At 88, Jared Diamond has metal spikes installed in front of his house. He put them there, he told Fortune, to protect against angry anthropologists. “Half of anthropologists have been very helpful to me,” Diamond cheerily said in a Zoom interview from his office in Los Angeles, “and half resent the fact that I — a gallbladder physiologist who happened to have learned a lot about languages and genetics — am trespassing on their specialty.” He called them a “contentious lot,” adding, “they’ve been really nasty.” It’s a well-earned position for Diamond, the contrarian who won a Pulitzer for his smash 1997...