[Ohioan]

You continue to pursue a series of half truths, none of which has the slightest relevance to your utter failure to advance any evidence, whatsoever, that the people in the Near East, today, have equivalent aptitudes to the people in Christian Europe or to Americans of European origins. Without some evidence of that equivalence, your attack on Islam as the reason for Near Eastern stagnation is hopelessly flawed.

You seem unable to grasp the fact that the burden is on you, not I, here. But although no one else seems to have any continuing interest in this thread, I will respond to your latest assertions, briefly.

A productive debate depends on resolving conflicting evidence. Ours failed when you refused to cite a source for what you said was “history” and then refused to discuss the timeline that conflicts with it. You then refused to process how racist neo-Nazi web sites conflict with your claim that Nazis are not racists.

I am sure any of the great Encyclopedias of the 19th Century, in the era when Near Eastern studies started to come back into vogue, would have material on the Mongol slaughters in Mesopotamea. Nathaniel Weyl, in his 1967 article in the Intercollegiate Review, on "Aristocide As A Force In History," cites the Mongol conquest as one of the major dysgenic catastrophes. He also refers to it in several of his other writings, which I do not have immediately at hand.

I have, personally, discussed in this thread, your claims of a time line, which contradicts the hypothesis of Weyl and others; pointing out the capacity of the Islamic Turks in 1571, long after the collapse of the great Arab civilization in the Near East.

What you seem unable to grasp, moreover, is that it would not matter--as an example of the failure of your essayist to offer a convincing case--whether the shortfall in certain aptitudes was the result of a slaughter (genocide) or simply the sort of decline in average aptitudes, which we have witnessed in America, as a result of the Welfare State, and the incentives on the least productive to have the most babies. The burden, again, is on you, not I, to sustain any basis for your underlying assumption of equivalence.

As for your reference to "Neo Nazi" websites? What on earth does that have to do with anything? Have I cited a "Neo Nazi" web site, as part of my argument? Hardly. I have denounced your demonization of Islam, which too closely parallels the real Nazi technique of demonizing Judaism. What whackos post on the web is totally irrelevant. I also cited Col. Gayre's personal testimony, based upon his first hand familiarity with Nazi anthropology, garnered while he was in Germany before the War as a British intelligence operative.

What Gayre was pointing out in the article, which I quoted--was that Nazi anthropology was political, not scientific. It was as flawed as was the Boas/Montagu school over here. While the Nazis did not claim as did Boas/Montagu, that there was such a thing as equality among peoples, they completely abandoned genetics--in the Mendalian sense--by postulating a new Master Race, based upon a type of spiritual rebirth in Nazi dogma (I am paraphrasing for brevity.) That is every bit as much an environmentalist aberration, as the Columbian school here's postulation that after hundreds of thousands of years, apart, we are all still somehow the same (in terms of educable aptitudes).

The Nazis were into the idea of "One Germany," with one leader and one Will. That is hardly consistent with the considerable ethnic diversity of the German population. While the Jews--who were a creative elite were demonized--they were far from the only minority. Nazi "racism" was pure politics--just as Soviet economics was pure politics.

Google’s an index to sources, not a source. I showed you one link to 50 google references to racist remarks by your friend rather than post 50 links because you refuse to process anything that disagrees with your claims anyway. Life is short. Whatever honorable military or intelligence record he has in addition to that is no more relevant to the process of resolving our disagreement than are his piano skills.

Google is a business which sells ranking to anyone--well almost anyone, as there have been complaints from Conservatives who were refused the right to sponsor listings on certain subjects. Col. Gayre, was a major opponent of the Boas/Montagu school of environmentalist propaganda. I am sure that there are those who have smeared him on the web. Does that refute any argument he made. Of course not. His Assistant Editors Henry E. Garrett, the leading Psychologist involved in intelligence testing in America at one point, and R. Ruggles Gates, a British Professor Emeritus at Harvard, who was an outstanding Physical Antropoligist, have also been smeared. That hardly refutes their arguments!

Are you so naive that you are unaware of the recent attacks on the authors of "The Bell Curve?" The Socialists in the life sciences go into a panic mode, whenever anyone seeks to actually study comparative group aptitudes. The reason should be obvious. All Socialist experimentation with human society is premised upon the idea that social environment, culture, molds the individual. Otherwise, Socialism would be understood to be what it is, a war against Nature, and a conspiracy against human excellence. But, while there is an inertia like effect derived from culture, that culture has been created by the people who embrace it--or their immediate progenitors, etc.. It reinforces the group dyanmics already in place, as a result of Nature.

As I pointed out to you, earlier in this thread, Myrdal, the Swedish socialist who wrote an "American Dilemma," is right in his assertion that Conservatives could accept an environmental determinant, and still be Conservatives. But he is silent on the converse. You cannot justify Socialism and acknowledge that the data shows a 2/3 to 3/4 genetic determinant in human performance. (If you doubt it, go to a good Library, and read up on the studies of Identical vs. Fraternal Twins.)

I have also, earlier in this thread, cited numerous examples of the fact that aptitudes trump cultural repression to a considerable extent--as a comparison of the high IQ, but terribly repressed North Koreans--ability to develop the Atomic bomb and rockets of their own--in comparison with the slightly less repressed Iraqis, where with huge Oil revenues, not available to the Koreans, Saddam had to hire French and German technicians, to try to get WMDs. (By the way, you do realize that Baathist Iraq was not the repressive theocracy, your essay was directed towards. The stultification of Iraq was a mixture of Socialism and lower average IQs than the European norms.)

One might also cite the series of Arab/Israeli Wars, where the Socialist Arabs fared more poorly than the more Islamic Monarchial Arabs--although the predominantly European heredity of the Israelis, clearly outperformed in every conflict, despite being outnumbered.

You have bought a pig in a poke. But enough of this. You and I are preaching to an empty auditorium. You may want to keep this going, like a playground taunting match, but I have better things to do. If our paths cross in a more active thread, dealing with Nature/Nurture questions, I will be happy to go into more details.

[elfman2]

Thank you for eventually sourcing the claim you say is history. That enables us to do more than simply flame each other’s ideas. In Aristocide As A Force In History , Weyl says the idea he’s advancing is a “virgin philosophy of history”. I see that with 22 google references to the term aristocide, it hasn’t grown legs since 1967.

Weyl theorizing on lingering genetic damage of Middle Eastern genocide consists of just 5 sentences out of the nine page article. He spends more time exploring the general idea of aristocide where “Dysgenic catastrophes caused by war often occur when a more primitive culture concurs one more civilized.” It’s interesting, but appears to suffer from internal inconsistencies.

Weyl devotes more time to the case that Brittan’s War of the Roses and subsequent purges "decimated the English aristocracy", but fails to note that it immediately went on to become the preeminent world power.

Weyl makes a case made for Roman and Grecian aristocide, yet Italy subsequently led the renaissance.

He describes the dysgenic effect of Spanish Inquisition that “bore down most heavily on the talented, the prosperous, the successful and the well educated”, but fails to note that it was followed immediately by Spain’s own Golden Age. That’s another counter indicator.

Weyl says that the “extermination of twelve million Christians and Jews by Nazis is no doubt the supreme instance of aristocide in history” but we see 60 years later that Jews have the highest IQs in the world.

Taken alone, various explanations “might” account for one of those other peoples’ subsequent success compared to the Middle East aristocide while already well into process of continuing decline, but taken as a whole it looks very implausible.

I think effective aristocide would be dependent on the following:
1) An overwhelming correlation between genetic potential and aristocracy that’s at best marginally or sporadically available outside free societies based on equality of opportunity, justice and liberty.
2) A systematic effort to not just eliminate resistance but the eliminate aristocracy like what was done in Cambodia.
3) A multi-generational effort to eliminate those that display potential from recessive genetic talent.

So I think that Weyl aristocide thesis is both 1) internally inconsistent and 2) technically improbably for the reasons listed above. I have very limited time or interest to study this, but I’m sure that if I can spot these flaws, that those who do and publish can see the same. That would explain why Weyl’s aristocide theory never took off. Even Weyl acknowledges that his primary source for the claim that conquest disproportionately kills city residents, and in turn aristocracy, blames the cultural “trauma” of Mongol conquest rather than genetic damage for Eastern Europe missing the renaissance, reformation and enlightenment (Peiker writing in Cambridge Medieval History).

I think that promoting a more radical political theory comes with greater responsibility to reconcile it with contradictory evidence. But you dismiss competing and more widely held Muslim underperformance theories as products of socialist conspiracies. I’m sure as a racialists your sensitive to accusations of racism, which I’ve seen little direct evidence of from you. But your belief that racialism does not lead to racism, which may or may not be true, has apparently led you to reflexively deny evidence to a correlation between racialism, eugenics, Nazism and racism. You dismiss it as leftist conspiracies and suggest the lack of support on the net is google censorship. You’re operating in a state of self censorship if you refuse to acknowledge the significance of a plethora white supremacist and racist assertions in virtually every neo-Nazi publication. I suspect you wouldn’t follow a link to this if I cited it so I have to actually post it to even get you to close your eyes as you page down:

Above: The Nuremberg laws had strict genetic rules as to who was a Jew and who was not: a person was only classified as Jewish if they had more than two Jewish grandparents. This chart, issued by the Reich Health Office in 1936, is an overview or "admissibility of marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans." The white circles represent "pure Germans", the circles with black indicate the proportion of Jewish blood. Allowable (zulassig) was a marriage between full Aryan and a one-quarter Jew; not allowed (verboten) was a marriage between a one quarter Jew and a three quarters Jew - an interesting example of how the laws actually sought to dissipate the Jews into Germany.

If you won’t trust the author of that because in your mind socialist can’t be racists, how about taking it from someone that you’ve already cited:

Little has been written about Marx's racial views, the contempt in which he held not only non whites, but whole groupings of Europeans, especially the Slavic peoples. In his book, Karl Marx: Racist, Nathaniel Weyl showed how Marx privately developed an entire racial hierarchy and racial view of history by the 1860's. In the middle of that decade, Marx was casting about for some scientific or pseudo scientific justification for his racial notions, which he found in the work of P Tremaux. He and his friend and financial benefactor Friedrich Engels went so far as to advocate wars of extermination against the White Race and the destruction of the Russian people.

So according to your primary source for the genetically damaged Muslims theory, at least “some” socialists can be racists. I understand you to say that Nazi anthropology was a politically compromise, but I think everything’s compromised in a Nazi society. And it’s their most outrageous compromise, their racist “anthropology” rather than any logical extension from their compromised socialist ideology that is virtually synonymous with the name “Nazi”. Egalitarian agendas and conspiracies will inevitably exist, but that’s not the reason for linking racism with Nazis. I think the supposed continuum of far left egalitarians and far right racialists is actually circular, reaching a common ground of collectivism of different flavors. Both result in beliefs that either the race or the state determine identity, and both create elaborate rationalizations and practice self censorship of contradictory evidence.

To further purify the race, those women of mixed blood were to be sterilized, and those with ideal Aryan characteristics were bred like livestock. But how to determine whether an individual had the ideal Aryan characteristics? The Nazi Bureau for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare recommended the classification of Aryans and non-Aryans on the basis of measurements of the skull and other physical features. They measured the parts of the head and face as well as comparing eye and skin color to color charts.

I’m nothing like an authority on genetic/environmental determinants or on Islam, but I’ve looked into some twin studies and found them to be small, rare and generally suffering from sampling problems. Even accepting your 2/3 to 3/4 genetic determinate claim, that seems sufficient to explain lower IQs among cultures where rote memorization of a religious text that literally means “submission” and where everything external to it is considered of subordinate value if any value at all. Intelligence potential under a philosophy named “submission” or a reformed philosophy guiding poor intelligence potential - what’s worse to the progress of a people? Over a millennium, its affects appear to be worse than 50 years of dictatorship judging from the Korean nuclear program that you bring up.

As far the Turks 15th century incursion into Europe goes, assuming that has significance beyond the Mongol successful conquest of Islam, it appears to correlate well with Europe’s Reformation and Renaissance, consistent with what Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na 'Im promotes for Islam

I think it’s fare to acknowledge after all this that I could be partially wrong. Maybe in a larger sense the role played by a brain drain is somewhat to blame. Maybe there’s a brain drain from people escaping not just the Moguls, but escaping cultures crippled by Islamic fundamentalism. How many talented people imigrate from the Middle East each year? I don’t know , but I doubt it’s material yet. The explanation promoted in this article by Thierry Gattuso make more sense to me. There are many supporting opinions that I could cite .