Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that different societies have unique characteristics that influence their ability to embrace new ideas and innovations.
Jared Diamond points out that the variation in human societies is influenced by multiple independent factors, such as geography, culture, economic systems, and political structures, which together shape their receptiveness to innovation. Understanding these factors is crucial for fostering environments that encourage creativity and adaptation, highlighting the complexity of societal development and progress.
In practice
Discussing the barriers to technology adoption in diverse cultures during a conference.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean β once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.
O telescope, instrument of much knowledge, more precious than any sceptre!
We farm workers are closest to food production. We were the first to recognize the serious health hazards of agriculture pesticides to both consumers and ourselves.
Humans are natural-born scientists. When we're born, we want to know why the stars shine. We want to know why the sun rises.
What is it that keeps you so interested in the telomere? It's so intricate and complicated, and you want to know how it works.
Perfection is crucial in building an aircraft, a bridge, or a high-speed train. The code and mathematics residing just below the surface of the Internet is also this way. Things are either perfectly right or they will not work. So much of the world we work and live in is based upon being correct, being perfect.
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