This surprises you?
Neither have I but the way it was explained to me was that history=destiny and geography=history. I saw the movie if that helps, but it seemed like a lot of reaaly obvious stuff.
Well there wasn’t that much in the way of domestiable plants and animals on an acre for acre basis in Asia and Europe either but what there was could be farmed in a greater area.
It’s a combination - geographic location, like you said - not just climate, but also geopolitical location on one of the main E-W trade routes, a wealth of mineral resources (seriously - check up how many minerals SA is in the top 10 producers of), also a greater degree of social interaction between groups (those anti-miscegenation laws were put there for a reason) than was common in the more master/slave colonial situations further North. But yes, I think climate plays a big role, too.
This is a common response to GG&S, but not what Diamond intended, so he wrote Collapse specifically to examine how societies make choices and how those choices affect their outcomes, independent of their geography. Since the difference is most obviously seen in how societies avoid (or fail to avoid) environmental collapse, that’s what he examines: societies that didn’t avoid obviously foreseeable collapse (such as the Easter Islanders cutting down all the trees) and societies that did (such as Polynesian cultures on very limited islands who found a workable balance with what was available). It’s worth reading.
The movie isn’t bad, but it has very little to do with the book. Diamond’s work is a little overblown, but there’s a lot more depth to it than what you have down. Essentially, Eurasia had a number of advantages over the other continents–food biodiversity, domesticable animals, climate, and so forth. As has been indicated in other posts, Diamond isn’t preaching utter predestination, but he does make a very good case that physical environment played a huge role in Eurasian world dominance.
As far as the “why Europe and not China” question is concerned, there’s a large body of historiography on that. There was a good essay in American Historical Review a few years ago that sums up the various strains of thought pretty well.
Those are the same folks.
I believe one the key observations was re isolation.
Bigger networks are better for resource and knowledge generation as well, as a not entirely related observation.
QFT. I think corruption is the worse contributor. I have no cites just a gut :).
In addition, if you do manage to overcome the above then you become a target - a possible source of money to be exploited.
Are you saying that if Japan today could exploit Africa’s land and anural resources they would become very very wealthy. Sure maybe, but if you transplanted the japanese people to Africa 2000 years ago, I don’t know if they would be quite as successful as they might be if you transplanted them today. To be fair, it gets a bit tougher to make this argument with Asian cultures because they have had such large stable empires for so long that you can’t make the same sort of arguments you canw tih Europe where you basically had barbarians in northern Europe until the middle of the roman empire.
The Kleptocracy feesl the same way.
I wish my smilies would work from here so i could click the sarcatic irony smiley.
I hardly read anything anymore unless I get paid to do so. Its really pretty sad.
I trust this remark wasn’t directed towards me?:dubious:
Africa’s misfortunes are still being exploited by the ‘Western World’. We pay Africans to maintain the lion population, something that is unlikely to be a growth industry, instead of eradicating them as pests and increasing the livestock production.
I don’t want lions eradicated (as they were in Europe), but it is difficult to dismiss the exploitation of Africa’s resources for the benefit of the rest of the world as a major factor in the current state of affairs. I don’t see many signs of ‘great civilization’ before the start of the renaissance, and since then Africa has been invaded and exploited, had their original cultures destroyed, people enslaved and carried away, artificial national boundaries created, been the playing field for proxy wars, on top of the problems of disease. Nowhere do I see evidence that Africa would not now be in a very different situation if these problems did not exist, or that other continents would have fared better under those circumstances.
Not quite…
What one would expect is that, if population differences are immutable because there is a genetic underpinning, the sub-saharan population would fare more poorly within any given country and political system than other populations with which the nature theorists want to compare them.
And that pattern is what we do, in fact find.
I’d bet that, on average, Europeans from Warsaw Pact nations do better in almost every circumstance, worldwide, requiring high-cognitive skills, than do sub-saharan Africans. That’s the pattern I find so hard to dismiss.
Of course any given political system and national history has an effect on how a particular citizenry is doing compared with the rest of the world. But what you will find is that Asians outperform sub-saharans in Asia and in sub-saharan Africa; whether they are the majority or minority; whether in a political system developed by them or by colonialists or by Africans. (That’s what got them kicked out of Uganda, for instance, by Idi Amin.)
It’s not a perfect pattern. It’s not a perfect metric. But it’s an average pattern, and it is a suggestive pattern for fundamental differences in skillsets, particularly when one sees enormous success for endeavors requiring different skillsets, such as sprinting and West Africans.
It’s easy to argue by exceptions to the overall pattern. It’s easy to simply fling the term “racist” around (not you, but others here).
But it’s hard to look across the world and ignore that pattern repeated over and over.
Well shucks, forget my puny 10 hypothetical. According to your cites many sub-Saharan nations have an average IQ of ~70. That means the average citizen of that country would be literally, literally Joe Biden, mentally retarded. This could make these threads much shorter. I thought we were hemming and hawing over a couple points here and there, why hasn’t anyone pointed this out?
Africans are retarded. Literally. Yes sir. Air tight case.
Since the statement to which you are responding has already received Moderator attention, I expect you to refrain from bringing up the subject again.
Drop it.
[ /Modding ]
Well, this certainly isn’t true of cattle herding cultures like the Masai and the Dinka, where a young man simply couldn’t get married if he doesn’t have enough cows. I’d be interested if someone can show some real differences in selection pressure between the Africans who live/d by cattle herding and war making, and the Germanic peoples who did the same before the civilizing influence of ancient Rome.
It definitely isn’t true of achievement oriented African ethnic groups like the Ibo, where a man’s worth was measured in the number of yams and other food he could grow, and a man who farmed poorly couldn’t get a wife and had no children.
It also isn’t true of the Yoruba who lived in organized city states for centuries.
So maybe Clark et al are addressing an imaginary Africa, not the real one.
How much of Africa really has/had female farming systems? Did women peasants in Europe not do huge amounts of heavy labor? When people talk about women doing the hard dirty work while the men hang out and booze it up, they’re describing certain communities in Africa, and in Russia.
I’m fairly sure that a rigorous survey of African economic and cultural practices would shoot down most of your assertions.
At least they admit that their model is a cartoon. I’ll take it as seriously as I take Bugs Bunny.
Interestingly, the pattern that I note is that Africans removed from Africa tended to be removed in chains as labor with no effort to educate them while Asians moving to Africa, (and Oceania and the Americas), tended to be invited and were allowed to bring their education and their cultural traditions with them and that once either group was settled in a new location, the Africans were systematically more oppressed by law than the Asians, even when both groups suffered some level of oppression.
So when I look at the average situation, I see a lot more culture and history than I do innate qualities or skills.
The sprinting issue raises a separate point regarding respective populations. It is currently accepted common wisdom among many that the current domination of Oympic level sprinting events by West Africans or descendants of West Africans is a genetic trait. I am, barring serious evidence to the contrary, willing to entertain that hypothesis. However, I note that the only serious measure that is ever put forth is the number of sprinters from that (ancestral) region who win at the highest levels of competition. I have never seen any attempt to determine median sprinting speeds analyzed by ethnic group. What we seem to perceive regarding West African sprinting is that one group appears to produce a remarkable number of outliers for a particular phenomenon. In other words, I have never seen any evidence that West African descended people are faster sprinters on average, only that the group appears to produce the greatest number of exceptions. If that is our anchor point for accepting that separate ethnic groups display hierarchies of traits, then I am more likely to accept that separate groups provide the most outliers for any trait than that any group is genuinely better or worse on average.
What I think I’ve read is that certain groups like Kenyans happen to have a build that often does well in distance running, and now there is a culture that breeds love for the sport. Are Americans really that naturally good at basketball, or do we have more people playing it, and for more hours per day?
I think every sport is a battle of the genetic and motivational freaks. Jordan and Bryant were certainly given body and muscle types that lent themselves to basketball, but they also really really really practiced. Maravich practiced like he had a gun to his head. But if he’d been 5-8 instead of 6-5, there would have been a different story about him.
Well that’s a start, and I’ll take it. Small steps toward a general perception that groups differ genetically for phenotypic traits.
If all we had was past civilizations to use as markers, we might erroneously decide the Greeks were the best athletes, what with their Olympics and all, and West Africans were non-starters. The mobility of modern societies allows a side by side comparison that makes it obvious that would be a mistaken assumption.
As to this idea that there may be some genetically-advantaged outliers, well yes and no. Yes, you might be seeing only outliers for a small sub-population (and in the case of “West” Africans that sub-population certainly isn’t the Mbuti, for instance). But the thing is, these “outliers” are representative of general trends across a population. It’s not as if there are two totally discrete groups–the superstars and the piddlers, with the piddlers in all populations all being equal, and a given population having this totally separate handful of outliers.
If (hi, you with the face!) we used sprinting or basketball as examples, we’d find that not only are there extreme outliers at the highest end; there is an over-representation at every level of the population that’s “good” at it.
I think it’s a fair statement to say that if we see a marked over-representation of a given population at the outlier end, we’ll likely find an ability spread across that whole population to a greater prevalence than a population with fewer outliers.
I would not be surprised to find that West African subpopulations are overrepresented at every level of sprinting competitions, across every culture and nation in which they have equal access to participate in it. And I am not surprised to find China, with a billion people and a very directed program to cull out and groom superior athletes, get their ass kicked by West Africans in sprinting.
In short, the outliers tell us something. I do not discount the possibility that only a small subset of a population carries a particular advantageous gene with greater prevalence, and that it is possible that that subset alone accounts for the higher “average” performance of a larger grouping. In fact, I think that’s likely, since there are dozens or hundreds (or thousands) of “populations” depending on whether or not you are lumper or a splitter.
But I maintain the key point: Where you find differences and can show opportunity has been normalized, it’s genes.
Cognitive ability is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for economic success. Obviously, if you have absurd economic policies it won’t matter how clever your population is.
As for the ancient Egyptians, they were Mediterranean.
I’d recommend that you read Mary Leftkowitz’s books *Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History *(1996) or Black Athena revisited.