I recently finished a nice book called ‘The Third Chimpanzee’ written by Jared Diamond. There is hardly a book I have ever read which such a variety of interesting themes. I knew Jared Diamond from a book – Collapse – I have read in my last Christmas holidays and back then I was very happy with that book, too.
Collapse is a very extended argumentation that all civilizations in history which collapsed had a similar pattern for their breakdown. Diamond is talking about the famous people of the Easter Islands (Rapanui) and about the Anazazi (natives of Northern America). I wisely chose the words ‘very extended’ for this book because it has 400 pages and sometimes it was hard to read everything without becoming bored. Nevertheless, after this book my general education had grown and now I understand social and cultural interdependencies on this planet a little bit better.
The main theme of the book ‘The Third Cimpanzee’ is supported by ‘Collapse’. First of all Dimond gives a good overview of how humans became like they are and what herritage we all have in our genes. 
He gives some good reasons why we could be called a ‘third chimpanzee’. After the first half of the book the theme is shrinking to the consequences of human culture and economy on this planet and where it leads to. It is hard to explain all the intersting facts and arguments in a short post but to give a little taste of some of them here some questions aswered inside the book:
- Why do humans have such a complex emotional and social sturcture, including love?
- Should we give chimpanzees human rights?
- Why was the past not a ‘Golden Age’ (contrary to Rousseau)?
- Why, based on our experiece, we will never meet alien life?
- Why there are human races and why it is an absolute nonsense to make a difference between races?
- Is it a sheer accident that the western world dominates the globe?
- etc.
