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.
Now we do have many examples of transitional sequences.
Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis.
A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans, and so forth. Its warped space whirls around the central singularity like air in a tornado.
Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed: It is safe, and you can't get safer than safe.
The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.
False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.
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