Life & Wisdom Quote by Jared Diamond

Diamond’s line lands like a cool rebuttal to techno-optimism: the bottleneck in human progress isn’t always a lack of ingenuity, but a lack of raw biological candidates. By framing domestication as something essentially “completed” in prehistory, he reverses the usual story of modernity as nonstop improvement. The punch is in the implication that ancient people, armed with patience, hunger, and close observation rather than labs, already ran the world’s biggest agricultural R-and-D program - and they did it under brutal selection pressure. If a large mammal was docile enough, social enough, fast-breeding enough, and not inclined to panic-kill you, it eventually ended up yoked, milked, or ridden.

The subtext is classic Guns, Germs, and Steel Diamond: history is lopsided not because some societies were smarter, but because they inherited different ecological inventories. “Every possible” is a deliberate overstatement that dares you to argue; it compresses a messy evolutionary story into a clean constraint. The phrase “despite the efforts of modern science” adds a pointed humility: genetic knowledge can tweak traits, but it can’t conjure a temperament that evolution never built, or a species whose life cycle simply doesn’t scale for human use.

Contextually, the quote defends a structural view of history against heroic narratives. It nudges the reader to see domestication not as a moral achievement but as a contingency: a one-time harvest of a limited set of animals, with enduring consequences for labor, war, disease, and inequality.