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.
Science is but an image of the truth.
Some experts say we are moving back to the pre-antibiotic era. No. This will be a post-antibiotic era. In terms of new replacement antibiotics, the pipeline is virtually dry. A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child's scratched knee could once again kill.
Data is like garbage. You'd better know what you are going to do with it before you collect it.
Mathematics deals exclusively with the relations of concepts to each other without consideration of their relation to experience.
The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.
If your economy grows [by] 4 percent, you ought to reduce child mortality 4 percent.
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