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 ...
There's poetic justice in there... thanks for sharing...
...
What happens when there is no more scarcity? When there is no economic demand for the services most people are capable of providing?
By the standards of two hundred years ago, America's "poor" enjoy a lifestyle which the wealthy of that day would envy. Warm homes in the winter, air conditioning in the summer, TVs, electric light, plenty of food.
Today, the US could feed the world, at the level of providing everybody with a bag of wheat or a sack of rice, and a plastic 5-by-5 hut to keep the rain out. The cost would be the American middle class being reduced to that level as well.
What makes you think that the future productive classes would enjoy having their standard of living reduced in order to support the unproductive?
Right, that’s why the Boers died off in South Africa instead of building Africa’s only first world nation. The fair haired, fair skinned Boers.
The NBA seems to agree, that traits are heritable, they certainly draft on that basis.
What matters is what traits cause you to become part of the current dominant class. If the smartest people come to rule, then smartness is important. If the most skilled swordsmen rule, then athletic ability is important.
Because the ruling class defines importance on its own terms.
The current darker population was imported from parts closer to the equator when there simply weren't enough laborers locally.
More precisely, economics trumps theology. The Democrats offer welfare, social services, and the affirmative action which boosts them into much higher-paying jobs than they would otherwise qualify for.
Germans took a simple reality - that racial groups have differences ... and jumped from that into insanity.
It would be as if someone 'discovered' men and women were different - that women had less upper body strength - and used the finding to 'justify' murdering millions of women. It's nuts.
The conclusion to draw is NOT 'we can't notices differences' but that we must stop evil insane narcissists from making insane evil choices.
Exactly. Anything, anything on earth, can be extrapolated to absurd extremes. That doesn’t nullify the basic fact.
South Africa has a temperate climate. I once had a girlfriend who was from there. She told me of snowfall in Johannesburg. Currently in Johannesburg it's 65 degrees, with the expected overnight low being 45.
And the mostly British-descended Australians built Australia into a thriving, exemplary first world nation, in spite of all the dangers inherent in that continental country.
Highly educated people have a bias toward their in-group, which generates the highly abstract theories. Highly educated people skew to higher IQ in general, but in general the higher the education, the more narrow the specialization. Intelligence outside one's area of specialization is not a given, not at all in my exposure.
That’s a good explanation, a stereotypical example being the “absent-minded professor”.
Yes, but culturally, it began long before then.
From the 11th Century BC to 722 BC, when Israel fell, though the Kingdom of Judah and several city states continued. They finally fell in 586 BC.
The Hebrews adopted some of the better Philistine and Phoenician ideas, and several Biblical tales are clearly based on mythology outside of their region.
In any event through the various diaspora, the Jews kept up the traditions, as they do today. External pressures may certainly have augmented it, but it was already there.
Those mostly British-descended Australians were largely sent to Australia involuntarily as a court sentence. It was a penal colony. This explains a certain amount of aggressive ingenuity and willingness to flout the rules, which makes Australians the only people who are as a group somewhat like Americans as a group. This, despite the fact that of the original British colonies only Georgia was a penal colony.
Culture is the issue. Culture/subculture is the problem among many people within races. Culture can also be changed.
This thesis has a certain powerful explanatory force. It helps explain why less successful cultures don’t simply copy more successful ones. “If the differences between a tribal society and a modern state were purely cultural,” he writes, “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.
That's human nature and culture. It's also why that those within the groups that impact matters. An Englishman, Brahmin, or Orangeman can not get Irish to change. Those within have to change.
There's still the stereotype of "drunken and fighting Irish" but the stereotypes used to be a lot worse. Wife-beating. "undeveloped brains". Lazy. Criminals that ended up in the paddywagon. Prostitution. It was also allegedly due to generic. We're Celts, not Anglo-Saxons. You don't see those three stereotypes anymore. Today, American Irish are among the more educated whites in society, aren't regulars in jail, and are productive members of society. That started with people like Archbishop John Hughes. It starts with the moral code and the family.
Though just 30 or 40 years before, New Yorkers had viewed the Irish as their criminal class, by the 1880s and 1890s the Irish proportion of arrests for violent crime had dropped from 60 percent to less than 10 percent. The Irish were the pillars of the criminal justice system. Three-quarters of the police force was Irish. The Irish were the prosecutors, the judges, and the jailers.
Alcoholism and drug addiction withered away. By the 1880s an estimated 60 percent of Irish women, and almost a third of the men, totally abstained from alcohol. Many Irish sections in the city became known for their peacefulness, order, and cleanliness—a far cry from the filth, violence, and disease of the Five Points and Sweeney’s Shambles of mid-century. Gone, too, was the notorious Irish promiscuity of those years; New York’s Irish became known by the latter part of the nineteenth century as a churched people, often chided by the press for their “puritanical” attitudes. Irish prostitutes virtually disappeared in the city, as did the army of Irish youths wandering the streets without adult supervision. Irish family life, formerly so frayed and chaotic, became strong and nourishing. Irish children entered the priesthood or the convent, the professions, politics, professional sports, show business, and commerce. In 1890 some 30 percent of New York City’s teachers were Irish women, and the Irish literacy rate exceeded 90 percent. In 1871 reformer “Honest” John Kelly became the leader of Tam-many Hall, and with the election in 1880 of shipping magnate William Grace as mayor, the Irish assumed control of city politics.
Culture, not genetics.
That’s true, and a good point that it wasn’t only the supposed “best and brightest”, voluntarily adventurous Europeans, who were able to create civilisation in a harsh environment. The ancestors of contemporary Australians were the criminals (though it wasn’t hard to become a criminal when stealing a loaf of bread was a hanging offense), who were exiled to Australia, and still created a thrivng civilisation in a very harsh environment, with dangers completely new to them (highly venomous animals, harsh environment and climate, etc).
Yep. And Australia regards skin cancer as a major public health risk.
In the absence of modern medical treatment the palest of British stock is at a very real survival disadvantage.
Over multiple generations they would be supplanted by their darker brethren.
Simply not true.
"White" Caucasians vary in skin color from snow white to near pitch back.
"Black" Africans vary from pale honey colored to darn near purple-black.
Fortunately, there are those who have “the right stuff” to develop protection and treatment for that. And even before we had that knowledge, in spite of that being one of the dangers, the Australians’ ancestors developed a first world nation of the highest order.
We overcome. We go to the moon, we go to the abysses of the ocean, we risk our lives to attain the knowledge for future generations to build upon.
The we throw it all away to “level the playing field”. Now NASA is a Muslim outreach agency.
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