Africa’s not a country.
No. Your specific comments were meaningless. You tried to make an issue that they had only borrowed their knowledge from other outside cultures while specifically ignoring the fact that, with the exception of the original Sumerian culture, there is evidence that every culture in Eurasia and Africa has borrowed knowledge from other outside cultures. There was no point to your claim that they had gotten information from the Westward moving Arab/Islamic culture in the context of your persistent claims about intelligence because it simply meant that they were like everyone else. The same dismissal you issued against Ghana is equally levelled against Greece and Rome, (and almost certainly Egypt and India and China).
My point was that you pretended that I had claimed that African civilizations were “on a par” with every other civilization. Since I have never said that, (as I recognize that it takes time to transfer knowledge and then build upon it and that all civilizations have involved successive transfers of knowledge), your claim for my statement was false.
And I deny your claims as being inherently erroneous in regard to the development of civilizations and cultures. I do not even know what you mean about “playing World’s Best Civilization.” Modern mobility does nothing to address problems that have longstanding historical bases and it, (like your simplistic and erroneous comparisons of post-colonial societies), deliberately ignores the realities of the societies, both at the point where the colonists withdrew and in the matter of outside interference for the emerging nations. If modern mobility erases all historical differences, then all former Warsaw Pact nations should currently be in just as good a shape as all the pre-1989 NATO nations.
Fact - West Africans independently developed iron smelting.
Fact - Africans independently developed agriculture … twice.
etc., etc.
There’s no talking with racists, especially when they continually misuse terminology as they go.
“High cognitive function” is a medical term, relating to senility and developmental retardation. You find it in the literature on Alzheimer’s, Down’s and strokes. It’s not a synonym for “intelligence”, it’s the language of medical illness. It subtly colours the tone of the conversation. I’m not saying it’s intentional, but its misuse (by someone I was given to understand was in the medical field,) is not a positive sign for the coherence of the arguments put forward.
That the kind of selection pressures that Greg Clark refers to in his article ‘Genetically Capitalist’ don’t appear to have been as strong there.
http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/capitalism%2520genes.pdf
Another example of the different selection pressures is that you have female farming systems in Africa. Cochran & Harpending discuss these:
Well, actually it would be pretty significant:
Relevance of education and intelligence at the national level
for the economic welfare of people Rindermann Intelligence 36 (2008) 127–142
http://www-classic.uni-graz.at/pslgcwww/rindermann/publikationen/08IntEco.pdf
Also, see Jones’ discussion of poverty traps here: ‘Cognitive Ability and Technology Diffusion: An Empirical Test’
That’s a stonkingly enlightening article.
And beyond that, within Africa there are some very disperate climate and cultural zones. Sahel West Africa is as alien to Southern Africa as it is to Europe in many ways. Talking about Africa as one thing is really a lot of n
Tribes are nothing more than ethnic groups, not really all that different than the conflicts in the Balkans actually. Nowadays when you talk Yoruba, it’s like saying “Serb” or “Croat” (or Bosniak or Macedonia, etc).
Multi ethnic states with little solid history… rarely a good model.
Cold war damage built on and exacerbated colonial era.
More than the issue of paper, the Sahel mostly (not entirely) outside of the malaria zone as well as mostly outside of the Tse Tse fly zone, meaning proper domesticated Eurasiatic livestock including horses could be kept (and human disease burden is lower: both re trypanosomiasis). I for one think it no accident you find the largest and most well-developed “medieval” African states in this climate zone. The lower disease burden (malaria is one horrible disease) plus benefits of healthier, larger livestock are just astounding. Hell, being involved in certain agri type investments in the region, thinking about the disease burden relative to productivity is a real consideration.
Wankers who run on and on about genes and the like relative to African development just simple racists and I have no use for them.
OK. You hav expressed your opinions regarding racists.
That is not the topic of this thread and you will refrain from any further similar comments lest it be construed that you are attacking other posters.
[ /Moderating ]
Done.
Fine, as of this moment Africa is “yours”. How quickly can I expect your report on your great wealth? Or isn’t that what you meant to say? Did you mean “Make me dictator of Africa through force of arms and re-enslave the Africans to bend to my will, and I will be wealthy”?
Africans may suffer from poor access to education, but what use has your education been to you?
Please comment, all, on this. This is not a fully informed piece, I admit.
I had a friend who went to Tanzania in the Peace Corps, and when he got back he had a “what happened to you over there” night at his parents’ house.
My summary of his conclusions was:
For many centuries people have been living in tribes with limited resources, meaning that valuables must be shared, or everyone eventually dies for lack of something. This means that working for yourself is not something people really think of, and it inspires great jealousy if someone creates a fish farm and insists that it is NOT a fishing pond for everyone else. That pond is likely to get poisoned.
Since everyone knows this reaction has happened before, it puts the brakes on even getting started. Even worse is the thought that you will get secretly cursed, and they are not kidding. Friend kind of argued with some of them, based on the fact that he wasn’t afraid of the curses (“but your white and Asian ancestors are more powerful than ours”) and they claimed to be Christian, but it of course didn’t work.
Since everything should be shared, many people are hired simply through nepotism, because the first person to get hired into the company knows of the hassle it will be if he/she doesn’t get some relatives into the bounty of having a job. This means many jobs are filled by someone incompetent, who also often has no real intention of performing the job at any reasonable level in the first place.
All this rolls up in a ball of expectations and attitudes to the point where the Westerners (including “liberal, sensitive” Friend) start pulling out their hair at the lackadaisical attitude toward getting anything really done.
Another thing he pointed out was that the money from “the West” had spoiled people in some ways, and they saw it as an unlimited resource that should be used for gifts, instead of something that might help them help themselves. This is why Bill Gates and Bono and such are so big on growing business instead of just giving the money to the governments, who often stole it, or just giving things away with no further expectations.
Friend couldn’t convince the older men of his little rural village to organize a group of younger guys to hack the weeds out of the irrigation ditch every couple weeks, because they said he should get a hold of those unimaginable resources of his and have the ditch paved. He’d told them he didn’t have any money, but they didn’t really believe him, as he clearly was wearing nice shoes, and money kept arriving out of nowhere for him to eat and live, so he should make the call for the $10K it would take to pave the ditch.
Of course, he points out that he was living in the sticks with the uneducated, and you can get some real eye popping situations in outer Alabama, too, but there does seem to be a different level of expectations through the greater society.
Genetically speaking, North Koreans are insdistinguishable from South Koreans and yet the North Koreans are doing much worse. Did all the stupid Koreans move to the north during teh war or is it possible that other factors can have a large enough impact that you don’t need genetic intellectual inferiority to explain why people are living in squalor.
How did the ancient Egyptians overcome their genetically inferior IQs and create the most powerful empire of their time?
Southern Africa has a different climate that allows for Asian/European crops and animals (but not central-African crops). Guns, Germs and Steel makes the argument that this is the main reason South Africa was the only place that really got colonized by large amounts of Europeans (that, and the diseases that were and are still prevalent elsewhere in Africa), and that European farming allows for comparatively good food production. Especially compared to central-north Africa. This may be the reason SA is as well off as it is, even with its social issues.
But I’m really not knowledgeable enough to know how much of that is correct. It just sounds plausible to me.
And you must document the fact that they do not take sugar with their porridge.
How much better off where the Germanic tribes or the Cletic tribes or the Norse tribes than the African tribes a couple of thousand years ago? What environmental factors in Europe and Asia that did not exist in Africa during the last 2000 years gave enough of an evolutionary advantage to intelligence that you would experience the stark difference in intelligence (we’re talking about one stadard deviation or 15 IQ pionts) that you are convinced is the cause for their modern day failures?
Fact:
The Eurasian population, on average, has done better than the sub-saharan population, on average, everywhere and all through history.
[/quote]
Aren’t you repeating yourself here?
Yeah over the last thousand years or so.
Yeah, this is pretty recent too.
Once again, recent.
Once again, pretty recent.
The “correction” you are talking about does not adequately correct for all factors. An adopted white kid in a suburban white neighborhood is not going to have the same experiences as an adopted black kid in a suburban white neighorhood no matter how similar the adoptive parents may be.
Even if I accept that there may be genetic differences in IQ, I suspect that it is not really enough of a difference to explain the stark difference between what we see in Africa today and what we see in Canada.
You seem to be implying that all other things are somehow “equal enough” that you can make ssumtions about IQ and their effects on Africa.
I am not resistant to the idea that there are genetic differences between groups of humans that have largely bred within their race, I have a little trouble believing that there is a standard deviation’s worth of difference in IQ between races, I am entirely unconvinced that whatever differences in IQ that may exist goes very far in explaining the dramtic differences between Africa and Taiwan.
African countries do not generally have the creditworthiness to be able to support trade deficits. They tend to export a lot of raw material and resources. The money ends up in the hands of corrupt governments.
The only reason i find it controversial is that the end game of this argument frequently seems to be “and so because the huge disparities in socioeconomic status we see between the races is the result of differences in IQ, therefore we should abandon affirmative action because any further convergence due to affirmative action would be arifitical and not the result of levelling the playing field”