1. "Guns, Germs, and Steel"

You should understand I’m not one of those people who overuses superlatives.  But also know I believe this is one of the most fascinating books I've ever read!  Yup, the scope and breadth of the book’s implications are that vital and fundamental.  Here’s one excerpt about the book….

“The question, ‘Why did human societies have such diverse fates?’ has usually received racist answers.  Mastering information from many different fields, Jared Diamond convincingly demonstrates that head starts and local conditions can explain much of the course of human history.  His impressive account will appeal to a vast leadership.” -- Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Professor of Genetics, Stanford University

Human societies have greatly differed over the course of ten thousand years.  Many, many people have thought it was about race.  Thinking their race was the best, and then therefore their society and way of life are superior.  Jared Diamond questions that thought and goes on to thoroughly dismantles it.   He then explains how geography and related geographic coincidences have led to the vast divergences of human societies.

For someone interested in evolutionary psychology, this book brings light to some key areas.  For one, it talks about the different ways humans have reacted to different environments in the past.  Evolutionary psychologists figure out how we reacted in the past and how that affects us today.  One way is too look at people still “in the past” so to speak.  For example, page 271-272.   “In traditional New Guinea society, if a New Guinean happened to encounter an unfamiliar New Guinean while both were away from their respective villages, the two engaged in a long discussion of their relatives, in an attempt to establish some relationship and hence some reason why the two should not attempt to kill each other.” 

For someone interested in an immensely eye-opening journey through the past ten thousand years written understandably and interestingly, then this book will appeal to you.

Here are some selected pages that I found to be important…

-         87 This graph outlines the train of thought that was used.

-         139 Points out the high concentration of edible grasses as a key factor to human civilization.

-         160, 161, 206 the pernicious stuff we got/get from animals. The tables show that many human diseases came from animals.  As a present day example, the SARS epidemic was traced back to a cat! Here's a CNN article about it.

-         169- The multiple problems associated with domestication of wild animals.

-         177, a little diagram showing how the continents are tilted.

Well, I hope you read the book! 

2. "The Third Chimpanzee"

P. 202 “On 4 August 1938, an exploratory biological expedition from the American Museum of Natural History made a discovery that hastened towards its end a long phase of human history.  That was the date on which the advance patrol of the Third Archbold Expedition (named after its leader, Richard Archbold) became the first outsiders to enter the Grand Valley of the Balim River, in the supposedly uninhabited interior of western New Guinea.  To everyone’s astonishment, the Grand Valley proved to be densely populated – 50,000 Papuans, living in the Stone Age, previously unknown to the rest of humanity and themselves unaware of others’ existence.  In search of undiscovered birds and mammals, Archbold had found an undiscovered human society.”

That’s an astonishing paragraph!    Until very recently, humans lived very isolated from each other.  In the above case, fifty thousand people lived as unaware of the outside world as it was unaware of them. Presently, there are still people who have not been contacted by the outside world.  Meaning they know their world, but don’t know they’re part of a world.  This national geographic article talks about tribes still living in isolation. 

P. 209- 210. “….Europe today has only about fifty languages, most of them belonging to a single language family (Indo-European).  In contrast, New Guinea, with less than one-tenth of Europe’s area and less than one-hundredth of its population, has about 1,000 languages, many of them unrelated to any other known language in New Guinea or elsewhere!”

Jared Diamond discuses the evolution of languages.  He writes why he thinks there is this great language discrepancy between places like Europe and New Guinea. All and all, it makes for a fascinating read.  If you’ve ever wondered how languages traveled from one place to another, then this will be an interesting book.

P. 230-231. This shows an example of the evolution of the English language.   I think it’s hard to understand evolution because we don’t really see it happening (in a short time period).  The example of the change in English shows language evolution.  I’m trying to point out that most anything I can think of evolves, from humans to religious thought to language.

The proceeding chapters disguises genocide.  We know genocide is horrible.  But we don’t know why we do it.  Jared Diamond raises some possible hypothesizes in the sixteenth chapter. 

P. 262.  “Of particular interest in understanding our genocidal origins is the behavior of two of our three closest relatives, gorillas and common chimpanzees.  Two decades ago, any biologist would have assumed that our ability to wield tools and to lay concerted group plans made us far more murderous than apes – if indeed apes murdered at all.  Recent discoveries about apes suggest, however, that a gorilla or common chimp stands at least as good a chance of being murdered as the average human.”

P. 261 “Actually, studies in recent decades have documented murder in many, though certainly not all, animal species.  Massacre of a neighboring individual or troop may be beneficial to an animal, if it can thereby take over the neighbor’s territory, food, or females.”

We are similar to animals and therefore our actions should be similar.  If we study animals we can get a better understanding of human’s actions.  As in the case of genocide this seems to be true.  Evolutionary psychology takes into account human’s similarity to animals.

A while back I was talking to a friend of mine about genocide.  He’s involved with Amnesty International and has read a lot about genocide.  I asked him why do you there’s genocide?  He replied well, I guess there are just bad people born (who participate in it). For me, this doesn’t answer the question. Just since 1950, there already have been millions of people killed as a result of genocide. That's a horrible reality of humans. Evolutionary psychology is trying to understand our past so we don’t have a similar future.

Well, I hope I didn't jump around too much from issue to issue.  It's difficult to summarize such important topics.  All I can say is you should go read the book!

3. "Why is Sex Fun?"

I think in order to better understand humans, it’s important to look at our past. “Why is Sex Fun?” points out the mostly unique body features of us humans and why these evolved features have potentially been so instrumental to us.  The thing is, the vast majority of animals don’t have such a crazy sex life.  For a great example, let's look at the first page of the book, written from a dog’s perspective…

“Those disgusting humans have sex any day of the month!  Barbara proposes sex even when she knows perfectly well that she isn’t fertile-like just after her period.  John is eager for sex all the time, without caring whether his efforts could result in a baby or not.  But if you want to hear something really gross-Barbara and John kept on having sex while she was pregnant!  That’s as bad as all the times when John’s parents come for a visit, and I can hear them too having sex, although John’s mother went through this thing they call menopause years ago.  Now she can’t have babies anymore, but she still wants sex, and John’s father obliges her.  What a waste of effort!  Here’s the weirdest thing of all:  Barbara and John, and John’s parents, close the bedroom door and have sex in private, instead of doing it in front of their friends like any self-respecting dog!”

This example humorlessly illustrates how really different us humans are.  From an evolutionary psychology perspective, we try to understand why our ancestors evolved this way and how it affects our behavior.

Following this line of thought, there are some body structures that just can’t be advantageous.  For example, the plumage of a peacock.  All these feathers take energy to make, don’t help to camouflage it, and impede the animal if it needs to escape from a predator to name a few reasons.  Yet, peahens really seem to really like these plumages.  This could possibly be because… “When a female sees a male with that handicap, she is guaranteed that he is not cheating by carrying the gene for a big tail and being otherwise inferior.  He would not have been able to afford to make the structure, and would not still be alive, unless he was truly superior.” (132-133)

Interesting! 

“One can immediately think of many human behaviors that surely confirm to Zahavi’s handicap theory of honest signals.  While any man can boast to a woman that he is rich and therefore she should go to bed with him in the hopes of enticing him into marriage, he might be lying.  Only when she sees him throwing money away on useless expensive jewelry and sports cars can she believe him.  Again, some college students make a show of partying on the night before a big examination. In effect, they are saying: ‘Any jerk can get an A by studying, but I’m so smart that I can get an A despite the handicap of not studying.”(133)

So now the next question would be are there any human body structures that are unnecessarily big?  Following this postulate, yes there are.  Without going into explicit detail, I’ll just expound on one; the human penis.  Yup, there’s really no need for this appendage to be so large.

“The human penis may also illustrate Zahavi’s handicap model as a structure costly and detrimental to its owner.  Granted, it is smaller and probably less costly than a peacock’s tail.  However, it is large enough that if the same quantity of tissue were instead devoted to extra cerebral cortex, that brainy redesigned man would gain a big advantage.  Hence a large penis’s cost should be regarded as a lost-opportunity cost: because any man’s available biosynthetic energy is finite, the energy squandered on one structure comes at the expense of energy potentially available for another structure.  In effect, a man is boasting, ‘I’m already so smart and superior that I don’t need to devote more ounces of protoplasm to my brain, but I can instead afford the handicap of packing the ounces uselessly into my penis.’”

Now I know this information sounds out there.  Yet, it’s also a very interesting theory.  This is also where you can start to see the economic principles used in the past.  There’s only a finite amount of energy, where did our human ancestors allocate it?   How can we better understand humans if we look at their body structures?  What was the economic give and take that evolved humans to where they are today?  These are the type of thought provoking questions addressed in this book.