Yet, he too proves unable to escape the foundational beliefs and logical consequences of Darwinian survival of the fittest. Diamond, a passion to gain wisdom about his world and his fellow man that will help preserve our species. There is a deep humanity and empathy to Dr. Unlike the new atheists, he does not seek to tear down the religious beliefs of his readers or prevent them from passing on those beliefs to their children. Diamond is an irenic, non-combative person with no axe to grind. Diamond rather than Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, or Sam Harris, for Dr. His argument is a compelling one, but it was not until I read his earlier work, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1992), that I realized how utterly grounded his thought is in Darwinism. Diamond, a professor of geography at UCLA, famously argued that the West’s conquest of Africa, Australia, and the New World was due to geographical rather than genetic differences. The truth of this statement was brought home to me again as I read a book by Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). Even the most clear- and open-minded of modernists find themselves unable to think outside of the Darwinian paradigm… or to escape the implications of that paradigm. For on his shoulders rests the modern world. He is the untouchable one: the one who must not be dethroned, abandoned, or questioned. Over the last three decades, scores of secular humanist academics have criticized, if not discredited the theories of Freud and Marx.

Of the three founding fathers of modernism-Freud, Marx, and Darwin-only the third remains unscathed in the halls of academia.

The Third Chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond (432 pages, Harper Perennial, 2006)

For the twenty-first-century disciple of Darwin, man-though he possesses no essential, intrinsic worth that separates him from his chimpanzee cousins-has proven himself a most effective destroyer of that very mother nature who evolved him into his present form…

Jared diamond theory