Posted on 02/09/2004 1:09:47 PM PST by CobaltBlue
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:49:37 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
More than half of the class at San Jose's Piedmont Hills High School, students from numerous racial and ethnic backgrounds, are linked in their DNA to the same ancestor, born more than 100,000 years ago in central China or Taiwan.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
To say white people left the cities to separate themselves from black people is incorrect- they left the cities to escape failing liberal governments that were running the cities into the ground.
Yeah, okay, but blacks voted for the liberals who created the dysfunctional cities. (This was about the time that southern Democrats switched from being patrons of the KKK to supporting the civil rights movement). It's like saying whites aren't fleeing blacks, they're fleeing what the blacks do -- which is more accurate.
But I was talking about why there are races and, like you say, there were the ethnic neighborhoods that kept races from socializing even if people would see them on the bus. That's what I'm talking about. Even on the most liberal university campuses you see blacks socializing almost exclusively with each other.
A liberal friend of mine gave me that book as a present (and in soft-cover, yuk--but that's beside the point).
I have not yet read it, but if your account reflects what this book is about, then it seems to me to be a superficial accounting based on chauvinist standards of judgment.
For one thing, I have doubts that hunter-gathering is inferior and that our modern world of agricultural subsistence, literature, technology, and nation-states is superior.
And that would be just the beginning of the faults I suspect I'd find with this book's arguments.
From your link: "On average, Orientals are slower to mature, less fertile and less sexually active
Yeah, I kind of doubt that assessment myself. I mean how would anyone collect data on sexual behavior except by asking people. Maybe the rest of us just like to brag about it more.
Wouldn't that depend on what is asked. "Come in here often?" might generate some data.
The latest rage is a move to dun America for a trillion dollar bill to be paid to African-Americans for reparations for slavery. Unless Americans are allowed to present an alternative theory for this we will have to remain silent and lose the argument.
The Nazi's problem wasn't that they believed in racial differences, it was in succumbing to the little demon that infects many people of German decent, sinful pride, a vain belief in their own superiority. Good Germans know what is buried deep in their souls and suppress it, but Hitler was an expert at drawing it out of them and exploiting it.
But they need that to draw up some congress districts in North Carolina less than a mile wide.....
And I am not so sure that Western man's standard of intelligence is the better one when it comes to ultimate survival of mankind.
I agree, but Western man's standard of intelligence is necessary for the survival of Western Civilization. But if Western civilization survives I doubt if anything short of a supernova will ever kill off mankind, we are too tough and too diverse.
Not that it was all fun--just that It might be more uncomfortable for many individuals, but for the species, perhaps healthier than Western man and his overdeveloped technology.
Not all elements of our civilization depend on overdeveloped technology. The Old Order Amish believe in exactly the opposite and they are very civilized people.
No, if you're heterozygous for SCA you produce normal hemoglobin, and in fact can function as an aviator, etc. It's the people who have two copies of the sickle cell gene that have the anemia.
There are similar conditions, the thalassemias, that affect people in the Mediterranian area.
I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but Joseph Greenberg said something to the effect that "synchronic breadth allows us to look back into diachronic depth". He was discussing how the fact that there are something like 700 Native American languages allows us to reconstruct parts of the ancestral language, even though it was last spoken more than 12,000 years ago.
an Asian couple are going to produce an Asian looking kid....
If you grew up in an Italian area, you might very well subconciously be looking for an Italian looking spouse....
It is difficult for me to understand the surprise that some folks feel about these findings. Regardless of opinions about our origins, we live in an essentially closed system on one tiny planet in a huge Universe. Whether life had it's origins upon a warm damp rock, or as clay between the Master's fingers, we had a common beginning that has given us all many common traits.
And indeed this is fortunate - else we could not share blood or organs and tissues, sometimes even between species (e.g. porcine heart valves), antibiotics and antifungals would never have effectively cured afflictions equally well in plants and animals. Even the very air we breathe is appropriate for almost all life on our little planet.
Perhaps many global problems would fix themselves if we looked more toward our similarities than our differences. < /idealistic rant>
If I gave that impression, it certainly wasn't intentional, since that's not a position the book puts forth, nor is that my impression of it (nor my belief). In fact, the author has spent years of field time with so-called "primitive" peoples (especially in the wilds of New Guinea) and has nothing but respect for them. His motivation for the research leading to the book was the result of his trying to find answers for questions raised by his New Guinean friend Yali, about why certain peoples had come to develop technology and others had not. The author had no easy answers originally since he saw no lack of intelligence, ability, or ambition among the hunter-gatherers he has known. So he set out to find the root causes of why history followed different courses for different peoples.
As for your specific concern, the following from the prologue is directly relevant:
Third, don't words such as "civilization", and phrases such as "rise of civilization," convey the false impression that civilization is good, tribal hunter-gatherers are miserable, and history for the past 13,000 years has involved progress toward greater human happiness? In fact, I do not assume that industrialized states are "better" than hunter-gatherer tribes, or that the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for iron-based statehood represents "progress," or that it has led to an increase in human happiness. My own impression, from having divided my life between United States cities and New Guinea villages, is that the so-called blessings of civilization are mixed. For example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span, but receive much less social support from friendships and extended families. My motive for investigating these geographic differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over another but simply to understand what happened in history.Another hint as to the author's feelings about whether modern life is necessarily superior to what came before is his title for the chapter on the rise of nation-states from tribal beginnings: "From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy". And the mixed blessings of animal domestication are signaled by the title of another chapter, "Lethal Gift of Livestock", so named because most of the epidemic diseases of mankind were pathogens which made the jump from domesticated animals to the humans who kept them.
To give a flavor of the book, I'll quote one of the more amusing passages, where the author describes how he was put in his place by the people he was studying. The topic is whether some peoples might not have developed agriculture because they were perhaps unaware of the potential crops around them:
Before turning to those regions, however, we must consider two related questions arising in regard to any area of the world where food production never developed independently or else resulted in a less potent [crop] package. First, do hunter-gatherers and incipient farmers really know well all locally available wild species and their uses, or might they have overlooked potential ancestors of valuable crops? [snip]As regards to the first question, an entire field of science, termed ethnobiology, studies peoples' knowledge of the wild plants and animals in their environment. Such studies have concentrated especially on the world's few surviving hunting-gathering peoples, and on farming peoples who still depend heavily on wild foods and natural products. The studies generally show that such peoples are walking encyclopedias of natural history, with individual names (in their local language) for as many as a thousand or more plant and animal species, and with detailed knowledge of those species' biological characteristics, distribution, and potential uses. As people become increasingly dependent on domesticated plants and animals, this traditional knowledge gradually loses its value and becomes lost, until one arrives at modern supermarket shooppers who could not distinguish a wild grass from a wild pulse. ["pulse"=bean -- Ich.]
Here's a typical example. For the last 33 years, while conducting biological exploration in New Guinea, I have been spending my field time there constantly in the company of New Guineans who still use wild plants and animals extensively. One day, when my companions of the Fore' tribe and I were starving in the jungle because another tribe was blocking our return to our supply base, a Fore' man returned to camp with a large rucksack full of mushrooms he had found, and started to roast them. Dinner at last! But then I had an unsettling though: what if the mushrooms were poisonous?
I explained to my Fore' companions that I had read about some mushrooms' being poisonous, that I had heard of even expert American mushroom collectors' dying because of the difficulty of distinguishing safe from dangerous mushrooms, and that although we were all hungry, it just wasn't worth the risk. At that point my companions got angry and told me to shut up and listen while they explained some things to me. After I had been quizzing them for years about names of hundreds of trees and birds, how could I insult them by assuming they didn't have names for different mushrooms? Only Americans could be so stupid as to confuse poisonous mushrooms with safe ones. They went on to lecture me about 29 types of edible mushroom species, each species' name in the Fore' language, and where in the forest one should look for it. This one, the tanti, grew on trees, and it was delicious and perfectly edible.
And that would be just the beginning of the faults I suspect I'd find with this book's arguments.
Since you already own a copy, perhaps you should try reading it first before presuming its arguments.
Even if you do end up disagreeing with some of the conclusions, the book contains a wealth of fascinating information about early man and various societies, and that education alone is well worth the time it takes to read the book. For example, how did dingos get to Australia? Why are most plants unsuitable for farming? Wild almonds are poisonous, how were they domesticated? Why were horses domesticated but not zebras? Why did European diseases ravage North American populations when the populations met but not vice versa? Why was writing so hard to invent, and why was an alphabetic written language invented only once? Why did the invention of raised type in 1700BC not produce the revolution that the Gutenberg press did 3100 years later? What uses did Edison have in mind for his invention of the phonograph, and why did he resist using it for playing music? What impact did the north/south orientation of the Americas have on its history? How did China become and then stay large and cohesive for over 2000 years? And so on.
One. The human race.
If I stand at my front window and look up and down the block, I see four houses owned by black families, two by Asians, one by Middle Eastern and the rest white. All of whom mow their lawns regularly and otherwise behave exactly like other suburbanites as far as I can tell. Shovel snow off their sidewalks. Have their cars inspected. Order pizza. Trim their shrubbery. Walk their dogs. Bring in their newspapers. Presumably pay their taxes and their mortgages since they remain in the same houses year after year.
If I never actually saw them, I'd have no idea what ethnicity they are.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.