Not at all, and I don’t really claim that any particular subgroup from either Africans or non-Africans is either representative, or superior to another subgroup. In fact, I’ve given an example that, within Eurasians, it’s entirely possible the group who migrate to cities has a higher IQ than the group which does not. Nor do I pretend no non-genetic factors are at play.
It’s the whole group average I’m talking about, for various skillsets, when nurturing is normalized.
I should also warn you: among the explanations not considered tenable on this Board among the proponents of absolutist heritable intelligence is actual history.
One will note that the general discussion in this thread has actually “blamed colonialism” except as it was one part of a much longer and more complex historical trend and as it was administered in a way much different than any other European colony, yet we see an advocate of “it’s gotta be brains” making that straw man claim without addressing the actual issues put forth.
So, your implication is that the various black empires could not have gotten better except through the example of and contact with outside societies, (much as the Celts and Germans were first “lifted” by contact with Rome, the Italians were “lifted” by contact with Greece, the Rus and other Slavs were “lifted” by the Roman successor civilizations, the Mongols (and Viets and other groups), were “lifted” by the earlier Chinese, etc.), yet there is, somehow, a problem with the intelligence of the Songhai, Mali, Ghanans, etc. that is supposed to be different than the non-black societies that arose in exactly the same way.
And the claim that other former colonial regions have prospered while post-colonial Africa has not can be tied directly to the ways in which the regions were colonized and the ways in which colonialism was directed. In fact, I have already pointed out those differences. Hand-waving away the differences does not make them disappear. In addition, your simplistic straw man also deliberately chooses to ignore the specific aspects of the Cold War and Western interference in each of those societies. Come up with a non-African society that was treated in the manner of African colonies that has since prospered on its own and your thesis will begin to look as though it is serious.
Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. Please learn to read a cladogram before making any other arguments about populations or genetics. For those of you who are willing to be educated, every cladogram has to be constructed using an arbitrarily designated outgroup. Here, the author of that figure lumped all of Africa into an outgroup despite the fact that African populations have more genetic diversity than the entire rest of humanity.
And what the hell does population divergence have to with any of your other completely unsupported points?
Genetic distance is not the same as genetic diversity.
To show genetic-distance, grouping all Africans together is acceptable because even if you broke them out individually, they’d still all clump together in the same forks that represent “distance.”
It’s easy to get confused about what this chart is showing, because it’s a popular misconception that the diversity of the sub-saharan populations means it meaningless to lump them as a group.
You can read about the Out of Africa hypothesis for yourself to understand how the basic concept is related to your distance from the trunk (if we are using a branch metaphor); essentially Africans and non-Africans are two different splits of the main trunk.
As a consequence, all sub-saharan Africans, while diverse from one another, are groupable by virtue of being part of the group that did not leave. The notion is that the group that left and produced Eurasians was fairly small, and therefore the descendants of that group are, well, groupable. Diversity within a given allopatric group is not of consequence in determining whether or not the group should be considered an allopatric separation. In addition, exposure of non-Africans to Neandertal genes may, all by itself, turn out to be another convenient way of biologically separating the two groups: Who has Neandertal genes and who does not? However that is a relatively new line of research and has yet to be elucidated.
As to the significance of divergence: A starting point to understand why human populations are different is to understand that our gene pools are different. We do not all draw from the same library of genes. Understanding divergence helps understanding of why this is so.
I find it incredible that there is such resistance to the notion that populations are different when it is quite clear that gene prevalences are different. It’s much more likely populations would be different than that they would be the same if they have access to different gene pools…
Surely potential colonies were treated according to what the colonizers could get by with, and not according to some arbitrary a priori plan. If you are attempting to swipe Japan you are going to have a different set of problems from swiping the Americas, are you not? And the extent to which you are able to establish infrastructure is equally dependent on the ability of the population being controlled to execute that infrastructure. So while I agree that Africa was “treated differently” I think that’s evidence that the population was different; not that colonizers somehow decided on one course for India and another for African regions.
As to a double standard of me complaining that it’s not powerful evidence for sub-saharan successes if those successes were built on importing outside knowledge, I simply point out that it would be more powerful if sub-saharan Africa were doing the developing and exporting in Even Sven’s examples…I don’t pretend expertise in African history, but I believe it’s correct that there has been fairly limited export over the years.
The “population was different” all right; they were organized differently and had differing levels of technology and different disease resistance and different population densities. And were colonized at different historical times, too. That doesn’t say a thing about intelligence.
Im puzzled…
We can all agree on that different ethnic groups can have different exterior traits.
Why would it be controversial to assume that different groups have different variations in their genetic make up. And why would it be controversial that different groups would have different phenotypes, not to mention genotypes.
Wherever we come from we have differences in our genes, compared to the next man. What invisible rule says that this can not manifest in different fields.
And if so, what makes it wrong to explore differences?
I take it on face value, that for example a large percentage of African Americans are more well suited in some particular sports, say Basketball and fotball as compared to other ethnic groups.
How is this controversial and touchy.
If you grant me this, What would be the reason for this not translating into other fields where some traits/genes whatever are more common in one ethnic group compared to others.
Could a trait only be different in athletic ability, but not in mental capacity for example?
I think these are topics most valid for debate/research
If they are not Im most open for debate.
Because historically such claims have been both wrong and motivated by malice. Given history, it would take extraordinary levels of evidence for me to take such claims seriously; there has been too much delusion and fraud in this area. If someone comes up with a bunch of statistics “proving” that black people are less intelligent, I see no reason to assume that it isn’t just another in the long line of erroneous or outright fraudulent attempts to use statistics to prove just that. The racists have been doing this for ages.
And because such claims are so obviously just covers for racism; again, there’s no reason to assume that genetically driven differences in intellectual capacity will conveniently match the racial categories made up out of whole cloth by biologically ignorant preindustrial racists.
Because this isn’t about exploring differences, it’s about excusing and encouraging prejudice. This is about the desire to label a group subhuman.
Not quite like Europe, though. It is possible to speak of a “European culture” encompassing all the different national cultures, but it is not possible to speak of an “African culture” at any time in history. Africa never had the unifying factors of a common religion or a common language of scholarship.
Exactly what does it mean to be “treated in the manner of African colonies”? And what do you mean by prospering “on its own”?
Your straw man arguments are beginning to get a bit wearying.
I never made any claim that the Europeans set out to treat anyone in any particular way. You are correct that they simply reacted to the conditions they found, but the conditions were different and the results were different. You are the one who has made the false equivalence argument that since different colonies have survived de-colonization differently, then there must be a genetic difference between them. I have merely noted that claiming that India has done better than Kenya says nothing about the innate intelligence of Indians and Kenyans and that one must look at the entire picture, not just a start date and a current financial report.
Your claims about sub-Saharan empires are meaningless from any perspective. You complain that they must have borrowed knowledge from outside sources, as though that had some real relevance, while ignoring all the other groups that also borrowed knowledge from outside sources. Then you complain that you will only be impressed if those empires were involved in some sort of significant exports, while carefully ignoring the fact that the French, Germans, and English never really became export giants when they had reached the same levels of development. (Mali, BTW, was the most significant source for gold in Europe and Western Asia during the 14th century, via trade across the Sahara and the original Wagadou/Ghana Empire actually got its start by shipping gold and ivory to the Umayyad provinces on the Mediterranean.)
Now, let us consider the whole issue of why the various potential colonies were different. Humanity is only about 200,000 years old. Agrarian cultures, those that can support and give rise to empires, only began to emerge around 10,000 years ago and actual societies that gave rise to empires only emerged 5,500 years ago. So, we note that humanity spent 194,500 years with no empires of any sort. When empires did emerge, they tended to arise in locations with important river valleys where agriculture could take hold, and the evidence, limited as it is, still indicates that migrations or travels from one emerging agricultural region to another played a significant role in “seeding” others. Clearly, there was a certain amount of spontaneity in various cultures becoming agrarian and then producing empires–claims that the Mali created the Maya are rather far fetched–but trying to assign some sort of cause-and-effect relationship between group median intelligence and the rise of agriculture or empires would set the clear point that the ancestors of the Iraqis were the smartest people in the world, followed a bit by Egyptians and Indians, followed in turn by Chinese, and that Greeks and Romans were pretty dumb while Britons were dumber than rocks. Empires have only existed for about 2.75% of human history and making any assumptions about innate qualities of a people based on whether they have engaged in empire building for 2.75% (Mesopotamia) or .6% (Wagadou Empire) or .2% (British) of human history is rather silly–particularly if one is going to not even consider all the other groups who did not manage to reach that stage. This is most especially true if one deliberately ignores the availability of crops that would sustain diet for a large population, the climate in which those crops must be grown, the availability of routes for transportation, either by river, sea or land, the availability of beasts of burden, and any number of other factors.
When Europe discovered that it could use its ships and gunpowder to go forth and plunder the world, eventually deciding that conquest and colonization worked better than simple raids, it encountered a lot of different lands in a lot of different stages of development. Now, we can make up stories about how “intelligence” differences led to the differences they found, or we can look at the actual development of different societies to discover why they happened to be at a particular stage before European intervention intruded. Once we have done that, we can consider whether those histories (along with current geography and politics), have played a role in the post-colonial development of those regions. Once we have determined those situations, we can look compare equal situations to see whether intelligence might play a current role in their situations. If you can demonstrate that an African and a non-African region had “equal” situations at the end of their colonial periods, I will consider looking at their purported intelligences.
In Africa, native peoples were not permitted to participate in the creation or maintenance of their own infrastructure except as manual laborers. When Europeans established mines or farms or other sources of income, the local peoples weree never permitted to participate in the ownership and all revenue was sent out of the country. (Spain did a bit of this in the Americas, but so many native peoples died of European diseases, that those colonies tended to be resettled by more Europeans who were then able to participate in the infrastructure and the profits.)
You are free to discuss this if you can actually define your terms in ways that are factual and make sense. If you start out with some wild claim about “races,” then you should be able to identify who is acxtually in one race or another, then provide evidence that these “races” actually demonstrat what you claim about them.
Instead, we see–over and over–generalizations about groups who are quite distinct as though they were unified and then claims made for their abilities or lack that are not supported by facts. The fact that such claims so frequently, (not to say conveniently), follow the lines that identified what were erroneously supposed to be “races” decades ago tends to make such assertions suspect.
The narrative advanced by even sven seems to suggest that in some vague past (she typically picks the late European Middle Ages), Africa was about on par with the rest of the world. Then we jump to its wretched state over the last couple hundred years or so, with an implication that Colonialism trashed what would otherwise have been a natural progression into an equally-performing subcontinent.
That’s what I’m calling unsupported nonsense.
Great Civilizations come and go. Regional conflicts rise and fall. All Great Civilizations innovate, export, import and amalgamate their knowledge and advancements. To do so effectively requires a certain intellectual capacity and as such is a (not the, and not a perfect) marker for cognitive ability. If you and sven want to believe that the history of sub-saharan civilizations is a history of equal contribution to the world’s book of knowledge to that of Eurasian civilization contributions, have at it. I don’t see it.
As to Europe’s “discovery” that the use of gunpowder and ships could allow them to go forth and conquer (as opposed, I suppose, to the use of spears and sticks to go forth and conquer), I love that Jared Diamond-inspired language. It uses the word “discovery” in a way that makes it sound like the Europeans were fortunate enough to find sophisticated weapons lying behind their local hedge bush. The Diamond narrative creates an Easter Egg Hunt for mankind and as it turns out all the good eggs got stashed in Eurasian regions, to be “discovered” by their fortunate inhabitants. That the British turned Rhodesia into a breadbasket or the Boers turned South Africa into a developed nation seems to go contrary to the notion that the only good eggs are in the Northern Hemisphere, but hey…why bring messy details into the Good Luck story (no Nigerian pun intended)?
In other words, not only are you claiming black people are stupid; you are claiming they are extremely stupid. Neanderthal stupid. Too stupid even to copy things.
Who’s claiming they have? They’ve never had the opportunity.
In other words, you’ve never actually read Jared Diamond.
They turned South Africa into a racist hellhole. As for Rhodesia; it’s rather easier to make a place into a “breadbasket” once they import wheat with which to make bread. One of the points Diamond makes that you are ignoring is the paucity of domesticatable plants in animals in among other places, Africa.
Not sure you want to refer to the Afrikaaners as Boers. I’m told by an African history specialist that this is insulting.
At any rate, the Afrikaaners couldn’t have created an industrial society in South Africa on their own. It was the business and industrial leadership of the English speaking whites, and their political and trade connections to the British Empire that made it possible.
Apartheid was in part an affirmative action program for Afrikaaners.
Again with the straw man arguments?
I suspect that you are misinterpreting what even sven has said, but regardless, your claims, here, have nothing to do with what I have said.
I do not assert that Africa has always been at some par with the rest of the world. In fact, it is your odd claim, implied here, that the world has had some general par level that it has continually experienced. While it is true that empires have risen and fallen, it is not true that it is some sort of constant pendulum for all humanity, (except those poor benighted Africans), that simply swings back and forth. There has been, rather, a general progression from hunter-gatherer, through agrarian, through city-kingdom, through regional kingdom, to empire throughout the world. As that progression has occurred, the various increasingly larger societies have tended to spur nearby regions to participate in the same developments to the point where we finally have larger kingdoms and nations, interacting. It is this development that the Ghana, Mali, Songhai empires reflect, just as we can witness in Mesopotamia, then the Nile, then the Indus beginning three thousand years earlier or along the Yellow and Yangtze two thousand years earlier, or in Meso America at a roughly contemporaneous period. In other words, in widely scattered parts of the world, similar histories were repeated at different times. And the differences in time are very negligible on the scale of the life of humanity. Such events were not all contemporaneous because the discoveries that permitted them to occur–and the transmission of knowledge from their points of discovery to other places–did not all occur at the same time. Different regions in Africa were at different stages of the general development when it was interrupted by Arab and European intervention–in the same way that different regions in Eurasia and the Americas experienced the same general development at different times. If you want to claim that it was innate intelligence that “held back” Africa, then you need to acknowledge that Northern Europeans were simply not as smart as Mesopotamians and Egyptians and Indians and Chinese.
I am not sure what your comments regarding Europeans and gunpowder and ships is supposed to mean. I did not claim that Europeans “discovered” gunpowder or shipbuilding, I said that they discovered that those tools allowed them to do things differently (i.e., at a great distance from their homes), than they, (or anyone else), had done earlier. My point was hardly some idea invented by Jared Diamond; it is the clear history of the world. Several regions had gunpowder (and guns) and ships capable of world exploration. (Dhows and junks were clearly the equal of caravels in the earliest days of exploration and all those seafaring societies had a range of ships available.) It was only the Europeans that actually happened to exploit those implements and it was European intervention that then changed the rest of world history. (Diamond does have a hypothesis to explain why it was the Europeans and not the Chinese or the Turks or Moguls who happened to choose the path of world exploration and conquest, but his hypothesis for that event is clearly speculative and it is not that relevant to this discussion.)
The stories of Rhodesia and South Africa demonstrate something different than you are ascribing to me. I would note that there were no nearby politan civilizations to spark a different development in that region in the way that the Nile and Indus were likely sparked by expansion from Mesopotamia. The pastoral environment that existed in that region was sufficient for the peoples living there and a lack of beasts of burden limited the development of agrarian society. When the Europeans arrived, they brought with them a culture that already had the tools and livestock, (and, by that time, the products of the Industrial Revolution), to exploit the land in ways that the indigenous peoples could not previously. The same thing happened in North America.
The Inca and Aztec (and predecessor Maya) had built Mesopotamian-like societies and the Natchez and the Iroquois were beginning to coalesce into the sort of societies that had developed in Mesopotamia, generally hampered by the lack of livestock to permit the movement of heavier loads, and when Europeans arrived, bringing the appropriate tools, they were able to more fully exploit the same land.
Your “Easter Egg” claim is false both in regard to the way that Diamond has expounded and certainly in regard to what I have posted, here. It is another straw man argument that seeks to ignore actual events to assign a claim to me that I have not made.
There’s hardly any Afrikaner alive who doesn’t have a healthy dose of sub-Saharan ancestry, AFAICT.