DAILY BEAST Column: …Much like the humans he documents who came to rule Earth, Jared Diamond is out with a new book sure to increase his rule in the classroom. Most students known Diamond from the PBS documentary based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning bookGuns, Germs, and Steel. Now, Diamond is out with a new edition of his popular book The Third Chimpanzee, this time adapted “for young people” by Seven Stories Press and Rebecca Stefoff. The book, for those who missed the original, discusses how and why humans evolved differently than did chimpanzees, who differ from us in DNA by only 2 percent…
Beyond the generally enlightening narrative and eye-opening hypothesis about how and why we are the way we are now (for Diamond it was the development of language), part of the joy of reading his books has always been the neat little aperçus he drops in. In the case of this text, it’s tidbits like how the difference in size between males and females is related to the size of the harem. For southern elephant seals, in which the male is three tons and the female is seven hundred pounds, a male has an average of 48 females in his harem.
The new book may say “for young people” on the cover, but don’t let that put you off if you’re not so young any longer. Anyone not looking to wade through the sometimes dense pages of Guns, Germs, and Steel or the original Third Chimpanzee is welcome here. This edition is definitely a digestible and informative dip into our past… (more)
