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 ...
So we shut down this science?
Reductio ad Hitlerum !!
I, too, am guilty
Wait...Rand Paul will be up in arms about this! It will alienate the African American voters who will never, ever vote Republican anyway...
2-300 years ago it was the norm.
I'm not a scholar or a peer, and have never participated in any peer review of any scientific study. I've never attempted to collect data on this or any other subject or subject any data to any kind of statistical analysis. And heaven knows I'm not a statistician.
It's a lot like anthropogenic global warming. It's supposed to be based upon scientific study -- but I have no way of assessing the validity of the science for myself.
But note well, the questions that lead off the article are a good example of how to start off a discussion by warping the discussion before it gets going. The very way in which they are phrased -- only my opinion now - betrays a sinister motive in the asking.
Liberalism certainly can lead to eugenic ideology and that leads to horrible consequences.
” Jewish and Chinese cultures place high value on education. “
Indeed a lot of the success has to do with Culture vs. genetics.
Genetics has a role of course but it is like the genetics that lead to heart conditions and such, it doesn’t 100% guarantee you will get heart disease, just make if a lot more likely that it will develop into it.
Culture is VERY important, because the wrong culture can wreck ANYONE and eventually EVERYONE.
Genetics is just the “Hardware platform”, like the difference between a Dell and a Compaq Computer, Culture is the “Operating system”.
We have a lot more software problems than Hardware issue when it comes to humans.
Successful societies - groups of people with good genes - depend on geography, in order to procreate.
Urban black Americans used to score higher than rural white Americans in tests administered for the first world war. And their “moral” score (percentage of out-of-wedlock births, crime figures, etc.) were also higher than some newly immigrant American ethnics.
All that changed after the second world war.
That’s culture.
A few years ago every black MBA student at Harvard was an African immigrant; despite having a much, much smaller pool to draw from, they outscored all “African-Americans”.
That’s culture.
In some parts of West Africa, when there is a wedding, the next day the families of the bride and groom hold a second “marriage” where the two huge extended families join to become “one” new big family.
Compare that to baby-daddies in the US.
That’s culture.
African churches generally oppose gay marriage, abortion, etc.
That’s culture.
“For a variety of reasons, including brutal population pressures, people developed a cluster of traits – nonviolence, literacy, thrift and patience – that gradually became the values of society as a whole. “
They are trying to take “Cultural Traits” and Wrongfully align Genetics with their Dying Belief in the “Noble Savage” in order to save the farce that is the “Noble Savage” lie.
So any successful societies in 1800, was only because they all shared good geography?
We can breed Border Collies to have a hunger to herd sheep (and everything else that moves). We can even breed them to have specific preferred patterns in how they work the sheep. We breed dogs, horses etc for temperaments and attitudes and even specific preferred behaviors. You can, for example, buy a horse bred to be ‘cowy’.
So why would it shock someone to think that human genetic differences could result in disproportionate behaviors and actions?
Point of order.
Recently read this book. That is NOT what it is about.
It very calmly and logically discusses the impact of intelligence on class structure in America.
It does not shy away from from noting the effect of differential IQ between racial groups, but that is by no means the focus of the book.
In fact, it shows very clearly that those white people of intelligence similar to the majority of black Americans have very similar life outcomes. IOW, race as such makes little difference in their lives.
This book was intended as a plea for changes in policy to make a place in society for those of less than average intelligence, who are increasingly excluded. Which of course has been utterly ignored.
Liberals turned it into some sort of a racialist white supremacist book, which it absolutely, positively was not. There's no need for us to join them in this slander.
You make good points.
However, facts are what they are, and pretending they are something that they are not, or refusing to examine them to determine their truth or falsity, will not help anybody.
Let’s look at it another way. If you are constantly told there is no actual difference between your race and another, yet your race consistently does less well, what is the only remaining explanation?
Well, it must be that the other race is keeping your’s down, intentionally or not. A recipe, if there ever was one, for brewing resentment, hatred and a desire for revenge. And, of course, if there actually are differences, it is a situation that simply cannot be ameliorated.
I would love it if the Declaration of Independence were literally, rather than metaphorically, true. That all men, and all groups of men, are literally equal in every way.
But my desire for that does not change the facts as they exist. And a considered refusal to find out what those facts are also will not change them.
Actually, the absolute heyday of racism and white supremacy in USA was probably just about 100 years ago.
However, it was based not on Biblical explanations, but on the science of the time, which was pretty uniformly outspoken about the inequality of the races and the superiority of the white race.
The only real scientific argument over this at the time was about which branch of the"white race" was superior to its other branches. Oddly enough, each of the scientists generally determined that it was his own branch. :)
The "nonviolence" part of this is an expression of the bias of the "scientists."
History is pretty clear that successful societies were nonviolent within the society, or evolved to become that way, while spectacularly violent when necessary when dealing with outsiders.
Societies that were not successfully violent in their dealings with outsiders were exterminated, or enslaved and eventually assimilated.
I read the bell Curve as well and found that it most certainly didn’t fit the slander it has been painted with. In fact, I got the impression that the author laid a lot of blame as the feet of the academic elite.
I know these same academic elite today are the primary source of some awfully damaging social manipulation, education, and social programs.
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