Douglas Adams moderates a discussion between Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and Jared Diamond. The discussion focuses on attempts to apply darwinian principles and explanations to areas other than biology, such as cosmology, language and psychology, as well as pointing out areas that are less likely to have darwinian explanations. Towards the end, the discussion turns to issues of religion and the psychology of belief and imagination.
Jared Diamond, professor of geography at UCLA, received the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1998 for Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Science. His most recent book is Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2004).
Professor Diamond argues that religion has encompassed at least four independent components that have arisen or disappeared at different stages of development of human societies over the last 10,000 years.
Based on Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, Guns, Germs and Steel traces humanity's journey over the last 13,000 years – from the dawn of farming at the end of the last Ice Age to the realities of life in the twenty-first century.
Inspired by a question put to him on the island of Papua New Guinea more than thirty years ago, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” Diamond embarks on a world-wide quest to understand the roots of global inequality.
Why were Europeans the ones to conquer so much of our planet?
Why didn't the Chinese, or the Inca, become masters of the globe instead?
Why did cities first evolve in the Middle East?
Why did farming never emerge in Australia?
And why are the tropics now the capital of global poverty?
