Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond

Many of my fellow International Development students know Jared Diamond as the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel or other popular science books I would guess that fewer people know about some of the work that he did before getting into this field. In my conservation biology class on Thursday, my professor told us about one of his studies from 1975 regarding bird species in New Guinea and its nearby islands.

Diamond looked at 141 species of birds found in the area. He then looked at which species of birds were present on each island. Comparing the makeup of species on each island he tried to determine if the subsets were always predictable with the more competitive species persisting on each island.

He found that competitive ability was important and there were "forbidden combinations" of bird species that were never able to exist together. The makeup of species also depended on abiotic factors like the size of the island. On the larger islands, the species that were less competitive were able to escape from the dominant species and there were fewer species on small islands.

It's interesting to look at the life of someone like Jared Diamond and see how many different things in which he's been involved. I would guess that there are more people who have read his recent work compared to his older studies, but I think that these older studies are also quite interesting and worth a look.