Nicholas Wade, who is retiring from the New York Times, has an NYT article on recent evolution among African-Americans since arriving in the New World. The most obvious is for a decrease in the sickle cell gene variant, because the worst kind malaria is much less of a problem here, so the crude and dangerous sickle cell defense is overkill.
There is tentative evidence for evolution of more defenses against influenza -- in general, blacks had a hard time surviving in the North due to respiratory tract infections, which is one reason slavery faded out in the North, which something they ought to teach you when you study the Civil War.
There is some arguable evidence for selection in a direction associated with particular African-American medical problems, such as hypertension and prostate cancer. Presumably, there were more than offsetting benefits. Prostate cancer correlates somewhat with higher levels of male hormones and hormone receptors, which (and this is a real stretch) might suggest that something (whether medical, climate, social, or cultural) in New World or North American environments was selecting for more masculinity among black men (or selecting for something else for which the cost was higher prostate cancer rates).
The chain of evidence for my surmise is extremely tenuous, but might go some way toward explaining a little bit about how some African-Americans wound up as global pop culture icons of masculinity.
The chain of evidence for my surmise is extremely tenuous, but might go some way toward explaining a little bit about how some African-Americans wound up as global pop culture icons of masculinity.
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«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 215 of 215...it suggests that Yankees didn't reject slavery simply because they were moral giants. --Capt. Jack
No, it was because they had the foresight to settle where white people belonged. (The white death rate in Virginia was as bad as the black death rate in Massachusetts.)
Also, in the northeast the mountains begin within walking distance of the sea. Nobody dragged Africans up the mountains anywhere.
Anyway, why would the Jews and Irishmen who write modern histories want to tout the moral superiority of Puritan descendants? They hate us even more than they do Southerners.
Northerners could afford to be moral giants since there were few blacks in the North...--Zhivago
...thanks to that ancestral foresight.
The British were much more abolitionist than the Unionists in the U.S. Which conflicts with their tacit support for the Confederacy-- but not with Zhivago's observation.
But most French athletic stars seem to be from Africa. -- Anonymous the First
In proletarian soccer, sure. Where they're the first to tucker out.
Not in rugby, which is what really counts in France. (Possibly because you can inflict more damage on les anglais.)
The girl-power hormone.
"Our results suggest that aromatization of testosterone into estrogen is important for the development and activation of neural circuits that control male territorial behaviors."
"We provide evidence suggesting that aromatase is also important in activating male-specific aggression and urine marking because these behaviors can be elicited by testosterone in males mutant for AR and in females subjected to neonatal estrogen exposure."
http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(09)00916-7
"Self-control = masculine
No self-control = animal
All healthy cultures promote the cardinal masculine virtue of self-control - civilization is impossible without it."
Shouldn't it be
self-control = human
no self-control = animal
After all, femininity also requires self-control, possibly even more than masculinity.
I think you're just defining masculinity this way because you've lost to the Negro in the area of whupping ass. Since you can't claim top position in the field of kicking butt, you try to reclaim masculinity by redefining it as sitting-on-butt. It's so much like the leader-guy in DEAR WENDY.
Self-control is the hallmark of civilization, true, but I don't see how it's any more masculine than feminine. Masculinity must be defined in opposition to or as distinct from femininity. What is the difference between maleishness and femaleishness? The male is more aggressive, more warriorlike, stronger, more competitive in a physical way. There is some of this among women too but MORE among males. Now, too much of anything is bad, so excess masculinity is bad. Who wants a society filled with WWE types?
Anyway...
honesty = virtue
bullshit = crap.
Your 'self-control = masculinity' is crap.
What you should have said is
masculinity + self-control = good man.
Furthermore, it's not true that animals have no self-control. If anything, all species of animals have extreme form of self-control on their own terms. For example, a big cat predator must be extremely self-controlled in its stalking of prey. It takes a great deal of self-control and diligence for birds to build nests and feed their young. Beavers must build a 'house' for future use. Now, this may be more instinctive than conscious(on their part), but animals don't mere run around doing whatever they please. Predators must control their movement so as not to alarm the prey they are stalking to kill. Prey animals be alert to danger around them--and this requires self-control--or otherwise they'll be eaten. If you've ever seen deers, they are never fully at rest. Among pack animals, there is hierarchy. IN mating, there are certain rules and 'rituals'.
In some ways, what makes humans 'human' is their movement away from self-control. Civilization isn't possible without self-control(and control from above), true. But civilization also creates certain spheres where we can let go of our inhibitions and conventional modes of thinking and manners and be 'free' to think new thoughts and do new things. Of course, this doesn't mean one gets to do just about anything. It's more like a paradoxical letting-go-of-control-within-the-realm-of-self-control. It's like Beethoven worked very much within the classical music tradition but freely expressed his own ideas within its 'rules'. He accepted the cage but roamed freely within it and even expanded the perimeters.
Here's a bit of the grizzly on the castration bit of the discussion--it seems that Muslims couldn't do legally certain things, so they left it to Christians and Pagans (one of the reasons they took slaves from southeastern Europe and Africa):
"The concubines of the Ottoman Sultan consisted chiefly of purchased slaves. Because Islamic law forbade Muslims to enslave fellow Muslims, the Sultan's concubines were generally of Christian origin. The mother of a Sultan, though technically a slave, received the extremely powerful title of Valide Sultan, and at times became effective ruler of the Empire (see Sultanate of women). One notable example was Kösem Sultan, daughter of a Greek Christian priest, who dominated the Ottoman Empire during the early decades of the 17th century.[16] Another notable example was Roxelana, the favourite wife of Suleiman the Magnificent.
The concubines were guarded by enslaved eunuchs, often of African origin. The eunuchs presented another problem, because Islamic law forbade the emasculation of a man. Ethiopian Christians, however, had no such compunctions; and thus they enslaved and emasculated members of neighboring nations, and sold the resulting eunuchs to the Ottoman Porte.[17]
The Coptic Orthodox Church participated extensively in the slave trade of black Nubian or Abyssinian eunuchs. Coptic priests sliced the penis and testicles off underage boys around the age of 8 who were children in a castration operation, the eunuch boys were then sold in the Ottoman Empire. The majority of Ottoman eunuchs endured castration at the hands of the Copts at Abou Gerbe monastery on Mount Ghebel Eter.[18] The black boys were captured from Abyssinia and other areas in Sudan like Darfur and Kordofan then brought into Sudan and Egypt. During the operation, the Coptic clergyman chained the boys to tables and after slicing their sexual organs off, stuck a bamboo catheter into the genital area, then submerged them in neck high sand to burn in sun for a few days. The recovery rate was ten percent. The resulting eunuchs fetched large profits in contrast to eunuchs from other areas.[19][20][21]"
That's only true in the case of the Bantus if you consider the Capoid populations they steamrolled (the Khoisan & co. at whose expense they most dramatically gained ground) to have been "black".
What are they if not black?
t-level studies actually show black males have higher estrogen levels, and both white males and black males have higher t-levels
No, T studies have not actually found that. T studies have been inconclusive and inconsistent, with some showing that blacks have higher T and some other studies showing them with lower than average T.
Is that Manny being manny and not womanny?
"To an intelligent observer it seems consistent with stupidity and immaturity, which are not actually masculine traits at all."
Hallelujah! That's exactly what I've thought when being "hit" on, or more often, just harrassed, by the demographic under discussion here.
Cornerback at the N.F.L. level is the most challenging position in sports. It demands extraordinary speed and quickness. Like fighter pilots, cornerbacks must possess an unusual blend of physical strength and emotional toughness, the ability to think and act quickly under pressure.
Compare that quote (from the NYT via SBPDL) to the previous comment from our Black-worshiper.
I suppose anonymi have good reason for remaining anonymous.
AFRICAN DIET AND DIETARY DISLOCATIONS OF TRANSPORTING SLAVES TO NORTH AMERICA.
I am struck by the previous question about this issue. There's one commentary I've noticed in this strand that alludes to pressures of hunting and food competition in Africa vis a vis more plentiful food under slave status. But the long evolved selection process/ accommodation/ at work in Africa was radically ruptured by the dietary CONTENT offered in servitude in North America. Obviously, for most slaves so transported, access to fresh fruits and vegetables of any sort was restricted often during at some of the winter months. Likely, the fat contents of meats accessible to them would have been greatly at variance with their evolved African metabolic accmmodations (?) Any informed literature re this?
@Reg Cæsar
France made it to the finals in the 2006 World Cup with an almost entirely African team. They only lost to Italy on penalties after drawing the main game.
France made it to the finals in the 2006 World Cup with an almost entirely African team.
Depends on your definition of "African". Many of the French players were from North Africa, but they were Arabs or Berbers rather than blacks. Zinedine Zidane, for instance, was of Berber parents. "African" in the current context of this thread means "Black African" or "Sub-Saharan African".
100% of White French guys scored their penalty so they obviously needed more Whites.
What are they if not black?
Many physical anthropologists regarded "Capoids" as a major division of mankind in their own right, and these diminutive "apricot-yellow" people were quite typically regarded as a people apart by the European colonists (and their descendants) who were personally acquainted both with them and with Bantu-speaking southern Africans.
It's a good bet that they were even more physically distinctive prior to Bantu incursion, as variable degrees of two-way intermingling have clearly taken place since then (as evinced in the appearances of people like Nelson Mandela, the assimilation of click consonants into languages like Xhosa, and the existence of the Khoikhoi, whose pastoral way of life may have been adopted from incoming Bantus).
Modern genomic analyses have substantiated the pronounced distinctiveness of Khoisan from most other Africans, and some have in fact indicated that West Africans (as represented by Yoruba) could in fact be closer to non-Africans than they are to Khoisan and Pygmies. One possible explanation for this is discussed here.
"Something like 35% of the arab genome comes from africa"
This is an overestimate. Autosomal DNA studies surveying hundreds of thousands of loci across the genome show variable levels of African admixture throughout the Middle East. It reaches its highest levels, around 20-25%, in Yemen but is around the 10% level as one moves north. Sub-Sahara admixture is significantly less among non-Muslim Middle Easterners.
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