The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal

We share 98% of our genome with that of chimpanzees. The impact, enormous, has been studied and delved upon elsewhere. But there is another question to ask: what do the 2% left, defining us as a separate specie, truly imply?

Jared Diamond tells us here the story of homo sapiens. He questions what differentiate us (or not) from our cousins the chimps and the bonobos -from language to sex and from art to violence. He recounts, above all, a key revolution in our history: that of the apparition of agriculture, having led to 'the third chimpanzee' indeed to conquer its environment... at the peril of destroying it too!

Prehistory and ethology are, here, dancing around with ecology, as Jared Diamond demonstrates, if need be, that nothing is show more more important than a solid understanding of our past to better move on towards our future.

Here's a vertiginous book, mirroring our faraway past before projecting us forward into a possible future that, only our abilities to learn from history (can we?) will determine if it ever belong to us or not. Highly recommended to anyone interested by the most fascinating odyssey ever: ours. show less

Very early on Diamond sets his stall. He's not interested in intricate molecular insights, but an overarching evolutionary basis for human lifecycle and behaviour. Sometimes he digresses, like when he talks for no obvious purpose about how the relatively large size of the male penis is unexplained, when really it might just be chance: there may be no direct impact to passing one's seed and it's really not a driver of natural selection.

Ageing, bizarrely in my view, is described as many unconnected factors (deteriorating senses, brittle bones, weakening heart) converging over time so that they fail optimally around the same time. Why maintain one feature when others are failing? More likely, shortening telomeres at the ends of our show more chromosomes cause most if not all these conditions. The notion that one underlying cause can be expressed in many different ways is dismissed offhandedly.

Language gets some treatment. I feel as though Diamond makes too much of minor aspects such as word order. Apparently, subject-verb-object is the "natural" order of human language, yet many precursors to English such as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit (the last especially) have no such restriction. There's too much emphasis on how Old English got to English, when really we should looking at how these more ancient languages developed.

Diamond believes races exist due to sexual selection rather than natural selection. In other words, natural selection explains only some variation in skin colour across climates. A much more potent driver, according to Diamond, is people are attracted to those who look like people they are raised around. I'm not sure about this. I wouldn't put it beyond ancient humans to want to keep genes in tight communities for other purposes, e.g. trust within a clan when sharing resources. Diamond does, however, give a convincing explanation for maladaptive traits, e.g. a peacock who is fast even with a plethora of useless but eye-catching tail feathers is deemed attractive to peahens.

One point where I agree wholeheartedly with Diamond is the importance of multi-generational knowledge, made possible (via a positive feedback loop?) by improved life expectancy, in advancing a preliterate society. There's no archaeological evidence for this, but Diamond's own experience living with "traditional" New Guinean societies adds colour and indicates the importance of studying these traditional societies today to understand better our distant past.

The last third is an accessible overview of Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse. If you have the time or interest to read only one or a couple of Diamond's books, choose these over The Third Chimpanzee as they cover Diamond's views on natural history and chance driving society in greater depth. show less

The roots in our evolution of what we can be proud of as a species and of what we should be ashamed of as a species.

I found the first part rather heavy going, partly because I suspect at least some of has been outdated by discoveries in the field of genetics since the book was written in 1990. The author has explored many of the themes of the rest of the book in greater detail in his other popular works, though his overview of the history of genocide was new to me. Given his knife-edge between optimism and pessimism about our species's future in the epilogue, there seem to be depressingly more grounds for pessimism looking back at the 30 years since then.

"The Third Chimpanzee" was Diamond's first major book, and it sows the seeds for his three more recent works, "Why is Sex Fun?", "Guns, Germs and Steel", and "Collapse". Many of the chapters here introduce the ideas of the later books prior to their later expansion and development.

Diamond's aim is to view human history through the lens of biology: given that we are about 98% genetically identical to chimps, what light does that shed on our own life-cycle, culture, history and destiny?

The book's first section briefly documents our genetic history - our divergence from a proto-chimp ancestor, and the development of homo sapiens over about six million years (homo erectus, homo habilis etc). Diamond is always keen to draw out the political show more implications of his science, and suggests that if we were to label chimps as "homo troglodytes" rather than "pan troglodytes", we might make different ethical decisions about their treatment. I found this first section all too-brief - I'd have liked to see a lot more detail on the biological commonalities and differences between humans and chimps.

The second section reviews the human life-cycle, particulary our sexuality - why are we monogamous? How do we choose mates? What can sexual selection suggest about human races? This draws heavily on comparisons and contrasts with other animal species and I found it all interesting.

The third section covers the evolution of things that might seem "uniquely human" - language, art, agriculture, drug use - and traces animal precursors to see whether we really are as unique as we think. I found all of this to be far too brief - a whole book on this area would have been interesting. I did find sympathy with Diamond's argument that the development of agriculture was as much a curse as a blessing (being the source of the apparatus for political oppression). There are strong similarities here to the ideas of radicals like John Zerzan who has expanded on the same theme.

The next section enters the territory of "Guns, Germs and Steel", discussing how much of human history has been determined by geographical and biological accident e.g. the difficulty in migrating crops across continents with a strong north-south axis (Africa and America) leading to a slower pace of development. This section also asks why the human race seems to be prone to genocide, again with a strong political slant.

The final section covers extinction - both analysing the countless past extinctions of other species that humans have caused, and the implications for our own future.

Throughout, the book's willingness to spell out political implications is very welcome. I also appreciated the extent to which the content draws on Diamond's own extensive work in New Guinea. On the downside, there are just too many ideas here, and it would be nice to see them all explored at greater length - although of course that's exactly what the author has since done in other books. show less

***.5

The man's got O-pinions! Starting out with anthropology and evolution as the title implies, soon we are hearing about everything from linguistics to the Fermi Paradox and SETI.
It's interesting to see how things have 'evolved' in the 30+ years since the book was written. Some of the science is outdated, some of the speculations disproven, but many of the conjectures have been borne out.

The beginning of this book was well written and fascinating to read. There were actually witty remarks that had me amused in parts, which you wouldn't expect from something so scientific. The explanations for how humans developed behaviors and the comparisons with chimps and other animals in order to help with those explanations were easy to associate with and really helped with the taking in of the information. The text didn't treat the readers like award winning scientists, but it didn't dumb everything up for the ignorant either.

By the last 100 pages of the book I became frustrated, however. As long as the book was actually doing what was expected of it and comparing us to chimps and explaining our evolution, I was content, but once show more it switched to how we were destroying our environment, it became less of "this is why we do what we do" to "this is how the demise of the world will come about." There wasn't even really a connection to humans beyond that we killed things. I'm not saying it wasn't well written, but it simply wasn't as mind-catching the way the first 200 pages were.

Definitely worth the read for the amazing revelations put forward about human nature and the ways of some animals. I know that I will forever have friends check the lengths of their middle fingers against their spouses from this point onward. show less

Really the first draft for Guns, Germs and Steel and even of the follow-up, Collapse. I read those books a long time ago and I still get a deja vu feeling all over again reading, for example, about the environmental collapse of Easter Island. If you haven't read Guns, Germs and Steel--the story about everything--drop this immediately and read it. Then Collapse, I guess.

It is sort of interesting to see that he didn't have much of the over-arching theory yet re why some societies (continents, civilizations) developed so fast because of the tools and domesticated animals they had. Here, there's more emphasis on why humans came out ahead of some of our close brethern but not a lot more.

I'm slightly interested to see how he updated this in show more 2006, but doubt it's an essential for any library. One interesting thing: He was wondering where the next genocide would be and notes those by the Tutsi of the Hutu in Burundi in the 1972 and by Hutu of of the Tutsi in Rwanda in the 1960s. How often do you see those two precursors brought up? Of course the Serbian cleansing of Muslims was to come soon. His point is that there have always been mass murder of "the other"--not possible to miss for someone who has spent time in New Guinea. Genocide didn't surface in the modern day, any more than humans' extinction of animals did (see, for example, the Maoris' rapid extinction of so much of NZ's fauna). For the most part, though, the book is rather superficial and wanting in anthropological and historical underpinnings, especially for areas of the world beyond ANZ-Pacific and North America. show less