I see. You prevent a kid from going to school, not allow him to make any of his own decisions, not allow him access to the outside world, and then at 18 you turn him loose. When he goes unemployed and homeless, and is taken advantage of by almost everyone, you say the problem is his poor decisions. Right.
I do have to wonder if, on average, they would have been any better without colonization, THe Belgian Congo and a few similar nasienesses notwithstanding. As a whole, few states lasted terribly long even in northern Africa (mabe Egypt is sucking up all the stability). The alternative to today’s brutal thugocracies might be smaller, equaly brutal thugocracies.
University of Virginia Psychologist Jonathan Haidt also made a similar observation in light of recent studies showing accelerated genetic changes over the past 10,000 years.
The one often produces the other. Viz. Napoleon (who actually was of average height for his time and place, but spent his whole life overcompensating for a sense of social inferiority to his high-born classmates at the military academy he attended on scholarship).
True, but are you suggesting that King Leopold of Belgium had a sense of social inferiority?
Keeping up with the Jones’s maybe.
I was actually more interested the point by Mr. Excellentthat this complex, whatever it’s character, was caused by Leopold being a constitutional monarch.
The recent acceleration paper suggests it arose 10,000 years ago though, and there is no evidence of agriculture in sub-saharan africa until at least 4,000 years ago. The advantage of this is something that Jared Diamond discusses here:
But I think the point Blake is making is that agriculture reached Africa BEFORE it reached Western Europe. (Yes, agriculture did originally arise in western Asia long before it reached either of those other regions.)
So even if agriculture does exert evolutionary selection pressures on human populations, those selection pressures have been operating on Africans at least as long as on Western Europeans.
So the “evolutionary selection pressures due to agriculture” theory can’t explain differences in economic development between Africans and Western Europeans.
This claim is a little confusing because what you quoted is actually a blog post about Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel, by an educational psychology grad student named Mete Akcaoglu. I can’t tell how closely his remarks track what Diamond’s book actually says, nor whether you’re inadvertently mistaking this for a summary by Diamond himself or making an implied claim about Akcaoglu’s accuracy in interpreting Diamond’s ideas.
The summary you quote seems to range all over the map chronologically, jumping from the period of the introduction of agriculture to European imperialism in early modern times. I don’t think it really makes a coherent argument for different evolutionary selection pressures due to differences in early agricultural practice in Africa versus western Europe.
I don’t have a copy of GGS in front of me, but that seems an accurate account of Diamond’s position. Geographic advantages and availability of domesticable
plants and animals allowed some societies to have greater food production, leading to population increases, greater population density (leading to more complex governance systems, states and formalized laws), and specialization (allowing technology to develop, writing etc) as there were food surpluses.
Chen, I really can’t follow your argument any more. It’s not helped by your technique of quoting from web pages that agree with you, rather than stating your own actual position. The result is incoherent and confusing.
What precisely are you arguing? That African didn’t develop agriculture simultaneously with western Europeans? That there was some qualitative difference between African agriculture and that of Europeans? Something else altogether?
What you have posted so far is largely based on misconceptions and as such not really likely to produce a correct conclusion. Africans didn’t develop agriculture later than Europeans, so I’m still at a loss as to why you think they skipped the evolutionary changes that are supposedly associated with agriculture.
Actually, I think it’s nowadays generally accepted that agriculture didn’t “reach” Sub-Saharan Africa, but was, in fact, independently developed there. Not once, but three times.
It’s still a matter of debate, and one that’s not likely to be resolved any time soon. The competing theory is that sub-Saharan’s initially adopted northern agricultural products that were unsuited to their locale, and then using that as a template they went on to domesticate native crops, eventually discarding the northern plants. We know that domestic animals were physically moved into the southern regions.
The problem is that no matter which theory is correct, the evidence that remains will look exactly the same. So short of finding wheat or barley in a sub-Saharan location prior to about 2, 00 years ago, the issue won’t be resolved.
Agreed. Although if earlier sites continue to show only the sorghum/pearl millet assemblage without any evidence for einkhorn or barley, or any other trade evidence, I think Occam’s Razor lets us safely declare it for independent domestication.
I don’t think it’s that simple. The problem is that only a small number of groups in the north of the region, say in Somalia, would have adopted the Eurasian crops, and then domesticated African crops using that base. The African crops would then have spread south on their own. So unless we’re lucky enough that the very earliest “trans-Saharan” sites were preserved, we wouldn’t really expect to see any Eurasian crops in the earliest site sin most areas, because in most areas the earliest sites wouldn’t have had an Eurasian crops.
This is all complicated because we can have fairly good evidence that trade *was *going on across the Gulf of Aden/Red sea thousands of years ago, so Eurasian crops probably did make it to sub_Saharan before agriculture was established there. So we might expect tot find evidence of them in Somalia in the earliest sites even if they were never actually grown there.