Guns, Germs, and Steel revisited

In particular, Diamond argues that people in PNG are significantly smarter. "in mental ability, New Guineans are probably genetically superior [my emphasis] to Westerners”: p21. This is sufficiently odd that readers of GGS often refuse to admit that Diamond ever said it.

In arguing that the last actually are first Diamond dismisses the entire field of psychometrics. It’s a ballsy approach – implying that the whole field is just crap not even worth discussing. It’s how I deal with astrology or gender studies. It’s how everybody should have dealt with Freudian analysis.

The problem is that aptitude tests actually work. A one-hour paper-and-pencil test gives a reasonable estimate of a student’s general problem-solving ability.

Regional scores on IQ tests and other educational tests ( PISA, etc) do track regional differences in S&T achievements. Not perfectly – northeast Asians have the highest scores but have not made the largest contributions to the development of modern technology – but pretty well. Populations that have low average scores on such tests have contributed very little to the development of modern science and technology.

Diamond acknowledges, “We see in our daily lives that some of the conquered peoples continue to form an underclass, centuries after the conquests or slave imports took place. The transistor leapt 8,000 miles to launch an electronics industry in Japan – but it did not make the shorter leap to found new industries in Zaire or Paraguay. The nations rising to new power are still ones that were incorporated thousands of years ago into the old centers of dominance. Prospects for world dominance of sub-Saharan Africans, Aboriginal Australians, and Native Americans remain dim.”

Why should that be so? If hunter-gatherers are ” probably more intelligent”, why doesn’t it show? Where’s their Paul Morphy, their Ramanujan, their George Green? If Aboriginals are so smart, why aren’t they rich? Why do they flunk algebra?