[BretLudwig]

((Maybe "Jared Diamond" means "Not All That Goddamned Smart" in some
obscure language. Bret.))



Jared Diamond: Life is full of interest in the New Guinea highlands

"Winston Churchill learned in 1897 while fighting the feuding Pathan
tribesmen of what's now the Pakistan-Afghanistan border:

"Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud. The
numerous tribes and combination of tribes all have their accounts to
settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are
left unpaid€¦ The life of the Pathan is thus full of interest€¦"

Now Jared Diamond has published in The New Yorker an account of a tribal
feud among New Guinea highlanders based on his native chauffeur's old war
stories. It's an interesting description of the logic of violence when
there's no state with a monopoly on force to put an end to squabbling.

The uncle of Diamond's pal was killed in battle by another tribe in 1992,
so honor demanded that his nephew avenge it. The young tribesmen spent
three years organizing his revenge, which involved expensive diplomacy
with many other tribes to borrow their warriors, six battles, and thirty
deaths before vengeance was finally his.

Granted, that just meant the ball was now in the other tribe's court to
get revenge on him, but at least it gives the men something to do with
their days while their women are out working in the fields.

These are the people that Diamond theorized in his bestselling Guns,
Germs, and Steel must have higher intelligence than Westerners because
they are under more intense selection pressure by their environment. As
Diamond wrote in the Prologue of his Pulitzer Prize-winner:

"My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working
with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning
of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average
more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in
things and people around them than the average European or American is. At
some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain
function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar
surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of
course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have
been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not.
Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they
look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid
I look to New Guineans when I'm with them in the jungle, displaying my
incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting
a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I
have not.

It's easy to recognize two reasons why my impression that New Guineans
are smarter than Westerners may be correct. First, Europeans have for
thousands of years been living in densely populated societies with central
governments, police, and judiciaries. In those societies, infectious
epidemic diseases of dense populations (such as smallpox) were
historically the major cause of death, while murders were relatively
uncommon and a state of war was the exception rather than the rule. Most
Europeans who escaped fatal infections also escaped other potential causes
of death and proceeded to pass on their genes. Today, most live-born
Western infants survive fatal infections as well and reproduce themselves,
regardless of their intelligence and the genes they bear. In contrast, New
Guineans have been living in societies where human numbers were too low
for epidemic diseases of dense populations to evolve. Instead, traditional
New Guineans suffered high mortality from murder, chronic tribal warfare,
accidents, and problems in procuring food.

Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape
those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies.
However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional
European societies had little to do with intelligence, and instead
involved genetic resistance dependent on details of body chemistry. For
example, people with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to
smallpox than do people with blood group A. That is, natural selection
promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in
New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies,
where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.

After this introduction, Jared spends hundreds of pages explaining how
it's totally racist to think that there could possibly be IQ differences!
The distribution of power and accomplishment in the modern world is all
due to geographical differences between the continents! But, as I gently
chided in my review of his book in National Review in 1997,

"Diamond makes environmental differences seem so compelling that it's
hard to believe that humans would not become somewhat adapted to their
homelands through natural selection."

But exactly what kind of Darwinian selection pressure does constant
feuding impose? Diamond's buddy, as the survivor of the feud, is
presumably good at feuding, but he's not exactly James Clerk Maxwell.
Everybody in Diamond's story seems content to play the game by the old
rules, over and over again, with nobody trying to change the rules by
technological or political innovations. Even the European tradition of
dueling, which strikes us as pretty stupid today, but which served to
isolate feuds among two individuals, allowing honor to be satisfied
without the extended families being dragged in, seems to have proved
beyond the New Guineans.

I suspect that female farming cultures like New Guinea and Africa, where
the men spend their ample leisure hours competing to be Big Men, selects
for Big Men traits, Machiavellian skills at manipulating others into
fighting your battles. (Of course, Machiavelli was hardly the first
Machiavellian. What he brought was the power of abstraction to coherently
explain the rules of the game of power that so many Big Men had
intuitively grasped before him.)

What these kind of female farming economies where the women do most of the
work select for is not the nerd traits that are crucial to technological
advancement. Perhaps the need to survive winter selects for nerdish genes
that are good at technology, which can then be used for creating better
weapons.

It's not exactly clear from Diamond's account what kind of battles took
place. There seem to be "public" battles where young men show off in front
of their fans just barely in range of the other side's arrows, and more
serious "stealth" battles, which sound more like Mafioso rub-outs --
ambushes and massacres -- than the Battle of Gettysburg. The idea of the
Waterloo-like "decisive battle," where armies line up and march shoulder
to shoulder toward each other strikes most peoples down through history as
nuts. Indeed, the whole idea of a "fair fight" strikes most peoples as
nuts."

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/05/j...-interest.html

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