[ek_hornbeck]

If success were purely a matter of fixed, innate racial traits, the power map of the world would have remained static for thousands of years

This is a valid point when comparing European civilization to certain Asian civilizations - China, India, Persia etc. These Asian societies have waxed and waned in relative achievement in comparison to Europe at various times - i.e. more advanced than us during much of the Middle Ages, but later stagnating and falling behind.

In sharp contrast, you have the peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa who have really never advanced and never even approached, much less equaled, European or Asian civilization. That points to innate differences, not cultural cycles.

[Cronos]

ek_hornbeck This is a valid point when comparing European civilization to certain Asian civilizations - China, India, Persia etc. These Asian societies have waxed and waned in relative achievement in comparison to Europe at various times - i.e. more advanced than us during much of the Middle Ages, but later stagnating and falling behind.

And the "waxing and waning" was not due to genes but shifting social, political and institutional conditions - culture and society in short.

Note also that when the Hittites, ancient Egyptians, Harappans, Akkadians and even the Zhou dynasty China existed, at that time Europeans were primitive hunter-gatherers or just starting agriculture - did that make them 'genetically backward'?? NO

read Conrad's 'the heart of Darkness' - the first chapter to see how civilizational achievements aren't genetic related.

In the first chapter of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad reflects on the Roman conquest of Britain. He describes the ancestors of the modern 'Anglo-American' population—the people you seem to think are the only ones capable of civilization—as 'savages' living in a 'dark place of the earth,' prone to the very 'dysfunctional' behaviors and lack of technological development that you currently attribute to Sub-Saharan Africa.

If your theory of 'fixed, innate racial traits' were correct, the Roman Empire should have seen those ancestors as a permanently inferior, unassimilable 'problem group' and walked away, or predicted that they would never build a global civilization. Instead, those people were subjected to the 'institutional framework' of Rome—its laws, its infrastructure, and its systems. They 'waxed' from that primitive state to become the architects of the modern world.

Conrad’s point, and the historical reality, is that the 'darkness' is not a feature of the people; it is a feature of the lack of institutional development. When you concede that China, India, and Persia 'waxed and waned,' you are admitting that human potential is tethered to the system, not the blood.