Lighter Skin = Better?

[Whateverist]

guns germs and steel is a book that simply furthers the racist theory of enviromental determinism and can be considered quite racist as it's conclusion is the same as the OP that lighter skin societies are better and it's because of the enviroment and "here's why"..... the truth is societies with the smallest/defunct male genitalia are the most inherently violent and therefore focus more on developing technology and killing eachother rather than lying in sun eating and having sex any alien intelligent lifebeing would easily say darker skin is far more "civilized"

So did you not read it or did you just fail to understand it? The guy's thesis was a response to a question from a native person from (as I remember) New Guinea, asking why it was that foreigners had so much more "cargo" (to trade) than they do. The whole book is an answer to that question and the answer boils down to a couple key inventions coupled with a long history of living with stock animals.

One of his key points is that domestication of livestock wasn't so much brilliant of us as it was lucky that we happened to live where large herbivores were domesticable. Most aren't and never will be. Crops found anywhere on the euroasian land mass would pretty much succeed anywhere else there since the change is one of latitude, not longitude, with only altitude differences to account for: another bit of luck that neither the continent of Africa nor the Americas benefit from.

Because of the availability of animal labor and particular requirements of growing the available food plants, the number of hours of labor required to feed one person in New Guinea vs Europe pretty much rules out much specialization which crimps invention and the advance of technology. So another point is that the 'foreigners' are not intrinsically brighter. He even gives evidence for thinking the opposite is true in terms of native intelligence.

With our technological advantages and the germs which we'd grown immune to through long years of living in close proximity with domesticated animals, peoples in the southern hemisphere really couldn't compete. So, in short, it was good fortune not any racist conception of superiority which gave us the advantage.