re: #439 doppelganglander

My objections were largely to the anti-Western tone and the sense that we should almost be ashamed our ancestors were successful.

Huh?! I confess it’s been a while since I’ve read the book, but I don’t recall any “anti-Western” sentiment.

His romanticizing of the Papua New Guinea tribesmen is off-putting to me.

And I definitely don’t recall that… in fact, I very much DO recall his description of how their hunters, when encountering each other in the forest, would sit down and ask each other questions about their kinship… to figure out if they were somehow related… because if not, they’d feel compelled to try to kill each other. And he went on to point out that hunter-gatherer societies, as best as anthropologists can tell, tend to have staggeringly high homicide rates, as a result of just that sort of thinking.

It reinforces my sense that his real purpose is to blame Europeans for all that is wrong in the world,

Again, not my recollection. I remember that he speculates that if Africans had managed to domesticate their native megafauna, one could have postuled African conquerors riding into Europe on trained rhinocerii. That is to say, the Europeans weren’t somehow morally inferior, they just wound up better placed to do the same sort of conquest that everyone was doing.