Posted on 12/31/2007 2:24:28 AM PST by america4vr
Drivel.....
The strong and thus most intelligent Africans eliminated their weaker less intelligent rivals by enslaving them. The bottom of the gene pool was enslaved.
“Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!” -Muhammed Ali
***And why is the average IQ supposedly around 70?***
Have you ever taken mass transit in a large city?
re: The Reason Article.
Thanks for posting this. It is much closer to the truth of the matter than this silly argument that blames the slave trade on the lack of development in Africa.
There is, without question, a difference in the IQ of blacks and whites. Some of that is probably genetic and therefore hard to fix. But, IMHO, much of it can be traced to the lack of support for intellectual development that young blacks have from their family, relatives and friends. And that could be fixed in a few generations. Unfortunately, I don’t expect that to happen. Black culture does reward skill in sports more that skill in mathematics. That needs to change but change is hard.
There’s another key factor you miss... no navigable rivers in most of the Continent. Before the railroad, river travel was the only way to get stuff in bulk from place to place. The Congo is the only river in the center part of the Continent and the Nile in the north, but there’s nowhere else, unlike Europe, with the Danube and Rhine and their tributaries.
Another factor to consider is tropical diseases that would affect horses, sheep, and the other ten basic domesticated animals. Without horses, what are you going to haul?
I would like to see a serious citation that says the average African IQ is 70. That’s really, really low.
There, fixed it.
And yes, it took Poland years to recover, but eventually they will catch up with the rest of Europe, despite their tragic history.
This is a load of caca.
Nigeria has NO excuses. They have every type of material resource available to them.
They also, still, have 1800 tribes, all speaking different languages. There is no education infrastructure, and the ‘chiefs’ fun their kleptocracy.
You can’t enforce a contract, people aren’t really free to own property, and there is no freedom of religion or speech.
The place fails all three major tests of a market economy.
It’s poor because nobody in their right mind is going to invest private capital there with the expectation of turning a profit. Full stop. Nigeria is poor because the fundamentals for an emerging economy are missing.
Europe lost a large portion of its population, too. Perhaps as high as a third of its people. It was called the black plague, and it was followed by.......the Renaissance.
There’s a never ending list of excuses for Africa’s poor condition. Yet nothing bad that ever happened to sub-Saharan Africans is unique to them. The same things happened to people all over the world, and they shook it off and went on the build great empires. Nations were ravaged by war. Slaves were bought and sold from every region on earth. Diseases ripped through civilizations. Minorities, such as the Jews, were constantly oppressed and marginalized.
But guess what? These people came through these crises and were remarkably unscathed by it. Entire continents revived after being decimated. Ethnic groups rose to the top after centuries of oppression. Nations became economic powerhouses after losing millions of their young men in wars.
Your claim that sub-Saharan Africa was developing just fine until many of its inhabitants were carted off elsewhere as slaves isn’t supportable. No technological innovation is ever known to have come out of Africa. And, of course, I’m excluding the Egyptians and Phoencians because they were from above the Sahara and weren’t black. One of the reasons the race activists have been trying to re-write history and claim that everyone from King Tut to Cleopatra to Hannibal was black is because of the lack of actual development below the Sahara. Progress there was determined entirely by the amount of contact they had with other peoples. Below a narrow strip along the southern edge of the Sahara, there was no inkling of progress in Africa until the colonial powers began arriving there.
Marco Polo found great civilizations in the East. So great that when he returned and told of them, some people thought he was lying. Years later, when explorers returned from the New World with sometimes fanciful stories, including myths of lost cities of gold, people were willing to believe them because of the earlier experience with Marco Polo. But no one ever returned from Africa with stories of great civilizations, learned scholars, unique writing systems, soaring temples, or even believable myths about those things.
There will apparently never be an end to the excuses for the problems of Africa. A hundred years from now, when South Africa is destitute, it’ll be blamed on “the legacy of apartheid”. Five hundred years from now people will be blaming the slave trade when blacks don’t pass the exam to join the Venus Colonization Project.
Just face the facts that the peoples of planet earth are different and create different types of societies. You want us to celebrate diversity, just not notice it.
What about Liberia? Now there should have been a case where an African nation would have been prosperous, according to the theory.
The geography didn’t help, either
IQ tests are culturally biased. Structure an IQ test based on third world knowlege (what bugs are edible; what vines provide drinkable water; what fruits do you avoid a certain times of the year; what is the first step in choosing a site for your hut, et.) and most of us would look like morons.
And I've often given the example of Japan in these debates. Geographic isolation can stifle a nation's development. Japan remained sort of stagnant for many years because of an outmoded feudal system and lack of contact with the outside world.
But they never literally failed to develop. They just developed at a somewhat slower pace than they otherwise would have. Once Perry opened the ports, the place took off like a rocket and within a few decades they were able to defeat China and Russia in wars, and then later give us a run for our money in WWII. We had to totally flatten them to defeat them, and a few short years later they were back in the running as an economic and cultural powerhouse.
Compare that to Africa, where the geographic isolation was broken by the colonialist powers. The amount of progress there was determined almost entirely by how many foreign people settled there. The West didn't have to colonize Japan to get it running, but they did have to do so in Africa. The two African nations that became the wealthiest were South Africa and Rhodesia, where the largest number of whites settled due to the moderate climate and relative lack of thick jungle.
Once the colonialists left, these places fell backwards. That's a very different experience from the one the West had with Japan, and indicates that Diamond's thesis that geography is to blame for certain regions' lack of performance isn't accurate. Isolation can indeed slow development, but it can't account for its absence. And breaking the isolation can send a nation upward very rapidly, but only if its population is prone to that behavior to begin with.
t Your deck is missing a few cards if you think the best and brighest were selling their own into slavery. They were selling the losers in the latest war or slave raid into the interior.
Your premise (and that of the author of the piece) is uninformed and naive.
Read the account of black Washington Post reporter Keith B. Richburg in "Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa." Assigned to cover Africa Richburg assumed the continent's problems were caused by slavery, colonialism and the Cold War, and that Africa would otherwise have become prosperous, in step with the rest of the world. To quote from the slip cover copy:
"But what he finds instead is senseless cruelty and repressive dictators, which have not emerged from the sins of the West but are homegrown. Inhumanity in Africa wears a black face, and the more Richburg sees, the more disillusioned he becomes...to those who would romanticize Mother Africa as a black Valhalla, where blacks can walk with dignity and pride, he regrets to report that this is not the reality.
"He has been there and has witnessed the killings, the repression, the false promises, the horror. And in his darkest night of the soul, Richburg looks into his own family's past and concludes, 'Thank God. Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive. Thank God I am an American."
The discrepancy was already HUGE before the first African slave was taken by the first European slaver, and it had to do with food production, plant and animal domestication, and city living. It had nothing to do with the inherent worth or basic intelligence of the people living in each respective area; as much as it might be self-serving to our ego’s to claim such.
They are human beings, they can be taught as well as anyone. If people are brought up in the same medical situation, food supply, that would be evident that their natural abilities will come forth.
Kill the diseases, cure the sick, feed the hungry, and in 2 generations the offspring will be as smart as anyone ever will be or could be.
To claim that the people are lower IQ just because of who they are sounds a little close to racism.
You’re right, I think, but it’s really more complicated than that.
Three of the world’s continents, NA, SA and Aus were some combo of hunter-gatherer and agrarian and most definitely pre-industrial when the Euorpeans arrived. On those continents, the pre-industrial cultures have been almost entirely replaced.
So my strange point is that, in Africa, the hunger, disease, short life expectancy and unproductive economy is a measure of the relative success and survival of the traditional, pre-European culture.
He ignores (deliberately) one very obvious fact. If Europeans were "lucky" to be living in an environment that stimulated development, and Africans were "unlucky" not to, then that would mean that over time Europeans would naturally select for higher IQs and civilizational abilities and Africans wouldn't.
Take some animals from a herd and place half of them in an environment where speed is beneficial, and half in an environment where strength is beneficial. Over thousands of years, the former animals will become faster and the latter stronger.
If indeed Africa was a place that lacked the stimuli for progress and development, then Africans wouldn't sharpen their abilities for those things, while Europeans would. After thousands of years, you'd have IQ and behavioral differences.
The USS Okinawa docked pierside in Mombassa Kenya in 1980 when I was there. Not a super carrier, but still a quite large ship.
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