Guns, Germs and Steel: Why This Diamond Doesn't Shine Jared Diamond is author of one of those semi-academic books that get on all the book lists and award lists and review lists because it says what the intellectual establishment wants you to believe, which is usually well toward left of center and generally veering into the ditch. Diamond's book made a particular hit because it is the only book in the known universe (ie, California, Washington and New Yawk) which has proposed an antithesis to that sub-rosa thesis of white racialists and white supremacists, to wit, that the white race has reigned supreme in most of the world for the last three thousand years or so because it has SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE. Diamond, however -- being the clever fellow that he is, put forth the theory that white success was not due to white intelligence (Diamond, after all, is an equalitarian, which means that he believes that highbrow equals lowbrow, stupid equals smart, and of course, black equals white), but rather to GEOGRAPHY, which is not surprising when you think about it, since Diamond is a Professor of Geography at the University of Whereverthehell. (Here we are reminded of the old joke about the tailor whose success led to an audience with the Pope. When he returned home, a friend asked him, "What kind of a man is the Pope, really?" The tailor responded, "Oh, he's a 38 small.")
Contrary to the reader's expectation, we must grant that the Diamond hypothesis is at least believable. His thesis is basically that Eurasian whites grew up in circumstances which allowed them to develop their culture more rapidly than those of other lands -- they had better animals to domesticate, better grains for which to pound their plowshares, and more lethal germs to cull their population, with the result in the latter case that they spread the little buggers everywhere and killed off so many that dominating the world was a virtual cakewalk at the Darktown Strutters' Ball, with the Darktown Strutters as the victims.
Now as I said earlier, Diamond's thesis is believable, and I am sure that a great many of Diamond's fellow leftists believe it. But the ugly fact is that Diamond's thesis can no more be proved or disproved than, well, the white racialists' theory that white dominance rests on superior white intelligence. What I am getting at is that history is so complex that there is very little point in trying to maintain that this event or that event was THE cause, or THE PRIMARY CAUSE, of some other event. It is a bit like the old saying about 'For want of a nail, a shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, a horse was lost; for want of a horse, a rider was lost; for want of a rider, a battle was lost...'. Maybe, indeed, you can trace some event down to the point of a nail, but is this to say that no other event could have changed things? Maybe if they had just thought to send their message by pigeon... This, of course, is not to say that Diamond's thesis is 'wrong' or that it fails to be thought-provoking. But if the late philosopher Karl Popper is to believed, then Diamond's thesis must fail on the proposition that it is not FALSIFIABLE, ie, that there is no conceivable data that can possibly make Diamond's thesis untrue (tho there is undoubtedly data which can make it seem LESS PROBABLE). Now I don't happen to agree with Popper on the matter of falsification, but, hell, if I can drop a name like Popper's into the stew, I figure I can win a few Brownie points, and maybe even get the melting pot aboiling.
But even if we do not do the boogie-woogie with Karl, it remains a fact that the white racialist theory is one up on Diamond. More specifically, Occam's razor -- also known as the Law of Parsimony -- enforces on scientists the rule that they should adopt the simplest theory that fits all the facts, and attributing white dominance to white intelligence is much simpler than a complex theory like Diamond's, in which one is forced to reason out dozens of such arcanities as that Africa's zebras are really less domesticable than Eurasia's ponies.
But there is much more than this to the fallibility of Diamond's thesis. In particular, Diamond argues that Eurasia is an advantageous locale -- a doubtful proposition at best, since many white racialists argue that Africa is the WORLD'S RICHEST CONTINENT, a point they make in the context of arguments that black intelligence is inferior because blacks, tho born to African riches, have never developed a civilization worthy of the name (Sorry, Jack -- the Egyptians were NOT black). Indirectly the same argument has been made by black scholar Thomas Sowell (and independently by Yours Truly) that whites came out of Africa because they were PUSHED OUT BY SUPERIOR NEGROES, and survived only after the cull of the Great North had winnowed their number down to those with the high intelligence that allowed them to survive in the bleakness of Eurasia. Thus while negroes were at one time superior, they never got beyond the rich man's game of plucking bananas and harvesting worms, and thus allowed whites to gain and finally surpass them in the evolutionary struggle. This, however, is something we suspect is not unknown in evolutionary annals: It sounds also like the story of the Jews who apparently have been persecuted into superiority by whites (ie, only superior Jews have survived so many generations of Christian persecution) -- whites who are now at the mercy of those Jews who are riding high because of Yahweh's evolutionary promise of punishment for his enemies 'unto the fourth and fifth generations of them that hate me.'
But if Diamond's thesis meets its antithesis in Sowell, it also meets a roadblock in Prof Richard Lynn's extensive cataloging of 'IQ and the Wealth of Nations', something which shows a clear correlation of IQ and wealth. This, then, constitutes powerful support for IQ as the fons et origo of culture -- it cannot prove the thesis, as I have already argued, but it can certainly make it a lot more believable.
In conclusion, we see that Diamond, as a leftist Jew, wishes to knock the white race off its pedestal of superiority because he doesn't think it should be there (after all, it is only JEWS who are the CHOSEN). One way to do this is to adopt equalitarianism, which denies that racial superiority is possible. But this does not satisfy Diamond, who is more honest than some of his fellows (or at least recognizes that dishonesty is not going to buy him lunch), so he invents a theory that acknowledges white superiority, but does it in such a way as to impute no virtue to whites, but only the luck of being born in the right place. Personally, I think that white intelligence is a lot better explanation for white dominance and the superiority of white culture, and while my view, like Diamond's thesis, can never be proved, I think it will get us a lot further down the road without running us into that proverbial ditch.