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 ...
No, we haven't. 19th century and Nazi theories of race were not based on good science. They were based on atrocious science. Which doesn't mean that it is impossible to do good science on the subject.
It didn’t turn out too well last time.
Quite right. I agree 100% it is a dangerous area.
But research on genetics is not going to stop. Far too many potential benefits. Whether it is the intent of the research or not, data is going to be acquired on whether real differences between "races" exist. That data is going to be available for analysis.
IOW, it's like the issue of cloning humans. I think it's a really dangerous area. But research on it WILL continue, in China or elsewhere if we outlaw it here.
Science is a (one) way of determining the truth about the world around us. Resolutely ignoring the monster under the bed won't make it go away if it's really there.
We're heading for an Emperor's New Clothes world. It is possible that at some point the evidence of racial differences will become so overwhelming that moral and ideological qualms will be crushed. IOW, the world is as it is, not as we wish it was. Ignoring the truth because we don't like it will normally just make things worse in the long run.
And we don’t already have festering, unspoken (at least unspeken from one side) resentment because of forced “equality” through social engineering in a varity of matters?
What of white flight-practiced as much, if not more, by liberal elites? Their self-segregation through a number of disingenuous means, such as certain tests for schools beginning even before kindergarden?
What of middle class white flight, away from the Detroits with high crime and lowered academic standards, different community standards of behavior, property, etc?
All of this bogus “diversity is our strength”, while La Raza chases blacks from Compton, blacks chase whites from neighborhoods, then bitch about “gentrification” when some whites drink the KoolAid and try to move into decaying high crime black areas and restore them.
The only difference is, whites have make excuses and use codes for our tribalism. The others are allowed to be tribal, and loud and proud about it.
Yet in spite of all the brouhaha about “white oppression”, the rest follow the white flight as soon as they can afford to, or as soon as the taxpayers are forced to foot the bill for them through Section 8, etc.
I’m sick of it.
Yet I personally had an old guy try to convince me that the mark of Cain was real, and that all blacks had it.
Just because the Bible has not a trace of racism, doesn’t mean that a human is incapable of finding blatant racism in it.
The Shulamite is described as black, yet beautiful, as if beauty is an anomaly for anyone black...
I suspect someone has been to a Mensa meeting or two...
And now that the whites have voluntarily left, or been pressured into conceding power (South Africa), the countries are either regressing into acute poverty and violence, or the resources are being utilised by the Chinese, who have zero “white guilt” and don’t give a damn about PC or world opinion, and won’t over-exert themselves to show benevolence or shoulder the “Asian man’s burden”.
People already don’t ignore the truth, though it’s unspoken and often subconscious.
Penalize the problematic behavior equally and the problem will resolve itself eventually. Freedom of association means accepting that some people will self-segregate. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, so long as it’s not used to penalize that group or some other group.
Your suspicion is correct.
But whites are penalised in a number of ways for any self-segregation, even purely social. There must always be, in any majority white gathering, at least a token minority, to show “diversity is our strength”. But associations of other races, including professional ones, are just dandy.
The part which makes me angry is that whites are the minority globally, yet we’re still expected to shoulder the burden for the rest of the world. When has a black millionaire rapper sponsored a trauma center in Detroit?
We’re constantly accused of “oppression” yet the so-called “oppressed” will sue at the drop of a hat to be near us “oppressors”. In all the history of mankind, when did an oppressed group fight tooth and nail to stay close to their oppressors? That’s more akin to the relation of a parasite to a host.
The Bantu, all 600 some odd groupings expanded throughout Central and Southern Africa during the last 5,000 years because they were very good farmers. Colonists need workers for their farms or mines and the Bantu filled the bill. That has been in the last few hundred years and disrupted the culture of eons. Even before that, they were in some cases the slaves, in other the suppliers of slaves to primarily the Arabs / Muslims. So you have a bit of disruption of cultures there. In general, the British were less disruptive of the Africans’ society and were willing to educate and train Africans. With the notable and large exception of Zimbabwe (Rodesia) British colonies worldwide have fared better than others.
The point being, I’ve been reading Wade and tend to agree with some of the hypothesis he presents but I think the divisions and differences he proposes are based on groups segregated from others by geography and segregation (the Jews and Roma). Race seems too large an aggregation to be meaningfuly delt with. History throws so many variables in the what may be good for survival today might doom you tommarrow.
I just think that a few types of scientific research would be best ostracized from the mainstream for now, in order to maintain the social and moral underpinnings of modern society.
The same way human cloning and eugenics programs are ostracized, largely for the same reasons. None of these things can be stopped, but they can be marginalized.
Because such a fundamental change in social mindset is an incredibly dangerous step to take, and quite frankly I don’t think the current status quo is bad enough to justify making that switch from preaching equality to teaching acceptance of racial inferiority and superiority. Maybe it could be okay to make that switch in the future, but not now.
Voltaire once famously said that “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
I would venture that “If racial equality did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.” Because the consequences for today’s society, in terms of human life, could be bad. Really bad.
It should be noted that the Jewish cultural (or possibly cultural/genetic) predisposition for intellectual activities was not a tremendously positive aspect for success in life for most of history.
It’s only in the last 100 years that the classic geek/nerd became someone likely to become wildly successful. (More accurately, the last 50.) For example, had Bill Gates been born 200 years ago, would he have become one of the richest men in the world?
Not likely. The traits necessary for success change over time.
So the traits Jews had developed in isolation (imposed by others) and which may have helped them survive, allowed them to thrive explosively when the world changed and those very traits became in great demand.
South Africa was a first world nation until 1994.
Yes, let’s just continie to allow whites to shoulder the burden as being the reason for black failure, after all, it’s our “burden”. We can afford it, even if we ate the minority globally and being genocided in the few areas where we remain the majority.
Who’s going to foot the bill, and take the blame, when we’re extinct?
I don't think this reference is to a black woman. The Shulamite was almost certainly an Israelite girl.
But she worked in the fields and vineyards and was therefore tanned. In most societies throughout history, beauty is associated with wealth.
Wealthy women don't have to work outside and don't get tanned, so paleness in these societies is generally associated with beauty.
BTW, this all changed when most people began working in offices or factories. Being tanned meant you could afford to be outside lounging on the beach or playing tennis, so IT became a sign of wealth and privilege and therefore of beauty.
““Human evolution has been recent, copious and regional,” Mr. Wade says in his book.”
From a strictly scientific point of view I have no doubt this is true, as it has always been true of every species ever to exist. Why should humans be any exception?
A lack of diversity does not extensive the process of natural selection. That being said I believe culture and technology is a major factor as well far more immediately effecting.
But of course theses factors are themselves in part a result of small genetic factors resulting from as little as hundreds of years of regional natural selection.
Paleness is also apparently a sign of beauty in S Korea judging from all the references I see in Korean television shows.
There is a Larry Niven short story in which all the stories of Eden are true, several hundred small groups or couples are scattered around a habitable world. The inbreeding results in racial characteristics and weak recessives showing up. Weak ones die out. The most successful groups spread, meet other groups, mingle. Group average increases through hybrid vigor as the genes for greater intelligence or problem solving spread.
The story is set in the then modern time, with a walking-talking IQ test of a robot looking for the smartest people who wouldn’t be missed to collect for the next round.
But the concepts are relevant here. Those with the greatest drive would try to expand. But only the smartest and most capable of learning and adapting would thrive outside their native range. The diaspora, then, are the smartest, bravest, most adaptable. Those groups that continued trade and population exchange had to be smarter to communicate with outsiders and remained healthier and grew smarter through genetic interchange.
Africa, in contrast, has continued tribal cultures with inbreeding and violence. The exception has been along the Mediterranean and Egypt, where there is cultural and genetic interchange with Europe and Asia.
The lower IQ for the population has been constant even when you look at Africans moved to other continents and don’t face the same malaria/disease burden and malnutrition that slowed growth in that continent for centuries.
You don’t think we already have a problem, when white South Africans are being exterminated, and black on white crime statistics are out of all proportion to theor app 12% of the population? Or is it Ok when it’s just whites who are being genocided?
You do realise that what’s occurring to whites worldwide is defined by the UN as genocide, or would be, if it were other than whites? But since it’s just us whites, it needs to unackowledged and ignored?
Imagine the world without whites-Chinese hegemony, on top of third world chaos. They’re already overwhelming traditionally white nations because of the chaos they themselves created in their own countries. In the worst days of colonialism, we never genocided an entire race out of existence.
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