Jared Diamond
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2012
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jim Al-Khalili talks to Jared Diamond about how his passion for the birds of Papua New Guinea overtook his medical interest in the gall bladder, and led him to undertake a scientific study of global history. Science polymath and celebrated author, Jared Diamond has tackled some of the big questions about humanity: what is it that makes us uniquely human not just a third species of chimpanzee; and why do some societies thrive and others struggle to survive, or collapse? Once a Professor of Physiology (specialising in the gall bladder), he became increasingly fascinated by the birds of Papua New Guinea and does an excellent imitation of the ptilinopus fruit dove, among others. Now Professor of Geography at University of California in LA, he stresses the vital importance of the environment in determining the success or otherwise of a society. He argues first that it was settled agriculture that enabled the white man to develop guns, germs and steel and later that abuse of the environment is often responsible for their collapse. But can the history of humanity really be understood in much the same way as we might seek to explain the success or otherwise of a particular species of bird?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the |
| 0:03.8 | podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC. |
| 0:08.6 | It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world. |
| 0:15.0 | What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism |
| 0:20.0 | and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines. |
| 0:23.7 | And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject |
| 0:28.3 | you might not even have thought you were interested in. |
| 0:30.2 | Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment, |
| 0:36.1 | you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:39.9 | Thank you for downloading the live Scientific from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:44.0 | For most of a scientist, myself included, the search for ultimate explanations leads us to define our questions ever more precisely, |
| 0:52.0 | to zoom in on something and study it at a level of detail |
| 0:55.2 | that non-scientists can often find bewildering. |
| 0:58.6 | But for Jared Diamond, constantly asking why has taken him in the opposite direction, |
| 1:04.1 | asking ever bigger questions and seeking easy to understand answers. |
| 1:08.6 | He started his life scientific |
| 1:11.0 | studying the precise mechanism by which our gallbladder absorbed salt. |
| 1:16.8 | But mid-Korea started asking much broader questions. |
| 1:21.1 | When and how did we become uniquely human and not just another species of chimpanzee? |
| 1:26.0 | What causes some societies to thrive and others to fail? |
| 1:30.0 | And most recently, what can we in the West learn from traditional societies |
| 1:35.7 | before they disappear? |
... |
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