My friend, with whom I am discussing this with, doesn’t at all consider himself to be some kind of Ethiopian anomaly among a country of retards. He notes that the people ‘over here’ seem to be every bit as sharp/dull as the people ‘back home’.
He also said (and I’m cleaning this up a bit) that anyone who would believe that all Ethiopians (and other Africans too) are severely retarded or close to it has never been there himself, and is most likely racist. I would have to agree with him, as this claim seems to be mind-boggling stupid and offensive. Where does it come from? How can he make such claims? Why would people agree to this conclusion?
@tomndebb That is a very good point, ‘races’ are so internally diverse that it is meaningless to talk about them - ‘population’ is a bit geographically specific - one really needs another word.
@Catpower I’ve been to Ghana twice on business and did a very brief trip to The Sudan where I met with some pretty smart cookies. I got more of a chance to get a feel for Ghana, where our Gha local contact gave us a hilarious run down on the characteristics of the local tribes that make up the population. It also seemed very accurate.
My impression was that the major factor was cultural, people adapt to their social as well as physical environments.
I think that your friend might agree that the majority of Africans have fewer opportunities for education, live in a more uncertain environment with a different ethos to the majority of people in the USA. Which is simply stating the obvious, and is of little interest or value.
The entire idea is rediculous. The simple fact that every single one of my neighbors speaks three to six languages precludes them from being mentally retarded.
I suspect that from a Western Economic point of view, rather a lot of Africans are ‘culturally retarded’.
Moving continents, I’ve often found that, in the UK people, from the Indian sub continent talk about how corrupt their legal system is. ‘Here you have law, there things can happen’.
Here, I am looking at a normal IQ bell curve and I try to imagine a country which reaches 63 in this scale. It’s amazing. These people also believe that San/Khoi people have an IQ of around 54. Why? I am trying to understand how can some university professors swallow this?
All these people have put out articles in support of this trash book. I just can’t understand it. Their claims go beyond extraordinary into factually impossible.
Imagine that you are an alien, absent of any and all preconceived notions. You have nothing at stake in the outcome. You come and study earth’s cultures, populations and achievements. You rank those achievements by the degree of intelligence required to accomplish them; not by whether they are good or bad. (Creating a hydrogen bomb might be an example here.)
Would you come to a conclusion that there is a difference in the amount and degree of achievements among populations?
Assuming you would, to what factor(s) other than inherent abilities across a broad population would attribute those achievements?
Would you be more likely to attribute achievement to opportunity or to inherent ability? If your answer is “opportunity,” would it not then be your expectation that a given genetic pool would be equally likely as any other to succeed in a given area? (i.e., if you looked around the whole world, sometimes Group A is the most successful; sometimes Group B; sometimes Group C, and so on. In general though, wouldn’t the most successful group be totally random if there is no innate difference so that if you were take Iceland, Haiti, St Maarten and Eritrea, it would be completely unpredictable which population pool “owned” which country?)
I, for one, would love to hear some really robust answers from someone as passionate as you…is it possible to write up a summary position in just a few sentences?
Define what are acceptable achievements? Would anything I come up with be acceptable?
Define who are we talking about? Races, countries, towns, cultures, linguistic groups, youth, economic classes? Who are these competing populations/groups that I am comparing?
When are we talking about? 1000 years ago, 500 years ago, now?
Are you now answering for me?
I really hope you are not acting smart here as this would make me very unlikely to respond to you seeing as I am already pissed off enough with this racist trash.
You’re forgetting need. A IX century king of Navarra is credited with inventing an easy-to-make snow shoe. Why wasn’t it invented before? Because until then, nobody had been in the situation of having to run over a perma-cold, snow-covered mesa in order to overtake a bunch of horse thieves… people had the brains to stay home when it snowed.
I imagine that by then Laps had been wearing booties for milennia.
If you don’t need a second language, you don’t learn it. And if you don’t need an abacus, you don’t invent it.
If, if Africans have 15 points less of an IQ than Europeans, then the average US IQ should be less than Canada’s. Other than the Africans, most of our populations are of the same European stock. We don’t have anywhere near the 13% black population that America has. By my reckoning, based on Canada’s 97 IQ rating, the US should come in at 95. The fact that Canada is actually ranked lower than the US in IQ according to the link pretty well establishes that the whole concept of IQ differences between populations is pure bullshit.
This is the exact issue that Jared Diamond addresses in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. I do not claim that all of his information is totally accurate (although he did a pretty decent job of synthesizing most of the relevant previous research), and I will not insist that his thesis is perfect, but he did a very good job of showing how the luck of geography corresponds very closely to the rise (and, to a certain degree, fall) of “civilized” nations.
In a nutshell, (with some errors clearly introduced by oversimplifying his book), he demonstrated that [ol][li] agriculture arose in the areas where there were the largest collection of wild plants that could be domesticated, [/li][li] agricultural based city states, (then nations and empires), arose in the areas where there were animals available to be employed as beasts of burden[/li][li] the transmission of crops and animal husbandry spread most easily where there were large east-west land masses with fewer natural barriers (such as oceans) because changes in climate in north-south axes was a more solid barrier to such transmission[/li][li] writing (providing a way to pass technical information from one generation to another) appeared where an expansion of agriculturally based empires established trade[/li][li] societies with fewer domesticated animals are less likely to develop diseases that jump species and, therefore, fail to develop immunities to such diseases.[/ol]So, a location where there were few high-calorie wild food sources that could be domesticated were going to develop large societies much later than locations where there were numerous such crops.[/li]A location where there was no animal that could be domesticated (or imported) was going to develop empires much later than other societies. Thus, the Americas, with no beast larger than a dog only developed a small number of empires very late in its history–just as Europe was about to overrun that region–and the lack of immunity from animal-borne diseases meant that those diseases served to destroy existing societies when they were introduced.
A location where the climate presented a less permeable barrier than mere mountains would be cut off from sharing the benefits of discoveries in other locations. Thus, the Middle East, India, and China not only had head starts in getting agricultural societies off the ground based on the existence of more plants and animals that could be domesticated, once they developed, their societies expanded in East-West directions to the point where they made contact and shared their technologies, foodstuffs, and animals (as well as immunizing diseases). Europe and Northern Africa (which lacked most of the plants and several of the beasts) benefitted from slow the migrations of agriculture, husbandry, and writing (all of which originated in Southwestern Asia), while Southern Africa was cut off by bands of climate and climate based insect disease that prevented it from from sharing the same benefits of wheat, horses, and a written language. The climate barriers between (what is now) Honduras and Peru prevented exchanges of mutually supporting technology to promote trade, so the stone carved pictographs of Central America and the knotted rope techniques of the Inca never progressed to a more flexible and easily transmitted variety of writing. Examinations of the histories and prehistories of most societies demonstrate that they followed similar paths, either being jumpstarted by the introduction of developments from other places (Europe) or moving more slowly due to a paucity of the necessary factors to grow (the Americas, sub-Sahara Africa).
Your principal fallacy here is actually racism. You’re assuming that Africans = African Americans, and that Europeans = white North Americans. They don’t. They’re not the same populations.
It is hardly racism, per se. The conclusion may be challenged on the several points, but his argument follows directly from the claims and Rushton and his ilk, using thier logic to demonstrate their own nonsense.
It is the claim of folks like Rushton that the varying levels of IQ, being genetically based, explain variances (for example) in the reported IQ scores of people in the Americas whose ancestors are European or African. IF that were true, then it would seem a logical conclusion that societies in which there were a greater percentage of African-descended persons (whether “pure” African or African “mixed”) should have their IQ “dragged down” in similar fashion. The Flying Dutchman made no assertions about any group’s “real” intelligence; he merely pointed out a glaring flaw in the claims put forth by the Rushton supporters.
See, it’s this kind of emotional, knee-jerk reaction that makes me wary of this position. If the “objective” measurements don’t show all races are the same, the measurements must be wrong, or better, yet, “meaningless” - which has the added benefit of discrediting any future research in the area. This “fit the data to the hypothesis” argument (to say nothing of reflexively calling the investigators racists) is sloppy science, and the sign of a desparate idealogue, regardless of what the objective reality is.
Couldn’t we use the word breed? We talk about breeds of dogs to differentiate between Great Danes and Poodles ,likewise horses .
When all is said and done we’re only a species of mammal for all our arrogance.
I suppose that we could if we actually had exhaustively correct genealogies of all humans, with new “breeds” being named any time any parents bred outside their groups. (Or we could establish a hundred or so breeds for the couple of million persons for whom they are available and call the remainder of the 6+ billion folks currently walking around “mutts.”)
If we tried that in the U.S., we would be back to silly terms like “octaroon” and other things that would serve only to divide and stigmatize. I don’t much see the point.
I don’t care, call me an ideologue; my idea is that Africans aren’t some sort of lobotomized human, I stand by that. These people are racist scum, I stand by that too. You be the objective one.
Frankly the “climate” barrier theory is absaloute nonsense,the climate being warmer or cooler in different regions has never stopped populations,that wish to do so from migrating,exploring ,trading with or colonising other areas of the world.
Europeans settled in Africa,India,S.America and Australasia amongst others where the temperatures were significantly different from that of their homelands,often wearing totally inappropriate clothing and eating totally inappropriate foods(salt beef in Africa !)
Breeds are very regulated with regards to reproduction. Any offspring which isn’t born of two certified parents doesn’t count as a member of the breed. Since humans of all types interbreed extensively, it doesn’t make any sense to use the nomenclature of highly regulated domesticated animals.
The climate barrier is not postulated to have stopped human movement, but movement of domesticated species (mostly plants). If you think it’s absolute nonsense, I suggest you try raising Canadian Hard Red Spring Wheat varieties in Kansas and see how well you do.