I'm Professor Jim Al-Khalili. And today in Discovery from the BBC, I'm talking to Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of geography at the University of California in Los Angeles. For most of us scientists, myself included, the search for ultimate explanations leads us to define our questions ever more precisely, to zoom in on something and study it to the level of detail that non-scientists can find bewildering. But for Jared Diamond, constantly asking why has taken him in the opposite direction, asking ever bigger questions and seeking easy-to-understand answers. He started his life scientific studying the precise mechanism by which our gall bladders absorb salts, but mid-career started asking a much bigger question: when and how did we become uniquely human, not just another species of chimpanzee? What causes some societies to thrive and others to fail? And most recently, what can developed countries learn from traditional societies?
Welcome, Jared Diamond.
And it's a pleasure to be with you today.
Well, many people would know you from your books, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse. But I want to talk first about your lifelong involvement with Papua New Guinea, a place you visited many many times over the years. Why Papua New Guinea?
I went out to the island of New Guinea, which is divided between the country Papua New Guinea in the east and Indonesian New Guinea in the west when I was 26 years old, thirsty for adventure, young and ignorant.
