The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee
by Jared Diamond
Summary
Humans share around ninety eight percent of their genes with the two chimpanzee species, close enough, Diamond begins, that a taxonomist from elsewhere would file us as the third. The book is the working out of that reclassification: if we are the third chimpanzee, which parts of the human story are genuinely new, where did they come from, and what do they imply about where we are going?
The tour runs through the whole human condition with the zoologist's frame held steady. The great leap forward of language and art, which Diamond ties to a small genetic change with enormous consequence; the strange economics of human sexuality, menopause and mate choice read through sexual selection; the origins of agriculture, delivered with the book's most quoted provocation, that settling down to farm was in important ways a catastrophe for human health and equality; drug use as a costly signal; the puzzle of why some societies conquered others, a chapter that already contains, in miniature, the whole argument he would expand into Guns, Germs, and Steel. The dark chapters give the book its second half title: genocide as a human practice with animal precedents and a long documented history, and environmental destruction as the habit of every human society that could manage it, Easter Island standing as the rehearsal for the planet.
Around three hundred and sixty pages, brisk, opinionated and packed.
Best for readers who want the whole Diamond programme in one book, the human species examined as a species, before the sequels made him famous.
Historical Context & Significance
The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee won the Science Book Prize in 1992, Jared Diamond's first major award and the prize's fifth year, and it announced the career: a physiologist of the gall bladder turned New Guinea ornithologist turned synthesiser of everything, whose real subject was the human species treated with the tools he used on birds.
The book is now read as the seed catalogue. The conquest chapter grew into Guns, Germs, and Steel, which won this same prize and the Pulitzer in 1998; the environmental chapters grew into Collapse; the sexuality chapters into Why Is Sex Fun. Frans de Waal, reviewing it, praised the wit and breadth, and the breadth is the point: it remains the best single volume introduction to Diamond's method and to its risks, the criticisms later aimed at the famous sequels, determinism, overreach, the just so story, all having their first targets here.