The Ohio State University Discovery Themes, the Humanities Institute and the Inter-Professional Council present the Provost's Discovery Themes Lecturer Program featuring Jared Diamond on "The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?"
Diamond, professor of geography at UCLA, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and author of the bestselling books, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Why Is Sex Fun?, The Third Chimpanzee and The World Until Yesterday, Natural Experiments of History. His most recent book, The Third Chimpanzee for Young People: On the Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, is an adaptation of his book, The Third Chimpanzee, intended for the future generation and the future they’ll help build.
Diamond began his scientific career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical society.
Amony his many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Fellowship and the Lewis Thomas Prize Honoring the Scientist as Poet.
About Diamond’s talk:
Diamond compares life in modern, industrialized societies with traditional ways of life and argues that traditional societies have much to teach us about conflict resolution, care of elders and children, risk management, multilingualism and nutrition. Focusing on how we can improve contemporary society by learning lessons from the past, Diamond’s message is both urgent and persuasive.
This is Diamond's most personal speech to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people and others. He doesn't romanticize traditional societies, but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk and physical fitness have much to teach us.
This event is free and open to the public. Doors open at 6 p.m.
Registration requested. www.go.osu.edu/jareddiamond
