get a room
Don’t pretend like you disagreed with anything RA said.
normal people dont even know who those people in your video are. they just look at the mustache and walk away because it’s an obvious sideshow
Ah yes, judge people by what they look like rather than what they say, brilliant.
dont be stupid
k
Quite…
The Fertile Crescent: is in the Middle East, spanning modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, together with the northern region of Kuwait, southeastern region of Turkey and the western portion of Iran. Some authors also include Cyprus.
Also known as the “Cradle of Civilization”, this area was the birthplace of a number of technological innovations, including writing, the wheel, agriculture, and the use of irrigation.
The ancient countries of the Fertile Crescent, such as Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, and Phoenicia, are regarded as some of the world’s earliest complex societies.
That’s right.
The early civilizations were the first to develop intricate road systems with high-speed (Wheel) technology. Once they did that, information and technology began to spread quickly around the old world. However, keep in mind that Wheel-technology did NOT cross the Barren Straights into the Americas, with the Asiatic American Indians. That is telling about how-where-when such technologies began, and why.
Greek Hellenism was when Pre-historical tech rapidly ascended, along with introduction of Philosophy as means of deeper insights into Human Nature, Natural Science, Mysticism, and the like…
…an interesting find, that could explain the ancient mythological similarities and the first civilisations arising in the Fertile Crescent and Indus Valley areas and the Indo/Euro connection, of both language and beliefs.
The Khoisan, the oldest tribe in Aftca, are the spitting image of Malays and other S. E. Asian peoples.
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An Asian Origin for Human Ancestors?
Myanmar fossil suggests our earliest predecessors may not have come from Africa
[size=85]4 JUN 2012BYANN GIBBONS[/size]
That’s very rude to say.
I’d prefer if all of you cut the crap.
You tell 'em Dan!
Now it’s my turn.
I find what each one is saying to be troubling (Jared and RA, not Mr. R and urwrong), for different reasons. Jared seems too sure of what he’s saying and RA doesn’t seem to get how a debate works.
This whole debate reminds of the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by another Jared, Jared Diamond. The theory in that book, IIRC, is that white Europeans ended up dominating the world technologically and intellectually simply because, by chance, they got there first–that is, every race or population of people across the world, separated by physical barriers (oceans, mountains, deserts, etc.), were all developing along the same lines, and it would be absurd to suppose that they would all stumble upon exactly the same milestones at exactly the same time. Someone had to be the first, and it happen to be white Europeans. That they ended up using their technology to conquer and dominate over other societies and races is something any of the other societies and races would have done had they gotten there first.
As much truth as there might be to this theory, I think there are obvious factors that contribute to a population’s (I’m just going to use the word ‘population’ 'cause it really has nothing to do with race) evolution and growth other than chance; how much they contribute is anyone’s guess.
Religion/ideology: I think you’d have to be a fool not to think one’s ideology or religion, one’s beliefs and values, contribute largely to how one behaves and conducts him/herself in life and society. This is true of the pursuit of knowledge and the invention of technology. Believe that knowledge and technology are virtues and you will pursue them; believe they are vices, and you will not (or pursue them less). The dominant religion in Europe at the time of the Renaissance, and the scientific and industrial revolutions was Christianity. Christianity puts a huge emphasis on truth (I am the way and the truth and the life). And no wonder. If your ultimate fate is either eternal bliss in Heaven or eternal damnation in Hell, you’d better know the truth (this is what I think, in large part, drive Biggy). It instills a kind of desperate motivation, an insatiable drive, to learn the truth, to know as much as possible. Then when the middle ages gave way to the Renaissance, the old ways of ancient Greece and Rome were rediscovered, and Europeans began to realize that they could advance beyond their retched feudal existence and reacquire the glory of their past. And this didn’t dampen the drive to gain knowledge but simply shifted it to learning about the past–to exploring philosophy, politics, mathematics, and even science (to whatever degree the ancient world had science). Aimed in this new direction, the thirst for knowledge and the truth bore sweeter fruit as these kinds of pursuits (science, philosophy, mathematics, etc.) naturally lead to scientific discoveries of the natural world. Thus, the scientific revolution was underway. And of course, advances in science mean advances in technology, and so it was no wonder that the industrial revolution began only a century or two after the scientific revolution began. But as you can see, this would not be possible without the particular religion/ideology of medieval Europeans–Christianity instilling a thirst to know the truth, and the reinvigorating of the ancient Greco-Roman philosophies and political insights instilling hope for advancement and a reorienting of the search for truth and knowledge toward the natural world.
Sociopolitical Environment: Before the 20th century, there was a world of difference between the social and political world Europeans had built for themselves and that of the tribes and villages of Africans. In fact, going back to the times before the American and French revolution, the European sociopolitical environment was quite oppressive–in fact, it could be down right horrific–the tyrannical rule of despotic kings and the corruption and manipulative schemes of the various churches was enough for the masses to live in fear of being tortured or killed for any missteps or transgressions, for not saying the right thing when exercising speech–which undoubtedly contributed to the drive to seek out a better way of life. Science and technology promised this better way, as did learning in general and the practicing of basic skills (like math, reading, etc.) so people craved it with a fervor unlike in more sedentary and peaceful societies. The tribal way of life in Africa could not have seen anything even close to the horrors of medieval Europe at the time. Life for them was a balance–the right amount of work for the right amount of food and shelter (I am told that in tribal societies, the average amount of work to stay alive is about 20 hours a week). While there might have been tribal chiefs that ruled with the cruelty of a King Henry the 8th, and there was little protection against crazed psychopaths among your tribe that everyone had to be wary of, there couldn’t have been anything like the monolithic political systems that were thriving in Europe at the time, political systems that could easily be abused by monstrous rulers against their own people. Life in the tribe, in other words, was, comparatively speaking, a lot more “laid back”, and therefore there must have been much less motivation to seek out knowledge and invent technologies in order to improve life. Life, while not perfect, was “good enough” to preserve the status quo. Tribes would have to wait for their communities and social systems to evolve to a sufficiently sophisticated point that the kinds of politics that existed in Europe at the time would start to emerge, and make life a lot more miserable for the people, enough for them to start wanting change.
Proactive vs Reactive Advancement: If the advances of Europeans could be called proactive, those of the Africans (and other societies around the world) could be called reactive, at least once European nations started colonizing the world. What I mean by these terms is this: proactive advancements are advancements for the sake of improving life, whereas reactive advancements are advancements for the sake of catching up to or imitating others and their state of advancement. Proactive advancements are far more likely to be inspired from within the movement itself and to come with a much deeper understanding of what the advancements are for and how they work. Reactive advancements, on the other hand, are inspired from without (a desire to be like other more advanced people) and are often poorly understood. For example, the steam engine was invented from a thorough understanding of the laws of physics and thermodynamics, the implications they had for what could be built with them. But once the steam engine is built, it no longer requires a deep understanding of the laws of physics and thermodynamics; one only needs to know how to put the parts together and how to operate it. One shrugs his shoulders and says “idunno, it just works”. Therefore, reactive advancements will always depend on proactive advancements to show what can be done. It gets worse with social and political advancements. I think the reason that African nations have failed to achieve the accomplishments of democratic and republican styles of governments that Europeans and the West have achieved is because, from their point of view, they are imitating tyrants. Africans, by and large, don’t view their colonizers and enslavers as the deliverers of a better way of life, as a race of benevolent exemplars of what they could be. They experienced them as brutal thugs, an overwhelming force of oppression and cruelty. Therefore, if they are to imitate them in politics and government, then there’s only one way to do it: be tyrants themselves, be Machiavellian rulers. If you must establish a democracy, make it rigged. And if the results turn out not to be in your favor, squash it. This applies to peoples of all kinds around the world, especially those who are only trying to imitate the West, especially those whose encounters with the West were sour and on the losing end. At best, they are trying to imitate a system without understanding it sufficiently in depth, and at worst, they are imitating the wrong thing–the West that they experienced, not the West as experienced by Westerners themselves from within their own system.
The latter point, I think, can only be made after colonization. I think colonization really threw a wrench into the natural evolution societies take on their way to intellectual and technological excellence. Left to their own devices, Africans, Arabs, Native Americans, Native Australians, etc. probably would have gotten their eventually, but the interference of Western societies into their populations, especially as conquerors and colonists, threw these populations onto completely different trajectories. But supposing Western society hadn’t interfered in their course through history (somehow), it would only be a matter of time before they developed religions or ideologies that were more favorable to intellectual and technological advancements, and if they first evolved to the point where society became too unwieldy to management with simple tribal chieftains, and required more institutional political systems that ruled by fear, they would certainly develop reasons to value forms of advancement that promised a better way of life. The difference in time between when this happened to Europeans and when it would have happened to other populations around the world may have been several thousands of years, but that’s still a drop in the bucket on the scale of biological evolution, a small enough drop for there to be no reason to suppose one or another population got there first for any reason other than mere chance.
In making the above points, I realized another major contributor to the accelerated pace of white European advancement: the size of their continent.
You see, I made this point in the last post:
This convoluted run-on sentence contains the insight that lead me to consider the size of the continent as a major factor, the part in bold. What I’m saying here is that a population will keep growing in size, and so long as there is plenty of space to migrate, they can maintain their tribal way of life. But once you hit the limits or natural barriers of your continent, it starts getting crowded. Tribes can no longer live separately and people must live crammed together like sardines. This is where the leadership of these tribes must take the next step and form institutions and governments, two of the many key ingredients that distinguishes tribal life from civilization. This is where life starts to get rough. Whereas in tribes, your rulers lived among you, and everyone who wanted could contribute their thoughts and express their grievances to the rest of the tribe, and thereby work together, like one big family, in a harmonious fashion (relatively speaking) to maintain their small societies. But when tribes give way to civilizations, when chieftains give way to governments, you get entities taking over, entities made of human beings but, in a way, mentally controlling them like zombies. The main entity is called government–made of humans who are brainwashed (zombified) to not think but to follow what they are taught (by each other). They establish a way of governing society as though they comprised an unthinking cold machine, a leviathan, and it is that machine (called government) that takes over the roll of the chieftains. But government isn’t the only such entity–other entities (called institutions) might include legal systems, education systems, religious systems, industrial systems, market systems, etc. Human beings getting absorbed into these entities, losing their individuality, and being brainwashed to believe that an absolutely horrible way of living is right, unquestionably right, and that each one has an obligation to support and adhere to it.
This is where a desperation to improve life creeps in. In the case of medieval Europe, this longing for improvement eventually manifested in the scientific and industrial revolutions. But then this is very suggestive. It suggests that one of the reasons they were the first on the world stage to do this is because their tribal ways of living gave way to civilization much sooner than it did in other societies. And I would suggest this is because, compared to the wide open spaces and vastness of the continent of Africa, Europe was a very small continent, a lot of it being mountainous and unsettlable. To the North, West, and South, they were barricaded by oceans and seas. And you might think they could easily migrate East into Asia, but think about this for a second–if they were to migrate South East, they would be migrating into Muslim territory, the land of the enemy to Christian Europe (not to mention they’d have to cross great expanses of desert). The passage North East was no picnic either–maybe fine in the summer, but as soon as winter hits, it becomes a cold winterland tundra (Napolean’s army and that of Hitler on their march into Russia attested to this). Crossing the icy plains that bridged Northern Europe to Northern Asia might have been comparable to crossing the dry hot desert of the Middle East. This left only a small corner of the world in which Europeans had to dwell and eek out their survival. The greater point here is that this means they would have reached the limit of their continent much sooner than other populations around the world, especially Africans who had a much larger and generally barrier-free landscape on which to spread and propagate. This means Europeans would have been forced through the various stages through which a population transitions from tribal life to intellectually and technologically advanced, and maybe freer, societies. Tribal overpopulation and limited continental land gave way to at least two great civilizations–first the Greco-Roman civilization, followed by that of medieval and Renaissance Europe (with a dark age in between). And in the latter, a transition to an even more advanced stage–that of scientific enlightenment and technological prowess–was underway–all driven by a deep desire on a sort of “collective unconscious” level to reacquire a way of life that could make them happier, freer, and for each person to be able to reclaim their individuality, to gain a handle on Leviathan and subdue her.
So something as mundane as the size of Europe could very well be the primary explanation for why the white race won the intellectual and technological race on the world stage. Being crammed together meant having to erect oppressive non-human structures in order to manage the population, and the misery of living under such hellish systems was the driving force that lead them towards the intellectual and scientific goal line.
I completely disagree.
When it comes to Intellect, specifically, the less ‘Progression’, improvement, development has to do with “luck”, “chance”, or any such randomness.
This is obvious when it comes to very rigorous Intellectual enterprises such as Advanced Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and the like. There is no randomness when it comes to such development. Rather it comes with strict discipline, structure, investigation, inquiry, patience, funding, and focus. It is not “an accident” that some children are highly attuned to Mathematical or Logical understanding, and others are not.
If anything, the highest achievements of human understanding, discovery, and intellectual feats, comes directly inverse to the possibility of “Chance/Luck/Fortune”.
Human Intelligence, or Biological Intelligence as a universal phenomenon …persists because it reduces the Unknown (Chance), into the Knowable.
To Simplify,
More Intelligence = Less Randomness.
Therefore, gib, your entire premise is flawed. And the more developed/intellectual/successful a group of humanity becomes, the less “random” it would be, over time.
_
When you say less randomness, less randomness of what, exactly?
Flying a rocket to the moon, or to the space station.
“Randomness” = chance that it explodes and kills the astronauts aboard.
More intelligence = Less chances of explosion and death… hence the history of Rocket Science progression since the 1940s.
Or Captaining and guiding a ship across the Atlantic in the 1500s…
A less intelligent ship Captain, would fail, would get lost at sea, would not successfully navigate a storm or the weather, might get robbed by pirates, etc.
Take literally any example of humanity, at any point in history, more intelligence = best results.
Obviously you have a deep sense of History and technological, political, social, cultural Progress(ion)…
Yet, for you to disconnect it from ‘Intelligence’, and call it all “Chance” strikes me as deeply contradictive.
If I had to guess, I’d say you’re pandering to Political-Correctness to avoid the dreaded “DATS RACIS!!!” response… just a guess on my part.
For me, it’s much simpler than all of that…
Europeans simply have the most extensive world history of brutal, outright, total Warfare, compared to any other nations or cultures. 2nd place would go to the Middle East. 3rd place would go to the Native Americans.
And yet, warfare does make powerful Warrior societies and cultures, healthy and strong looking, beautiful peoples.
But that does not account for Technological and Scientific superiority…
Or Religious and Political superiority…
So that must be accounted for, in any and every grandiose Explanation.
In terms of Anthropology, there are only a handful of Natural world land barriers that essentially halted massive emigration of early, prehistoric humans.
The most obvious is the Alaskan striaght, land bridge that separated East Asian migrants, and sealed them into the interior of prehistorical North and South America. This obviously happened at the point in history before Wheel technology spread throughout the early Civilizations. This is the reason-why Wheel technology did not occur in the Americas.
Lesser Natural barriers, include the Saharan Desert, which separated the Sub-Saharan African tribes from those to the North. Once humanity emigrates from an area they naturally inhabit and adapt to… they tend not to return. This fact is very important when studying Anthropology, human evolution, and history. Then there is the Indian Ocean which separated the Aboriginal Australian Indians, who are very likely, some of the oldest Humans on the planet. Unmixed Australian Aboriginals exhibit deeply telling facial and bodily analysis of early, prehistoric Humans.
The Asian land barriers are a bit different, including the Siberian Tundra and highland plains (which the Mongols and Huns dominated), the Himalayan Mountains which separated East Asia Han Chinese and their ancestors, the jungles and marshes of East India, which blocked travel from those of climates who could not trespass or adapt quickly. This separated the East Indian population, along with Malaysians and South Asians.
“Intelligence” spread more rapidly and generally, after Literacy developed, along the Silk Road, from Western Europe (Great Britain) all the way to Indo-China.
That is when ‘Wheel’ technology, for example, spread between West Europe and East Asia, but not necessarily to Australia, Sub-Sahara Africa, or the Americas.
As the centuries and millenniums passed, social, political, and especially military improvements also passed along the Silk Road. Scholars regularly traded technological secrets and Mysticism between each other. This is how technology originally flourished in the Middle East, since they controlled the trade-routes and caravans.