> 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.
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.