La Comunidad Académica en Línea

Hace unos meses que leo este libro, Guns, Germs and Steel de Jared Diamond, es un poco complicado entender lo que describe en su teorí­a, que es por demás interesante, pero ahora en la red

me he encontrado algunas opiniones, claro sesgadas, pero que permiten ir entendiedo esta teorí­a. Reví­senlo es interesante:

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond is one of those books by the racial egalitarians that tries to disprove theories that do

not exist in the first place. Diamond wants to show that Western dominance and technological advancement was not a matter of a higher

intellect but was due to environmental and historical circumstances. The problem is, I am not aware of any advocates who try to make the

argument that because Western culture is more advanced, they are therefore the smartest. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Psychometricians

have shown that East Asians are more intelligent than Caucasians, and that they do not lead us technologically (outside Japan) because of

environmental or political/cultural differences. So Diamond has written a book to disprove a theory that does not exist. He is attacking a

straw man.

What he is really doing however is attacking Western culture, for no other reason than he finds it distasteful because of his hatred for the

existing power structure based on his egalitarian desire to reshape politics. For this reason, this book is filled with a history of how plants

and animals were domesticated, how germs became prevalent at the dawn of modern civilizations, and how advanced societies use weapons

to suppress conquered peoples.

The detailed analysis of these issues tends to be too long, and will be of limited interest to most people.

But he does go to great lengths to show how only Eurasia could have developed in the way it did, and that other parts of the world just did

not have the proper environment for modern development. I don't take issue with his arguments. In many ways they are "just so" stories that I

found credible but of little real interest when it comes to judging the worth of people, which he seems to be trying to do in this book. But

one must wonder how such a mundane book, with so much speculation and so little impact on the real world, managed to get the Pullitzer

Prize? And of course the reason is simple. This is another book by a Marxist with a universalist agenda. It is the same genre as Gould's The

Mismeasure of Man, et al. It serves the political interests of those who review, publish and promote authors who are radical

environmentalists.

So the salient parts of this book are summed up in just a few pages by Diamond, and expose his bias, no doubt a reflection of his extreme

ability at self-deception in the promotion of his political agenda. I will discuss these short but important aspects of his argument against

Western culture and I should say the sociobiological paradigm he dislikes so much. In fact, he doesn't even get past the first page before he

proclaims [1] the book is not racist because he ignores differences between races. So before he gets past the first page he boldly claims that

only racists would include biological differences between population groups, the standard academic Marxist shrieking that we have heard

for the last thirty years. Anyone who even considers racial differences is a racist. So on this proclamation alone, the hypothesis put forth, is

irreparably flawed because only a biased perspective will be allowed, one that denies that humans have a genetic basis for being human.

http://home.att.net/~eugenics/Guns.htm