the "big picture."

Then I finished the first ch...more

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02/17/08

Arthur rated it:

bookshelves: science

Read in February, 2008

This is the launching point for Diamond's other great, better known books. The early part of the book provides a quick description of human evolution, and explains the title of the book. The chimpanzees are our closest relatives within the animal kingdom, and according to Diamond, an unbiased taxonomy would call us just another species of chimpanzee. The first species is the common chimpanzee, the second is the pygmy chimpanzee, which is now known as the bonobo, and the third species is now call...more

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08/23/07

George rated it:

Read in April, 2008

A definite mixed bag. I LOVED his subsequent "Guns, Germs, and Steel," but this one is far less compelling, partly b/c it seems cobbled together from disparate articles at times, but primarily b/c his reductionist tendencies are far more in evidence, and far more offensive, since he's dealing with areas of the human experience that are far less amenable to scientific (or even philosophical) reduction ("Guns" deals with the science behind the rise of civilizations and the West...more

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03/13/09

Ryan Petersen rated it:

In this book, the author of "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "Collapse" (two of my favorites) takes the third chimpanzee (humans) from our ape heritage through to the present. Besides being a terrific read and an excellent source for insights into human nature, the book wins my admiration for Diamond's masterful application of Game Theory to man's decision to commit adultery. For anybody who enjoyed either of Diamond's more recent works, this is an excellent prelude not too be mis...more

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01/19/09

Andrew rated it:

Another excellent and thought-provoking Jared Diamond book. I suggest that, if you have the opportunity, you read this before any of his other books, as it was his first and served as inspiration for the rest. As you get further along, the information becomes somewhat redundant if you've already read "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "Collapse". There is still plenty of sideline information here that doesn't appear in the other books, though, and the early chapters about the simila...more

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09/04/08

Sommer rated it:

This book was decent. I can't say I didn't enjoy it, mainly because I love the subject. However, if you've spent any time reading other pieces of literature on this subject matter, you'll see this guy doesn't bring a lot to the table. Although, I can give him props for lots of research findings to back up his well known theories and that's always interesting. If an author provides readings about the crazy experiments and conclusions behind all their theories, it makes for some good reading. Good...more

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01/25/09

Joanne is currently reading it

bookshelves: academic-texts, currently-reading

Read in January, 2007

Not sure where Diamond is going sketching his evolutionary theorms. I was supposed to read this for a Yahoo Group and slacked off, as I am absolutely terrible at keeping a schedule, but made up my mind to keep it and take notes, as I am with Foucault. (It may be too late to acquire my doctorate, but I can still tackle graduate level reads and keep learning, at least until I get hit with Alzheimers.)

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