Diamond came up on TED Talks this week, and he is a great example of Edge’s idea of the Third Culture – taking the sciences and humanities and putting them together to get to the roots of how the world works.

Jared Diamond specialises in how societies collapse and how cultures have become different, by not only focusing on the social and political but also the environmental and evolutionary. One of his books, Guns Germs and Steel, tells the story of how human history took different paths and is one of my top science-related reads.

National Geographic ran a 3-part series on the book, and here it is on GoogleVideo:

Here are Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

In this talk, the comb-over king discusses how societies collapse:

Jared Diamond’s Edge profile

American Scientist interview

Amazon search results for his books.