(Note that Diamond is not shy about
giving his books ambitious subtitles!)
Before Diamond began writing for a
popular audience, around his 50th birthday in 1987, he
was a professor at UCLA's medical school and a leading
birdwatcher in New Guinea. His early magazine articles
in Discover and Natural History were
collected in his initial and, to my mind, best book,
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of
the Human Animal. His subsequent big books,
Guns, Germs, and Steel
and Collapse, were both sketched out
in tour de force chapters in The Third
Chimpanzee.
The power-to-weight ratio of
Diamond's writing didn't improve when he expanded them
into doorstop books. As a prose stylist, Diamond, while
perfectly adequate, isn't quite in the same class as
Gould, Dawkins, Wilson, or Pinker, and his long books
can be a tough slog.
Third Chimpanzee was also
distinguished by a fair degree of courage. Diamond
tackled politically incorrect questions like: Why did
most of the big mammals that lived in North America at
the time the Indians arrived—such as wooly mammoths,
camels, and horses—go extinct so quickly after the first
Indians arrived across the Bering Strait?
Diamond's answer: the Indians ate
them.
In fact, back in 1986 Diamond
published a study in Nature that is so unfit for
polite society that it would probably get him lynched by
his current admirers if they ever heard of it: "Ethnic
Differences: Variations in Human Testis Size."
Personally, I don't have a lot of first-hand experience,
so I couldn't give you my opinion on the validity of
Diamond's findings on racial differences in testicle
size. But Diamond seemed pretty fascinated by the
subject.
Unfortunately, the market for the
uncomfortable truths is a lot smaller than the market
for what people want to hear. So after his initial book,
Diamond remained a cult figure.
But Diamond has certainly solved
that problem. He turned to the topic of race,
offering impressive-sounding rationalizations for what
intellectuals wanted to believe anyway.
Diamond helped launch the
Race Does Not Exist fad with his November, 1994
Discover article "Race
Without Color." In this, he suggested that we
could define races on any physical characteristic we
chose. Norwegians and Nigerian Fulanis could belong to
the Lactose Tolerant race and Japanese and Nigerian
Ibos belong to the Lactose Intolerant race.
The reason that defining Fulanis
and Ibo as belonging to separate races is obviously
ridiculous is because the most useful definition of race
is not built on any particular trait. Instead, it's
built on ancestry. We all intuitively know that Fulanis
and Ibos are more racially similar to each other because
they have more recent ancestors in common with each
other than they do with
Norwegians or
Japanese. Race starts with boy meets girl, followed
by baby.
That line of thought suggests that
the most useful definition of a racial group is "a
partly inbred extended family," as I pointed out a
few years later in
response to Diamond.
But, when it comes to race,
obfuscation pays a lot better than illumination.
Diamond turned himself into Jared
Diamond, Superstar! with his 1997 bestseller
Guns, Germs, and Steel. This book purported to
Disprove Racism, which he defined tendentiously as
merely believing that genetic differences in
human capabilities along racial lines exist.
This book certainly made him a
fixture as a
speaker at the tonier sort of conference. (For
instance, I saw Diamond at legendary financier
Michael Milken's annual confab.)
Diamond's goal in his book was to
explain why Eurasians conquered Africans, Australians,
and Americans instead of the other way around.
Conventional social scientists shy away from such a
fundamental question out of fear of what they might
find. And Diamond duly
proclaimed genetic explanations
"racist" and
"loathsome." He set out to reaffirm the equality
of humanity by showing the radical inequality of the
continents. To him, the three most important engines of
history were location, location, and location.
Diamond
asked:
"Why
didn't rhino-mounted Bantu warriors swarm north to
decimate horse-mounted Romans and create an empire that
spanned Africa and Europe?"
His answer: rhinos and other
African animals are impossible to domesticate, unlike
Eurasian beasts such as horses and cattle.
Guns, Germs, and Steel
contained a lot of useful information and reasonable
speculation. But a little thought raises serious
questions:
But those are quibbles compared to
the central contradiction in Guns, Germs, and Steel:
Diamond makes environmental differences between the
continents seem so compelling that it's hard to believe
that humans would not become somewhat genetically
adapted to their homelands through natural selection.
Most of his readers must have
assumed that natural selection can't work fast enough to
diversify humans. But Diamond knows that's not true, as
his lactose tolerance illustration demonstrated.
This mutation didn't begin to
spread until people started milking animals sometime in
the last 13,000 years. However, by now
98 percent of Swedes are lactose tolerant as adults
versus two percent of Thais.
This example of human biodiversity
is hardly trivial: evolving the ability to digest milk
has had a sizable
economic and cultural impact on, say, the Swiss.
Self-defeatingly, Diamond began
Guns, Germs, and Steel by making a eugenic argument
that New Guineans are smarter than whites because
"natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has
probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in
more densely populated, politically complex societies…"
Of course, the reality is actually
that while New Guineans are, on average, no doubt better
at Stone Age life than you or I would be, people whose
ancestors have survived for many generations in
"densely populated, politically complex societies"
tend to be better at functioning in the modern world.
As far as I can tell, Diamond only
lectures, never debates. I've never heard of him ever
allowing himself to be dragged into a public discussion
with a well-informed opponent.
I talked to Diamond once after he
gave a speech. We were chatting nicely until I asked him
a tough question along the lines outlined above:
Wouldn't different
agricultural environments select for different
hereditary traits in different locales?
I mentioned how James Q. Wilson's
The Marriage Problem
has a couple of chapters on how tropical
agriculture in
West Africa affects family structures. Since women
can raise enough food to feed their kids, men don't
invest as much in their individual children. So wouldn't
the kind of man with the most surviving children be
different in a tropical agricultural environment, where
he doesn't need to work too much to support them, than
in a temperate agricultural environment, where he does?
Now, Diamond has spent a lot of
time birdwatching in New Guinea, which is similar to
Africa. So he knows all about what tropical agriculture
selects for. But he had no intention of touching
that tar-baby with a ten-foot pole. To get away
from me and my question, he grabbed his papers and
literally dog-trotted at about 5 mph out of the
auditorium!
Diamond can run, but he won't be
able to hide from the facts forever. I hear there are
now several scientific papers in the publication
pipeline about racial differences in genes that affect
cognition and personality, each comparable in importance
to the recent blockbuster paper on the genetic roots of
Ashkenazi Jewish IQ,
Diamond's latest bestseller,
Collapse, is about "ecocide"
or unintentional ecological suicide, due to
environmental disasters such as
deforestation. Ecological concerns are pooh-poohed
by many free-market ideologues, but
environmental problems, which economists call
"externalities," are indeed inherent in any economic
system. And Diamond supplies a lot of useful, if
overstated, information.
But "ecocide," while
significant, is less important than Diamond implies.
That's why he spends so much time on trivial
edge-of-the-world doomed cultures, like the Vikings in
Greenland and the
Polynesians on Easter Island, rather than on more
important collapses such as the decline and fall of the
Roman Empire.
Generally, homicide, not suicide,
is the main cause of collapse. Societies get
invaded and
overwhelmed.
Diamond cites the disappearance of
the Maya—but what about the Aztecs and the Incas, still
going strong when the Spanish arrived? He points to the
Anasazi Indians—but there were also the Cherokee,
the Sioux, and countless others. He notes the Easter
Islanders—but I counter with the Maoris, the Tasmanians,
the Australian Aborigines, the Chatham Islanders
(exterminated by the Maori), and so forth. He cites the
Vikings in
Greenland—but how about the Saxons in Britain and
the Arabs in Sicily, both conquered by descendents of
the Vikings?
Still, Collapse can be
valuable, especially if you look for the parts where
Diamond shows more courage than is normal for him these
days.
A close reading demonstrates that
Diamond is quite unenthusiastic about mass immigration.
For instance, in his chapter about the ecological
fragility of Australia, he relays this optimistic hope
for better policy in the future: "Contrary to their
government and business leaders, 70 percent of
Australians say they want less rather than more
immigration."
Diamond also points out that the
quality of immigrants matters. In an interesting chapter
comparing the two countries that share the island of
Hispaniola, the mediocre but livable
Dominican Republic and dreadful
Haiti, he notes that one reason the Dominican
Republic is now both more prosperous and less deforested
and eroded than tragic Haiti is the difference in their
people:
"… the
Dominican Republic, with its Spanish-speaking population
of predominantly European ancestry, was both more
receptive and more attractive to European immigrants and
investors than was Haiti with its Creole-speaking
population composed overwhelmingly of black former
slaves."
Ironically, when I left the
"Collapse" exhibit, with its warnings about
overpopulation, at Los Angeles's Natural History museum,
I turned out of the parking lot onto
Martin Luther King Boulevard, where the
billboards were in Spanish. In LA, the
African Americans have been pushed off even MLK
Blvd. by Latin American immigrants.
Diamond writes:
"I have
seen how Southern California has changed over the last
39 years, mostly in ways that make it less appealing…
The complaints voiced by virtually everybody in Los
Angeles are those directly related to our growing and
already high population… While there are optimists who
explain in the abstract why increased population will be
good and how the world can accommodate it, I have never
met an Angeleno … who personally expressed a desire for
increased population in the area where he or she
personally lived... California's population growth is
accelerating, due almost entirely to immigration and to
the large average family sizes of the immigrants after
their arrival."
Unfortunately, Diamond's bravery
then breaks down again. Rather than call for doing
something about immigration, such as enforcement of the
laws against illegal immigration, he merely laments,
"The border between California and Mexico is long and
impossible to patrol effectively …"
No, it's not. Israel, with two
percent of America's population, is successfully fencing
off its West Bank border, which is ten percent as long.
In another important section,
Diamond illustrates how ethnic diversity makes
environmental cooperation more difficult. He praises the
Dutch as the most cooperative nation on earth and
attributes their awareness of and willingness to tackle
problems to their shared memory of the 1953 flood that
drowned 2,000 Netherlanders living below sea level.
(Unfortunately, he doesn't mention whether Holland's
rapidly growing immigrant Muslim population remembers
when the dikes failed 52 years ago.)
Diamond notes that there are three
possible solutions to what Garrett Hardin called "the
tragedy of the commons," or the tendency for
individuals to over-consume resources and under-invest
in responsibilities held in common, leading to
ecological collapse.
Wow!
(A classic supporting case that
that Diamond doesn't bring up: American shrimp fishermen
in Texas were universally denounced as racists in the
late 1970s when they resisted the government's efforts
to encourage Vietnamese refugees to become shrimpers in
their waters. French director Louis Malle made a movie,
Alamo Bay,
denouncing ugly Americans fighting
hardworking immigrants.
(What got lost in all the
tsk-tsking is that fishing communities always
resist newcomers, especially hardworking ones, because
of the sizable chance that the outsiders who don't know
the local rules or don't care about them will ruin the
ecological balance and wipe out the stocks of fish—all
things for which Vietnamese fishermen are now
notorious).
The evidence Diamond assembles
indicates, although of course he never dares to state it
bluntly, that the fundamental requirement for dealing
effectively with environmental danger is: start with
a population that's limited in number, cohesive,
educated, and affluent.
Needless to say, mass immigration
from the Third World works against all those
characteristics.
My conclusion: keep in mind while
reading Diamond's bestsellers that, after a promising
start, he mostly sold out to political correctness. Then
you can salvage something from his books.
It's not edifying behavior from a
tenured professor—but in the current climate, we
have to take what we can get.
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]
