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Edited on Mon May-22-06 08:12 PM by igil
Just the idea is enough to cause some people to want to hurl firebombs and equally incendiary words.
There are some things we do know. IQ is largely a function of what you're exposed to; few people have their IQ decrease with age (until senescence, at least), and it's possible to crank some aspects of IQ with training. The IQ tests I've taken have either measured verbal knowledge, math reasoning, or spatial manipulations; any IQ test is, at best, partial. Moreover, Diamond has a keep appreciation for different cultures. Many such have trouble comparing cultures, since all they can do is non-judgmentally appreciate.
Diamond's GGS begat the later "Collapse", because it was obvious that he didn't actually quite show what everybody said he proved in GGS. Geography is a precondition for technological advancement, but not sufficient: given sufficient food, sufficient exchange with others, etc., and you can still have a relative dud (by most standards) of a civilization. On the other hand, you can also have a relatively isolated group do some outstanding things.
For example, the European Middle Ages saw a huge amount of advancement in Europe, sometimes taking things transmitted to them through Muslim lands from truly distant countries and finding uses that neither the originators, nor the Muslims, thought of, while at about the same time the 'brilliance' of Islamic civilization was peaking and about to start seriously waning. Same genes, same trade ties, but the culture and utilization of resources altered. In both cases the peasants had hellish lives; but in one case the scholars were after knowledge; in the other, they wanted to make their lives easier. This was unpredictable, given knowledge of anything but culture--and not the culture of the entire 'civilization', but of the class most likely to innovate. Perhaps Collapse can account for it, but I vaguely remember thinking as I read it that Diamond didn't come close. There's this unquieting sense that he managed to account for some pretty important preconditions for a nice civilization, and some pretty important conditions at the time of a civilization's flowering that can lead to its undoing, but that there's still something that he can't say: There's no claim that creating all the preconditions *must* create a flourishing civilization if the other conditions are met. Just that they're necessary, most of the time. His books end, still begging the real question. There's no hint that it's genetics, however.
I remember being taught that not all 'cognitive universals' are truly universal, or learned by members of different cultures at the same rate. So Wolofs came to 'quantativity' late, if the research I read about was valid. Why this was so was unanswered; presumably the researcher wanted tenure.
On the other hand, that there are some genetic differences between 'races', for all their similarities, is also hard to argue against. Meso-Americans do better with certain diets; Europeans learned to deal with lots of starch and sugar millennia ago, and have much lower rates of diabetes than the people more-or-less indigenous to the SW US and Mexico, all things being equal; this has to be accommodation of the Mexican group to their diet, and recent accommodation by Europeans to theirs (in the last 10k years). Some blacks have greater sodium retention, whether due to conditions from the Middle Passage or where their ancestors originated. Sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans have differing average proportions of the two types of muscle in their leg muscles, but those groups have been separated by 50k years or so. There's some evidence some proteins targeted by drugs vary by race. Some genes affecting brain development--it's still unclear what they do--have a geographic distribution showing that they innovated, and spread, at different times after emigration from Africa. Since the difference between us and more primitive species of Homo is putatively developmental, the latter are scary findings. But only moderately so.
What the author fails to show any evidence for is a rather different experiment from the one he suggests. Take me and a San and put us in wilderness, the San will probably live, and I might well die, since a San is trained to survive on his/her own and find food. If I don't die, I'm likely to produce a more comfortable dwelling, given my training. But both depend crucially on training. The real test would be to take two groups of European neonates (for example) and two groups of !Kung neonates, and cross them: give a European + !Kung group the same training in, say, a hypothetically color-blind Wichita school system, and a different European + !Kung group the same training in San folkways. Develop tests for both sets of people, and administer them. Searching for such differences one would, of course, pair either the !Kung and probably either Europeans or S. American indians (or any one of those with Aborigines), since they're probably among the oldest and therefore divergent pairings. But the test would have to be run soon--many Aboriginal groups are near extinction, under Euro-Asian pressure; and the Bantu have pretty much laid claim to just about the last San homeland, finishing what amounts to a long-term (1500 years) genocide campaign.
But in the absence of such a test--which would have to be replicated quite a few times, but won't ever be conducted even once--the default assumption has to be that any differences are vanishingly small. Snazzy statistical analysis might tease the differences out of data, but first we'd have to eliminate a lot of confounds that currently can't be eliminated.
Edited to correctly abbreviate "Guns, Germs, and Steel" as "GGS", not "GSS".
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