Why Has Jared Diamond Made Lists Since Age Three?

Jared Diamond has made lists ever since age three. His mother, a teacher who loved teaching, taught him to read when he was three, and he began a notebook he still has. He listed rivers, animals, animals of the Rocky Mountains, and birds of Europe. He also listed the streetcar numbers on the Boston streetcar system. He was a lister, and he loves making lists.

Making lists has given Jared Diamond a lot of mileage in biology. After his PhD, he was a membrane biologist. Among his contributions, he carried out the largest study ever of how permeable a biological membrane is to non-electrolytes. He and his first post-doctoral student measured the permeability of rabbit gallbladder to 210 non-electrolytes. They are all organic chemicals, including branched and non-branched molecules and molecules with oxygen groups or sulfur groups. He loved the project.

Jared Diamond has studied New Guinea birds since 1964. New Guinea has about 600 bird species, and he has encountered and gotten to know most of them. When he is falling asleep at night, he often recites lists of New Guinea birds to himself, sometimes by their foreign names and sometimes by their Latin names.