People Befitting Their Environment

Monday, May 5th, 2014

“Knowledge is usually considered a better basis for policy than ignorance,” Nicholas Wade concludes, in A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, but I doubt many liberal creationists — as Steve Sailer calls them — will agree, when the knowledge looks like this:

European cultures tried to keep population below the famine level by inculcating the sexual restraint and romantic choosiness conducive to relatively late marriages, while East Asian cultures cultivated grinding work ethics. In most of tropical Africa, however, the infectious disease burden was so lethal that dense populations could not be achieved due to epidemics. So the population could not form cities, nor even fully farm the countryside. The big danger in Africa was not Malthusian overpopulation, but underpopulation, which may account for how sexualized their cultures are.

Not surprisingly, each continent’s culture seems to have bred people befitting its environment, and their traits live on in their descendants in modern America.

Posted in Policy, Science | 4 Comments »

Comments

  1. Bill says:
    May 5, 2014 at 6:54 pm

    Thanks for posting about this book; I’ve now got a copy on order.

    It’s hard for me to maintain the fiction that race is purely a social construct. For example, I often hear physicians talking about race as if it has a real, genetic basis. African Americans have the highest incidence of colorectal cancer and the poorest 5 year survival rate, and genetic factors have been uncovered that appear to outweigh differences in health care coverage in the U.S.. About ten percent of Ashkenazi Jews appear to have a genetic mutation that increases their risk.

  2. Bill says:
    May 5, 2014 at 7:07 pm

    I was also reminded of what Sir John Glubb had to say about different races in his 1978 essay The Fate of Empires:

    One of the oft-repeated phenomena of great empires is the influx of foreigners to the capital city. Roman historians often complain of the number of Asians and Africans in Rome. Baghdad, in its prime in the ninth century, was international in its population — Persians, Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Egyptians, Africans and Greeks mingled in its streets. In London today, Cypriots, Greeks, Italians, Russians, Africans, Germans and Indians jostle one another on the buses and in the underground, so that it sometimes seems difficult to find any British. The same applies to New York, perhaps even more so.

    This problem does not consist in any inferiority of one race as compared with another, but simply in the differences between them.

    In the age of the first outburst and the subsequent Age of Conquests, the race is normally ethnically more or less homogeneous. This state of affairs facilitates a feeling of solidarity and comradeship. But in the Ages of Commerce and Affluence, every type of foreigner floods into the great city, the streets of which are reputed to be paved with gold. As, in most cases, this great city is also the capital of the empire, the cosmopolitan crowd at the seat of empire exercises a political influence greatly in excess of its relative numbers.

    Second- or third-generation foreign immigrants may appear outwardly to be entirely assimilated, but they often constitute a weakness in two directions. First, their basic human nature often differs from that of the original imperial stock. If the earlier imperial race was stubborn and slow-moving, the immigrants might come from more emotional races, thereby introducing cracks and schisms into the national policies, even if all were equally loyal…

  3. Al Fin says:
    May 6, 2014 at 7:40 am

    “Knowledge is usually considered a better basis for policy than ignorance,” Nicholas Wade concludes…

    Perhaps Nicholas Wade is naive, but I suspect he knows better: If the goal of modern factions is power, as it seems, then [the propagation of] ignorance might be a more effective basis for policy than knowledge. To that end, the armies of media, academia, special interest groups, and government bureaucracies conspire to smother the masses in thick layers of excremental ignorance.

    In the name of democracy, the thought processes of the masses are made irrelevant.

  4. Toddy Cat says:
    May 6, 2014 at 9:15 am

    Glubb was a fine soldier, and a pretty sharp guy all around, it would seem. Wonder what he would think of London today?

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