By Kasredin:
Some of the world’s most eminent geneticists have condemned a new book claiming there is a biological basis for race and for racial differences in behaviour. So reports The Independent in an article discussing a recent book entitled, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History“, by author Nicholas Wade.
I don’t intend in this essay to try to answer the debate, but instead to assist readers in reaching their own conclusions.
Basically, it appears that human behaviour is influenced by two major factors: our genes and the culture in which we live. Our genes are inherited characteristics, embedded in the biochemistry of the human body. We cannot change our genes. We are stuck with them for life. Culture refers to the prevailing attitudes and behavioural norms in the society in which we live, and culture can not only be changed, but changed rapidly.
The Seven Years’ War was fought between the years 1754 and 1763, and resulted in Britain becoming a major world power for roughly the next two hundred years. The outcome could have been very different, however, had it not been for one incident early on. In 1756, the French captured Minorca from the British, following which a British admiral called John Byng was convicted of the crime of failing to do his utmost, and was shot by firing squad. While controversial, his execution left Britain’s army and naval officers in no doubt that they were expected not to shy away from combat.
In 1851, Britain hosted the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. It ran for several months, and attracted many visitors, including a large number from abroad. It was a celebration to technological advance, but primarily of British technological advance. Even its venue, the Crystal Palace, was in itself a revolutionary architectural innovation. However it was an event which might never have taken place had it not been for the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.
Up until 1834, many people in Britain had been unwilling to work because welfare provision at the time was perceived to be excessively generous. Its drastic reform in 1834 led to a major cultural shift among the poorer social classes. Quite simply, a work ethic was born more or less overnight.
If immigrants behave differently from British people, then it might be down to culture, or it might be down to genetics. So far as I can see, it can only be the one of the other. There is no third factor at work. Consider intellect.
Britain, like most European countries, has valued intellect for pretty well as far back as our history is recorded. Adult literacy was below fifty percent until the nineteenth century, and it is not surprising that literate people often enjoyed higher salaries, and people saw a clear advantage to having their children schooled if possible, and so learning gradually spread through the population. We can see a similar pattern in many third world countries today,
but it is nevertheless the case that intellect was not generally a prized commodity in the hunter-gatherer world of pre-colonial Africa. If the reader can think of any exceptions to this rule, then they were exactly that –exceptions.
We might therefore conclude that lower intellectual capacity among black people was historically a matter of culture. The fly in that ointment however is that if true then we would expect black people to catch up with white people intellectually as soon as a culture shift occurs. The effect might not be immediate, but surely it could be achieved in a matter of a few generations at most.
We find a different situation however. Many black people in Europe today are second or third generation immigrants, and yet their intellect generally remains low relative to white people. It is true that immigrant children have tended to outperform British children in schools in recent years, but this can be dismissed as a matter of culture. Too much pandering to immigrants in the classroom has left many British pupils feeling undervalued.
Take history lessons. In my day they were about examining evidence and drawing relevant conclusions. Nowadays it is about being brainwashed about fictitious black achievement. Making children memorise that Mary Seacole was a black woman who ran a hospital when she was in fact a mixed race woman who ran a canteen for army officers is education close to its worst.
If culture rather than race is what separates whites from blacks, then how come black people do not change their culture significantly when living among whites? Black people tend to listen to certain types of music, such as soul, reggae, and hip hop. The only black classical composer I can think of was Samuel Coleridge Taylor, and even he was African only on his father’s side. Likewise the only black rock star I can think of is Lenny Kravitz, and he is black only on his mother’s side.
Consider this quote from the Telegraph: In his book, Mr Wade attacks the “longstanding orthodoxy” among social scientists that human races are a social construct with little or no basis in biology and genetics, along with the idea that human evolution effectively stopped long ago in the distant past.
I have three questions. First, I would like to know what evidence there is for race being a matter of social construct. (I currently believe it to be no more than wishful thinking.)
Second, if we accept – as all scientists do – that genetic differences can account for superficial differences among humans (such as skin colour,) then why should we not also at least consider the likelihood that genetic differences can also account for more fundamental differences (such as intellect or propensity to violence)?
Third, I would like to know what logic evolutionists have for believing that human evolution could ever stop, as supposedly happened in the distant past.
Evolution is widely taught as being the consequence of purely random biochemical changes, with the only method in the madness being that some of these random biochemical changes confer a survival advantage whereas others do not. There is therefore no logic whatever in believing that evolution could ever stop. People who tell you that black people are on a separate evolutionary trajectory from white people are merely trying to make sense of evolution. People who deny that black people and white people are on separate evolutionary trajectories either do not believe in evolution, or else believe in a politically correct version of evolution which is utterly hypocritical.
Has anyone read Nicholas Wade’s book? Please leave a comment if you have.
By Kasredin © 2014
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AAA
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This of course is the age-old Nature-Nurture debate inherent in sociology and psychology and venturing too into anthropology. While I agree with the crux of this article, I do take exception with the following point:
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“If immigrants behave differently from British people, then it might be down to culture, or it might be down to genetics. So far as I can see, it can only be the one or the other. There is no third factor at work.”
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In the Nature-Nurture debate I sit on the fence. I agree that there is a biological basis for race and for racial differences in behaviour (the Nature side of the debate) but I also acknowledge that there are many other contributing factors informing and influencing behaviour (the Nurture side of the debate).
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Those wishing to read further into the Nature-Nurture debate might like to consult the physiological psychologist, Roger Sperry (Nature) and the Behaviourist psychologist, John Watson (Nurture).
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A fascinating subject.
Max Musson
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It is evident that an individual’s circumstances will to some extent influence the opportunities they have to succeed in life and better themselves, and therefore individual circumstances will often prevent us from establishing precisely what contribution ‘nature’ had in determining an individual’s achievements.
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Where whole nations are concerned however, especially when such nations are racially homogenous, we are able to observe how a race of people perform on average, in their task of bettering themselves and building enduring civilisations. Within an entire nation, there will be people born into riches and there will be people born into poverty, there will be people who receive education and there will be people who do not. We can therefore see in the nations of Africa how Negros perform when left to their own devices.
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Similarly, when whole towns or cities change from being predominantly inhabited by one race of people, to being predominantly inhabited by another race of people, we can again see how different races cope with the task of maintaining cultural and civilizational standards, and see how they perform on average.
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I believe that comparisons between, for example, the countries of Africa and the countries of Europe give us an insight into the proportions by which ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ influence human outcomes, and I believe that comparisons between cities like Detroit in the 1920s, which was 95% White, with Detroit in the 2010s, which is 85% black, also give us a clear insight.
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Some argue that the development of the African nations has been held back by White colonialism and White racism ever since, but what they fail to realise is that 50,000 years ago, all of the races of mankind were living a subsistence, stone-age, hunter gatherer lifestyle, with stone tool technology, and that in the period between then and the first White colonial expeditions into Africa, the progress of the African nations had been unimpeded by the White man. However when the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa first encountered Europeans, they had no agriculture, they had no written language, they had no system of numbers extending beyond the number of fingers on two hands, they had yet to discover the wheel and they had no building technology beyond the construction of simple huts of wattle and daub. They had no hospitals, no schools, no textiles, no sanitation and no running water. All of this speaks volumes.
AAA
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Max, of course your last paragraph delineates the fact that Nature predominately dictates IQ and therefore ability or not to achieve. Philosophically speaking, Nature informs the concept known as the ‘state of nature’ which you alluded to by highlighting uncomfortable Truths about the Negro race. All of which I agree with.
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Perhaps I was guilty in my opening commentary of digressing from the racial context of this article and into the realms of psychology. That is to say that in my commentary on the Nature-Nurture debate I believe Nurture to be presently an intrinsic part of our development or else regression. For example: one can provide education and other stimulus to advance the state of being (Nurture) –but inevitably we are what we are (Nature). Education and disproportionate opportunities have been provided in the West to Blacks and some have advanced. But that advancement is the exception and not the rule because their ‘state of nature’ dictates otherwise –likewise, conversely, that of Whites (Nature).
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However, other stimulus (materialism, consumerism, television, media, ‘popular’ opinion/group-think…) has been a contributing factor to the plight of the Occident and this cannot be ignored. Regardless of our state of nature/state of being, outside factors (Nurture) contribute to our demise.
Albert
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The African is Thousands of years behind Europeans, if left alone like the Australian Aborigines they would still be in the Stone Age, Millions of Africans now live in European Countries, but inside they are still Stone Age man living in the European 21st Century, They can never catch up, Some Africans lived in Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome ..but they have never learned, The African has never invented anything and never will, They can never catch up, But the European by interbreeding with them can actually go backwards..and is that not what the Zionist Jews want…??
Shaun
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I think Francis Parker Yockey’s conclusions about the nature of human achievement are the best I’ve ever heard. To Yockey, each individual is born with an inner will, an inner nature that interrelates with the environment in a way unique to that person. Some people are born with a strong impulse to acquire knowledge, so they will, despite their educational opportunities, become learned in their areas of interest through 2nd-hand bookshops, libraries, and the Internet even if they weren’t given a lot of opportunities through the British education system.
Other people, public school types, might spend their life living in ignorance because they haven’t got any interests that they view as worth pursuing.
The environment, of course, does have the potential to regulate the inner drives of people on a mass scale. Read a great book called the Welfare State We’re In. This book shows, without equivocation, that the welfare state created the conditions for the single parent epidemic that has plagued the West since WW2. Why? Mothers are no longer forced to make the right choices, fathers aren’t hounded by their communities to stick around, and … this allows people with pre-dispositions toward profligate sexual behaviour to indulge themselves without consideration for the consequences.
In my opinion, a person’s nature will prevail if they are given the opportunity. Environment, however, can control a person if the punishments for dissidence are strong enough.
Dicey
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Enjoyed your post Shaun, especially the first two paragraphs, that’s very true.
Nimble
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“It is true that immigrant children have tended to outperform British children in schools in recent years, but this can be dismissed as a matter of culture. Too much pandering to immigrants in the classroom has left many British pupils feeling undervalued.”
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I’m not sure the last sentence is true, to be honest. I personally think, as much as we might not like to admit it, the children of immigrants tend to have far more pushy parents then the children of British parents, of course this isn’t always the case, and there are many parents who strive to instil great work ethics into their children, but I do think that on the whole immigrant children will often have parents who are extremely pushy, likely to an extreme degree, to push their children in the direction they want, the “you WILL be a doctor/lawyer” mentality. I think in British families today there is less of this attitude, that isn’t to say that the prevailing attitude is one of neglect of their children’s studies, but perhaps a more laissez faire approach where the idea is to leave their children to study on their own initiative and pursue whatever job they might think, at such a young age, they possibly want to pursue.
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Just speaking from my own experiences, and I know those of others might be very different, my parents were interested in me succeeding in my studies, I think only the lowest parents can actually claim not to be, but employment and future wise I can’t remember much being discussed, I can’t remember a single clear memory where there was any serious talk as to what I wanted to do as a profession prior to already being an adult, in contrast I think a lot of immigrant children are set on a path in life early on by their parents (something I personally do not think is a wholly unwise thing to do) and, with that set out, studying for that point is probably easier purely by having a clear goal with which to pursue and be actively supported in achieving by parents who desire the same goal. Again, there are lots, emphasis on ‘lots’, of British (I refuse to use the ridiculous term ‘white British’, it’s axiomatic) parents who aim to set paths like this for their children, but I do have to look at the people I knew from school, the odd one who is doing medicine or a high flying career, but the majority who, while clever people, have spent three years of their lives doing subjects like Philosophy, Sociology, and only god knows how many have spent three years doing Criminology and ended up working in their local retailers, the number of people I’ve seen doing the last one gives me the impression half the country is destined to be one big episode of CSI, except an unemployed version working in GAME.
I think excusing it as a result of feeling marginalised and there being a greater focus on non-whites is something I’m not quite willing to accept, I know some extremely unfortunate children are stuck in majority non-white schools, and then they would well be marginalised, but as a majority I think white students are still in schools where they do make up the large majority and I question how big an effect any attempts at marginalisation could be, although I have only attended a state school twice (90+% white), for a few years in all, but maybe that was the exception.
I think, if anything, there is a serious issue of parents being too open and allowing their children to take mickey mouse courses that lead to nothing in terms of a future.
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