“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.
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.
I was also reminded of what Sir John Glubb had to say about different races in his 1978 essay The Fate of Empires:
“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.
Glubb was a fine soldier, and a pretty sharp guy all around, it would seem. Wonder what he would think of London today?