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Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

> They practice cannibalism, and Michael Rockefeller was likely eaten there, and maybe Joe Biden’s uncle too - and one group ate their dead relatives’ brains at funerals so consistently that they gave themselves a mad cow type disease called kuru, which killed a large percentage of their population and then, within a few generations, evolved a genetic mutation that protects against it, one of the fastest cases of natural selection ever documented in humans

> Jared Diamond thinks the people there are genetically smarter than Europeans

Never seen two consecutive paragraphs so completely contradict each other.

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Well Jared Diamond is referring to individual intelligence, not the wisdom of their cultural practices.

More specifically, he states: "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."

No control for prosperity. Lifelong comfort insidiously cripples any people on all these levels.

For a fun novel on the very subject, read The Dosadi Experiment.

Jared Diamond's whole thesis in Gun, Germs etc is post hoc ergo propter hoc.

As opposed to us smarter people making cattle feed that contains cow brains, thereby propagating mad cow disease, then killing ourselves by eating them (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease)!

Or for that matter killing ourselves in dozens of other ways due to lack of scientific knowledge, or ignoring it.

We didn't keep contracting mad cow disease until everyone who wasn't genetically immune to it died. I'm pretty sure we figured it out and killed loads of cattle to stop us getting it.

OK, but generations of people keep drinking themselves to death.

Generations of people lived with lead water pipes and asbestos roofs.

Within living memory we had cocaine in coke, heroin in cough remedies and were giving pregnant women thalidomide for morning sickness.

Western science is a modern thing, and even now many people don't believe it.

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