I am interested in all the competing theories going around about Africa, and the problems it's faced developing throughout most of millennia. The prevailing one at the moment is the one advanced by California University professor Jared Diamond, in his book ‘Guns Germs and Steel’. His thesis is that Africa’s backwardness throughout history can be attributed to geographical difficulties on the African continent. “Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history” http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393317552/002-0300838-3747205?v=glance This book has won a Pulitzer, and is now being taught in American schools. I am personally a little bit skeptical of this book; It seems a little too fitting. In America now the mainstream political agenda has been for some years racial/cultural integration, ‘tolerance’ and ‘equality’. How appropriate it is then that a book comes along and concludes that all differences in historical progress merely reflect the inequality of our historical environments, rather than the differences between peoples themselves. I think this book is a symptom of a political movement, not an intellectual one. The fact is that even if it were true that, oh let’s say, genetic differences contribute, at least in part, to differences between occidental/oriental success and sub-Sahara Africa’s lack of success, than such a truth would have no chance of gaining credence in American, P.C, political and intellectual culture, anyway. I don’t have a huge problem with this, because even if it it true that certain racian groupings are less cognitive, it will just perpetuate old racial stereotypes and revive prejudice. But the question must be asked, what happenes to truth, in an environment that tempers it with politics? Surely the goal of scholars is the noble one of the pursuit of truth, not the most politically correct form of it. Many books have been written from a more scientific and less geographical point of view, dealing with the inherent differences between races, and showing how they contribute to historical progress. But unsurprisingly, the media doesn't drool over them. I don’t know why it need be such a surprise to people that their might be racial differences between humans. Anyone who watched the final of the 100m sprint at the Olympics recently need not be convinced that Africans and Europeans are not equal in ability at sprinting. Why should it be so unbelievable that some races can have different intellectual abilities? Well, it’s not, and many books have been written dealing with this subject. Professor Sarich, emeritus of Anthropology @ Berkely has written ‘Race: The Reality of Human Differences’. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/A...33963/sr=ka-1/ref=pd_ka_1/002-0300838-3747205 From publishers weekly: Sarich, a Berkeley emeritus anthropologist, and Miele, an editor of Skeptic magazine, cannot resist calling the current view that "race does not exist" a "PC dogma." They make cogent, if not convincing, arguments of their case in three areas. Race as a concept, they argue, considerably antedates colonial Europe, presenting such examples as an "Egyptian tomb with four races" (as one caption calls a tomb painting) that may point up "awareness" of difference, but whether that awareness correlates to concepts of "race" as currently defined remains unproven. Several chapters are heavy going on DNA-based research into the origin and differentiation of Homo sapiens, here interpreted as branching off from the other hominids recently enough to make differences among people very minor but, in the authors' view, significant. They move from the Human Genome Project into their final section, in which differences in intelligence are said to correlate to a concept of race (but are not said to be a justification for discrimination). This last argument is predicated on what will seem to many readers an excessive faith in IQ tests. Nevertheless, the book lacks vitriol, other than that needed to fuel the skeptic's attempt to debunk. Some interesting excerpts: "Strong evidence in the case for race comes from examining the amount of variation actually present in a proper comparative context. The differences in morphology (cranial and facial features) between human races are typically around ten times the corresponding differences between the sexes within a given race, larger even than the comparable differences taxonomists use to distinguish the two chimpanzee species from each other. To the best of our knowledge, human racial differences exceed those for any other non-domesticated species. One must look to the breeds of dogs to find a comparable degree [to humans] of within-species differences in morphology. We also point out other aspects in which human diversity in morphology, pharmacogenetics (body chemistry), and behavior more closely parallels our best friends (the dogs) than our nearest relatives (the apes), and what that reveals about the origin of our species." ------------------------------------------ Sarich and Miele also discuss how the courts also have no trouble in recognizing race and accepts "the ability of the average individual to sort people into races." It seems also that racial classifications is rather innate: "Ordinary people can and do divide Homo sapiens into a number of reasonably discrete groups on the basis of reasonably objective criteria. No special expertise is required. A series of experiments in cognitive psychology carried out by social anthropologist Lawrence Hirschfeld showed that as early as age three, children readily classify people on the basis of racial characteristics, without having to be taught to do so." -------------------------------------------- "Why can we do this? Why, in fact, are we so good at it? The reason is no mystery, or at least it shouldn't be. Homo sapiens is a socially interactive species and was so even before we became quite so sapient. The common ancestor we share with chimpanzees and all our ancestors along the way must have been able to recognize the members of their social group as individuals and, by extension, tell the difference between any of them and members of another group. So can baboons, wolves, dogs, killer whales, and lions (but not the other big cats, who are solitary) make such distinctions. The evolution of interactive sociality strongly selects for individuals who are able to recognize other similar individuals and adjust their behaviors with respect to who else is involved. The physical evidence for the evolutionary importance of this ability can be seen in the large amount of brain tissue devoted to these tasks at the base of our brains. As Hirschfeld concluded, 'Because human groupings (i.e., collectivities of people based on gender, race, native language, or kinship status) are integral parts of nearly all social environments, acquiring knowledge of such groupings is a necessary part of the child's early development.'" ------------------------------------------------- "We explain that elapsed time does not determine the amount of change in traits that have survival value. Anatomical differences among human races can exceed those found between chimpanzee species. Finally, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond has argued that the characteristics chosen to distinguish between races are arbitrary. Choose a different set of characteristics and you will come up with a different set of races. We demonstrate that the comparison of randomly chosen DNA variants produces the same races as the commonsense view, the art and literature of ancient, non-European civilizations, and anthropology." ------------------------------------------------- Sarich and Miele addresses Jared Diamond's attempt to deny race: "There is a further critical flaw here. The proportion of individuals carrying the sickle-cell allele can never go above about 40 percent in any population, nor does the proportion of lactase-competent adults in any population ever approach 100 percent. Thus, on the basis of the sickle-cell allele, there are two groups (possible races by Diamond's criteria) of Fulani, one without the allele, the other with it. So those Fulani with the allele would group not with other Fulani, but with Italians with the allele. Those without it, along with the Italians without it (in both cases the majority) and all the Swedes, would form another unit—in effect, primitive Homo sapiens." "Perhaps not, you might argue. Diamond is talking of frequencies of traits in populations, and the frequencies of lactase-competent adults are more similar in Swedes and Fulani than in Swedes and Italians or Fulani and Xhosa (one should note here that lactase-competence has clearly evolved independently in Europeans and Africans). And, yes, he is. But the discordance issue he raises applies within groups as well as between them. He is dismissive of the reality of the Fulani-Xhosa black African racial unit because there are characters discordant with it. Well then, one asks in response, what about the Fulani unit itself? After all, exactly the same argument could be made to cast the reality of the category 'Fulani' into doubt. Diamond's no-race position is thus clearly logically untenable and need concern us no further." ---------------------------------------------------- Sarich and Miele take an analytical swipe at Lewontin's assertions: "Yet the world had to wait until 2002 for someone to explain the basic problems with Lewontin's famous 15 percent. It was Henry Harpending replying to a question from Frank Salter. Lewontin had noted that 85 percent of the genetic variability was among individuals within populations, and only an additional 15 percent was added when individuals in different populations were compared. However, this analysis omits a third level of variability—the within-individual one. The point is that we are diploid organisms, getting one set of chromosomes from one parent and a second from the other. To the extent that your mother and father are not especially closely related, then, those two sets of chromosomes will come close to being a random sample of the chromosomes in your population. And the sets present in some randomly chosen member of yours will also be about as different from your two sets as they are from one another. So how much of the variability will be distributed where?" "First is the 15 percent that is interpopulational. The other 85 percent will then split half and half (42.5 percent) between the intra- and interindividual within-population comparisons. The increase in variability in between-population comparisons is thus 15 percent against the 42.5 percent that is between-individual within-population. Thus, 15/42.5 = 32.5 percent, a much more impressive and, more important, more legitimate value than 15 percent. It's interesting that Henry Harpending noted in an e-mail to us that no one has ever published this calculation." "One might argue here that the genetic distances involved are so small that it makes no difference what level is being discussed—100 percent of nothing is still nothing. The appropriate and effective rejoinder, as previously noted (and will note again), is 'dogs, dogs, and more dogs.' There the amounts of both anatomical and behavioral variation added by going to between-breed comparisons are obviously far greater than for similar human between-race comparisons (though certainly no one doubts they are gene-based, while the degree of genetic variation is minimal, apparently much as in us)." Looking at other species alone, especially breeds of dogs, makes the validity of subspecies, races or breeds of dogs obvious. Unless one accepts denying evolution, and that humans as yet have not escaped evolution's basic construct of ecological differences acting on different subspecies, then there has to be differences between races that are more than "skin deep." -------------------------------------------- Sarich and Miele explain: "Molecular data suggest that the two chimpanzee lineages separated around 1.5 million years ago; the comparable human figure is on the order of 15,000 years. In other words, the two chimp lineages are 100-fold older, yet show the same amount of variation. That is a remarkable result, the implications of which take a while to sink in. The implications follow this logic: Human races are very strongly marked morphologically; human races are very young; so much variation developing in so short a period of time implies, indeed almost certainly requires, functionality; there is no good reason to think that behavior should somehow be exempt from this pattern of functional variability…." --------------------------------------------------- "…there were huge differences between dog breeds, both in morphology and in behavior. How different were they genetically? Had the same methodology been applied to sorting out dog breeds as was described for humans in Chapter 5? With such large morphological and behavioral differences, shouldn't there be large DNA differences between the breeds? (It is now well known that the morphological and behavioral characteristics that distinguish breeds from one another are genetically based.) Vince's surprising answer was that (at that time) not only were there no known DNA differences between the breeds, but these methods couldn't even distinguish between domestic dogs and wolves. Although it was possible to identify individuals with the same micro satellite approach that has been in use for the past two decades, only this year (2003) have researchers been able to distinguish between a few dog breeds by DNA differences." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Philippe Rushton, of University of Western Ontario, in his book Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t..._books_1/002-0300838-3747205?v=glance&s=books ..which I found to be quiet good as well. As a contrast to the geographical argument, I find an argument that links cognitive differences to progress more sufficient. As in. “The I.Q and Wealth of Nations”, by Richard Lyn (University of Ulster). See summary by Steve Sailer. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/wealth_of_nations.htm
