In bookstores round the world, thousands of policy scholars must have had a look at Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, written by Jared Diamond and honored with the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science and a Pulitzer Prize. Intriguing, ambitious, brilliant, demanding, exotic, idiosyncratic, cranky, and irrelevant to policy debate-these must have been typical first impressions, all but the last one correct.
This book must be counted among the many works that to greater or lesser degree have been written to counter, or-as one would guess here-altered to counter more effectively, The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994), a putatively objective remaking of an old and still subjectively appealing argument that the fates of societies are differentiated powerfully, perhaps chiefly, by the comparative distribution of their members' inborn intellectual abilities. Diamond mentions The Bell Curve by name only in an appendix, calling it "[t]he best-known or most notorious recent entrant into the debate about group differences in intelligence" (p.431). But it and its predecessors' arguments were squarely in his mind's eye when aiming his own bolts, as is made clear early and often. "An enormous effort by cognitive psychologists has gone into the search for differences in IQ between peoples of different geographic origins now living in the same country. In particular, numerous white American psychologists have been trying for decades to demonstrate that black Americans of African origins are innately less intelligent than white Americans of European origins" (p.20). Note in passing the author's awareness, which he hopes to impart to his readership, that "black" and "of African origins" are not interchangeable modifiers, and that neither are "white" and "of European origins."
Inexplicably, Diamond's opening attack takes shape as an assertion, drawn "from 33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies," but supported by no citation in what is disappointingly a footnote-free book: "[I]n mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners" (pp.20-21). Is this a lapse of authorial judgment and editorial responsibility, the reader might ask, or is it the first of many problems? It turns out to be a lapse. The weaknesses of a genetically