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 ...
*sigh* yeah. One crab can climb out of a bucket. A bunch of crabs will keep any crab from escaping.
You misunderstand. There are plenty of swarthy Brits.
Besides, these days we have sunscreen and surgery.
I know that, I know there are swarthy Brits and always have been. The “swarthy” Brits weren’t particularly chosen to be exiled to the penal colony of Australia, therefore weren’t the only ancestors of the present Australians. In spite of that, in spite of the presence of the fair skinned, vulnerable, Australian ancestors, before they had knowledge of sun screen and skin cancer treatment, those Brits-both swarthy and fair, created the civilised first world nation of Australia. This in spite of their encounters with new dangers, and a steep learning curve.
You still misunderstand. If a bunch of Brits had somehow gotten to a high UV environment a thousand years ago, before sunscreen, before surgery, before modern technology, their descendants might still regard themselves as of British ancestry (and they’d be correct) they might still have traces of old British culture, they might still tell tales of the Norman Conquest.
They’d just be a population with darker skin tones, perhaps even one where most individuals were darker than any of the original cohort.
It’s not a coincidence that British Colonials recognized that Hindi and English shared a common linguistic group. Caucasians got around quite a bit! Some of them ended up in places where dark UV induced cancer resistant skin was a survival necessity, and some ended up where pale Vitamin-D generating skin was.
Caucasians all.
It ought to be noted that the Dominicans did revolt and win their own freedom.
Of course, they didn’t win it from the Spanish, they won it from the Haitians, who conquered them in 1821 and were finally kicked out in 1844.
Don’t necessarily think they would. But if the “productive classes” are 10%, 5% or 1% of the population, the equation changes dramatically.
Unless the productive classes want to kill off or enslave the others, they’re going to have to give them enough to keep them happy enough not to rebel.
Carry the logic of increasing productivity far enough, and at some point you produce nearly infinite stuff with almost zero human input. Intelligent machines have, at least in theory, the ability to completely replace humans in production and potentially even in innovation.
At that point there will BE no human “productive classes.” Only people “taken care of” by machines. Who might eventually wonder why they should bother to do so.
I did business extensively in Haiti from 1988 to1993
I’d be glad to share.
The Sierra Leone of the Caribbean
Lol
Its is tomorrow for me
Last nite ended at 530AM
Inaccurate. There were no Bantus at the Cape when the Dutch arrived, but there were plenty in the central and northern parts of what is now South Africa.
AFAIK, white South Africans never imported black slaves. They did import Malays, Indians and a few Chinese, but they had all the blacks they needed and more.
I have 5 children
All different but similar physically and personality wise
And I can see physical and personality traits in them from their forebears distinctly as can their mom
Myself...I am basically my grandfather looks and personality
Everyone, liberal or conservative, secular or religious, weill admit that dog and horse breeds differ in intelligence, trainability, and temperament (meanwhile, you get big differences even within a breed, many of which "run in families). Left-wing double-think must be very powerful for so many people to bury their heads in the sand and say that the same thing applies to humans. It's especially ironic when liberals who otherwise tirelessly promote Darwin and evolution throw them out the window as soon as they come into conflict with "equality" and egalitarian social engineering.
Tom Sowell has a very good discussion of this issue. He talks about, if I remember the terms he used correctly, abstract knowledge gained through education versus empirical knowledge gained through actual experience doing something.
Those whose experience and natural bent is towards the abstract tend to devalue empirical knowledge. They think of themselves as educated and anyone without the formal education as ignorant. They assume their own background is the best preparation for anything.
That's why attorneys turned politicians have no qualms about thinking they can "run the economy" and its businesses better than the people with actual experience making business decisions.
Scientists tend to have similar delusions. Their extreme expertise in field A will translate, they assume, into similar expertise in any other field.
I think this is a very common delusion among the highly intelligent and formally educated.
Limited experience leads me to believe that this is less common among people who acquired expertise through the school of hard knocks rather than Harvard.
All very good points.
But because the genetics of the Irish in America allowed their culture to change so dramatically in such a short time does not necessarily mean the same is true of all other ethnies.
IOW, that the negative Irish traits you mention were cultural rather than genetic in origin does not mean other ethnic groups with similar negative behavior may not have those behaviors be more genetic in origin.
Certainly could be, and I hope that is the case, but that the Irish can change does not of itself prove that any other group can.
Few Americans realize that a very large percentage of the colonial immigrants from Britain were criminals "transported" to the colonies.
The British government only became interested in Oz as a place to dump its criminals when the American colonies made themselves no longer available.
At my age I even notice mannerisms and walking styles and gestures in my kids which I saw in older relatives I knew
Nobody will convince me mental aspects are not inheritable
A warning for anyone...not you
Behavioralism.....think Skinner....is the cornerstone of humanism
I’m convinced just from observance that we are more nature than nurture baring extreme environmental variants
Of course.... let’s say the developed world agreed....then what to do about it
The bitter contradiction is that through soft bigotry and liberal paternalism
Our culture does but denies it.
I watched a highly successful, wealthy man wreck a business he bought due to this. His success had come via rising up through accounting and finance, and he was brilliant within that arena, but outside of it he was fairly clueless. His people skills were wanting as well. He equated not asking questions with intelligence, and was very derogatory toward longtime employees who actually ran the place, “dime a dozen,” I believe was his sentiment. He bought a company that was very diversified as far as customer base, that was weathering the poor economy well, growing in 2008 and every year up to 2013. He only cared about profit margin and basically ran off all the large accounts except for one. Now, the business is declining and he’s letting people go, with a bias toward letting those longtime employees go over newer, inexperienced people with degrees that impress him, who don’t ask questions and are therefore more intelligent in his estimation. Vendors are not getting paid, deliveries are months late. That one customer is now looking for another supplier. It won’t end well, and all because he mistook his success as a numbers guy to mean that he knew everything about the place better than his employees.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3154750/posts?page=12
NYT editors sound like some posters here
I’m convinced just from observance that we are more nature than nurture baring extreme environmental variants
IOW, that the negative Irish traits you mention were cultural rather than genetic in origin does not mean other ethnic groups with similar negative behavior may not have those behaviors be more genetic in origin
Nobody doubts that some differences among groups of people is due entirely to culture, relgion, or socio-economics. For example, the violent and barbaric behavior we associate with Arabs is mostly due to the current interpretations of Islam that are prevalent. Christian Arabs are often prosperous businessmen while their Islamist brethren live in slums. Similarly, England and Holland were in many ways economically and technologically more advanced than Germany (or rather, parts of the Europe that have since been unified into Germany) in the 16th-18th centuries, because trade exposed them to goods and ideas of the outside world at an earlier date. Obviously genetics has nothing to do with that, just as it has nothing to do with your examples of the socio-economic status of Irish-Americans between the late 19th century and today.
However, because culture and socio-economics account for some differences, you can't jump from that to making the claim that it explains all differences. When a group of people makes a very quick leap from under-achievement to achievement (Irish Americans) or vice-versa (Arabs), you can't blame or credit genetics. However, what of groups of people who have throughout their history been underachievers (or have been high-end achievers throughout their history)? Until Europeans arrived, no Sub-Saharan African country ever had a 2-story building. Similarly, east Asians seem to have no trouble adopting the technology and science of the west, yet in spite of being exposed to them in more or less the same way (Colonialism and trade), Africans never assimilated these things. While this doesn't in itself "prove" that genetics is to blame, it does strongly suggest that there's something else involved besides culture and good luck/bad luck.
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