Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.

— Jared Diamond

Recreational sex is thus supposed to function as the glue holding a human couple together while they cooperate in rearing their helpless baby.

— Jared Diamond

Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.

— Jared Diamond

Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

— Jared Diamond

Sex in social mammals is generally carried out in public, before the gazes of other members of the troop.

— Jared Diamond

Sex is flagrantly separated from reproduction in a few species, including bonobos and dolphins.

— Jared Diamond

Take air quality in the United States today: It's about 30 percent better than it was 25 years ago, even though there are now more people driving more cars.

— Jared Diamond

Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face t

— Jared Diamond

Technology has to be invented or adopted.

— Jared Diamond

Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses, with 20–25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source of fiber and oil (termed linseed oil: flax seeds are about 40 percent oil). Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.

— Jared Diamond