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 ...
Thank you for noting that, and for actually bothering to read the book. It must also be said that in the famous Ch. 13 on g and race the statistical modeling was, IMHO, weaker than elsewhere in the book.
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This author asks alot of good questions that I’ve never heard publicly speculated about before because, I guess, everyone else is too afraid or intimidated to dare to even openly wonder about why these things are so.
And I’m really surprised that there seems to be so much hostility to the author’s ideas by some people here.
Murry’s law
1. The Law of Imperfect Selection: Any objective rule that defines eligibility for a social transfer program will irrationally exclude some persons.
2. The Law of Unintended Rewards: Any social transfer increases the net value of being in the condition that prompted the transfer.
3. The Law of Net Harm: The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.
Thanks for the response.
I had never read the book, but was familiar with the controversy about it from 20 years ago. I didn’t read it at the time because I’m not interested in racist screeds.
Saw it about a year ago at a garage sale, and bought it just to pick apart. Much to my surprise, it wasn’t really about race at all! That was a peripheral aspect, inflated wildly out of proportion to intentionally discredit the rest of what the book had to say.
BTW, the increasing marginalization of the less capable members of our society that the book predicted unless steps were taken to prevent them has proceeded exactly as the authors said it would. If anything, it’s happening even faster than they predicted.
It’s the most important single issue of our time, and absolutely nobody is talking about it. Very sad.
I will defer to your opinion on the racial statistics issue. Don’t claim to be a statistician, never even took statistics in school.
But that there are real differences in human intelligence between individuals cannot be disputed by any reasonable person. Whether there are racial disparities is more or less irrelevant to the author’s contention. More and more, there simply is no economic demand in society for those of lower intelligence, whatever their race.
I have always been intrigued by what those who refuse to investigate the subject of differences in human intelligence between “races” are implicitly admitting.
Their reason for refusing to look is a fear of what they might find. That is we do find such differences between average intelligence of groups, those groups will be proven inferior and it would make sense to treat them as such.
This is, of course, implicitly admitting that individuals of lower intelligence, whatever their race, really are inferior and should be treated as such.
Personally, I refuse to agree that IQ, or intelligence, or whatever you want to call it, makes one human being superior or inferior to another, except in that one area.
We are all equal in the most important way. We are all children of a God who loves us. Intelligence, and any other minor differences, are from that standpoint inconsequential.
The Bible documented the existence of a form of slavery in the bronze age Middle East. This was used by God Fearing men of faith who made their livings buying selling and working slaves to justify the thing their very lives and livelihoods depended on. The Bible mentioned it, therefore the Bible condoned it.
As to why the slaves were black Africans, rather than the more traditional Slavic peoples, after all that's where the very word slave (and me!) came from, why any devout Christian could answer that, black skin is the mark of Cain!
I give BenLurkin major major props for recognizing that his opinion is an opinion and that his expertise is not universal. Were that we all were so wise.
Mostly we all, each and every one of us, has a pretty much unlimited ability to justify doing whatever the heck we've set our hearts on doing, for God and Country, for the Children, because (my whackadoodle interpretation says) it's in a Holy Book, or whatever!
It seems to me that it would provide a defining rationale for segregation and apartheid, and a rationale against the viability of equality. Self-discrimination and segregation would accelerate, and the resultant anger and civil unrest would just create a vicious circle towards ethnic violence.
Resentment would be much greater than it would if they only believed racism from an established minority was the problem, than if they were to compelled to believe that their own racial weaknesses were the problem. Not to mention that they would likely reject conclusive results as racist propaganda, as an unprecedented display of racial oppression.
Africa was been proven to have excellent resources for successful agriculture ... after it was colonized
A quick thought experiment. Let’s suppose that scientific experiments conclusively show that people of Blue descent are much more aggressive, violent and less intelligent than people of Red or Green descent.
Don’t you think that upon knowing this that Reds and Greens wouldn’t, at the very least, self-discriminate against Blues in intellectual and cooperative activities? Wouldn’t they avoid Blues on the street, pull students out of schools full of Blues, move out of neighborhoods full of Blues en masse?
Do you really think the Blues would just accept the scientific conclusions, and essentially accept racism, with them on the lowest tier? It would also set the precedent for more troubling experiments characterizing intellectual, social and creative fitness.
What if then, it was then conclusively shown that people of Light Red descent were superior to those of Dark Red descent? That people of Magnenta descent were extremely likely to give birth to children who were disabled or intellectually and socially inferior?
We’ve been down this road before. It didn’t turn out too well last time.
Isn't this Darwin's Theory of Evolution?
100% agree!
I think Sowell’s cultural capital theory holds more water.
I agree 100% that the Bible was used to condone and justify slavery. Even in the New Testament, it was unfortunately accepted as a fact of life, like blue sky, and wasn’t given a moral aspect. In the Old Testament, those passages that can be construed as condemnatory or critical of slavery are not critical of the institution as such, but of God’s people being enslaved. IOW, it wasn’t opposed to slavery, it was opposed to slavery of Jews.
However, the Bible has not a trace of racism in in anywhere, not particularly surprising since the whole concept of inferior and superior races, and indeed that “races” are important, is only a few centuries old.
Those who used the curse of Cain to say black people are intended to be slaves were/are idiots. All of Cain’s descendants died in the Flood, leaving none to populate Africa and provide a convenient source of God-approved slaves.
*sigh* Yeah. And not so good after the European farmers were kicked out.
City dwelling Africans proved no better farmers than Cambodian "intellectuals"...
I am suing the NBA for not paying me millions because I am a fat old white guy and a lousy basketball player. It is discrimination, I tell you! I am also suing the leading modeling agencies for the same reasons except drop the basketball and substitute, because I aint gay.
If we admit that there are differences between men and women and I don’t mean just the plumbing, than how on earth could there not be differences genetically between the races.
Wait, I may be wrong. Just take a look at California, yes it could be that geography creates loons. Never mind.
diversity destroys when carried to the extreme.
the darwinnian concept of survival of the fittest is turned on it’s head to the detriment of society and the species
I could simplify this argument.
Culture and social conditions, over time, influence natural selection.
Jews are an excellent example of this in several ways. For example, culturally Jews admire education, and they have a rare cultural acceptance of “good ideas”, no matter *who* thinks them up. Even if their hated enemy has a good idea, they may just adopt it for their own use.
Over many generations this has led to intellectualism being an admired trait, resulting in reproductive preference.
But importantly, while on the surface the flip side of this represents some diminution of physical traits, these are still kept in reserve, so that, for example, in just a generation or two, Jews can become very strong athletes.
But only if they have a cultural impulse to do so.
There is truth to genetics but it’s not pure like Darwin believed.
At this point in our crazy group-fighting world, this kind of discussion is at best unprofitable and at worst outright anger mongering.
Because of how volatile this subject is, and how cruel some tormentors could become with a misunderstood smidgen of the big picture, we as a creation of Gd should focus on individuals and their strengths. We should not let born outer appearances predetermine our thoughts about anyone.
That said, our non genetic child is determined to have her own genes no matter our loving family - she is athletic at a very early age like her genetic forebears and even has some other physical/ medical traits of her genetic relations. Yet I am sure we will have a deep effect on her development as well.
“What if race is more than a social construct?”
What if society is a racial construct?
Personally, I refuse to agree that IQ, or intelligence, or whatever you want to call it, makes one human being superior or inferior to another, except in that one area.
Smiling. Someone understands one of life’s deepest truths.
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