August 2, 2012 at 1:36 pm PZ Myers In an obvious ploy to appear erudite and well-read, Mitt Romney recently cited Jared Diamond to support his ill-informed opinions on culture. Itâs really a bad idea to misrepresent a living scientist, because they tend to come back and expose you as a dishonest fraud. It is not true that my book âGuns, Germs and Steel,â as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, âbasically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.â That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continentsâ sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore, which is so widespread that its distribution has had little effect on the different successes of different peoples. (As I learned this week, Mr. Romney also mischaracterized my book in his memoir, âNo Apology: Believe in America.â) Oops. Didnât read the book, huh? Iâve had a few student papers like that. The real stinger is in the conclusion. Mitt Romney may become our next president. Will he continue to espouse one-factor explanations for multicausal problems, and fail to understand history and the modern world? If so, he will preside over a declining nation squandering its advantages of location and history. http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/08/02/jared-diamond-spanks-mitt-romney/
I think Romney is right that a difference in culture accounts for the outcome there, where the environment is essentially the same. Romney was trying to cushion his opinion with the iron ore thing. It is completely reasonable to say that one culture, augmented by outside money and technology, (recall that culture is the sum of knowledge, beliefs, and artifacts) could end up dominating neighboring cultures.