Botswana has been stunningly successful for a landlocked, underpopulated, largely desert, initially almost completely uneducated backwater.
Since independence, Botswana has had one of the fastest growth rates in per capita income in the world. Botswana has transformed itself from one of the poorest countries in the world to a middle-income country. By one estimate, it has the fourth highest gross national income at purchasing power parity in Africa, giving it a standard of living around that of Mexico and Turkey.
While Mexico and Turkey are hardly the gold standards of achievement in the world, it’s also nothing to sneeze at, considering just where Botswana started in 1966. It is also impressive consaidering AIDS has had a HUGE impact on the country, cutting life expectancy in half relative to the pre-AIDS period ( in the early 80’s, it was higher than South Africa under Apartheid ). Yet even with that devastating burden, a disaster of a magnitude unimagined in the developed west, the economy continues to grow.
I think you hit the nail on the head. If you were to put a bunch of uneducated white rednecks, with little to no understanding of how modern economics, public works and bureaucratic institutions are supposed to work, in charge of their own country - well, if you’ve seen Idiocracy, you got a glimpse of what you’d end up with.
You seem to be committing the moralist fallacy. So you don’t like Chief Pedant’s hypothesis - that doesn’t make it incorrect.
You should read David Friedman’s piece about how Christian creationists oppose evolution, but some who claim to believe in evolution - oppose its implications:
Well, Africa has been around as long as anywhere else, but fair enough. I do note that any number of other countries have wonderful niche success stories despite devastating internal circumstance in recent history. And the success I am asking for is not success as a nation–it’s simply some niche successes as proof cases for your point that the raw talent is there.
For what it’s worth, like many individuals blessed by accident of birth, I consider it my personal, individual responsibility to reach out and help where I can. As I have said elsewhere, being born to a particular skillset and circumstance is not an accomplishment of any kind, and the obligation of every member of the human family is to function as a member of a family.
Orcenio has demonstrated repeatedly that Chief Pedant’s claims, and yours, are counterfactual, and unscientific. It’s not a question of disliking the claims. It’s that the claims are demonstrably false.
You seem to be committing the “wild-ass” fallacy -where you believe any wild-ass racist theory that spouts “Blecks iz teh dumb” regardless of appropriateness (claiming “genetic answers” to easily understandable/answerable socio/political/economic/historical questions) or accuracy (lack of any shred of said “genetic evidence” beyond your own racist ramblings).
Add that to your “testify” fallacy -where you must invade any/all Africa related threads to actively preach and share said race theory. This is basically done to dominate all available discussions and crowd out any chance of real educational learning for the rest of the posters.
Couple these with a huge dollop of “conspiracy” fallacy -That the cross-discipline main stream scientists who rejected said wild-ass racist theory, are somehow corrupted/blind/mislead/left-wing/PC/etc.
and in *finale *“blog” fallacy -where you put a sickening high level of faith into random bloggers then those said scientists (the bloggers are the “real experts”).
There are readily identifiable clusters of points, corresponding to traditional continental ethnic groups: Europeans, Africans, Asians, Native Americans, etc. (See, for example, Risch et al., Am. J. Hum. Genet. 76:268–275, 2005).
There is variation in frequency distribution is in genes that that influence superficial traits.
There may be variation in frequency of genes that affect athletic abilities?
There may be variation in frequency of genes that affect cognitive abilities?
Recent research suggests that 7% or more of all our genes are mutant versions that replaced earlier variants through natural selection over the last tens of thousands of years. There was little gene flow between continental clusters (“races”) during that period, so there is circumstantial evidence for group differences beyond the already established ones (superficial appearance, disease resistance).
For example, you see new versions of SLC6A4, a serotonin transporter, in Europeans and Asians. There’s a new version of a gene (DAB1) that shapes the development of the layers of the cerebral cortex in east Asia. There is no strong evidence yet for specific gene variants (alleles) that lead to group differences (differences between clusters) in behavior or intelligence, but progress on the genomic side of this question will be rapid in coming years, as the price to sequence a genome is dropping at an exponential rate.
Because I had to look up Malawi just now to find out where it is. (At least I knew it was a country, and not a tropical flower or the latest iPod. Yay, me!) Let’s see. Japan: Infant mortality 3‰, Life expectancy 89, GDP per capita $34,000, Average child goes to school for 15 years, state not ruled by dangerous maniacs. Malawi: Infant mortality 89‰, Life expectancy 43.8, GDP per capita $800, Average child goes to school for 9 years, state not ruled by dangerous maniacs.
Good for Malawi. I don’t notice things like that with a casual glance from 10,000 km away. But if African countries don’t suck, why do they so look like they suck? Worse than Haiti?*
*I think “because blacks are dumb” is on a par with “because of evil thought rays from a cloaked Romulan warbird,” BTW.
The influence of conservative interests in mainstream news aside…because it takes something really unusual to get a story on CNN, and that something is most often a massacre or coup of some sort?
You don’t need to read mainstream news. According to Amnesty International, Zimbabwe does not figure in the top 10 of African countries for what it calls “horrendous” human rights abuses; it comes instead towards the top of the second division for unlawful detentions, beatings, torture and executions. According to Amnesty, there are at least 24 other African countries in which, like Zimbabwe, freedom of expression simply does not exist and there are none at all where it is entirely free and untrammelled.
And? I think I answered coffeecat’s query satisfactorily, but what is your point? Assuming this information is true (and I’m not doubting you, but a cite would be nice), so what? What does this prove? Are you then going to conduct an unpaired t-test and assign “freedom scores” to various countries?
CP claimed there was no evidence that black Africa has produced successful programs or innovations or even niche solutions on par with examples such as Ukrainian rocketry, Indian IT outsourcing, N Korean nuclear programs as a way of demonstrating that the talent is there. In other words, no evidence backing up the claim of Orcenio that black Africans are equally capable. As I mentioned earlier, this does not mean the talent does not exist, but it certainly gives credence to my position that there is no evidence to date of such talent.
Would you be so kind as to either personally advance some examples, or point me to wherever it is that Orcenio, MrDibble or anyone else has posted them?
Now why would I disagree with such a simple-minded characterization of human genetic diversity? :rolleyes: You know, I have a link for you. A few years ago Nature Genetics had an entire spread dedicated to “Genetics for the Human Race”. There are two papers I would like to especially encourage you to read, and read well. The first is “Implications of biogeography of human populations for ‘race’ and medicine”
This is truly an interesting paper. Read it. Learn it. Accept it. If not, then at the very least you must learn to stop misrepresenting the view of mainstream scientists/geneticists, here is a direct quote from the Human Genome Project
As you can see Risch actively condemns your wild-ass, shrill, one-note, “blecks iz dumb,” voodoo, blog-based claims/statements. Read on, he even starts to advocate action against such claims
Read Risch
Wild-ass claim #1
Wild-ass claim #2
Wild-ass claim #3 for “circumstantial evidence for group differences.” Jeez, literally “meh, we could find SOMETHING;” find it, then start making wild-ass claims to it’s real properties like Lahn did (and hope you don’t fail at your wild-ass interpretation like he did).
About time you said 1 iota of truth, but your stupid chicken littlism that follows it hardly makes it worth anything…
There is no doubt in my mind that I have wasted my time in responding to a bunch of “race realists.” Please prove me wrong, drop this “race realism” crap and start honestly participating in this thread.
I thought your point was that some countries may appear worse than they really are because of biased sensationalist news coverage?
That may be true to some extent, but you can quickly confirm whether this is the case or not from World Bank data on poverty rates or Interpol on crime rates.
I thought I had given you an excellent example with Botswana. Or are you looking for something super-specific like Finland dominating the rather rarefied Icebreaker industry? If so I think that is a pretty poor indicator of anything, other than a historical, largely accidental association. 40 years of sustained economic growth in the very definition of a backwater is pretty darn impressive to me.
Ethiopia was never colonised and never really in the “Sphere of Influence” of any of the major Colonial powers and the country is still a byword for “Famine, disease, and incredible poverty”.
If you take China 100-150 years ago, the place was a mess and in real danger of suffering the same fate as Africa (ie being divvied up amongst the European nations). Yet the Chinese fought a massive combined Civil War and World War in the early-mid 20th century, got their shit together, and now they produce most of the planet’s manufactured goods and are a major global power. The same is true of India 60 years after Independence.
But there are no sub-saharan African nations with any real international clout anymore; even South Africa isn’t really a global player in anything substantial nowadays besides diamonds (and there’s plenty of those coming from Canada, Russia, and elsewhere in Africa nowadays), Human Rights (which is no trifling matter, I’m sure we all agree), and sports, IMHO.
There is, in short, something very wrong with Sub-Saharan Africa and it can’t all be blamed on “Colonialism” or “European Interference”.
Do you think China and India would have made it so quickly if Mao and Ghandi had been blown up in mysterious airplane accidents or stuffed in a CIA car trunk? When you kill, jail, pay-off and discredit a country’s leaders, it tends to make it difficult for them to find the kind of leadership they need to modernize quickly.
Note that there are plenty of Chinese people who, if they were alive, would raise their eyebrows at the idea that China’s recent history has been a huge success story. And there are plenty of places in India that make your average African village look like Beverly Hills.
He was shot by a local political opponent with a relatively personal agenda. This is a very different thing than a targeted assassination by a colonizer/former colonizer with the express purpose of stalling independence or influencing who leads after independence.