Anyone who even considers racial differences is a racist. So on this proclamation alone, the hypothesis put forth, is irreparably flawed because only a biased perspective will be allowed, one that denies that humans have a genetic basis for being human. He later puts forth his main aim of the book via a question from Yali, a new Guinean philosopher one supposes, who asks why some people have all the power and affluence . And the rest of the book is all about trying to show that some civilizations have all the power and affluence because of dumb luck, they happened to be born in the right place at the right time. Once one sees through the mixed up logic, we have to assume that Diamond's only real intent is to attack Western culture, and pointedly Anglo-Saxon Western culture in particular.
Westerners continue to accept racist explanations privately or subconsciously.
In Japan and many other countries, such explanations are still advanced publicly and without apology. But what an irony, when later in the book he uses exactly the same technique that Westerners used over 100 years ago to subjectively rank people for intelligence. So apparently he does believe there are differences in intelligence between races or population groups, and he goes on to explain why based on environmental factors. This is the very same technique used by J. Philippe Rushton in Race, Evolution and Behavior and others that explain the higher intelligence of Eurasians because of the environmental forces from glaciation prior to about 10,000 years ago. Now, what if I wrote a book, from my work experience where I deal a lot with Blacks and with Whites, and I stated some obscure reasons for the Whites being more intelligent and then concluded, based on my observations, that the Whites were more intelligent than the Blacks without any other data but my own subjectivity.