Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
Why are there modern unequal distributions of power and economics among different nations and peoples?

Why did civilizations progress differently across the world?

I’m currently 16 minutes into a 16-hour audiobook, and there’s already so much I want to note. I don’t know how I’m going to make it through this one.

New Guineans, in the author’s impression, are more intelligent than Western Europeans. Possible explanations include that New Guineans are mentally engaged from birth, regularly interacting with other children and adults, something universally accepted in psychology as beneficial to cognitive development. In contrast, many modern Western children spend a lot of time in passive activities, such as watching TV.

Genetic selection also differed: for Europeans, it had more to do with surviving disease; in New Guinea, survival was shaped more by avoiding war and murder, where those who were more intelligent were more likely to pass on their genes.

Nature vs. nurture.

The “nature” argument has dominated European explanations for human differences for at least the past several centuries. This likely stems from the need among whites to justify the enslavement of Africans. The argument was that Africans were naturally inferior and subhuman, and that slavery was somehow good for them. Since then, whites have sought ways to prove that Africans and other nonwhites are genetically inferior, most prominently through the use of IQ tests, a trend that persists today. Often dismissed is the effect of environment on the development of different societies.

Originally written in July 2020