December 2, 2010

Africa's traditional lack of a Malthusian Trap

The concept of a Malthusian Trap, in which the finite amount of land limits food supply and thus population, is a highly stylized but still useful concept for thinking about much of human history before the Industrial Revolution. The major exception to the idea of a land-based Malthusian Trap was sub-Saharan Africa. As John Reader wrote in Africa: Biography of a Continent,  (p. 249):
The human population of Africa has never approached the size that the continent seems capable of supporting. ... An FAO survey published in 1991 reported that only 22 percent of land in Africa suitable for agriculture was actually in production (the comparable figure for south-east Asia is 92 per cent).

Reader offers a long list of discouraging factors, such as disease burden, poor soil, and wild beasts, especially elephants. We think elephants are cute, but they're huge and thus quite capable of eating a farmer's crop. Africa tended to be populated in a patchwork fashion. In some regions, enough people could be concentrated to drive off elephants, while other areas were conceded to elephants until enough human numbers could be assembled. Somewhat similarly, stronger herding tribes would tend to drive farming tribes (who use less land per person) into refuges in the mountains or islands. 

So, intensive agricultural use of land was rare, which meant that men didn't have to work terribly hard at farm work as long as they had women hoeing weeds for them. 

Reader writes:
From the time that Europeans first set foot in Africa, travelers have commented upon what they saw as an excessive interest in sex among Africans.

Think of this from the perspective of the Malthusian Trap. Europeans already tended to voluntarily keep their populations below Malthusian limits by practicing the moral restraint that the Rev. Malthus famously advised in 1798. From 1200-1800, the average age of first marriage for an Englishwoman was 24-26. Rich women tended to marry at younger ages, poor women at older. Illegitimacy rates were in the lower single digits. 

Thus, due to this sexual restraint, Europeans tended to be in a less Malthusian situation than, say, the Chinese, who tended to marry younger. Consequently, Europeans tended to be richer while working less hard than the Chinese. If the European population didn't grow as fast during good times as the Chinese population did, they didn't experience quite as many vast die-offs from famine during times when good government broke down (e.g., as recently as the early 1960s during Mao's crazy Great Leap Forward). England, for example, hasn't had a major famine in over 600 years.

So, Europeans developed cultural forms that attempted to sublimate sexual urges in more restrained and refined directions. Traditional Europeans dances like the minuet didn't feature a lot of pelvic thrusting, for example.

In Africa, however, conditions of life were such that the Malthusian Trap was not an active worry. More people were needed, so African culture -- dance, song, and so forth -- tended to encourage mating now rather than to encourage delay. Listening to Top 40 radio today, this pattern seems to have carried over from Africa.

Of particular interest as an exception that supports the general rule is an island in Lake Victoria, Ukara Island, now in Tanzania, where the Malthusian Trap seemed to operate. The population has been around 16,000 for a century, with about one percent of the population annually moving to the mainland, a rate of increase unusual in Africa until recently.

Ukara has a few major advantages over the surrounding mainland of Africa: no tsetse flies to spread sleeping sickness. No lions and no elephants, either, to compete with humans. Life (and death) is presumably less random than on the African mainland, so hard work and investment pay off more reliably.

Life on Ukara sounds rather like life in a poor Southeast Asian peasant society rather than in most of Africa. A 1968 aerial survey showed that 98.6 percent of the land on the island was in use. In contrast to the typical pattern of land use rights in Africa, almost every resource on the island, including each tree, is privately owned, which has prevented deforestation. (Here's a description of Ukara from a libertarian perspective.) People on Ukara practice much more intensive and sophisticated agriculture than elsewhere in Tanzania, supposedly working ten hours per day, every day.

I spent some time looking for accounts by recent tourists visiting Ukara Island, but it became apparent that very few people go there, which is not surprising since people on holiday generally visit big cities or go to less crowded places to relax. We tend to think of islands as being less crowded (and thus more relaxing) than mainlands because they are less convenient to get to, but in Africa, apparently, things work the opposite. Being inconveniently far out in Lake Victoria makes life healthier and less risky than being on the mainland.

Has the Ukaran culture spread with the steady flow of Ukarans to the mainland of Africa? Evidently, no. Phil Raikes wrote in 1986:
This provides a very clear example of Esther Boserup's contention that necessity in the form of population pressure is the mother of agricultural innovation. Further evidence for this comes from the fact that Ukara Islanders who migrate to the mainland, where population density is far lower, promptly drop their labour-intensive methods (over ten hours per day throughout the year) for the much easier methods practised on the mainland.

I'm not sure what the ultimate lessons are from Ukara Island, but the place is worth thinking about.

131 comments:

Cognitive Elitist Svigor said...

Steve, I have the solution to all of Africa's problems, but the racists aren't going to like it.

Just as America will be better off with smarter immigrants from Asia, Africa will be better off with smarter immigrants from everywhere but Africa. Think of how much better-off Africans will be once they've imported everyone with an IQ over 100 from Europe, America, and Asia!

Now, I know America needs lots of help to be made livable, but let's face it, we should get in line behind Africa. It wouldn't be fair for us to hog all the world's smart south and east Asians when Africa's in such dire need. That would be selfish in the extreme. Matter of fact, Israel isn't as well-off as the US, either, so she's in line ahead of us, too. Fair's fair, after all.

Stay tuned for my next post, where I outline my plan for making Israel into a paradise by importing hundreds of thousands of the smartest people from China and India.

travis said...

Europeans developed cultural forms that attempted to sublimate sexual urges in more restrained and refined directions. Traditional Europeans dances like the minuet didn't feature a lot of pelvic thrusting, for example.

This reminds me of the joke in Rob Roy: Do you know why Calvinists are against shagging standing up? They fear it may lead to dancing.

Luke Lea said...

Here's a good lecture by Bob Allen on the preventive check in Western Europe vs. Eastern Europe and China:

http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/General/Members/allen.aspx

Anonymous said...

CE Svigor,

Francis Galton proposed the Chinese solution c 1870. Interestingly, Johannesburg now has a Chinese 'ghetto', the formally Jewish area of Cyrildene.

Anonymous said...

Elephants and low population density? Maybe, but weren't those exactly the same conditions that met the Siberians who came across the Bering Strait?

The people - whom we now have run our Casinos - first came into a completely uninhabited continent but one filled with Mammoths and Mastodons. They also faced the short faced bear and Smilodon which were at least as fearsome as any African lion. The Indians just ate them.

Everywhere else even in Australia, early man killed off all the large dangerous animals. Yet somehow in Africa the presense of such animals is given as an explanation for why the natives there are so primitive?

The mainstream "Out of Africa" theory today holds that modern man arose in Africa but only crossed the sapiens grade when he left Africa. Those left behind have lagged behind ever since. I don't know just why that should have been but I don't think it's elephants.

Albertosaurus

Anonymous said...

Reader writes:
From the time that Europeans first set foot in Africa, travelers have commented upon what they saw as an excessive interest in sex among Africans.


I wonder if the same would hold for American Indians and Polynesian Islanders? I seem to recall reading that both were similarly interested in sex when Europeans arrived, and that both had undercultivated the available land.
-- JP98

Anonymous said...

"Traditional Europeans dances like the minuet didn't feature a lot of pelvic thrusting, for example."

Google "twirk team" It's fascinating to watch from an anthropological perspective.

asdfasdfadfs said...

I don't think we should confuse sexualism with higher fertility. Anglos settled the vast lands of North America(which offered excess lands for everyone), and they had very high birthrates as they expanded across the 'fruited plains'--as Limbaugh calls it. Yet, Anglo-American sexual mores were still 'puritanical' until relatively recently. And blacks were encouraged to have lots of children by their slave owners, but blacks weren't allowed to do all that jungle boogie stuff. Whites forbade stuff like bongo drums and boogie oogie.
So, a culture that encourages sex doesn't necessarily act sexually wild.

The Middle East has very high birthrates--Arab Muslims seem to be doing a lot of humping--but they don't seem to be doing a lot of grinding on the dance floor. Even the belly dance is mostly for tourists or Christian Arabs.
In contrast, though Japanese seem orderly in public and have very low birthrates, their popular culture is very sexual. But, Japanese sexualism is different from that of blacks. Japanese are horny and shy(and get their kicks through geeky fantasies)whereas blacks are very open and brazen about their sexuality.

The Torah told Jews to be 'fruitful and multiply'--which Jews recently changed to 'be fruity and multicultural', but that's another story--, and Jews did a lot of f---ing but traditionally Jews weren't into bumping and grinding either. And even though Woody Allen is one horny bastard, he isn't very Africanish in his sexual style.

Black sexual culture and style are rooted more in their biology than social factors. They are a very funky people.

Btw, North American Indians had a lot of excess land, and may be they were into lots of f---ing too, but they still not funky. They were almost rigid--like in the way they say HOW--like the Asians.

asdfasdfadsf said...

"The people - whom we now have run our Casinos - first came into a completely uninhabited continent but one filled with Mammoths and Mastodons. They also faced the short faced bear and Smilodon which were at least as fearsome as any African lion. The Indians just ate them."

Not sure this is true. Though early Americans did hunt cave bears and mammoths, most of the creatures might have died out due to climate changes. If early Americans were so badass, how come they were able to wipe out the fearsome lions, sabertooths, and giant short-faced bears but unable to wipe out the smaller cougars, black bears, and bobcats?

I heard ice a mile thick covered all of Canada and much of America tens of thousands ago, and that probably wiped out most of the badass creatures. Maybe more of them could have migrated south and survived had it not been for the narrow parts of Central America which acted as a bottleneck of sorts.

AllanF said...

Yes, what does Ukara and the Dominican Republic have that Haiti does not?

Which does the typical US inner-city more resemble both in inputs, ie. social policy, and outputs, ie. social structure?

How do we transition our inner-cities to be more like the former and less like the latter? Is anyone with any control over the input side of the equation even interested in a transition?

Mudpuppy said...

I think sleeping sickness is (African) trypanosomiasis.

Tom in VA said...

Svigor, we could combine your plans by implementing the so-called "Uganda Proposal," where British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain supposedly offered Uganda to Theodore Herzl as a Jewish homeland.

Anonymous said...

"...and wild beasts, especially elephants."

Elephants (mammoths, actually) used to exist in northern latitudes too. It's thought that they were hunted to extinction by enterprising humans. Man's environment is to a large extent his own creation. The abundance of dangerous animals in Africa is a consequence of human inaction. Their relative lack in Eurasia is a consequence of human action.

Harmonious Jim said...

In one of Richard Dawkins books, I think it was The Ancestor`s Tale, he mentions the age-old farmer`s wisdom of saving the best grains from the crop to use as next year`s seed.

But he also remarks in an aside that African farmers did not do this. Instead they ate the best grains and planted the rest at next sowing. (His source: apparently Dawkins` father was an colonial official in Africa at one point).

If true, might help to explain Africa`s historic underpopulation, (plus the impact of numerous diseases and wild animals).

Albertosaurus: the big beasts of the Americas and Australia were not used to humans; Africa`s had eons to adapt to human wiles.

Steve Sailer said...

In North America, mammoths and lots of other huge beasts were quickly wiped out, either by newly-arriving Indian hunters or by the diseases they brought with them. A lot of big animals are easy prey when they haven't seen humans before, like 500 pound moa birds in New Zealand.

In Africa, humans and elephants co-evolved or a long period of time, so elephants had time to notice that those tall skinny beasts were getting to be more dangerous than they used to be.

Anonymous said...

American black bears use to be much more dangerous. The aggressive genes didn't last long with the introduction of gun powder.

Harry Baldwin said...

. . . men didn't have to work terribly hard at farm work as long as they had women hoeing weeds for them.

Is this whence comes the custom of considering women "hoes"?

Henry Canaday said...

Lesson?

“There was nothing in the way of fighting that Kala Nag did not know, for he had stood up more than once in his time to the charge of the wounded tiger, and pulling up his soft trunk, to be out of harm’s way, had knocked the springing brute sideways in mid-air with a quick sickle-cut of his head, that he had invented all by himself; had knocked him over, and kneeled upon him with his huge knees till the life went out with a gasp and a howl, and there was only a fluffy striped thing on the ground for Kala Nag to pull by the tail.”

- Rudyard Kipling, “Toomai of the Elephants”

TGGP said...

Greg Clark wrote in "A Farewell to Alms" that the Malthusian English were richer than the Chinese because their higher disease burden (I recollect him describing the English of the time as "a filthy people") meant a lower population.

Peter A said...

Whatabout Australia? No large wild beasts there, no awful diseases, fairly decent climate - why didn't the Malthusian trap hold for Aboriginals? Did they just simply never develop sustainable agriculture and thus never managed to grow their populations fast enough?

Anonymous said...

A lot of big animals are easy prey when they haven't seen humans before, like 500 pound moa birds in New Zealand.

What about lions in Europe? There were plenty, at least south of the Alps, throughout the era before the birth of Christ. The last European lions were hunted down in northern Greece about AD 100--well before gunpowder, and you can't say they hadn't had plenty of time to observe/adapt to Euro-humans. Is it possible the Roman games consumed big animals at that great a rate that it explains their extinction? Or was something else at work?

Svigor said...

Sailersphere, I need help with a hard case. I got this Chinese-Merrican friend who says his primary loyalty is to the United States. But I can't get him to express it! I say stuff like, "well, if you want to advance U.S. interests, how 'bout you get your Chinese pals to let us buy real estate over there? Or, how bout gettin' barriers to investment in China reduced for Americans? Or, how 'bout gettin' the borders to China opened up completely so I don't have to go through all that hassle to start up a business in China and bring in cheap foreign labor to run it." Instead of agreeing with me, he acts like I'm insulting China, and he has to defend her. I keep telling him that's not how someone whose primary loyalty is to these United States, but there must be a cultural or language barrier somewhere because I'm not getting through. He hasn't said WORD ONE expressing how he'd like to see advanced the interests of the United States (a country to which he owes his primary loyalty; he told me so), except by importing high-IQ immigrants stateside. I keep trying to drop the hint that I get it, that's a nice suggestion, but there are SO MANY other ways we can advanced the interests of the United States, and that he should DIVERSIFY a bit.

But I'm hitting a brick wall here. Can anyone here help?

Anonymous said...

"In Africa, humans and elephants co-evolved or a long period of time..."

At some point after leaving Africa man evolved an extremely important trait, one which seems to be absent in all other mammals. This is the ability to act in large, disciplined, well-coordinated groups. I would assume that it was this trait that allowed man to eventually exterminate American and Eurasian megafauna. Hunters wouldn't have faced mammoths, etc. alone or as disorganized crowds.

As far as I know, elephants still haven't evolved any defense against the above-mentioned human trait.

Anonymous said...

"The Torah told Jews to be 'fruitful and multiply'--which Jews recently changed to 'be fruity and multicultural', but that's another story-"

Good one! Thanks for the laugh, something I needed today.

dfasdfasdf said...

"American black bears use to be much more dangerous. The aggressive genes didn't last long with the introduction of gun powder."

Even before white man with guns, black bears learned to run cuz grizzlies, wolves, and cougars often killed/fed on them.

Anonymous said...

"...traditionally Jews weren't into bumping and grinding either. And even though Woody Allen is one horny bastard, he isn't very Africanish in his sexual style."

Another good one!


"Black sexual culture and style are rooted more in their biology than social factors. They are a very funky people."

The difference seems to be in the ability to laugh, relax, and have a good time. If you want horny Woody to represent neurotic Jewish men, (there are quite a few... Jewish men who are horny and neurotic, that is) the contrast with blacks is the contrast of uptight versus
untroubled and laid back, the contrast of seriousness versus levity.

When we can finally identify genes that influence personality traits, that's what we'll find.

dsfasdfasdf said...

"In North America, mammoths and lots of other huge beasts were quickly wiped out, either by newly-arriving Indian hunters or by the diseases they brought with them. A lot of big animals are easy prey when they haven't seen humans before, like 500 pound moa birds in New Zealand."

I don't buy this. The human population of North America was exceedingly low before the white man came. I heard the entire population of Indians when the whites arrived was AT MOST 10 million. Some say it was closer to 5 million or less. 10,000s of yrs ago, the entire human population of North America was probaby in the tens of thousand or at most, in the 100,000s.
So, there was plenty of room for cave bears, saber tooths, lions, mammoths, mastadons, small faced bears, horses(there were them too), etc to flee from man. (And I'll bet a good number of them saw humans as food.) And even if disease had an impact, I find it difficult to believe it would have killed off ALL the animals.
After all, the arrival of the alien white man didn't kill off the African elephant or other kinds of African animal that had never seen a white man. And while Spanish disease killed off lots of South American Indians, it had no impact on Jaguars, specatcled bears, llamas, and the coati mundi. Also, human diseases are generally not communicable to animals(and vice versa). Animals generally don't catch human flu, and humans don't catch cat flu.
And it's not like primitive man had guns or stuff.
It had to have been the climate that made the difference.

asdfasdfadsf said...

The Amazonian Indians go butt-naked and probably have fewer sexual hangups(as seen in Gibson's Apocalypto), but they aren't funky like blacks either.
The only non-blacks who are kinda sexually funky are Hawaiians and Maori, but I heard they got some Negroid blood.

Wandrin said...

"We think elephants are cute, but they're huge and thus quite capable of eating a farmer's crop."

Just struck me how everywhere else large mammals were wiped out millenia ago. When Asians crossed to North America weren't all the mammoths etc wiped out very rapidly?

beowulf said...

China needs land, Africa needs people, yup its a winner. I'll write the PLA to let them know we're on board.

beowulf said...

American black bears use to be much more dangerous. The aggressive genes didn't last long with the introduction of gun powder.


"200-Pound Bear Chased Up Home's Back Yard Tree By Kittens"
Officials To Assess Situation
http://www.clickorlando.com/news/15731422/detail.html

Anonymous said...

Steve, the cognitive elitist that posted the first comment made the point that Africans would benefit from an influx of high IQ Northeast Asians.

Putting aside that this was a joke, a joke made by someone I respect very much in the HBD blog-o-sphere (Svigor) is there indeed something to this point?

I would say that on the level of material goods most high IQ whites benefit from the presence of high IQ northeast asians. Society is cleaner, there are more taxpayers, there are fewer criminals, things are more honest, in general, adding high IQ Northeat Asians is a boon to high IQ whites.

Low IQ whites generally don't like having Northeast Asians around. Many of the high IQ whites I know that are fed up with things in America are not fed up with Northeast Asian immigrants. In fact, they long to live in a society of fellow high IQ people, not an all white society.

I spend my time traveling among the high tech centers of the USA and there is a pervasive sense among the high IQ whites that America is heading in the wrong direction. The most common thing I hear from high IQ whites is that America is doomed and they are going to move to either Vancouver or Singapore.
it should be obvious that high IQ whites who think America is going downhill are not looking to move to an "all white ethnostate" rather they want to move to a place where they are surrounded by a mix of high IQ Asians and high IQ whites. Redmond, Irvine, Newport Beach, Palo Alto, and Fort Lee all fit the bill. You find very very few low IQ whites that want to move to these places but plenty of high IQ whites.

there are a number of places where a white person can spend his time almost 100% among other whites. These places are Maine, West Virginia, Idaho, and a few others. The general rule is that high IQ whites, no matter where in America they were born, seem to flock to the places where they mix with high IQ people of other races. High IQ whites are NOT rushing to move to Maine, West Virginia, or Idaho. Now you might say that is because those three places lack high paying jobs, but even when the same high paying job is available in an all white place vs a place with a mix of high IQ people, the high IQ job seeker goes where there are other high IQ people. Steve you should do a post about the choices made by high IQ whites who get medical degrees, for an example of this go to the medical job placement sites. You will see that for example a heart surgeon will get paid LESS in Irvine than he will in Maine. Similarly the heat surgeon will get paid less in San Francisco than he will in Idaho. Even when the jobs are there, the jobs are begging for candidates in the all white sections of the USA the white people with very high IQ (such as heat surgeons) will not accept those jobs. They just don't want to live among the low IQ and or traditional white types they want to live among the high IQ people of all races that populate the exciting coastal cities.

Now of course I support strongly the establishment of a formal white homeland for any and all whites that want to move to it. I also support giving this white homeland a very attractive piece of real estate, perhaps all of the pacific coast North of Marin County and South of Portland. This is a beautiful and attractive area, and is already today nearly all white today, so it shouldn't be too hard to make it in to the official white homeland.

Anonymous said...

I assume that for those that want to establish a white homeland, this is the best possible piece of land, but if others have an idea for an alternative piece of land I'd like to hear it.

Anyway, high IQ whites seem to be very happy living among Northeast Asians.

I respect very much the people here who would prefer an all white ethnostate to a high IQ multi racial state. I would just like to get a better sense for how many of us there are on each side of this line.

How many of us prefer to live in a country filled with high IQ people of all races and only high IQ people, vs how many of us would prefer to live in the newly established all white ethnostate ( again assuming equal climates and equally attractive geographies)

Anonymous said...


Everywhere else even in Australia, early man killed off all the large dangerous animals. Yet somehow in Africa the presense of such animals is given as an explanation for why the natives there are so primitive?


As an additional data point, some Asian groups have managed to domesticate elephants ...

Anonymous said...

Steve Sailer said

In North America, mammoths and lots of other huge beasts were quickly wiped out, either by newly-arriving Indian hunters or by the diseases they brought with them


Can you substantiate the claim that cross-species diseases were a problem for large mammals in the US?

Anonymous said...

There are elephants in Asia.

They are viewed as an asset to civilization not a liability.

Yeah I realize its a different species but they are pretty aggressive too...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_elephant

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/u2uYpKwVX6O22ZmKPNqxWw

Whiskey said...

Steve, you are ignoring the critical role of technology adoption in Europe. From the Moldboard plow to better looms, water-driven and then steam driven textile mills, development of the wool, linen, gun, paper, and printing trade, Europe unlike Asia was open to constant technological change.

The European Knight was roughly contemporaneous with the Samurai, consumed even more resources, and was culturally as critical. As soon as the advantage of mass armies conscripted over armored knights became apparent, Europe went wild for Musketeers. While Japan banned firearms after the Tokogawas took control, and preserved the Samurai.

Africa too shows technology refusal instead of adoption. If you can use better, newer, more advantageous tools to get over on the other guy, why not?

Because it would disrupt society thats why not. Europe has been willing to do so, and Africa and Asia not so much.

Steve Sailer said...

But the climate got nicer as the Indians arrived through a growing gap in the ice sheet that had covered Canada and much of northern U.S.

There used to be woolly mammoths living on what's now Wilshire Blvd., falling in the La Brea tar pits. When the climate warmed up, why didn't they just walk north to Oregon or climb up 6,000 feet to Big Bear?

So, I don't buy climate change for why most of the big beasts suddenly disappeared about the time the Indians arrived. Either the Indians ate them or they brought some kind of new disease, perhaps via their dogs. I can't see any other possibilities, but maybe there is one out there.

adfasdfasdfasdf said...

"But the climate got nicer as the Indians arrived through a growing gap in the ice sheet that had covered Canada and much of northern U.S.
There used to be woolly mammoths living on what's now Wilshire Blvd., falling in the La Brea tar pits. When the climate warmed up, why didn't they just walk north to Oregon or climb up 6,000 feet to Big Bear?"

I'm almost positive it was the climate that was the main factor. Man finished the job, though.

It's like this. Those animals existed in large numbers BEFORE the ice age. Not just in North America but in Siberia, etc. But the ice age came, and killed off most of them. And there was a chain reaction. Since vegetation became scarcer, giant herbivores decreaed in number, and then the big predators that fed on them also decreased in number. So, let us say Ice Age killed about 95% of them. But they didn't entirely die out. But this was a time when man began to hunt better and spread out. And so, man finished off what the climate had already pretty much decimated.

Let us say, for example, there were 1,000,000 mammoths prior to the ice age. Let us say that near the end of the Ice Age, there were around 1,000. And man came along and killed them off.

And once the giant herbivores died, many big predators that fed on them also perished. It's like if the big game were to disappear in Africa, most lions will die. They will not learn to survive by hunting for frogs and gophers.

Prior to firearms and modern transporation, the main means of species extinction was habitat destruction--by ice age, volcanos, or spread of agriculture(or towns and cities). Man with spears and primitive bows could not have wiped out all them critters. Primitive man could only have finished the job that nature started and did most of.

Because there were still some mammoths and other big creatures when man spread to Siberia and North America, people think Man was the main agent of their destruction. I would say man was the late-comer who hammered the last nails in the coffin.

Suppose some big tough guy walked across a desert and made it out alive. Though naturally big and strong, he can barely walk and is very feeble. Suppose a weakling beats him to death. Technically, the weakling killed him, but didn't the desert do most of the work in his demise? The weakling only finished the work of the desert.
Same goes for empires. We say Germanic Barbarians destroyed Rome, and it is technically true. But Rome had already rotted away due to other major historical forces, and by the time the barbarians attacked, Rome was already on its last legs.

adsfasdfasf said...

Has there been major studies on pickle cultures?
Earlier, there was some discussion here about lactose tolerance as an evolutionary advantage. The suckle culture.
Milk drinkers with cows could travel long distances with readily available food.

I heard that Mongols placed cabbage beneath their saddles, and it got pickled that way. I wonder if this is the origin of sauerkraut. Anyway, Mongols could travel long distances and have portable pickled cabbage to eat. It must have fed them enough to conquer so much territory.

corvinus said...

Greg Clark wrote in "A Farewell to Alms" that the Malthusian English were richer than the Chinese because their higher disease burden (I recollect him describing the English of the time as "a filthy people") meant a lower population.

Disease might explain how Europeans were able to colonize vast stretches of the Americas and Oceania, but as for the idea that we are more disease-ridden than the Chinese, I don't buy for a minute.

TGGP said...

I think black bears have long been less aggressive than brown bears, even before guns. Black bears run from threats and climb trees.

FF said...

Koreans and Germans especially into pickled cabbage, very bright people, preserving greens for the winter via benign co-operating bacteria.

Anonymous said...

Bumping and grinding is pretty popular with today's white youth, from what I can tell. So is rap. Illegitimacy is running at over 25 percent for white Americans even higher for some of the white European ethnicities, especially in the north. About half of all marriages end in divorce. European culture may have been minuets and church dances at one point, but I don't know if there was long term selection for high sexual restraint.

To the extent that different races vary in sexual behavior, I'd look at differences in testosterone levels. Blacks tend to be high, whites intermediate, and Indians/Asians low. Not surprisingly, Indian-Americans are, in general, not very sexual people in comparison to, let's say, Puerto Ricans.

If the Chinese did marry off their women at a younger age and more universally, there would have been more need for strong work ethic among the Chinese...... but there also would've been less selection for IQ and problem-solving ability. After all, if all the ladies get married, the lunkheads breed too.... If only some women marry, those less clever, and therefore less able to figure out how to sustain the long term industry of a worthy and successful man, get weeded out. Which then might support the idea that outside of the affluent urban areas and highly academic/commercial southeast, there wasn't strong cognitive selection among peasants.

China does have a long history of polygamy, but it's not clear if polygamy would select for higher IQ. After all, the Middle East practiced it quite extensively, without any seeming boost to cognitive skills. Of course, in many polygamist societies, it was often the bored and useless aristocrats that spent their time chasing tail and siring lots of illegimate children. In a typical rural Chinese village, for example, peasants tended to 1 wife and the big landowning family practiced polygamy.

Elbrac said...

Why are black bears so timid?

http://www.bear.org/website/bear-pages/extinct-short-faced-bear.html

FF said...

Whereas organic agriculture may not be able to feed the world, it has been the reason for the success of the Bukara islanders.
It looks like a fine example of Permaculture design.

Via google earth the villages are well shaded, placed on the ridges either for safety or water source... but the strip fields are not too far from the homes to receive individual attention and constant fertility in the form of organic manure and tree compost-my guess the trees would be mostly nitrogen-fixing legumes, good kindling in kitchen also.
Also fish wastes available from the surrounding lake to maintain high fertility in potentially overused soil.
There do not seem to be farmhouses on the plots of land as such but clustered together in villages.

Lake well stocked with crocs and hippos to heighten the sense of isolation.

The shape of the fields reminds me of the long narrow plots down to the St Lawrence in Quebec, the result of inheritance arrangements.

Anonymous said...

"Steve, you are ignoring the critical role of technology adoption in Europe. From the Moldboard plow to better looms, water-driven and then steam driven textile mills, development of the wool, linen, gun, paper, and printing trade, Europe unlike Asia was open to constant technological change."

Sigh. You're not just a fool when it comes to the inscrutable mysteries of the opposite sex I see Whisky.

Gunpowder, paper and printing were all first devised in Eastern Asia. The Chinese were unwilling to purchase British woollen garments because they were considered crude compared to their own textile products. The Chinese were early pioneers in the use of water-power, and from what I recall from Needham, more efficient ploughs as well.

Pretty much the only thing you nailed correctly in the above post is the fact that samurai and knights were roughly contemporaneous. The Tokugawa did not preserve the samurai as you assert, however - they pacified them as they were rendered obsolete by unification - the "Pax Tokugawa" which endured from the outset of the 17th century until contact with Western powers.

The Chinese never developed empirical science the way the West did (otherwise this conversation would most likely be in Mandarin), but their pre-modern technological accomplishments are nonetheless doubtable.

Barry Wong.

Anonymous said...

J. Philippe Rushton's famous r/K hypothesis us relevant here.
Basically 'r/K' is a term from biology in which differing reproductive strategies of animal species are contrasted.At one end you have typical insects and many fish species (100,000s of eggs are dispersed)at the other you have creatures such as elephants and whales - only one child is produced in many a year, high parental involvement.
Rushton (very controversially) sought to extend the theory to human ethnicities.

Anonymous said...

Just as America will be better off with smarter immigrants from Asia, Africa will be better off with smarter immigrants from everywhere but Africa. Think of how much better-off Africans will be once they've imported everyone with an IQ over 100 from Europe, America, and Asia!

Disease burdens make this unnattractive for at least Europeans and possibly also NE Asians (you can't really expect to expect people to sign up for a death sentence on the basis of dulce et decorum est struggling third world masses mori), but importing rafts of Thais and the Indian elite would probably do some good things for the continent (maybe some bad things as well, since there are some things we probably don't like in these people's cultures, or our own, but a net positive).

'Course, things didn't go too well for the Indian middle classes the last time they went to Africa, probably since the Africans didn't (and still don't) have many Leftists who are in the business of making them feel guilty for "nativism"...

Matt said...

Steve, I would bet another angle to consider would be that stationery bandits who want to tax people were rarer or later in Africa for whatever reason, which encourages nomadism and discourages intensive agriculture. Put another way, stationery bandits (the antecedent of what we call government) would want people to stay still to be taxed, which would stop all the movement required for a successful slashing and burning (slash and burning being a space burglar and so limits the total number of people, even if it might be easier and more productive for the people doing it).

"Greg Clark wrote in "A Farewell to Alms" that the Malthusian English were richer than the Chinese because their higher disease burden (I recollect him describing the English of the time as "a filthy people") meant a lower population."

TGGP: Nick Szabo in his latest post on Malthus (http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2010/10/malthus-and-capital.html) places the 17th century British higher on his Malthusian isoclines than he does China, which would suggest that by the 1600s a non-disease reliant difference in standards of living was evident. I'm not sure what he bases his graph on though.

as for the idea that we are more disease-ridden than the Chinese, I don't buy for a minute.

Seems to me like pre 18th/19th century Chinese and Europeans were much more similar in filthiness than either was to modern people or probably even late 19th century Europeans, but Chinese may have been the least filthy and disease ridden filthy and disease ridden folks. I do think it would probably be biased or a more likely a weird attempt to show off your cosmopolitanism to refer to pre-modern Europeans as "a filthy people" and not refer to pre-modern Chinese or Arabs or Indians as "filthy peoples".

As a tidbit, apparently Westerners had less of an emphasis on washing (relative to other contemporary Eurasians) due to monastic beliefs in mortifying the flesh filtering down to the populace through the Church hierarchy, and that this causal relationship ended up causing a slight hygienic effect when the Protestant Reformation severed much of this connection (leading "Cleanliness" to come closer to "Godliness" and ultimately Protestant countries to have better toilets). There may be some of this left in our culture (or even genes!), all things being equal.

Matt said...

Steve, I would bet another angle to consider would be that stationery bandits who want to tax people were rarer or later in Africa for whatever reason, which encourages nomadism and discourages intensive agriculture.

Put another way, stationery bandits (the antecedent of what we call government) would want people to stay still to be taxed, which would stop all the movement required for a successful slashing and burning (slash and burning being a space burglar and so limits the total number of people, even if it might be easier and more productive for the people doing it).

Matt said...

"Greg Clark wrote in "A Farewell to Alms" that the Malthusian English were richer than the Chinese because their higher disease burden (I recollect him describing the English of the time as "a filthy people") meant a lower population."

TGGP: Nick Szabo in his latest post on Malthus (http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2010/10/malthus-and-capital.html) places the 17th century British higher on his Malthusian isoclines than he does China, which would suggest that by the 1600s a non-disease reliant difference in standards of living was evident. I'm not sure what he bases his graph on though.

as for the idea that we are more disease-ridden than the Chinese, I don't buy for a minute.

Seems to me like pre 18th/19th century Chinese and Europeans were much more similar in filthiness than either was to modern people or probably even late 19th century Europeans, but Chinese may have been the least filthy and disease ridden filthy and disease ridden folks. I think it would probably be biased or weird attempt to show off your cosmopolitanism to refer to pre-modern Europeans as "a filthy people" and not refer to pre-modern Chinese or Indians or Arabs as "filthy people".

As a tidbit, apparently Westerners had less of an emphasis on washing (relative to other contemporary Eurasians) due to monastic beliefs in mortifying the flesh filtering down to the populace through the Church hierarchy, and that this causal relationship ended up causing a slight hygienic effect when the Protestant Reformation severed much of this connection (leading "Cleanliness" to come close to "Godliness" and Protestant countries to have better toilets). Some of this might still be present in Western culture still.

FF said...

Farmers of Forty centuries Dr. Arthur Stanley, Health officer of the city of Shanghai, in his annual report for 1899, considering this subject (humanure) as a municipal problem, wrote:

"Regarding the bearing on the sanitation of Shanghai of the relationship between Eastern and Western hygiene, it may be said, that if prolonged national life is indicative of sound sanitation, the Chinese are a race worthy of study by all who concern themselves with Public Health. Even without the returns of a Registrar-General it is evident that in China the birth rate must very considerably exceed the death rate, and have done so in an average way during the three or four thousand years that the Chinese nation has existed. Chinese hygiene, when compared with medieval English, appears to advantage. The main problem of sanitation is to cleanse the dwelling day by day, and if this can be done at a profit so much the better. While the ultra-civilized Western elaborates destructors for burning garbage at a financial loss and turns sewage into the sea, the Chinaman uses both for manure. He wastes nothing while the sacred duty of agriculture is uppermost in his mind. And in reality recent bacterial work has shown that faecal matter and house refuse are best destroyed by returning them to clean soil, where natural purification takes place. The question of destroying garbage can, I think, under present conditions in Shanghai, be answered in a decided negative. While to adopt the water-carriage system for sewage and turn it into the river, whence the water supply is derived, would be an act of sanitary suicide. It is best, therefore, to make use of what is good in Chinese hygiene, which demands respect, being, as it is, the product of an evolution extending from more than a thousand years before the Christian era."

headache said...

I'm a white South African living in exile. Whenever I spend time down there, it becomes obvious again and again that ALL of Africa's problems emanate from the tribal mentality of blacks. White South Africa attained First World status within 25 years of independence from the oppressive British Crown. Unfortunately most of that development has now been ruined under 15 years of black power. This alone proves that the problem is not the landscape, the animals or the diseases but the mentality.

stari_momak said...

"The people who run our casinos"

The Indians do not 'run' our Casinos. The simple have been exempted from laws the rest of us have to folow concerning 'gaming', so largely white corporations build casinos on thei land and the Indians get a large cut of the action. Its pure rent seeking (and getting).

Bruce Charlton said...

I think Steve Sailer has misunderstood the concept of a Malthusian Trap (either that or I have!).

Of course the pre-contact Africans *were* in a Malthusian Trap!

The MT means that population is kept in check by factors such as starvation, violence and disease.

African population was kept in check by disease (especially Falciparum malaria, but many others) plus violence - the result was that Africans pre-contact used to have plenty of food per person, for less effort.

(According to Greg Clark) the East Asians had low disease (due to excellent hygeine) and low violence (due to strong central government) - hence the population was held in check by starvation (much lower calories per person than Africa).

Europse was somewhere in between.

Technologies and more-intensive food production would delay starvation by a generation or two, but population would expand until starvation (or disease, or violence) kicked in again.

Delaying reproduction only delays the problem, so long as fertility is above replacement level. (Which it always was in pre-industrial societies.)

In the end the East Asians were working very hard in very intensive agriculture to produce very little food per head of population.

It was only after 1800 in the West that the rate of introduction of productivity-enhancing technology began to out-run these Malthusian constraints - economic production and population went up together, and disease and violence also declined.

The West escaped the Trap for a couple of hundred years...

Camlost said...

Elephants (mammoths, actually) used to exist in northern latitudes too. It's thought that they were hunted to extinction by enterprising humans.

I've read that Asiatic lions existed as far West as Greece and the Balkans possibly as late as Alexander's time.

Anonymous said...

Barry Wong said:

Gunpowder, paper and printing were all first devised in Eastern Asia. The Chinese were unwilling to purchase British woollen garments because they were considered crude compared to their own textile products. The Chinese were early pioneers in the use of water-power, and from what I recall from Needham, more efficient ploughs as well.


There can be little doubt that Needham did no more than translate latter claims that had been attributed to an earlier age in coming to conclusions about gunpowder.

In the same way that claims that the Greeks invented the steam engine is so obviously crap for anyone who understands the technical progress made by Newcomen and Watt, so too are claims that the Chinese invented gunpowder.

By advancing such claims you display a great deal of ignorance about the actual technology and label yourself a dilettante.

lesley said...

"but as for the idea that we are more disease-ridden than the Chinese, I don't buy for a minute."

Nor do I. There is a memoire I read on-line, (memoires and testifying were a popular artform during the cultural changes of the early 20th century. Women unbinding their feet told their stories in well-publicized newspaper articles during the 20s and 30s) of older Chinese who lived through most of the 20th century. A woman described the life of her mother who had born about 11 children of whom most died in childhood. This was prior to WWII, but still, 20th century. The interesting observation was that that was "common" in those days. There was nothing unusual for a mother to lose 11 children in childhood. Almost made infanticide (also practiced mostly by the urban poor) not worth the effort.
The Chinese premature mortality rate was extremely high. As in the opening pages of the Good Earth: only Wang Lung had survived which is why a woman must "bear children continually" in order to have any survive.
By the 20th century most of the West had left such a high child mortality rate behind. By 1900 it was about 10% for upper class families, although still about 25% for society as a whole. By WWII it was way lower, though I don't have the stat for it.
So while I am a great believer in some of the Chinese medicines, etc., they owe their enormous increase in population and vast decrease in child mortality, to the adoption of western ways, and -- it's hard for me to admit -- some forms of western medical practice. Just having flush toilets and running water makes a huge difference. Otherwise you are surrounded by filth. Imagine being sick from "both ends" in a small, crowded room with only pots of water. One Chinese friend (ex-Party member, no less), said that among peasants it was not unusual for little boys to get bitten on genital area while doing their business because latrines were built over pig styes and the pigs had no respect. And this was late 20th century.
We just have no idea how most of the world lives.

Svigor said...

Anyway, Mongols could travel long distances and have portable pickled cabbage to eat. It must have fed them enough to conquer so much territory.

Again, they had mare's milk, blood, and in a pinch, meat to sustain them.

lesley said...

There are also on-line the reminiscences of a well-known Australian misionary traveling through China in the 1880s. Mostly he likes and respects the inhabitants, notes their lawfulness, and social order that generally prevailed, and thinks the women are much better looking than the Japanese, whose admirers he doesn't understand. He thinks the incidence of female infanticide is overstated by missionaries (though how would he know for sure?), but notices the strong favortism towards male children. All in all though, he admires the country.
When he talked to an American missionary in a large city, she said the local ladies liked to dress in their best and visit her western style house, which apparently was well appointed though not extraordinary.
Certainly they similar desires to ours concerning a way of life, just no way of implementing it, given the limitations of material culture at that time. The Chinese ladies commented on the house's cleanliness, order and light, and called it "heaven."
It wasn't just the opium wars that made China want to beat the West at its own game.

Svigor said...

Disease burdens make this unnattractive for at least Europeans and possibly also NE Asians (you can't really expect to expect people to sign up for a death sentence on the basis of dulce et decorum est struggling third world masses mori), but importing rafts of Thais and the Indian elite would probably do some good things for the continent (maybe some bad things as well, since there are some things we probably don't like in these people's cultures, or our own, but a net positive).

'Course, things didn't go too well for the Indian middle classes the last time they went to Africa, probably since the Africans didn't (and still don't) have many Leftists who are in the business of making them feel guilty for "nativism"...


Pish tosh. We can't let a little thing like disease burden (or America's wide open spaces, or urban sprawl, or a lower share of America's resources in the face of mass immigration, or the dissolution of America's culture, or lower wages, or...well, you get the point) stand in the way of progress! World's shrinking, we're all in this boat together, etc., etc., etc. We just have to move those racist liberals (Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, etc.) out of the way, roll up our sleeves, and get down to business. If Somalis and American blacks can tough out the vitamin D thing here in the States, then Europeans and Asians can damn well suck it up and take one for the team in Africa. Right?

sopadilla said...

ended up causing a slight hygienic effect when the Protestant Reformation severed much of this connection (leading "Cleanliness" to come close to "Godliness" and Protestant countries to have better toilets). Some of this might still be present in Western culture still.

I knew somebody would cough up that "mortify the flesh" crap again.
Italians and French were especially known for keeping the unmentionable areas much cleaner than the English. Bidets are a French invention, and were used centuries ago. The English were more prudish and thought giving too much attention to that area, even for hygiene, was in bad taste. No double entendre intended.
Anyway, the Church had less to do with non-washing than just the medical idea that immersion in water was considered unhealthy, as has been the case with many other cultures, from Himalayans to Saudi coastal Arabs. Europeans did do a lot of sponging off, but not immersion bathing. Partly because bath houses were meeting places for sword battles and promiscuity, they were closed in most cities late in the 15th century; but they had been quite popular, even for bathing.

The mother of Louis XIV was quite fastidious and was embarrassed by her son's bad hygiene. But that was a fetish of his, and considered a little odd even by the standards of the time.
I was once on a forum where one person was getting off on how dirty people were under their finery. She cited Marie Antoinette. I cited countless biograpies that made it clear daily bathing was current by the 18th century, at least among those who could. Poor Marie Antoinette had to stand shivering in her bathtub every morning as her garments were passed to her one by one, after inspection by her body-guard-maids. She was unusual in bathing in only one tub though--most who could had two tubs, one for soapy bathing and one for rinsing. The first thing Marie Antoinette did when brought back from the family's attempted flight (before the revolution), was call for a bath, which was duly brought to her. She was, after all, still queen at the time.

Svigor said...

I suppose what I'm getting at here is that America and the west is hogging ALL THE FUN. We know from the Friedmans and Unzes of the world that immigration is GOOD GOOD GOOD for America. We GET IT already. But I think it's totally selfish that only America gets to benefit from all this movin' around. Why shouldn't China, India, Israel, Mexico and Africa get a slice of the pie? It's just not fair.

And that's unAmerican. Americans are all about the fair. So we want to move a few hundred million Europeans and Asians into Africa. Spread the wealth around (hey, Obama can get behind this too! This just gets better and better, the more I think about it).

Then we want to move a few million, okay maybe 10 million, of the smartest Chinese and Indians into Israel. Americans love Israel, it's a well-known fact, and Americans know perfectly well from the Friedmans and Unzes of the world how GOOD GOOD GOOD "cognitively elite" immigration is for the recipient nations. So, having firmly in mind what's good, and that we love Israel and want to help her, and the fact that Israel (by dint of being poorer and less well-off than we) is ahead of us in the line for the boon of "cognitively elite" immigration, we formally object to the fact that we're getting all the goodies, and poor Israel is being left out in the cold, as it were.

This simply cannot stand. We cannot, in good conscience and as upstanding Americans, let this travesty of justice continue.

What's right is right. We're willing to take one for Team Humanity here, despite the pain and obvious loss. "Bear any burden," and all that.

Kylie said...

"Sailersphere, I need help with a hard case. I got this Chinese-Merrican friend who says his primary loyalty is to the United States. But I can't get him to express it!...he acts like I'm insulting China, and he has to defend her. I keep telling him that's not how someone whose primary loyalty is to these United States, but there must be a cultural or language barrier somewhere because I'm not getting through."

For some years I had extremely bright Chinese grad students as neighbors. I cannot overemphasize how pleasurable it was to talk with people who were so knowledgeable about so many things. Even better, they all spoke beautiful English and had a ready grasp of Western humor. All other things being equal, I'd rather talk to a high IQ Chinese person than a high IQ person of any other ethnicity or race.

But high IQ isn't the only thing that matters, at least, not to me. Culture matters, too. And while we never discussed it, except in oblique ways, I was always aware of the cultural gulf between me and them.

Additionally, there are things, turns of mind or abilities or traits that IQ does not measure that I value. The people I value aren't necessarily as bright or brighter than I am. Character matters to me, too--character as generally understood in white culture. While the Chinese people I knew were all of good character, it was nevertheless a somewhat different kind of "good".

I think there is a cultural barrier between you and your friend, as there was between me and my Chinese acquaintances (much as I liked them, the barriers precluded my thinking of them as friends).

Kylie said...

"Koreans and Germans especially into pickled cabbage, very bright people, preserving greens for the winter via benign co-operating bacteria."

Apparently the Russians did this, too. I love this passage from Doctor Zhivago:

"We have been lucky. The autumn was dry and warm. It gave us time to dig up the potatoes before the rains and the cold weather. Not counting those we gave back to Mikulitsyn, we had twenty sacks. We put them in the biggest bin in the cellar and covered them with old blankets and hay. We also put down two barrels of salted cucumbers and two of sauerkraut prepared by Tonia. Fresh cabbages hang in pairs from the beams. There are carrots buried in dry sand, and radishes and beets and turnips, and plenty of peas and beans are stored in the loft. There is enough firewood in the shed to last us till spring."

Now that's what I call winterizing. The Russians I've known still include cabbage as a staple of their diet. It's an excellent food, easy to store and prepare and very nutritious.

Anonymous said...

In Africa, humans and elephants co-evolved or a long period of time, so elephants had time to notice that those tall skinny beasts were getting to be more dangerous than they used to be.

I'm a little disappointed that have risen to present the conventional wisdom. Of course I have heard this explanation for decades. It's popular but is it plausible?

At it's essence it says that man in Africa isn't dumb it's just that the African animals are extra smart. This strikes me a a "just so story".

It could be true but is there any evidence? I don't have an explanation of my own but this theory has always struck me as much too convenient. It sounds like a form of political correctness in that it preserves the dignity of the African black man - our common ancestor.

I don't doubt that game can be naive. But they seem to lose and gain their fear of man in a matter of months if not weeks, suggesting learning not evolution. Animals all over the world change their behavior as they move on and off game preserves. The deer in my neighborhood don't act toward people around here the way they do during hunting season in the mountains.

According to this the "wily elephant theory", today's African animals behave differently from animals elsewhere - not that anyone ever says how. Is an elephant supposed to be more stealthy than a Mammoth? Is it that the Indians could locate the Mammoths and Mastodons but those damn elusive elephants kept slipping away undetected?

The persistence of the African mega-fauna it seems to me has never been adequately explained. The wily elephant theory has been prematurely embraced lest people conclude that there is something different about African people.

BTW if the African elephants are so damn wily, why are they now endangered by poachers?

Albertosaurus

neil craig said...

I'd be pretty confident that it is primatily the disease vectors. Africa, because we evolved there, has a level of diseases with which we have co-evolved to be particularly susceptinle. The island, being disconnected from disease bases looks like support of this.

The results of this may say much about humans there. Disease tends to be epidemic in places where there are a lot of people which makes cities in Africa (& hence civilisation) difficult to establish. Moreover if disease is the normal cause of death it makes having large numbers of children, rather than few & educating them, the optimum strategy. Hence also black sexiness.

Elephants will be a symptom tather than a cause. If the Amerindians could wipe out all the mammoths & other animals in a few centuries 25,000 years ago the elephants survival indicates that the humans were not pressing them hard rather than that they couldn't.

keypusher said...

Has there been major studies on pickle cultures?
Earlier, there was some discussion here about lactose tolerance as an evolutionary advantage. The suckle culture.


Calvin Coolidge was weaned on a pickle, I understand.

Truth said...

"They were almost rigid--like in the way they say HOW--like the Asians."

Buddy, I have to tell you, I look forward to your posts, they are comically moronic. I think you have officially surpassed Whiskey in that aspect.

Truth said...

"how 'bout you get your Chinese pals to let us buy real estate over there? Or, how bout gettin' barriers to investment in China reduced for Americans? Or, how 'bout gettin' the borders to China opened up completely so I don't have to go through all that hassle to start up a business in China and bring in cheap foreign labor to run it."

I agree with you here, Svigor, I think your friend should just get on the phone with Chairman Mao* and let his his opinions on these subjects be heard, in the name of fairness; just what you should do with Barry to discuss HBD.





*Yes, I know he's dead.

Dahlia said...

Why didn't Africa experience a Malthusian trap?
Perhaps they didn't have the intelligence to grow their populations large enough to experience such a problem. Only about 8000 years ago were cattle introduced.

We are all working on *the* problem: surviving and propagating. The necessities of life have costs. The problem of land, which is essentially food, and the attenuate inflation is only one kind of problem that people come upon.

Limiting children (or any burdensome people) is but one way to deal with the costs. There is also increasing aggression and taking over other peoples and innovating to bring down those costs.

Limiting children, but not other burdensome people, is now by far the easiest solution requiring the least intelligence and creativity to deal with these costs. That this solution is so suddenly available and so effortless today causes its own problems and we will need even more intelligence and creativity to overcome them.

texas first! said...

...rather they want to move to a place where they are surrounded by a mix of high IQ Asians and high IQ whites. Redmond, Irvine, Newport Beach, Palo Alto, and Fort Lee all fit the bill...they want to live among the high IQ people of all races that populate the exciting coastal cities.

I lived in Irvine for five years, "exciting" is not a word I would use to describe it (whatever "it" is. It's not really a city). I would describe it as "superficial" or "vacuous". It lacks substance. It could blow away tomorrow and no one would miss it. What creates bounds between a people and their land is culture, history, race and religion. Not high IQs, money and nice bike lanes.

Anonymous said...

Albertosaurus:
According to this the "wily elephant theory", today's African animals behave differently from animals elsewhere - not that anyone ever says how. Is an elephant supposed to be more stealthy than a Mammoth? Is it that the Indians could locate the Mammoths and Mastodons but those damn elusive elephants kept slipping away undetected?

I'm surprise that nobody yet mentioned that elephants are native to India (and Burma, Thailand, Siam, etc.) as well as Africa.

Sure, African and Asian elephants are different species. But African elephants are the larger and slower ones, and bolder too. Not at all sly and stealthy.

Anonymous said...

Disease has always been a population-limiting factor in sub-Saharan Africa. One of my uncles was a professor of medicine, and he used to observe that the tropics serve as a laboratory for the creation of new diseases. Almost all epidemics originate in tropical or sub-tropical places and spread thence towards the antipodes until something - the inhospitality of climate to the organism or the vector, or the paucity of potential hosts - brings them to a halt.

I'd dispute that there is no Malthusian trap in Africa. One look at the frightful poverty, famine, war, and disease in various parts of that continent suggests that there is, and it has been associated with European intervention of an "humanitarian" kind, particularly vaccination. As ever, when nature fails to rectify its imbalances in the old ways, new ones come to the fore. It is now pretty well acknowledged, for example, that AIDS is of African origin. The numbers of Africans infected with HIV, and the improbability that the disease can be controlled in Africa by the sort of measures used in the civilised world, suggest that African populations will be adjusted downwards significantly by this disease.

Wars and massacres, such as those seen in Rwanda and Liberia, are other processes by which populations are reduced to local carrying capacity. Finally, the mismanagement of agriculture, whether feckless as in Zimbabwe, or purposeful, as in Ethiopia after the communist take-over, bring about lower populations by starvation.

Vaccination and other humanitarian interventions in Africa by the civilised world can only be justified by an attempt to control the spread of pestilence out of Africa and into Europe and America. Is it any surprise that, after we eliminated smallpox from the last part of the world in which it was endemic - the Horn of Africa - that area (Somalia) became a hotbed of warlordism and piracy?

Our best hope would be to draw a cordon sanitaire around sub-Saharan Africa and to let nature take its course. We don't even have to help it deindustrialize, as Alex Kurtagic suggests. This will happen anyway once the civilised powers withdraw. Africa will return to its primordial savagery, sua sponte.

Anonymous said...

stari_momak said...

The Indians do not 'run' our Casinos. The simple have been exempted from laws the rest of us have to folow concerning 'gaming', so largely white corporations build casinos on thei land and the Indians get a large cut of the action. Its pure rent seeking (and getting).

The white corporations that run (most of) the casinos happen to be fundamentalist churches! Strange, but true. These churches also use their "cut" to the Indians to enforce religious purity, and make sure the Indians go the right churches (i.e. their church) and stay away from pagan influences.

It seems that gambling is a vice profitable to the fundamentalist churches - just like the Taliban profited from Afghan opium.

Kylie said...

"I'm surprise that nobody yet mentioned that elephants are native to India (and Burma, Thailand, Siam, etc.) as well as Africa.

Sure, African and Asian elephants are different species. But African elephants are the larger and slower ones, and bolder too. Not at all sly and stealthy."


In other words, there's a persistent achievement gap between African and Asian elephants.

Anonymous said...

Hey Svigor,

If you don't mind, where else do you comment? I enjoy your commentary very much.

ben tillman said...

Steve, you are ignoring the critical role of technology adoption in Europe.... Europe unlike Asia was open to constant technological change.

The European Knight was roughly contemporaneous with the Samurai, consumed even more resources, and was culturally as critical.


So you're saying that the stirrup caused feudalism? Thank you, Lynn White.

Anonymous said...

While the ultra-civilized Western elaborates destructors for burning garbage at a financial loss and turns sewage into the sea, the Chinaman uses both for manure. He wastes nothing while the sacred duty of agriculture is uppermost in his mind. And in reality recent bacterial work has shown that faecal matter and house refuse are best destroyed by returning them to clean soil, where natural purification takes place.

Not to take a ridiculous shit tangent (arguing over who uses their shit more efficiently would probably be the most absurd ethnonationalist pissing contest imaginable) but - this happened in both regions at least and probably Eurasian wide, but apparently was more efficient, at least in cities, in Europe than East Asia (likely rural regions experienced less contrast).

It seems plausible to me from searching that that the driver for this difference was a greater use of animals in agriculture in Europe (for whatever reason, seems to me plausible reasons are a byproduct of greater proximity to communities of herders or a product of a less diverse plant base forcing greater use of animal products). This leads to higher quality animal manure in Europe being available and less demand for comparatively low quality humanure. Since there's less of a financial gain from selling it or reusing it relative to throwing it away, and since there are no corps of publicly funded germ theory savvy sanitation engineers to correct this, a relative tragedy of the commons ensued causing human waste disposal to become less hygienic in the West.

corvinus said...

Exhibit A: white kids hook up culture on campuses like Duke

Exhibit B: grinding on the dance floor at white proms

Are you suggesting African values are infiltrating white American society by way of "cool" black culture and rap music?


Yes, it's obviously happening, but (as with illegitimacy in Sweden) it's not nearly as deleterious as it is among blacks.

From personal observation, girls of African descent are much more willing to do one-night stands and whatnot, but white girls, even if they act slutty, still are much more likely to keep actual sexual activity confined to their boyfriend or, if single, to at the end of the night shut down guys they don't know but were grinding with and leave the club with their girlfriends.

Women are (as we all know) the limiting factor in sexual relations, and these safety mechanisms among white girls keep a lid on the problem. While white girls do have illegitimate children nowadays, it's usually by a boyfriend and very rarely by a one-night stand. For black women, on the other hand, it seems to be routine.

gwood said...

"I heard that Mongols placed cabbage beneath their saddles..."
If I had to live on cabbage pickled in horse sweat I'd probably build a few pyramids of skulls too.

Reality Check said...

More people were needed, so African culture -- dance, song, and so forth -- tended to encourage mating now rather than to encourage delay. Listening to Top 40 radio today, this pattern seems to have carried over from Africa.

As we, The Enlightened, all know, Africans went straight from the African jungle to your top 40 radio today, there were no centuries of slavery or anything like that in between.

Anonymous said...

Sexual surveys show black and Hispanic men reporting more annual sexual partners than white men, but women of all races report similar numbers of partners in a given year. I don't think the data show black women to be especially slutty, but it's possible that people were lying.

Among whites, the most sexually conservative women are going to be from Ireland, Italy, Greece, Poland, Spain, Portugal, Russia, and Eastern Europe. Places where the Catholic or Orthodox Church was strong, or where Communism prevailed.

Indians, from the subcontinent, are sexually more restrained than even both whites and East Asians.

Kylie said...

"So you're saying that the stirrup caused feudalism? Thank you, Lynn White."

I'm a huge fan of Lynn White's Medieval Technology and Social Change and thought of it while reading this thread.

Glad to see I'm not alone in that.

Anonymous said...

> I don't buy this. The human population of North America was exceedingly low before the white man came. I heard the entire population of Indians when the whites arrived was AT MOST 10 million. Some say it was closer to 5 million or less. 10,000s of yrs ago, the entire human population of North America was probaby in the tens of thousand or at most, in the 100,000s.

The fact that it was low in the very beginning seems not relevant. It would have gotten very high quite rapidly.

Five million doesn't seem like a lot, but that's 2.5 million males who were hunting full-time (I think agriculture was rather marginal in North America). I would think that most of the giant bear individuals had humans hunting in their home ranges in most years. You can cover a lot of territory. With a small load, and light footwear, it's not particularly strenuous to cover 20 miles a day for many days. Thus, you could cross Ohio in a couple weeks; in the same time period you could pass through the home ranges of any number of mastadons or giant bears.

Remember, these animals may have barely even fled from man early on. Very likely, they at least fled less intensely than do the animals we know today. I'm certain that they owuld have evolved greater reticence by the time they were almost gone, despite the fact that huge animals with correspondingly low populations cannot evolve rapidly. But human hunters can be quite effective. And hardly can a mastadon or giant bear get around without leaving a trail that's obvious to the proficient native-born of a hunting culture.

Yes, Smilodon and some of the other taxa may have been smaller than the black and brown bears that still survive. But man may not have wiped out Smilodon by direct action only - it could have died out partly due to a lack of prey animals wiped out by man. Black bear eats very large amounts of vegetable matter today; brown bear 'up to 90%.' Wikipedia vaguely suggests that Smilodon ate essentially nothing but meat, though it probably did eat some animals that are still extant today.

Anonymous said...

As a tidbit, apparently Westerners had less of an emphasis on washing (relative to other contemporary Eurasians) due to monastic beliefs in mortifying the flesh filtering down to the populace through the Church hierarchy, and that this causal relationship ended up causing a slight hygienic effect when the Protestant Reformation severed much of this connection (leading "Cleanliness" to come closer to "Godliness" and ultimately Protestant countries to have better toilets).


Assertions like this sound plausible, given our cultural biases, but I believe the facts are otherwise. The mediaevals were actually somewhat clean, with public baths in most towns. It was the early moderns who turned against bathing, on the grounds that (1) the public baths promoted sexual immorality (possibly true, eh?) and (2) the best medical opinion held that bathing was dangerous, as it stripped the body of its natural defences against disease. A regular (say, weekly) change of clothes and some perfume were all the hygiene anyone really needed.

Chris

Anonymous said...

>As we, The Enlightened, all know, Africans went straight from the African jungle to your top 40 radio today, there were no centuries of slavery or anything like that in between.<

In the respects we're talking about, Africans and African-Americans are very similar.

Anonymous said...

Amurrica pushed for larger population from square one, as an unmitigated, unchallengeable good. All town boosters had but one basic goal: a growin' population, by garsh!

Far from being considered the road to poverty, increasing population was seen as the road to riches.

I used to go along with this and respect Julian Simon, but now I think all those people were wrong-headed, and Malthus was right. Within a certain limit, a small population means more wealth per capita. This viewpoint factors in the decisive fact of the worldwide scarcity of high (or even merely decent) IQ. European peoples and their Industrial Revolution were an anomaly or outlier, now regressing to the mean because of the political decision to encourage massive non-white immigration, massive transfers of wealth and power to nonwhites, etc. The political decision has been made to go down the drain and back to the state of nature where life is "nasty, brutish, and short." Altruism has turned out to be not more than a vector for barbarism.

Anonymous said...

The Diamondites offer as many reasons why Africa is backward as the Soviets used to offer for why the USSR didn't work. (The funniest one I heard was "uniquely on earth, all the rivers in Russia run backward".)

Svigor said...

I agree with you here, Svigor, I think your friend should just get on the phone with Chairman Mao* and let his his opinions on these subjects be heard, in the name of fairness; just what you should do with Barry to discuss HBD.

No doubt. I think the Bamster's got a winner on his hands with Plan Afrika. I'll pass the Mao suggestion on to Yan Shet.

Hey Svigor,

If you don't mind, where else do you comment? I enjoy your commentary very much.


Thanks. Mangan's. If one more person praises my writing this week my head's gonna explode.

Wandrin said...

"In other words, there's a persistent achievement gap between African and Asian elephants."

Also i think there may be a difference between the special stealth ninja elephants in most of Africa and those in Nubia / Ethiopa as i vaguely recall those regions in Roman times being famous for their trained war elephants. North Africa / Carthage also had a lot of those iirc.

"Among whites, the most sexually conservative women are going to be from ...Places where the Catholic or Orthodox Church was strong,"

My experience is the average is the same. The difference is in the distribution i.e a lot a little and a little a lot vs a much more regular distribution.

"or where Communism prevailed."

Not even remotely true. You think giant slave-camps where half the population are drinking themselves to death are going to be sexually conservative?

Anonymous said...

I own a quasi-coffee table book about mammoths, titled appropriately enough "Mammoths" and in it the authors discuss the asymmetry of megafauna extinctions throughout the world. Africa had an extinction rate of 14%, followed by Eurasia with 31%, North America with 74%, South America with 80%, and Australia with 96%. The reasoning is the further man got from his ancestral homeland, the greater the number of large animals who were not co-adapted to living with him increased. The reasons the last 3 continents had such high extinction rates according to the theory was that fully modern man was sprung on these animals with no time to adapt, unlike in Africa and Eurasia where the animals had plenty of time to get used to proto-humans before having to deal with modern Sapiens. The only problem with this of course is that Mammoths and quite a few other big critters were in both Eurasia and North America where the extinction rate was a lot higher. The authors attribute this to the Mammoth's low rate of reproduction which is assumed to be quite similar to that of Elephants and would account for both varieties of mammoth going extinct. But then again Elephants did survive in S.E. Asia till present day, so maybe the climate played a role as well.

When post-agricultural man developed watercraft and went to islands in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans he pretty much wiped out all the large animals (Often flightless birds) that were endemic to those islands. These examples illustrate the extreme end of what some people said happened in the Americas and Australia. Animals unaware of human hunting abilities and unafraid of this strange hairless creature getting wiped out. According to Jared Diamond in the Third Chimpanzee, the Polynesians killed off some 2,000 bird species as they colonized the Pacific islands, but I digress, what was discussion about originally?

Howard Hughes said...

"Among whites, the most sexually conservative women are going to be from Ireland, Italy, Greece, Poland, Spain, Portugal, Russia, and Eastern Europe. Places where the Catholic or Orthodox Church was strong, or where Communism prevailed."
Doesn't got anything to do with Communism. It's just that the traditional way of life lived on a lot longer in the Communist East than it did in the Protestant and Northwestern countries: UK, Scandinavia, Holland, and so forth.

Interestingly, Communist systems in practice are almost never socially progressive.

Simon in London said...

Anon - all else being equal (ie the white ethnostate is not a Nazi-esque dystopia) I'd prefer the white state to the high IQ state. I like white people (especially my native Scots-Irish and northern English), feel a kinship with them, and would face less competition!

neil craig said...

Asian elephants have been domesticated since at least Alexander the Great's time. This may be why they are smaller & more domesticable than the African ones. It used to be thought African elepgants couldn't be tamed but some Indian mahouts managed it but why, apart from experiment, bother when you have the Indian ones? It would be interesting to compare prehistoric skeletons from both continents.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous wrote:
I'm surprise that nobody yet mentioned that elephants are native to India (and Burma, Thailand, Siam, etc.) as well as Africa.

Excellent point!

In fact there were formerly three species of elephants in the old world during historic times. In the New World there were at least a half dozen species of Mammoths and Mastodons and related creatures.

All the the New World elephantines were of course consumed by Indians. Yummy!

In the Old World the elephant we read about in Livy and Polybius was the Mauritanian Elephant. Hannibal managed to get one of these across the Alps but the species was extinguished in Roman Arenas. Romans knew of the "large" elephant - the Indian Elephant but were ignorant of African Elephant.

So the pattern is clear, everywhere in the world when man has encountered one of the many elephant or elephant-like species he has made use of them. In the Americas they were "good eatin'". In North Africa they were war machines and/or arena fodder. In Asia they were work engines.

But in Africa we are supposed to believe that elephants were so wily that they couldn't be hunted and so fearsome they suppressed nascent civilization.

It should be obvious that invoking extraordinary characteristics of animals is just an attempt to avoid conclusions about certain peoples.

Readers know the term "race realist". May I suggest that all this African elephant bushwa is a form of "race sentimentality".

Albertosaurus

Mr. Anon said...

"David said...

The Diamondites offer as many reasons why Africa is backward as the Soviets used to offer for why the USSR didn't work. (The funniest one I heard was "uniquely on earth, all the rivers in Russia run backward".)"

They run uphill? One would think that would be a distinct advantage. Truly, leftists will grab hold of any factoid in defence of thier view of the world-not-as-it-is.

Anonymous said...

"As we, The Enlightened, all know, Africans went straight from the African jungle to your top 40 radio today, there were no centuries of slavery or anything like that in between."

You're assuming that culture and behavior aren't at all influenced by the underlying genetic landscape. In fact this was one of the central tenets of early psychologist William James - that behavior, like physical traits, can be genetically programmed and is shaped by natural selection.

Kylie said...

Albertosaurus said, "May I suggest that all this African elephant bushwa is a form of 'race sentimentality'."

As far as I'm concerned, you may suggest anything you like. Your characterization of that racially sentimental theory as the "wily elephant theory" is one of the funniest things I've read.

kurt9 said...

What creates bounds between a people and their land is culture, history, race and religion. Not high IQs, money and nice bike lanes.

Bonds between people are useful if they lead to increase opportunity and economic growth. I don't see much use for such bonds if they do not create opportunity or help to empower me.

Anonymous said...

The Soviet Union always had a very restrictive attitude towards sex, viewing it as hedonistic. Eastern Europeans are also pretty patriarchal and protective of their women.

Italy and Greece are known for their large extended families and control/protection of their women. The men, especially Italians, unfortunately are pretty lecherous.

Doug1 said...

asdfasdfadfs said...

Yet, Anglo-American sexual mores were still 'puritanical' until relatively recently.

This is a common Jewish in origin trope in their status jocking and vying with wasps post WWII. The Puritans were actually very into sex and enjoying it often, they just were completely opposed to pre or extramarital sex. The concept that ladies if they were true ladies probably shouldn’t get too caught up in sex actually comes from Victorian England, and I don’t think was ever as embraced in the US.

adsfasdfasdf said...

asdfasdfadfs said...

"Yet, Anglo-American sexual mores were still 'puritanical' until relatively recently."

"This is a common Jewish in origin trope in their status jocking and vying with wasps post WWII. The Puritans were actually very into sex and enjoying it often, they just were completely opposed to pre or extramarital sex. The concept that ladies if they were true ladies probably shouldn’t get too caught up in sex actually comes from Victorian England, and I don’t think was ever as embraced in the US."

You fool, that's why I put 'puritanical' in quotes. It is an over-simplification.
However, despite the Jewish 'culture of critique', criticism of American sexual mores began well before the Frankfurt School.

Anyway, my point was that a people can be 'puritanical' and still sexually active/fertile, as 19th century Americans and today's Muslims are.

Catholic European nations used to be sexually more repressed in the past but had far more kids.

kurt9 said...

"I would say that on the level of material goods most high IQ whites benefit from the presence of high IQ northeast asians. Society is cleaner, there are more taxpayers, there are fewer criminals, things are more honest, in general, adding high IQ Northeat Asians is a boon to high IQ whites.

Low IQ whites generally don't like having Northeast Asians around. Many of the high IQ whites I know that are fed up with things in America are not fed up with Northeast Asian immigrants. In fact, they long to live in a society of fellow high IQ people, not an all white society."


Lets say I'm a high IQ white person who has actually lived in Asia for 10 year and am married to an Asian lady (Japanese). Can any of you here come up with a convincing argument why I should prefer to be around low IQ whites instead of a hybrid society of high IQ white and Asians? Pray tell?

There is an existential reason why "white" nationalism is doomed to failure.

If any of you do non like my attitude or worldview, thats your problem, not mine.

Wandrin said...

Immediately after the revolution pretty much the entire cultural marxist program was implemented all at once. It led to millions of homeless children which led to the policy being reversed.


For later times read up on the scale of abortion in the Soviet bloc. Now unless things are different over there sex has to come before abortion.

kurt9 said...

Africa too shows technology refusal instead of adoption. If you can use better, newer, more advantageous tools to get over on the other guy, why not?

Because it would disrupt society thats why not. Europe has been willing to do so, and Africa and Asia not so much.


The future belongs to the dynamic.

Anonymous said...

"For later times read up on the scale of abortion in the Soviet bloc."

Yes, do read. Did you know that abortion was outlawed under Stalin? I suppose that makes him pro-life.

Anonymous said...

Can any of you here come up with a convincing argument why I should prefer to be around low IQ whites instead of a hybrid society of high IQ white and Asians?

There's not going to be a strong utility based argument for such a thing, unless it does pan out that White societies even if low IQ excel Asiatics in some utility predicting measures. Currently there are suspicions they may (the creativity, individualism, boldness, scientific temperament &c. stuff that pops up in the HBD sphere), but I think evidence remain pretty weak. I think the strongest argument in this vein would be that White people (and Asian people) can collectively have national solidarity and that this achieves great things, even if low IQ White people (and low IQ Asian people) don't have any great predictions individually.

But I think utility based arguments aren't that promising and that any argument would be based on the idea that you have to prefer (or even just like the continued existence of) White people and think that this is the way for humans to flourish. I don't personally think this kind of argument is "morally wrong" in any sense nor morally objectively right (in my opinion people are perfectly entitled to like the people they were brought up with more and to build fences to preserve their qualities and no other concerns, such as "human rights" or what have you trump this particularly), but you're clearly not going to necessarily be too strongly attached to this kind of argument you're the type to marry Asian women.

Anonymous said...

Good question Kurt9, on a personal level I can see no reason why you wouldn't want to live in a multi-cultural high IQ enclave. But those are just enclaves within a generalized national system. On the large scale, I don't think there is any way to determine who is in or out based solely on some hidden trait like IQ. A national political system that is still largely based on race, if most members of the dominant race seem to possess a decent amount of intelligence, seems the only current feasible way to maintain the needed IQ for a prosperous workable nation.

Maybe that's why many HBDers hate SWPL so much. HBDers think SWPL are solely concerned about personal pleasure in their enclaves and don't think deeply enough about unpleasant data like HBD that threaten the wider national political system.

Just shoot me said...

"Can any of you here come up with a convincing argument why I should prefer to be around low IQ whites instead of a hybrid society of high IQ white and Asians?"

Because Asian women don't have broad enough pelvises to easily birth the hybrid kids' ginormous heads?

Which means you have to have a functioning hospital system to do C-sections, staffed by, not just super-smart doctors, but also kinda-smart, just-not-quite-as-mentally-awesome technicians who are happy to do the tedious but crucially important work like running the sterilizers, where conscientiousness is critical, but a very high IQ person would go batshit crazy from the repetition.

The White race, with its 100-IQ average, provides for lots of technicians, so the super-smart can be free from carrying out the tedious necessaries and so have the time to do their super-smart thing.

Kylie said...

"Lets say I'm a high IQ white person who has actually lived in Asia for 10 year[sic] and am married to an Asian lady (Japanese). Can any of you here come up with a convincing argument why I should prefer to be around low IQ whites instead of a hybrid society of high IQ white[sic] and Asians? Pray tell?"

No and why would we want to? There's a difference between some whites desiring to live in an all-white society and some whites desiring that all whites live in an all-white society.

"If any of you do non[sic] like my attitude or worldview, thats your problem, not mine."

I think your attitude--as distinct from your racial preference[s]--is a problem. But it's your problem, not mine.

kurt9 said...

creativity, individualism, boldness, scientific temperament &c.

Add to this self-reliance, competence, and thinking for ones-self. Just basic competence and intelligence.

These are the characteristics I find attractive. Of course I identify with others who share these characteristics and do not with those who do not.

Why should I identify with people on any other basis?

Anonymous said...

>They run uphill?<

To be fair, the claim was that they run away from the seas, instead of toward them as other rivers do. This was given as the reason for the USSR's poor economic organization.

We have heard similar reasoning about Africa's poor development. For instance, there is the claim (don't laugh) that Africa's animals cannot be tamed, while Europeans got lucky because Europe's animals can be tamed. Then WE are accused of indulging in just-so stories.

>leftists will grab hold of any factoid in defence of thier view of the world-not-as-it-is.<

Yes. Anyone interested in writing a book could update "The Madness of Crowds" by exploring the internal contradictions of the Left, using examples such as the ones I gave above. Material isn't lacking.

ben tillman said...

Lets say I'm a high IQ white person who has actually lived in Asia for 10 year and am married to an Asian lady (Japanese). Can any of you here come up with a convincing argument why I should prefer to be around low IQ whites instead of a hybrid society of high IQ white and Asians? Pray tell?

If you have to ask, you're not high-IQ.

BamaResident said...

"Anon - all else being equal (ie the white ethnostate is not a Nazi-esque dystopia) I'd prefer the white state to the high IQ state. I like white people (especially my native Scots-Irish and northern English), feel a kinship with them, and would face less competition!"

I'm with you, Simon in London. I really have nothing against Northeast asians or other high IQ groups, but I feel more comfortable socially around people similar to myself.

Svigor said...

Lets say I'm a high IQ white person who has actually lived in Asia for 10 year and am married to an Asian lady (Japanese). Can any of you here come up with a convincing argument why I should prefer to be around low IQ whites instead of a hybrid society of high IQ white and Asians? Pray tell?

Is there any reason why we would want to convince you?

There is an existential reason why "white" nationalism is doomed to failure.

Is there any reason for us to extrapolate general principles from your personal situation?

Svigor said...

Since Anon took you seriously, I'll respond to his point:

Whites should look askance at Anime Island ("hybrid high IQ white and yellow societies") because there's no such thing. There's only a precursor to another Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan, or China.

(I do confess I find it amusing that "cognitive elitists" don't seem aware that central Asia is one big "Anime Island" composed of hybrid Caucasoid/Mongoloid populations; maybe it doesn't fit their model?)

Organisms don't last long if they're into having their genes replaced with those of others. Ever heard of one-way gene flow? That's where China stays Chinese, and America becomes Chinese, too, over time. And somewhere along that road, the inhabitants of America would probably call themselves a "hybrid" population.

Would any healthy, sane species of bird willingly invite a Cuckoo problem, if it meant bigger nests, less work, more calories, etc., in the short run?

"Cognitive elitists" have a real problem, in that their banner population is Ashkenazi Jews, who are running the world's only Caucasoid ethnostate. Ashkenazis are striving mightily to pants the "cognitive elitists."

So, what convincing argument can I make to an organism that it should want to survive? I confess to not having one.

Anonymous said...

"Because Asian women don't have broad enough pelvises to easily birth the hybrid kids' ginormous heads?"

I remember a lady who had studied different ethno-types; she lived among Asians and noted their generally uncomplicated births. I was surprised because I thought Asians were "small." She said, relatively speaking, their birthing apparatus was actually wider in proportion and they usually had less trouble giving birth than other races. I have actually seen stats on this but can't recall where. As far as the "hybrids" being that much bigger and therefore causing prob lems, I don't think there's enough difference in baby-size among the races for it to matter. But I could be wrong.

Anonymous said...

There is an existential reason why "white" nationalism is doomed to failure."

"White nationalism" as in...? Surely you don't mean "white nations" which,despite insane wars and upheavals, invented or vastly improved everything from perspective in painting (Europeans were the first ones to do so, and the only ones until their art was copied) to the car to airplane to the telephone to space travel to underwater roads and mass-produced flush toilets and universal education. In a word, the modern world. The world whose arts and technology define art and technology. You mean those nations? The ones Japan copied and other nations only dream of becoming? Those lil ol white nations. Yeah, you're right. They must be an illusion ready to evaporate unless we all become Chinese.
I like a lot of Chinese people and they certainly have their accomplishments and their right to be both pissed at the West (esp the Brits) and proud of themselves. But I'd say they've already got all our factories and make all the "stuff" we were making here a lot better for the most part. Now we have to outsource our gene pool?
As has been pointed out, the prime area of white/yellow mixing is Central Asia and maybe parts of Russia. It ain't all that.

Anonymous said...

I think blogging creates a hot-house effect. Some people spend so much time with just their thoughts and impressions that they are like people in the old days, who might have had only a picture book with which to imagine far-away places. It became their reality. So todays utopian HBD dreamers (a certain percentage) imagine a white/Asian admixture has no problems because they're both soooo smart.
Yeah, right. It is true that friends and spouses tend to have similar IQs, but you do not become friends just because you have similar IQs. White nations do just fine without Asians; Asian nations do fine without white people but they need the technology that was first developed here. I guess they could go it on their own now, though so far, only Japan has really proven that.
There are people who are just very attracted to another race. The percentage is a fairly stable 3% or so of any given race. They are ones who, given the chance, marry or identify with another race. It's kind of fascinating actually. Jane Goodall noticed that a certain percentage of young, female chimps used to look for mates in outside troops and usually ended up abused by the other chimp toops, and sometimes did not survive the experiment.

Truth said...

"As far as the "hybrids" being that much bigger and therefore causing prob lems..."

I thought that I had read here numerous times that Asian children had much larger brains, and by extention heads, than white children.

Anonymous said...

As has been pointed out, the prime area of white/yellow mixing is Central Asia and maybe parts of Russia. It ain't all that.

While I agree with the sentiment, relatively racially homogenous Iran+Russia(well...)+Mongolia aren't really all that either and we couldn't draw any conclusions about Europe or China from that (which suggests that Central Asia generally isn't a great model for what a White+Asian nation would be like).

Personally, the best I can say for East Asians is that they are the group I'd least dislike Europeans/Whites/my relatives/descendants to be absorbed into, but I can at least say that for them. Hard to say that any other group even comes close in that category.

JSM said...

"thought that I had read here numerous times that Asian children had much larger brains, and by extention heads, than white children."

Female Asian / male White pairings result in the highest C-section rate in America. That big round Asian head combined with Caucasian dolichocephaly = stuck.

http://anthropology.net/2008/10/06/higher-rates-of-c-section-deliveries-for-asian-mothers-white-fathers/

Matt said...

I thought that I had read here numerous times that Asian children had much larger brains, and by extention heads, than white children.

Well, here's a link that backs up the delivery problems issue - http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2008/10/distinct-pregnancy-risks-in-asian-white.html.

"More specifically, the researchers found that white mother/Asian father couples had the lowest rate (23 percent) of caesarean delivery, while Asian mother/white father couples had the highest rate (33.2 percent). Because birth weights between these two groups were similar, the researchers say the findings suggest that the average Asian woman's pelvis may be smaller than the average white woman's and less able to accommodate babies of a certain size. (Asian couples had babies with the lowest median birth weight, so caesarean delivery was less common among those women.)" Of course, this may be a question of absolute size, rather than head size, but the head is by far the largest organ of the baby, as it were...

As to brain sizes, I've seen a few mixed things. Beals' "Brain size, cranial morphology, climate, and time machines", if I remember correctly, seems to show peaks in North Eurasia and elevated sizes in East Eurasia relative to West Eurasia and Africa (but also shows British and Japanese having similar brain sizes, both small for their "region"). But I've seen other data that shows Central East Asians (Han, Koreans, Japs) having smaller absolute brain sizes that West Eurasians (amongst which is Rushton's analysis including various young men in various militaries).

The only consistent finding I've seen seems to be that the Siberian peoples have enormous brains. They seem not to be merely declining in brain size like the rest of the world, but to have actually increased in brain size during the Holocene. this is actually quite a strong trend - Professor John Hawks (who Steve references from time to time) has a video about this on youtube, which is pretty quick and watchable IMO -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXKbgc6BUc0, with brain size charts for Bushmen, Chinese and Europeans. I've think I've also seen some charts (not sure where from) which show Africans from 1500 having larger brain size than present day Europeans/Whites(!), though the relative size rank European>African was fairly constant in that one over time.

Matt said...

Female Asian / male White pairings result in the highest C-section rate in America. That big round Asian head combined with Caucasian dolichocephaly = stuck.

The problem with this theory (Mongoloid size + Caucasoid shape = bad news!) is that White women don't have the same degree of problems delivering the babies they have with Asian men and in fact have fewer than White Male + White Female couples (see my post above for ref).

Francis Galton said...

the prime area of white/yellow mixing is Central Asia and maybe parts of Russia. It ain't all that.

The Whites and Asians that mix in Central Asia are largely nomadic Mongoloids, Turkic and non-European Caucasoid peoples that aren't that different from their original White or Asian cultures.

Another example of White and Asian mixing are in elite universities and coastal urban centers of America like LA, SF and NYC. These tend to be an assortive mating between NE Asians, SE Asian Indians, WASPs, Jews and various similarly driven and talented Northern Europeans.

It's too early to say if this American White/Asian mating will be "all that". It may produce some interesting hybrid combinations since each group probably has at least slightly different genetic basis for various group strengths.

Wandrin said...

"Can any of you here come up with a convincing argument why I should prefer to be around low IQ whites instead of a hybrid society of high IQ white and Asians?"

None, except no man is an island.

Humans are tribal and in times of crisis can become violently so, so

1) If you're living in a society where all the low IQ people are non-white then if / when a crisis comes they'll take it out on you.

2) If you're living in a society where all the low IQ people were white but you sit by while they are replaced by non-whites then see 1).

3) Same as 1) or 2) but where all the low IQ people are from the same ethnic group as your wife in which case they're more likely to take it out on you in a crisis.

4) If you're living some place where all the low IQ people are white then if / when a crisis comes they may leave you alone as they'll be more inclined to attack males of other ethnic groups married to white females.


So the optimal situation for someone in your situation is to live among high IQ white people where the low IQ people are white too.

or

Live among any high IQ population where the low IQ people are different from you and hope there aren't any severe political crises.

Wandrin said...

"They don't tell you in the textbooks that MArie Antoinette and all of the royals were guillotined because they were married to blacks."

If there's no race difference then it can be class or religion but he specifically mentioned race.

It's really a question of distance where race is just one vector but race tends to come first because it is visible.

JSM said...

"The problem with this theory (Mongoloid size + Caucasoid shape = bad news!) is that White women don't have the same degree of problems delivering the babies they have with Asian men and in fact have fewer than White Male + White Female couples (see my post above for ref)."

Yeeeeesh. That's because White women have bigger pelvises -- which is why they can birth White babies, who are on average bigger.

Those small Asian pelvises can manage a big, wide, round Asian head attached to that small Asian baby because that round head will deform in the narrow Asian birth canal into an extreme cone shape. But if the kid's head is already wide, round AND a little cone-shaped (dolichocephaly from dad) before he enters the birth canal, that head often can't deform sufficiently for passage through that small Asian pelvis. (Not to mention, the larger body possibly makes baby more at risk for shoulder dystocia.)

SO:

A White + Asian baby will be physically smaller (because Asian babies are smaller) than a White + White baby, which means roomy White pelvises can get him out, but that W + A baby will likely be larger than an Asian + Asian and with a head shape that the Asian lady can't birth through her small pelvis. Get it?

Matt said...

Get it?

I might be still misunderstanding (I'm not that great a visuo spatial thinker), but I'm not entirely sure why a head that is more dolichocephalic to begin with has less flex room, which it seems like you're describing as the mechanism here "that head often can't deform sufficiently for passage through that small Asian pelvis". Assuming this, your argument stands up, but otherwise that argument doesn't make sense unless brains of hybrids are more capacious than the brains of purely Asian babies and so are "wider" (larger in their narrow dimension) even at maximum length flexation (which then causes delivery problems). But although I can't see a reason for your assumption, I don't know anything specific which would refute so and this is increasingly off topic and I'm not really interested in taking this any further, so I'm out here.