The full quote is:

> Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern Euro- pean and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults. Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation. This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans.

> That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up. Certainly, there is no hint at all of any intellectual disadvantage of New Guineans that could serve to answer Yali's question.

This is part of the prologue where Diamond rejects this genetic explanation, as well as Classical environmental determinism:

> A GENETIC EXPLANATION isn't the only possible answer to Yali's question. Another one, popular with inhabitants of northern Europe, invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland's cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human creativity and energy. Perhaps the seasonally variable climate at high latitudes poses more diverse challenges than does a seasonally constant tropical climate. Perhaps cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive, because one must build a warm home and make warm clothing, whereas one can survive in the tropics with simpler housing and no clothing. Or the argument can be reversed to reach the same conclusion: the long winters at high latitudes leave people with much time in which to sit indoors and invent.

> Although formerly popular, this type of explanation, too, fails to survive scrutiny. As we shall see, the peoples of northern Europe contributed nothing of fundamental importance to Eurasian civilization until the last thousand years; they simply had the good luck to live at a geographic location where they were likely to receive advances (such as agriculture, wheels, writing, and metallurgy) developed in warmer parts of Eurasia. In the New World the cold regions at high latitude were even more of a human backwater. The sole Native American societies to develop writing arose in Mexico south of the Tropic of Cancer; the oldest New World pottery comes from near the equator in tropical South America; and the New World society generally considered the most advanced in art, astronomy, and other respects was the Classic Maya society of the tropical Yucatan and Guatemala in the first millennium A.D.

(some paragraphs later)

> Nevertheless, we have to wonder. We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in peoples' status. We're assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation for the world's inequalities as of A.D. 1500 is wrong, but we're not told what the correct explanation is. Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. That seems to me the strongest argument for writing this book.

And the answer he offer to refute the racist biological explanation is a geographic one.

> Why did New Guineans wind up technologically primitive, despite what I believe to be their superior intelligence?

That's a direct quote where he says flat-out what he believes. It sets the tone for the entire book and the implications about how societies evolve. In the context of everything else, one could reasonably infer that he believes that Eurasians conquered the world because they genetically evolved to develop authoritarian, centralized societies where intelligence took a back seat to being a pawn in a hierarchical political machine.

But he doesn't say that explicitly, and probably doesn't even think that. His discussion of natural selection and evolution is so loose, equivocal, and as you point out even contradictory, who knows what he believes. Point being, no matter who's the good guy or bad guy, he uses very specious reasoning to build a sophisticated theory about how the world is ordered, the very kind of specious logic used in racist thinking everywhere.

His discussion of New Guineans is used to directly refute the claim that Eurasians were more advanced due to intelligence - New Guineans are just as intelligent (or more intelligent in his opinion) as Europeans, but did not develop advanced technology, thus intelligence cannot be the determining factor in technological development. He rejects intelligence as a determining factor, and spends the rest of the book after the preface explaining how influence of geography is much more convincing causal factor.

How you reach the conclusion that this reinforces racist thinking, particularly when he explicitly states that the geographic explanation he offers in Guns, Germs, and Steel is meant as a refutation to race-based explanations, is beyond me.

Huh?

>> Why did New Guineans wind up technologically primitive, > That's a direct quote where he says flat-out what he believes.

That's a question not a statement.