[2] Originally trained in biochemistry and physiology,[3] Diamond has published in many fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology.

The book also examines the animal origins of language, art, agriculture, smoking and drug use, and other apparently uniquely human attributes.

[citation needed] The first part of the book focuses on reasons why only a few species of wild plants and animals proved suitable for domestication.

The second part discusses how local food production based on those domesticates led to the development of dense and stratified human populations, writing, centralized political organization, and epidemic infectious diseases.

[27] In his third book, Why is Sex Fun?, also published in 1997, Diamond discusses evolutionary factors underlying features of human sexuality that are generally taken for granted but that are highly unusual among our animal relatives.

Those features include a long-term pair relationship (marriage), coexistence of economically cooperating pairs within a shared communal territory, provision of parental care by fathers as well as by mothers, having sex in private rather than in public, concealed ovulation, female sexual receptivity encompassing most of the menstrual cycle (including days of infertility), female menopause, and distinctive secondary sexual characteristics.

As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, he argues against explanations for the failure of past societies based primarily on cultural factors, instead focusing on ecology.

Among the societies mentioned in the book are the Norse and Inuit of Greenland, the Maya, the Anasazi, the indigenous people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Japan, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and modern Montana.

Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse was translated into dozens of languages, became an international best-seller, and was the basis of a television documentary produced by the National Geographic Society.

[33][34] In 2008, Diamond published an article in The New Yorker entitled "Vengeance Is Ours",[35] describing the role of revenge in tribal warfare in Papua New Guinea.

The book's title stems from the fact that it is not possible to study history by the preferred methods of the laboratory sciences, i.e., by controlled experiments comparing replicated human societies as if they were test tubes of bacteria.

The problems discussed include dividing space, resolving disputes, bringing up children, treatment of elders, dealing with dangers, formulating religions, learning multiple languages, and remaining healthy.

The nations considered are Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the U.S.[40] Diamond identifies four modern threats: nuclear weapons, climate change, limited resources, and extreme inequality.

[42] Daniel Immerwahr, reviewing for The New Republic, reports that Diamond has "jettisoned statistical analysis" and the associated rigour, even by the standards of his earlier books, which have themselves sometimes been challenged on this basis.

[27][46][47] Eastern long-beaked echidna Zaglossus bartoni diamondi was named in honor of Jared Diamond,[60] as was the frog Austrochaperina adamantina.