The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal

Jared Diamond's exploration of how the human animal diverged from the other two chimpanzee species, the evolutionary origins of our capacities for language, art, agriculture, genocide, and environmental destruction — and what that evolutionary inheritance means for our future.

Diamond's earlier book — the work from which the 'societal dominance' argument of Guns, Germs, and Steel was later expanded — sits on Munger's list as evolutionary biology applied to human nature. The two-percent genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees that produced entirely different species is a model for how small input differences in a startup (a different founder, a different timing, a different incentive structure) can produce completely divergent outcomes. For founders, the book is a case study in how small initial conditions amplify through evolutionary processes into large final differences — the same logic that governs why some companies compound and others stall.