Posted on 05/10/2014 12:45:28 PM PDT by Altura Ct.
Nicholas Wade, a leading science writer whose specialty is human evolution, likes to ask interesting questions. Here are some examples:
Why has the West been the most exploratory and innovative civilization in the world for the past 500 years?
Why are Jews of European descent so massively overrepresented among the top achievers in the arts and sciences?
Why is the Chinese diaspora successful all around the world?
Why is it so difficult to modernize tribal societies?
Why has economic development been so slow in Africa?
Contemporary thinkers have offered lots of provocative answers for such questions. It’s all about geography. Or institutions. Or rice culture. Or the devastating legacy of colonialism. Or Jewish mothers. Now comes another explanation, one that bravely explores the highly dangerous elephant in the room. Mr. Wade argues that human history has also been profoundly influenced by genetics.
Part of his new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, is a summary of new findings in genetic science, and part of it is highly speculative. All of it is bound to be deeply unpopular among social scientists, because it challenges their entrenched belief that race is nothing more than a social construct. The wide diversity in human societies around the world can be explained entirely by culture, they insist. We’re all the same under the skin.
Except we’re not quite. Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, evidence of subtle genetic differences has been piling up. As our ancestors branched out of Africa, different groups of people evolved in slightly different ways to adapt to local conditions...
(Excerpt) Read more at theglobeandmail.com ...
And the white race is responsible for the extinction of the Neanderthals? Because that’s my concern and my point-that whites have not inundated an nation and exterminated all the representatives of one race. Even our colonialism was usually paternalistic-bringing better healthcare, etc. Why else do you think that Africa’s population has exploded, thanks to the misguided aid from white nations, leading to cycles of famine?
No, that consensus doesn’t spontaneously exist, it is enforced, through “soft” tyranny. One day it won’t be so soft. South African whites are already seeing the truth of this, along with the disintegration of the only First World African nation.
We’re getting a taste of the “hard” kind of tyranny in the US, with the black on white crime rates and the suppression of those rates and any solution to them. There won’t be a solution, when the problem isn’t even acknowledged.
*shrug* The Neaderthals owned Europe for 100,000 years. They ain’t there now. That transition occurred when the current occupiers showed up...
Correlation is not cause, especially on a subject of which we know so little. And anyway, if we’re all “out of Africa”, how are whites to blame?
I generally agree.
I expect the world of the future to be immensely wealthy, producing a lot of "stuff" with very little human input. That is, of course, more or less the definition of productivity.
Such a world will be able to easily afford to provide everyone in the world with what we would now consider an upper middle class American lifestyle. As far as amount of "stuff" goes, that is.
But there is a much deeper issue when people have no purpose in their lives. For all history, that purpose has been for most people economic, the eternal struggle to provide for themselves and their families in an economy of scarcity.
What happens when there is no more scarcity? When there is no economic demand for the services most people are capable of providing?
Indian reservations, American ghettoes and British slums do not provide encouraging precedents of what happens when we remove the necessity for people to work, even though they objectively have a lot more "stuff" than their grandparents did.
As you intelligently point out, much conservative (and liberal, for that matter) ideology simply becomes irrelevant in a world of abundance rather than scarcity.
For example, the free market, beloved of conservatives and hated by liberals, is in its essence a way of most efficiently distributing scarce resources. In a world where most things aren't scarce, the market becomes irrelevant.
““it should be easy to modernize a tribal society by importing Western institutions.” But tribal societies are characterized by strong kinship relations and low levels of trust toward non-kin. Western institutions are characterized by high levels of trust among strangers. Tribal institutions are designed to empower the officeholder and his tribe, while Western institutions are designed to operate in the public interest. These differences are far more than skin deep, and have been shaped by centuries of human evolution.”
“
Now this is the most interesting observation of all. Most people in the western world tend to label this sort of behavior corruption but it is increasingly common in areas dominated by largely unassimilated minorities even here in the United States, just as it is increasingly common among the non-western world.
I honestly feel this is primarily a cultural legacy of the lands from which theses people originate. But i won’t deny the possibility that there may be genetic factors which leave people predisposed toward developing and retaining theses sorts of behavioral patterns.
Yet still, despite your refusals, there are no living Neanderthals, not a single living Tasmanian, and all the original occupants of Romania are gone forever.
The notion that there is something genetically different specifically allowing Western institutions to develop is, I contend, hooey, and based on a remarkable lack of historical perspective.
The high-trust societies discussed here are remarkably new in the world, evolving over only the last few centuries in western Europe, then spreading to other areas, most of them settled by western Europeans, or at least in which their culture is dominant.
Yet before a few centuries ago, all of Europe operated on what the author would consider a tribal basis, with offices mostly designed to “empower the officeholder and his tribe (or clan/family).”
The idea that this difference evolved in a few centuries is just stupid. Evolution just doesn’t happen that fast.
It also doesn’t explain most of Latin America, where officeholders, at least until recently, routinely looted the state for the benefit of their families. Yet Latin America has always been dominated, with a few exceptions, by families of impeccably European ancestry.
“Black churches are hotbeds of racist liberation theory, not God-fearing houses of worship.”
A population of people raised to think they are at war with the rest of us while their leaders lead them to war with their own future.
Very sad, I wish I knew of a way we could liberate them from this self-destructive madness. But we by virtue of our race and ‘defined’ believes which have nonthing to do with race whatsoever have been labled their enemy, and there is nothing we can say that will ever be taken seriously by the majority of them.
If we are to reach the majority of the black population it will have to be thou people, they have no labeled as the enemy. Sadly the color of our skin, and certain Democratic party defined aspects of our heart(which have nothing to do with race) prohibit them from even hearing us. Thus Dooming them to anything but the vicious self-destructive cycle of same old ideas that has been raping and destroying their future for generations now.
We know we need to help them, but we can’t do it yourself because we are too “white” or “republican” as the democrats have trained them to hate both.
We need a trogin horse leader among them, to introduce our ideas in a more subtal way and slowly change their education away from hate.
Absolutely. All you need to do is deny that early Europeans are “white” and that the Neanderthals didn’t survive their arrival.
I disagree. I don’t believe in the white man’s burden anymore. We had to lift ourselves out of the primordial ooze, and develop the characteristics to do so. Blacks will have to do the same, metaphorically speaking. The very doing develops the needed characteristics, much as exercise develops muscles.
This is somewhat discredited by recent evidence of Neandertal genes in modern humans.
Then that nullifies “out of Africa” of a distinct white race existed as early as co-existence with Neanderthals.
Speaking of Neanderthals, to all the learned people here-what significance does it have that all races, except blacks, have traces of Neanderthal genes, if I am understanding it correctly?
What happens when there is no more scarcity? When there is no economic demand for the services most people are capable of providing?
Very true. In a world of abundant productivity, I'd suggest the creation of typically low productivity materially but high satisfaction jobs that could provide higher levels of welfare and housing. Government will probably have to do that, although preferably at the state level and lower.
Another solution could be some sort of minimum income for all citizens, and they themselves could create the demand for these jobs, without government, with the purchasing power with which they are provided. A fusion of both is also possible.
Jobs such as teachers, special needs teachers, councilors, charity workers, mental health counselors and aides, explorers, geologists, zoologists, massage therapists, activists, government and community watchdogs and all kinds of community service.
I guess FDR's New Deal could be described as a crude predecessor to this, in that he spent massive amounts of money on employing people, even though often the job produced less than it paid. In this case, however, it wouldn't matter too much due to the abundance of productivity.
Just saying a lot of that does sound rather contradictory to current conservative thought, but I don't see why this couldn't be possible and even viable, given radical changes in economic circumstances.
Because people recognise “make work” when they see it, and “make work” is as detrimental to morale and mental and moral well-being as welfare is.
I’m npt moving any goal posts. You are trying to make the case for whites being responsible for the extinction of an entire race by using the Neanderthals, for pity’s sake.
1)You have no way of knowing this
2) The is no proof of a distinct white race in that period
3) Scoentists don’t even know how the Neanderthals became extinct, much less any people (or particular race) being responsible.
You are creating a straw man and then crying that I won’t answer it.
Such a world would seem to be more controlled by government, not less.
Which is what worries me. These issues can be easily handled, at least from the material POV, by expanding present welfare state policies.
I just don’t see a conservative solution, given the fixation conservatism has traditionally had, and for good reason, on the free market.
Knowing greyhounds run faster than Chihuahuas isn’t racist... it’s reality.
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.