Why isnt Africa more advanced than white countries?

This novel involves a second-generation Eritrean-American who ventures back to his father's homeland in an effort to fulfill his father's dream that his native Eritrea would be as free as America is. It is a very complicated story that I may have to break up into at least two books, since the entire story spans several decades to come to a final conclusion. I have other novels on other topics I am working on, since I can't seem to concentrate on just one topic at a time.

 

A number of studies including this one....

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1762596/pdf/ajhg00443-0003.pdf

conclude that there is far more genetic diversity WITHIN races than BETWEEN races.

"The interracial net codon differences relative to the intra-racial codon differences was small, indicating that the
genic variation between the three races is small compared to that within the same race. Using data on the rate of amino acid substitutions in some proteins, the minimum divergence time between the three races was estimated to be about 55,000 to 120,000 years.
This suggests/supports several ideas. First that social divergence between populations is influenced less by genetics than by other influencing factors including natural resources, geography, climate and culture among others. It also suggests, to me anyway, that cultural divergence moves at a far faster pace than biological (genetic) divergence.

 

Depends on how one looks at development. There were times in China's (or what we call China today) development that were more advanced than European civilisation in the same time period.

At one point (around the 12-13th centuries) Angkor Wat in Cambodia was the largest city in the world with over 1.5 million inhabitants. Much bigger than London (the largest city in Europe at that time) with infrastructure Europeans hadn't even thought of at the time.

 

Because IQ tests are generally content based.

 

Sorry, that's just not true. Again and again he claims New Guineans are smarter than Westerners. Here are some direct quotes:

From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is... Today, most live-born Western infants survive fatal infections as well and reproduce themselves, regardless of their intelligence and the genes they bear. In contrast, New Guineans have been living in societies where human numbers were too low for epidemic diseases of dense populations to evolve. Instead, traditional New Guineans suffered high mortality from murder, chronic tribal warfare, accidents, and problems in procuring food.

Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies. However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional European societies had little to do with intelligence... That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent... in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners

It's all fascinating to think about. But the fact that New Guineans test below Westerners (again, on culture-free tests) means he is trying to explain a phenomenon with no objective existence. It may be chic and fashionable to make people from traditional societies out to be brilliant and full of wisdom, but it isn't good science.

As you like. Personally, I find Diamond without credibility. Like a lot of authors, he writes for a popular audience. Conveniently, this means he makes a lot of unsourced claims in his writing - and I say "conveniently," because, as other reviewers have noted about his work:

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...sterday_anthropologists_are_wary_of_lack.html

When I began anthropological fieldwork in graduate school, I finally understood that old admonition—show your work! Citations assure the reader that you have engaged with the strongest counterarguments and facts. It’s harder to cheat when you have to explicate the steps you took to reach an answer.

I was particularly struck by a passage near the end of the book in which Diamond explains why, in a break from his previous practice, he decided not to publish the names of his New Guinea informants. Publishing names, he claims, is “standard practice among journalists” and was “formerly the practice among anthropologists,” but “anthropologists now appreciate that their informants may be vulnerable and may suffer harm if their behavior and views became known.” What Diamond does not tell us here is that he was recently sued for libel by two New Guinea men who claimed that they never engaged in the violent acts that Diamond ascribed to them in a New Yorker article. I find it difficult to believe that these lawsuits did not factor into Diamond’s decision to leave out identifying information. And if Diamond omits such a key piece of information in this section, what else is he leaving out? My lingering questions about sources and framing turn what could have been a delightful and informative introduction to anthropology and human diversity into a foggy text that obscures more than it illuminates.

It's set in the modern day?

What moved you to write it?

 

Let's make it even more clear. The average IQ test is written by people living in a metropolitan area in the West and designed to test the IQ of people living in the West. If I gave you an IQ test designe to test the intelligence of a Khalahari Bushmen you'd come of as the dumbest Bushmen ever because you most likely know almost nothing about his cultural background or his way of life.

I once administered the Peabody intelligence test to to first graders in three different communities. On was a rural elementary school out in the middle of no where, the other was in a major metropolitan area the other a small town. I then compared the results. The rural kids did far worse than the city kids and this was across all reading levels. That is to say the differentiation between kids who were reading well above grade level difered as dramatically as those kids who were well below grade level. The striking thing was that even after eliminating learning disabilites there were some city kids who read well below grade level who did better than some of the rural kids on the test.

The problem as it happens could be seen in the pictures the rural kids misidentified. They were almost all things that rural kids would by the time they were six unlikely to have experience but things that city kids were likely to have seen almost daily. This is why one must be extremely careful when attempting to draw broad generalizations regarding IQ from standardized intelligence test.

 

Three cheers!

Good post.

Ask whitey on survival in the jungle and he/she will fail dismally.

 

And yet there was a time when African civilizations, thouands of years ago, were building cities while us advanced Westerners were living in caves. http://www.britishmuseum.org/learni...1/wealth_of_africa/african_civilisations.aspx

 

Actually it is more like 200 years ago. Until the dscovery of quinine Africa was a death trap for Caucasians. The Zulus were in the process of uniting all of Africa until they ran into superior British firepower. The Ashanti, Dahomey and another centered in what is now Uganda, were also on the move and gaining in power and knowledge but the western empires discovered Quinine and soon they were no more.

 

No we weren't living in caves you historical illiterate. I know why you're saying it though: to what you percieve to be anti-african you have to reply with something anti-western. Why can't you people just be subjective for once, and not answer one bias with another?

 

I think you've hit on the biggest reason for Africa's dysfunction. The European powers drew maps that didn't take into account the various tribal and ethnic groups that lived in the area. Tribes were bisected into different nations, creating nations in which there were various different groups that had nothing in common with each other, so when they got the vote, they voted based on tribe, and of course the results are obvious today.

 

With all due respect, I was not the first to point to that in this thread, Lizard did

Just to give a nod to them.

It is set in the modern day, yes. The timeline goes from around the 1970s, to the present day, and into the future. I try to set all my conflict-based books a few years into the future.

The motivation behind this novel is very long-winded and the current plot is incredibly different from what I had originally set out to write, but I think this novel as is, is much better than the original premise. The entire premise to this novel is used to actually set up another novel, something I try to do, leave a "string floating in the wind" so I can use that to go off of and do another novel.

I don't want to get too in-depth about the novel's history in this thread though.

 

AVATAR (2009)
Jake Sully: They`re not going to give up their home. They`re not going to make a deal. Pff for what? A light beer and blue jeans? There`s nothing that we have that they want. Everything they sent me out here to do is a waste of time. They`re never going to leave hometree.

Part of a critique of the movie Avatar
"You could look at it from the perspective as to What Seems to be the Aggregate of the (You put in your preferred word here) Legacy, which seems to be nuclear weapons and fear of and eventual additional use of, from two World Wars to the Cold War (and all the garbage that came with that) to the what seems to be the new Never Ending Story that is 21st Century Terrorism (and/or the perceived threat of) pollution orbiting the Earth, continents of garbage floating throughout the ocean, ice caps melting, the air you breath in a city, blah blah blah…again, if you look at what appears to be the likely aggregate of what humans have done to this planet, the Human Legacy if you will, and then Avatar (I don’t if you realized this or not) but the movie takes place in another solar system so (I’ll paraphrase the story) the people have now gone elsewhere to do what’s been done to Earth."

 

I think "anti-Western" is probably your interpretation. I merely posted evidence that early African civilizations were once far more advanced than their Western counterparts. Call it my attempt to educate. Your defensiveness, however, is noted.

 

Not a bad explanation.

I think there is a political correctness being deployed by the scientific community.

This seems to be an acceptable scientific theory.

They are trying to emulate Western Society - the problem is our documented constitutions do not reflect the corruptions that generate the commerce. And more specifically the US Constitution was designed to generate technology through scientific exploration.

Further problems are it takes a lot of smart people in the government to organize and generate commerce, and the United States gathers the smart people from around the world and they do not return to their home lands to build their societies.

The last problem is that because Western Society has been built on corruption, the house of cards is doomed to fall, and that is why Obama was allowed to campaign for the Presidency of the United States, Affirmatively awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, and the election was fixed for his re-election.

When people realize that we are over populated and bankrupt, we are going to need a new constitution designed to stabilize the world economy.

 

My point would be that you said we lived in caves in the meantime which isn't true. It's as untrue as saying that africa has never had any civilizations and people there are just barbarians. You're no better than people who say the latter, you're only biased the other way.

 

It's certainly possible. Since politics has corrupted much of the scientific community within academia, and certain views and theories that conflict with the alleged "consensus" are being deliberately suppressed to maintain a singular narrative. But in this case, I'm inclined to believe that humans are all pretty much born with equal biological tools regardless of ethnicity. And here's why. If you pluck a kid out of Africa and transplant him into a successful part of the United States, he will typically adapt to the new culture around him and will grow up to be as successful as his peers. You can also do the opposite and it will typically produce the same results. Take a kid from the western world and drop him off in a tribal culture and he'll become a savage.

 

I think the biggest advantage is also our greatest disadvantage. WAR.

See, when tribes and the like are at war with each other, forming alliances and empires (which happened more often in Europe, China, and Arabia/Levant than in Africa), you have to develop faster. So a land with a bunch of roughly equally sized tribes with different technology you have two choices, either get better technology, or die as an independent tribe. So there's more of a push to develop better metallurgy and better military tech, and better strategies and better building technology because you want to be able to defend yourself against those barbarians across the river who look at your city and want it. You wouldn't take a technology of that type and use it as toys, because if you think gunpowder is a toy and those guys across the river build guns, you're going to have a problem. So you build guns. If they have rowboats, you outflank them with your sailboats. If they have calvary, you build a tank. Eventually, those techs allow those tribes with that technology to go out and sail the oceans and find new lands.

 

That sounds similar to the theory of historian Paul Kennedy, who wrote, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, on why Europe out advanced the other world centers of civilization. In 1500, the Persian, Ottomans, and Ming Empires were all either on a similar playing field, or slightly advanced of Europe. But those were massive central governments. Europe was a collection of kingdoms that were constantly at war with each other, pushing the technological development of weaponry and tactics. That eventually paid off for the Europeans/

 

I have seen and experienced quite a few tribal cultures, some where these cultures are just being introduced to the 21st, even the 20th centuries and they are far from savage.

Just because they live a subsistence lifestyle, pull their water out of streams, don't have paved streets and worship their ancestors doesn't make them savage. On the contrary, their respect for each other (in particular the elderly), the way they care for each other and the respect they have for nature far exceeds anything I've seen in a city or urban environment.

 

Really? Would you care to share some of your experiences?

As an aside, I think people have a tendency to either romanticize or demonize tribalists. There are good things to be said about horticultural, fishing, and foraging societies.

 

Yeah, I saw that movie too. It was called Avatar.

 

No, it was called Star Trek: Insurrection.

 

Sure,, in the remote areas of Northern Laos. I get up there once or twice a year with tribal groups like Hmong, Akha, Lanten, Yao, Lo Lo and others. Interesting people and always welcoming. Akha are the most interesting and the most spiritual. Do a Google search.

 

For people like you who've hardly been out of their state let alone out of their country, there are actually people who do travel.

Then there are those who get off the beaten track in very remote areas to explore regions rarely seen by tourists and experience cultures generally only seen by those who actually have the balls to step out of their comfort zones, like those who step away from their TVs to get another beer.

Funny that.