Jared Diamond is sort of a rock star in the sphere of biogeography (and science in general depending on your perspective). He is more a doom-sayer than a soothe-sayer, a prophet warning of the destruction of society and mankind as a whole. His magnum opus and prophetic text " Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" has received accolades from a variety of sources, the least of which was the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Having read that book myself, I came into his lesser-known essay " The Third Chimpanzee " with the expectation that it would be entertaining and enlightening at the same time. Gladly, I was not disappointed, but a glaring issue exists that I will address later. The first book published by Jared Diamond, " The Third Chimpanzee " explores the progression of human evolution in four parts. In the first, he explores the biological premises of our relationship to two other primate species, the common and pygmy chimpanzees (now c
Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan , or The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, is a veritable juggernaut (pun intended) of a book. It is Hobbes' magnum opus, having been circulated widely by the turn of the 17th and 18th Centuries at a time when England was plunged into civil war. Rather than rebel against the new political order (a war crime according to Hobbes which I will revisit later in this post), Hobbes' central thesis is to submit to the absolute authority of an established commonwealth (preferably, in Hobbes' point of view, a "Christian" one), which he compares to the overwhelming biblical sea monster, the Leviathan. Having just finished reading it, I would like to convey my thoughts on his central themes in as short a post as allowed by the breadth of the knowledge he passed on with this read. For this post, I will stick to part 1 (On Man), and deal with the subsequent parts of the book in later posts. Summary of P