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[url=http://www.history.com/topics/ancient-history/ancient-egypt]Ancient Egypt - Ancient History - HISTORY.com[/url]
[url=http://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/Sudan.html]Kush, Meroe and Nubia[/url]
[url=http://revealinghistories.org.uk/colonialism-and-the-expansion-of-empires/articles/the-empire-of-benin-and-its-cultural-heritage.html]The empire of Benin and its cultural heritage | Revealing Histories[/url]
Egypt was not built by blacks. You just proved my point.
Perhaps were it not for European colonialism they would have achieved this on their own already? Instead, Europeans (later Americans) used them as slaves, ruled their countries, and stole their resources.
Know your history. And yes, it is entirely relevant. If you deny someone educational opportunities for centuries, you cannot expect them, or their descendants, to be on par with centuries of descendants who spent years studying in the best universities in the world.
This is the sort of convoluted explanation I referred to. Humans came from Africa. We have been the for millions of years. Claiming that recent colonialism and slavery could have thwarted millennia of cultural development is absurd. Africa did not even have to weather the Ice Ages. There were plenty of places on the superbly rich continent where great civilizations, like the Mayans or Incas or Sumerians or Ancient China could have arisen. It is pure hubris to claim Europeans could have erased thousands of years of history, and one of its first and most obvious fruits, education.
Liberia was never colonized and it's one of the most dysfunctional countries in all of Africa. And if intelligence was not tied to biology then gaps in IQ could be closed in a generation by giving access to better education and nutrition.
Liberia was founded by freed American slaves. They literally started with nothing, and like most of Africa, they lacked capital in the beginning, capital never acquired by resources taken from other countries through armed intervention.
I'll take everything from you, and you start a family in the woods, and live off the plants you grow and the animals you raise. In 50, or 100 years, when your situation has barely improved, we will test your descendants I.Q. against typical American/Europeans who have come from generations of higher education and exposure to technology.
This is the sort of convoluted explanation I referred to. Humans came from Africa. We have been the for millions of years. Claiming that recent colonialism and slavery could have thwarted millennia of cultural development is absurd. Africa did not even have to weather the Ice Ages. There were plenty of places on the superbly rich continent where great civilizations, like the Mayans or Incas or Sumerians or Ancient China could have arisen. It is pure hubris to claim Europeans could have erased thousands of years of history, and one of its first and most obvious fruits, education.
The point was we don't know what Africans could have achieved on their own, precisely because it is a superbly rich continent with plenty of very valuable mineral resources for the taking. But that is really only marginally related to the fact that there is no biological component to the statement that Europeans are smarter than Africans. Someone of his education saying such a thing, it would be viewed in a purely scientific context.
With all conditions being equal, that statement is untrue. And that's what got the man in trouble. Your summation ignores that salient point.
The point was we don't know what Africans could have achieved on their own, precisely because it is a superbly rich continent with plenty of very valuable mineral resources for the taking. But that is really only marginally related to the fact that there is no biological component to the statement that Europeans are smarter than Africans. Someone of his education saying such a thing, it would be viewed in a purely scientific context.
With all conditions being equal, that statement is untrue. And that's what got the man in trouble. Your summation ignores that salient point.
The point was we don't know what Africans could have achieved on their own, precisely because it is a superbly rich continent with plenty of very valuable mineral resources for the taking. But that is really only marginally related to the fact that there is no biological component to the statement that Europeans are smarter than Africans. Someone of his education saying such a thing, it would be viewed in a purely scientific context.
With all conditions being equal, that statement is untrue. And that's what got the man in trouble. Your summation ignores that salient point.
What are you talking about? We do know what they can achieve on their own by picking any African country and/or comparing their countries to European countries before there was any contact between countries. And the guy is an expert in genetics so he does know what he is talking about.
Take an infant from Africa and raise them with a white child in the U.S. and in 20 years they will be very similar in 20 years on average.
Not true and it has already been tried. There was a long term study called the Minnesota Trans-racial Adoption Study where Black infants were adopted and raised by affluent White families. They tracked these children until age 17. They also tracked White adopted children as a control. The whole purpose of the study was to prove that intelligence was caused by upbringing.
At age 5 they found the gap between White and Black children to be minimal. This was widely reported and hailed as proof that environment was responsible for IQ. But by age 17, the large Black/White IQ gap that we usually find was present in these adopted children. They actually sat on these results for years as they were embarrassed by the findings, until they could come up with a narrative to fit their pre-conceived notion. Their answer? The White parents held unconscious racial bias against their adopted Black children. The researchers couldn't prove that environment raised IQ, so they made up an excuse to explain why the Black children lagged.
Tellingly, the children that were half White and Black had an average IQ midway between the Black and Whie children. This supports a biological explanation for IQ as this fits with Mendelian genetics, which shows that offspring tend to be a mixture of both parents.
The point was we don't know what Africans could have achieved on their own, precisely because it is a superbly rich continent with plenty of very valuable mineral resources for the taking. But that is really only marginally related to the fact that there is no biological component to the statement that Europeans are smarter than Africans. Someone of his education saying such a thing, it would be viewed in a purely scientific context.
With all conditions being equal, that statement is untrue. And that's what got the man in trouble. Your summation ignores that salient point.
Well, it depends upon how you view IQ. IQ tests from the US Military, global tests, SATs, GREs,etc. all show the same pattern. Psychometrics is controversial, and I would agree that IQ is not the ideal measure of a person, but it does strongly predict educational achievement, professional achievement, likelihood of doing time, and bunch of other things. Certainly nurture matters along with nature, but nature is not trivial. And cognitive aptitude can be measured quite well.
You miss my biggest point about African achievement. My view of it is the same view I have of Neanderthals. They were here for hundreds of thousands of year, but did not create comparable tools, art, or technology to modern humans. And over the last 20,000 years, Africans have not matched Eurasians. My argument is that those differences say something about differences in ability that make a stronger case than that one group oppressed another. Occam's Razor.
The biggest thing here is that people are afraid that if they admit that intergroup mean cognitive differences are real, they justify oppression. That is not true, because cognitive ability is not a measure of a person's worth, any more than your bench press, vertical leap, height, weight, hair color, singing ability, blood pressure, bravery, or whatever. No single thing describes your humanity. That is why I think that Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus, and maybe even Australopithecenes were humans. I am sure they all thought, felt, explored, invented and used tools, and did a lot of things we would recognize as human.
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