The Third Chimpanzee
This is a fascinating book. I’ve been working on it for some time because I keep restarting it and marking it up.
Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
How the human species changed, within a short time, from just another species of big mammal to a world conqueror; and how we acquired the capacity to reverse all that progress overnight
The book is filled with a myriad of ethical issues raised by the similarity between humans and animals. Ethical questions which, to me, should be addressed even by those who do not consider themselves Darwinists, or even evolutionists. While I am sure I will have more to say about these ethical questions after I’ve finished the book, I also find several quotes from the book intriguing to both my interest in evolutionary biology and my belief in the spirit of man. There are so many and they are so thought provoking that I will probably post here many times about them. The prologue opens with this one:
It’s obvious that humans are unlike all animals. It’s also obvious that we’re a species of big mammal down to the minutest details of our anatomy and our molecules. That contradiction is the most fascinating feature of the human species.