The risk of being civilized
Imagine that the whole world wears bifocals. Heavy black-rimmed things that conspire with gravity to slide down our collective nose. Or maybe sleek, light designer frames that just ooze West L.A. chic. The style doesn’t matter -- it’s the lenses that count, and most of us, truth be told, only use the little half-moons to see what’s in front of us.
Jared Diamond uses the rest of the lenses, and he sees things that most of us miss. A UCLA geography professor and physiologist, Diamond in his work has tracked parallels between modern Montana dairy farms and 10th century Viking settlements in Greenland that disappeared with the Arctic winds. He has found links between deforested flatlands on Easter Island and the mysterious collapse of the Mayans. He has looked at humans and other creatures, most of whom die when they can no longer reproduce, and speculated on the unique nature of menopause -- humans take longer to raise children, extending by years the mother’s role in ensuring genetic succession.
And why is it that the human penis is 3 inches longer than it needs to be to perform its reproductive function? How has natural selection come into play in that giggle-inducing realm?
Diamond’s guess: showmanship.
“The large size ... is a signal,” Diamond said during a recent lunchtime lecture at UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine, eliciting snickers from the audience of 100 students, faculty and staff. “The question: At whom is that signal directed?” Most women “don’t find the male penis particularly attractive,” though its size, like a peacock’s iridescent and outsized tail feathers, could be a showy indicator of relative sexual maturity.
So who then, at the Darwinian level, is getting signaled?
“Every man who has been in a men’s locker room and goes into the shower knows perfectly well who it is aimed at,” Diamond concluded as the snickers broke into wide laughter. “In the locker room, men are looking.”
Within the humor of that scenario, Diamond makes his more relevant point. No one really knows why the male sex organ evolved the way it did. “It illustrates unresolved problems remain in [understanding] human sexuality -- a subject that seems so familiar to us,” Diamond said.
Driven by a gleeful curiosity, Diamond has spent more than 40 years finding fresh lessons within the familiar. In his newest work, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” which he’ll discuss in three Los Angeles-area appearances in January, Diamond draws on known elements of evolution, ecology, archeology and other disciplines to create fresh theories about why civilizations persist or perish. The discursive work follows his nonfiction 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” which explored why early human society evolved faster in Europe and Asia than elsewhere -- mostly lucky access to easily domesticated animals and natural grains with easily stored seeds.
“Both of those books posed the most interesting questions I could think of -- the questions that have been bugging me for a long time,” Diamond says. “They are big questions.”
In “Collapse,” Diamond looks at the end of the process that brings societies together, finding five factors decisive for success or failure: environmental damage, usually human-inflicted; climate change; hostile neighbors; its inverse, sudden isolation after relying on trade for key goods; and how societies respond to those forces.
Diamond believes the answers could offer templates for the modern world. For instance, he wonders whether current First World nations’ reliance on oil has positioned them to collapse like the Polynesian communities on remote Pitcairn and Henderson islands, who lived in unsustainable environments and relied on trade with the people of Mangareva island for supplies key to their survival. When inter-island trade ended in the 1400s, so did the people of Pitcairn and Henderson.
“We have real problems, serious problems,” Diamond says. “The encouraging part is even though the problems are more intense and on a larger scale [than faced ancient Polynesians], we have advantages at solving the problems.... We have the opportunity to learn and they didn’t.”
The available lessons include those taught by Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868) and the 3,000-year-old society of Tikopia Island in the southwest Pacific, each of which understood the environmental degradation they were committing -- such as deforestation -- and changed practices, including creating sustainable forests, to ensure their own survival.
“The whole world today is a self-contained and isolated unit, as Tikopia Island and Tokugawa Japan used to be,” Diamond writes. “We need to realize, as [they] did, that there is no other island/planet to which we can turn for help, or to which we can export our problems. Instead, we need to learn, as they did, to live within our means.”
Born in Brookline, Mass., to a physician father and a pianist-linguist mother, Diamond grew up in an environment of intellectual stimulation. He went on to major in physiology at Harvard, earn a doctorate in the field at Cambridge in England in 1961 and do postdoctoral work in Munich.
“When my British and Yugoslav and German friends started telling me their life histories,” Diamond says, “I realized what a difference it made where you happened to be born.”
But his first success came in physiology. Diamond returned to Harvard in 1962 and quickly attracted attention for groundbreaking work in molecular cell functions. He joined UCLA’s physiology department in 1966 but has since expanded his academic expertise to geography, ornithology and conservation biology. He closed his physiology lab a few years ago and joined UCLA’s geography department full-time in July 2002.
A 1985 MacArthur grant-winner and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Diamond also speaks or reads 12 languages. “I just love it,” Diamond says, sitting on a couch in the sprawling Bel-Air house he shares with his wife, Marie Cohen, a clinical psychologist in UCLA’s School of Medicine, and their 17-year-old twin sons, Max and Joshua. “Different languages let you communicate with different people on their own terms ... you express different things in different languages. You become a different person when you speak another language.”
Diamond, slightly built with combed-over hair and a vaguely Amish jawline beard, speaks in an emphatic but soft and low voice, his diction precise. At the front of a lecture hall, he looks professorial but also like he’d just as soon be bird-watching in a New Guinea rain forest -- his brass belt buckle is an engraved line-drawing of a hummingbird.
A board member of the World Wildlife Fund and a founder of the Society of Conservation Biology, Diamond was a key figure in designing part of New Guinea’s national park system and conducted a wildlife survey that helped persuade the Solomon Islands to drop plans for bauxite mining on Rennell Island, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Still, a few of Diamond’s observations in “Collapse,” which he has also made in lectures and articles, have outraged other environmentalists. In particular, Diamond praises Chevron oil for its juggling of drilling and environmental concerns in Papua New Guinea, one of the richest and most diverse ecosystems in the world.
Chevron, which has been condemned by some human rights activists over alleged atrocities committed in the volatile Nigerian oil fields, pursued a policy of extracting oil from the New Guinea Kutubu oil fields while taking pains to minimize effects on the surrounding jungle. The result, Diamond says, is the Kutubu field has become one of the world’s best-protected wildlife preserves.
Diamond argues that to achieve similar ends environmentalists need to work with corporations, rather than constantly confront them. As a practical matter, he believes, corporations have more power than environmentalists and will forge ahead unencumbered unless convinced that eco-friendly development is in their financial interests. It is cheaper, Diamond says, to spend more money on environmental safeguards while drilling for oil than to repair degradation later -- a conclusion he believes Chevron has reached.
“Businesses, along with governments, are the strongest forces in our society and if we don’t engage with them we know that we have no chance of changing them,” Diamond says, adding that environmentalists who stick to exclusively adversarial positions “feel good about themselves, tell themselves they’re not engaging with forces of evil. But they’re condemning themselves to impotence.”
Again, Diamond looks at the issue through a wide lens. To stop environmental degradation, which he says threatens human existence, society must convince the degraders that it is in their interest to change their behavior.
The Vikings of western Greenland never learned that lesson. After settling in the 10th century along protected fjords, the new residents quickly damaged the fragile and slow-recovering grasslands on which their livestock depended. The communities survived for 450 years, but eventually collapsed, though experts have not come to agreement on exactly why.
Diamond, applying his template of five factors, concludes from artifacts and environmental records that a calamitous turn of weather destroyed the Vikings’ tenuous food supply at a time when they were largely cut off from other Norse communities in Iceland and Europe.
Had the Vikings embraced the ways of the Inuit, they could have survived. But for unknown reasons -- hubris, Diamond suspects, augmented by myopic leadership -- the Vikings didn’t adapt to the inhospitable sub-arctic North and had, in fact, early on eschewed the ocean fish and a species of seal that sustained native peoples during protracted periods of harsh weather.
When the Vikings’ European-style food supply -- livestock -- broke down, they perished. “Ultimately ... the chiefs found themselves without followers,” Diamond writes. “The last right they obtained for themselves was the privilege of being the last to starve.”
Ever the teacher, Diamond believes there’s a lesson to be learned in the ruins of a society that lasted longer than American society has existed.
“Half of [the book] is a fascination with understanding why these past societies collapsed, but the other half is its importance to the modern world,” Diamond says, a bright morning sun bathing the treed yard outside the window. “The modern world faces environmental problems that are serious enough to do us in. My hope in writing the book was that we could avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.”
*
Jared Diamond
Where: Barnes & Noble, the Grove, 189 Grove Drive, Los Angeles
When: 7:30 p.m. Jan. 5
Contact: (323) 525-0270
Also
Where: Borders Books, 1360 Westwood Blvd., Los Angeles
When: 7:30 p.m. Jan. 6
Contact: (310) 475-3444
Also
Where: Skeptics Society, Baxter Hall at Caltech, second floor, Pasadena
When: 2 p.m. Jan. 9
Contact: skeptic.com, (626) 794-3119
