Is There a Genetic Component to Culture?
by Fjordman
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, clearly views himself as a highly intelligent and articulate member of the Enlightened Class. He mocks people with crude “reptilian brains” who are stupid enough to care for primitive and unenlightened concepts such as preserving your culture and, yes, your ethnic group.
He’s particularly appalled by the almost Nazi notion that there might be a genetic component to culture, which would imply that one population group cannot be totally replaced with another and produce the same result. This is an insult to the currently accepted view that there is no such thing as a nation or a culture, that everything is a mix in a state of constant fluidity.
Obviously, one could not make the same claim in the hard sciences, because one would then quickly be laughed out of the room. Yet in some of the social sciences this assertion is currently considered acceptable, even laudable. Nobody in physics or chemistry would suggest that all liquids are equal, or that particles are socially constructed. For instance, water, H2O, is essential to all known complex life forms on our planet. Yet change a single atom and the molecule becomes hydrogen sulfide, H2S, which stinks and is very poisonous.
Needless to say, human societies are vastly more complex than chemical compounds, but sometimes changing a few basic ingredients among humans — or even just one central one — can produce strikingly different results. Can you really replace the traditional English population with Pakistanis, the French with Africans, the Dutch with Moroccans or the Germans with Turks within a few short years and expect the same end result?
Merely asking this question makes you very nearly a pariah in polite Western society today, which indicates exactly how far in the direction of a colorblind, universal Idea Nation the self-appointed Enlightened Class has pushed the West. But is this situation sustainable?
If you believe Professor Eriksen and his counterparts all over the Western world, it doesn’t matter if Europeans are genetically replaced by others, or that Europe could in the future look like an extension of Africa or the Middle East. Color is just a word, we are all part of the same human race and “There are more important things to worry about than the future of the white race. Such as the European Enlightenment values of humanity, brotherhood, tolerance and optimism!”
Yes, but why were these values the unique products of European societies in the first place? And why have they frequently proven very hard to transplant to many other regions?
And why did North America go from being a backward region of a backward continent in global terms to an international powerhouse after it became a demographic and cultural extension of northwestern Europe?
Does Mr. Eriksen truly believe, as Jared Diamond says, that the result would have been the same had the region been settled by Bantus, or Afghans, or Hmong people?
Are we really willing to risk the continued existence of European civilization on the strength of these assumptions?
Because that’s what we’re doing today.
It’s difficult to relate to people who on the one hand claim that there is no such thing as race, and on the other hand that the white race is uniquely evil. The very term “white racism” indicates that there is such a thing as “whites”, and since this term is not normally used to describe Arabs or Pakistanis, we may conclude that they are not included in this category.
The key is to depict whites — and by that I mean people who are overwhelmingly of European genetic extraction — as always having a negative identity filled with self-loathing, but never positive group interests that they are allowed to defend. That’s what this illogical double-think achieves, where whites are evil but also do not exist.
Preserving and continuing your genetic line is the most basic instinct among all living entities, even down to bacteria. Mice want to continue their genetic line, too. Does that make them Nazi mice?
As I indicated in one of my essays in 2006, by all available standards we’re one of the most successful cultures in the world, yet our largest flaws, which could eventually bury us, are our naïveté, our excessive openness, and our lack of tribal instincts.
Why on Earth should we quietly watch while our country is subdued by the most unsuccessful cultures in the world?
The most basic instinct of all living things is self-preservation. An amoeba possesses a natural right to self-preservation, but not a Scandinavian. The solution may be to argue that Scandinavians are indeed a species of amoebas, and that we thus need special protection from the Worldwide Fund for Nature. We could showcase some of our finest specimen of Multicultural intellectuals to prove our point.
These days, that shouldn’t be too difficult to do.
For a complete archive of Fjordman’s writings, see the multi-index listing in the Fjordman Files.
24 comments:
I believe that the tendency to marginalize race to "skin color" or refer to it as a "social construct" is considerably less prevalent among my generation than those of the past, of Jared Diamond and Thomas Hylland Eriksen.
When upon receiving my BA I attended my honors convocation a little over a year ago, I found that our guest speaker was a middle-aged white man, one who had had an illustrious academic career and who bought progressive fallacies wholesale. He regaled the crowd with slogans such as "we are all one race" and "we are all global citizens" while peppering his speech with dated quotes from the '70s--Woody Allen and Timothy Leary and all that. A few people, older men and women sitting in the "Family and Friends" section, listened intently and laughed. Yet most of us paid him little attention; several even chatted among themselves, including the two girls behind me who asked, "God, will he ever stop?" We had heard it all before, tested it against reason and experience, and found it wanting validity.
My experiences as an undergraduate were quite like this. My fellow students, whether those at my home school, or those various Americans and Europeans with whom I worked during my year in Europe, felt disconnected from the methods and beliefs of most of their professors. We understood that there were certain ideas which, for fear of reprisals, we could not voice, so we would usually equivocate or keep silent when asked about them. In private, however, we were quick to laugh at those things which, born of post-War progressivism, we were supposed to accept as incontrovertibly true.
I think that this behavior in my generation owes to the world in which we who were born in the late '80s and early 90s were raised. The demographic changes and anti-Western rhetoric that began in the '60s meant that my generation had to go to schools with large hostile "minority" groups, groups which degraded us daily as "stupid whites," "ghosts, "albinos," or simply "fags." A guy who went through secondary school in the '80s probably lived in a predominantly white Christian, Jewish or secular town, so race would have been little of an issue for him. We who went in the naughties be not help but be reminded of our genetic uniqueness. It is therefore harder for us to buy into non-scientific ideas of race and culture.
Perhaps my experience is an aberration. But when I see the large amount of youth support for Le Pen and the other "radical" parties in Europe, I cannot help but feel I am correct, and that the future shall be far brighter.
multicultural dogma has clouded the minds of otherwise intelligent ppl. Intelligence is necessary but it isn't sufficient for a robust culture to flourish.
I often wonder if the two "world wars" didn't kill off exactly those individuals with a strong sense of individualism and those with a highr number of self-preservation genes. Those wars left a long and unacknowledged shadow on the kinds of population which reproduced after the killing times; or, as Jung would have it, a shared unconsciousness about the meaning of those deaths.
The children of the survivors would be long on pacifist genes.
------------------------
In the US we did this much earlier with the slaughter of 600 - to 820,000 men (from all causes) in the War Between the States. Those left behind bred the very beginnings of the socialist generations here - though we had the advantage of gaining in male population via immigration of some of the hardiest & most adventurous of European stock.
By some estimates we lost 10% of our would-have-been fathers. Those who immigrated here couldn't begin to make up for that loss.
You could say that Scandinavia shows us how the perfectly modern socialist state can erase itself.
First you have the leaders of two successive generations push their best & brightest men onto the killing fields to see who is left standing.
Then you create a welfare state for the rest - a milieu in which iniative and spunk are viewed with suspicion.
Then you destroy boundaries as "selfish" and denigrate striving as "creating envy".
Easy pickings for the resurgent old enemy - the leaders rushed to open the gates to their killers...
Recent research has proved it beyond doubt that human mind is not a blank slate.A good part of our behaviour is hard-wired into our genes.For instance,twin studies have already shown that even political views may be genetically influenced.
But this is not true just for individuals but also for cultures, as Fjordman has mentioned. Asian countries tend to much more collectivist and ethnocentric where as European countries tend to be much more individualistic, and this is mainly because of the different genetic make up of Europe and Asian countries.
http://news.discovery.com/human/culture-genes-evolution-dna.html
May be this can also explain why of all the races on the planet, it is only the whites who are behaving in a such suicidal way.
The three golden threads running through the western civillization rationalism, universalism and self-criticism may be actually hard-wired into the genes of the western man.But these same qualities can turn out to be very dangerous if they are not in control. And, this is exactly what is happenning in the modern day west.
Ericksen is your typical self-loathing multicult Leftist, they infest academia and government positions like so many lice and leeches. He and others like him are traitors to the West and his society.
But really, multiculturalism has proven to be a disaster every where it's been tried. Enforced at gunpoint and judicial decrees and welfare(bribes) by the government, and with the White majority often having to suffer.
Overall MC has only succeeded in balkanizing countries and creating 3rd world enclaves. The sad fact is the 3rd world people show no interest in assimilating Western values and instead keep their own dysfunctional and often violent cultural mores. And why should we expect them to do otherwise when we go out of our way to allow them keep their backward ways?
It won't last much longer though, since it's highly dependent on massive cash inflows to keep the MC system alive. And with most Western governments on their sick beds, it's just a matter of time before they flatline and bring down the entire rotten PC/MC edifice.
I suspect the real reason for panic among the Western elites in regards to our economy is not the plight of the ordinary Westerner but they're going to watch their entire global agenda go down the toilet.
Fjordman, I'm unsure of what event changed your perspective so that it has more of a nationalist emphasis, but I'm glad to see it. I've been following GoV for a long time now and I recall the days when you were very hesitant to discuss the race factor or what it means in our modern society. To see you addressing this critical issue is refreshing - you are yet another intellectual who is helping to restore the image of nationalism beyond the primitive and violent portrayal we have suffered from decades of leftist media domination. I hope some day you are rewarded for your selfless work many times over.
There is yet another, little appreciated though rather evident component of the self-loathing ethnomasochistic leftism of western "elites". I would call it Freudian explanation.
1, In every human population, there is approximately Gaussian distribution of psychosexual dominance and submissivity (and yet, people practicing this stuff as a passtime kink tend to be just extremes from continuous distrubution of these normal, completely natural traits).
2. The mentioned traits are correlated with societal values. Dom folks (both men and women) tend to be territorial, traditional, hierarchy-minded, protective-but-demanding. Sub folks tend to be nurturing, sharing, innovative, rebelious, protection-seeking and lenient.
3. Nither dom nor sub traits are "good" or "evil", and both are necessary for societal harmony. It is the old concept of ying and yang, and it is also known that couples, families, but also units such as work-groups that combine and reconcile these personal traits, are more happy, stable and efficient than those consisting only from one pole.
4. Personality traits influence talents and professional as well as political choices. Dom-folks tend to seek resources-controlling professions, law enforcement, hard sciences, engineering; sub-folks inkline towards education, arts, social work ... ya know what else.
5. Now, consider what happened with Western society during last century or so.
5a. Breakup of traditional parochial structure ("modernisation"), which draw toghether similar, or even identical, individuals in schools, living quartes, professions..
5b. The two wars were, mistakenly, interpreted as being caused by dominant folks - the fighers were soldiers after all, a notion pertaining all the crappy Frankfurtean "philosophy" - all the books on authoritative personality, sexual repression etc.
5c. Counterculture movements of the 1960s had one unappreciated effect - it divided young generation into "tribes", seemingly based on music, pass time activities or political values, but in fact based drug use patterns, which has much to do with dom/sub leanings: dom-folks usually avoid innovations. In other words, this reinforced the above division, clumping together people which are similar, if not identical, and widening the gaps among thus established groups. Western "yins" lost connection with their counterparts, and vice-versa. We stopped communicating with each other.
6. The unavoidable result is breakup of western family. Partnership of two dominant persons is only slightly less hellish than partnership of two submissive persons. Poor understanding of this by psychologists, counselors, couches, lifestyle writers etc. made the situation even worse. We got families consisting of two intellectuals ... constantly whinning on unjustice of this World, and secretly desiring to finish it all; and partnerships of two dominants, not having anobody to care for, and transending their instincts into selfish greed. And - important - this is going on for generations, as a devilish selective breeding experiment, trying to produce two disparate "races" within single society.
7. Freudinan element: large part of academic, media, educational and political "intligentsia" are folks deeply distressed in their families, sincerely loathing themselves, and extending their loather towards whole society, which they blame for their unhappiness. In the same time, the powerful and practical ones, betrayed by those whom they were to protect, are either concentrating on poor selfishness (if educated and rich), or got just desperate and passive.
Based on the above, the way out of this mess may be relatively simple. We must return to more natural partnership patterns, based on complementarity, rather than identity. To become tribe again.
The extreme and preposterous position that genetics has nothing to do with culture may be refuted with this example: genetics is inextricably bound up with the culture of dairy farming or herding.
If, like most people in the world, the herders were lactose intolerant as adults, their culture would collapse in months for lack of any economic payoff from the herding. Adult lactose intolerance is genetic. Some populations are mostly lactose tolerant as adults, including African Fulanis and Tutsis, and today's N. Europeans. 2000 years ago, before the arrival of a disbanding regiment of Scythian cavalry in England, N Europeans didn't have that gene and didn't keep milch cows.
It's genetic, pure and simple. See Harpending and Cochran's book 10000 year explosion for details.
Horse and zebras can breed. When they do can you call them a horse or a zebra? Perhaps we should be forcing thorough breed race horse trainers to introduce zebras into the mix.
Anonymous and Anonymous
... the latter simplistic racialist argument (horses and zebras) is perhaps going too far.
Human races are much closer than horses and zebras. Plus, the diversity within various branches of Africans are much higher, than the differences within the rest of the World (put extremely simply). Plus, Arabs, as the exemplary (though not exclusive) muslims are, in fact multiracial mix of all the numerous nations, whom they had subdued (Assyrians, Aramenians, Phoeniceans...)-
The arguments may go forever. It is important to remember, however, that islam can brainwash + brutalise people from all possible racial backgrounds, including the poorest Nordics ... whereas apostates from islam immediately "gain" the best of all human traits, no matter if they are black, brown, yellow, violet or emerald-green.
@ Martin
Sub-Saharans differ most in the “junk genes,” which are those genes that do pretty much nothing. Still, you are implying that, were there greater intra- than inter-group variance among Europeans and Africans, the differences between them would be infinitesimal. Even the slightest variation may have important consequences for things like cognitive ability or (as the other anon mentioned) toleration of certain substances, which could affect civil order, health care, and other stuff reliant upon not just an individual person but an entire population.
The black-white-brown-yellow-emerald-green phrase is usually thrown out to mock people who accept racial differences. The idea is that race is skin color, that skin color is not symptomatic of genetic difference. Someone who worries about Norway or Japan being made into an African nation is as irrational as someone who fears an invasion by the emerald-green people (maybe they’re from Mars, or maybe they’re mole people living in the Earth’s crust or in the sewers of New York?). But then skin color is not synonymous with race. Arabs are white, but they did not evolve in the same environments as white Europeans--evolutionary pressure acted differently for them. As Fjordman (I think) and others have suggested, the harsh terrain and climate of Europe and NE Asia selected the most inventive people, who were most able to adapt to a harsh area, and weeded out the less. If this be correct, then we have a fairly good explanation for the differences in aptitude that have been observed over the last century or more. We also can figure out why I, being English, suffer terribly from celiac, which makes eating somewhat problematic for me, living as I now do in an area largely populated by non-Europeans who find digesting gluten easy.
The same would be true of those subterranean New-York Martians. Left alone in that hostile place for millennia, natural selection would chose the ones best equipped for sewer-life. They would still be human but they would have unique genetic components, including that which makes their skin a vibrant emerald-green.
Is Islam the greatest threaten to Western society? Probably. But if we only define ourselves by that which we are not, saying, “Neither you nor I are Muslim. We are the same,” then we miss out on those positive aspects of our identities that make our races interesting, that make the Norwegians Norwegian and the Japanese Japanese. We can unite against Islamic extremism while still understanding that we are different people, with different desires and different needs.
This is an excellent topic Fjordman, and thanks for having the courage to put it up, GOV.
Mark Steyn, Bill Crystal and Rick Lowrey are reading it like little boys with a Playboy.
Chuckie Football and Atlas Spandex are fact-checking for errors. Good luck with that.
A few smacks from the socialist billy club and they too will see the light. But by then they will be janitors or editing for the polit bureau.
The idea of protecting whites like spotted owls won't be effective though, because the goal of the elitist socialist/Muslim movement is not to wipe out the whites but merely to take all their stuff. There is no genocidal threat to whites but the intent to dhimmify and rob them is ever present. The feeling to whites is self-protective all the same.
China as example: China easily takes on many of the elements of European culture, but will it let the whites be citizens? Of course not. They like our stuff, our arts our science, our style, but us as human beings specifically? To some controlled degree. Do they hate us specifically, like genocidally. No.
The socialist powerchangers, using anti-white multiculturalism, don't understand. They can only steal our stuff like wealth and current technology, but can't steal our creative capabilities which keep it going (karma,"genes"). You end up stuck with who you are.
You New
Was it genetics that created islam or was it the strictures of islam that have refined the genes of its followers? I happen to believe that genetically the area of land where islam was thought up has a history of behaviour that islam condones. Why is it so successful in its propagation? I'm not sure, but apart from the terror that comes with islam, perhaps those in the subjugated societies who have a similar genetic coding, come to the fore and actively support the imposition of islamic rule. If my thoughts have any validity, it could suggest that there is a majority of the peoples in non-arab muslim countries who are genetically able to accept a conversion from islam to (for me, as a Christian) Christianity. If that is the case, then Western governments should be actively promoting missionary work and perhaps givin aid to countries on condition that they en masse convert.
Ericksen and his ilk imagine they are fighting the racialists of the 1800s and Nazi Germany - who made extreme and unsupported claims about race and culture, and justified crimes ranging from offensive to monstrous.
The victory over these forces gave Ericksen's crowd a great deal of prestige and power. They won't allow any critical discussion on the issue because it endangers that position.
There are remnants of the old foe around to be cited as a bogeyman.
And Jews in particular have an reflexive subconscious hostility to race-culture critical thinking. (An unsurprising result of two millenia of relentless race-culture persecution.)
Are there genetic variations which affect cultural variations? Almost certainly, but in subtle ways. They need to be looked at and dealt with. Unfortunately, the stupidities and horrors of the previous era have poisoned that well.
@john in cheshire
Let me get this straight: it's all okay for you to want to spread/impose(through economic incentives) your own culture in other peoples countries, but it's wrong for others to want to spread their culture in your country. Right?
How is that for a double standard?
HT
Dear Anonymouses above ;)
I did not mean to mock anybody by my "raibow-coloured" argument. I agree that the existing racial differences do influnce cultures to an extend, and although there is large variation among people within cultures, and do overlaps exist, it is means what plays a role. And so, Africans as a race will always excell in athletics, althoug some Africans can be as lame as the worst European nerd - and vice versa, and so on in multiple other traits.
But environment there is too... and all the data at hand point to a compromise solution, both nature and nurture play their roles, jointly and interwovenly.
I also fully agree with the poster claiming that even as different people, we can cooperate/unite against islamic threat, and not only this, we can combine and complement our skills, for the better of global culture, and the Planet, and all of us.
But there is much more about islam, environment and genetics. Recall that there had been, and still are, societies existing in similar conditions, even of related races(!), which have not evolve the patriarchal-paranoic-honour-crazed-hypocritical mind set, characteristic for islam true blue. Even the penninsular Arabs were different before "embracing" islamic lunacy. And reversibly, some genetically quite distant nations became quickly "arabicised", to astonishing degree, after embracing it.
Baldwin's effect is a term from genetics & evolution, describing how some behavioural trait can become rather rapidly "genetically fixed" - again in a population's average, not in all its members.
It goes: if a behaviour helps you to gain better or more mates, and to produce more children, than in persons not following the behaviour, underlaying genetic traits responsible for the behaviour will, gradually, prevail in the given population.
And there are, absolutely, behaviours which give you status and respect and richness (all of it eventually translates into women and children) in islamic society, but not in nonislamic society ... and which could have become, over the centuries, more prevalent in islamic than in nonislamic nations.
Such traits may include impulsiveness, indoctrinability, secretiveness, blurred perception of right and wrong, poorer to limited empathy, obedience (perhaps more so in women?), aggression (perhaps more so in men?) ... you name it.
I am biologist by profession, and I gave much thoughts to this issue. My conclusion: if practiced orthodoxly, islam is receipe for dysgenic disaster, no matter what is the initial "stock". Fortunately to islam, there are muslims who deviate from orthodoxy, and the heritability of behavioural traits is incremental, not straightforward.
And even more fortunatelly, the dysgenic effects are reversible (regarding populations, not individuals) and can be reversed quite rapidly, 1-2 generations after parting with islam.
Anonymous, 7:28 and John @ Cheshire,
I think Anon's taquiya sunrise needs more grenadine. And kool aid is not a substitute for Galliano, unless you're Mulsim.
Examples of the parity of government supported Islam and government supported Christianity in foreign lands don't exist. One is in evidence, the other doesn't exist. A better question would be, why should non-Western governments allow any funding of Islam in their nation by foreign nations, when it is illegal to fund even their own religion? John suggests only parity.
Ahh, the most cool new Obvious and Absurd Lie, the fallacy of our time--being so outrageously wrong that the opponent is brain-numbed and can't respond... (how could anyone say something so......noone would say anything that...... ).
It is the most used fallacy today, I'm noticing it constantly.
Regards, You New
@ Martin Konvicka....
Horses & Zebras are defined as different species whereas the races of man are subspecies. Subspecies is a lower level of differentiation. A subspecies is a group of individuals in a species showing closer genetic relationships within the group than to members of other populations, essentially discontinous sets of individuals or conspecific populations that differ from each other morphologically.
"In response to questionable interpretations of the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and to help ensure the evolutionary significance of populations deemed ‘subspecies,’ a set of criteria was outlined in the early 1990s by John C. Avise, R. Martin Ball, Jr.[10], Stephen J. O’Brien and Ernst Mayr [11] which is as follows: “members of a subspecies would share a unique, geographic locale, a set of phylogenetically concordant phenotypic characters, and a unique natural history relative to other subdivisions of the species. Although subspecies are not reproductively isolated, they will normally be allopatric and exhibit recognizable phylogenetic partitioning.” Furthermore, “evidence for phylogenetic distinction must normally come from the concordant distributions of multiple, independent genetically based traits.”[12] This is known as the phylogeographic subspecies definition, and a review of recent conservation literature will show that these principles have gained wide acceptance."
Higher genetic diversity in Africa doesn't mean squat. For example some populations of brown bears were found genetically, to be more closly related to polar bears than to other populations of brown bears. (Polar bears are just social constructs) And even more profound is the fact that polar bears reside within the brown bears genetic lineage. (they are not a separate lineage)
What makes a polar bear a polar bear rather than just another brown bear is different expressions in their gene frequencey. By analysing genetic clusters / gene frequenecy, researchers at Stanford university were able to identify the correct race of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity with 99.86% accuracy. So race is genetically measurable and therefore very real. Humanity is not the genetic continuum that we were led to believe.
So if you use the current arguments put foward as to why human races do not meet the criteria for subspecies you quickly will find that all other subspecies and even some species do not meet their impossibly strict criteria ethier.
There are about 12 different criteria for species alone. all of which have flaws( see the species problem) definitive boundaries in biology are few and far between. Human subspecies are just as valid or invalid as all other subspecies.
Source: whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/do-polar-bears-exist/
Source:
www.goodrumj.com/RFaqHTML.html
Source: med.stanford.edu/tanglab/publications/PDFs/GeneticStructureSelfIdentifiedRaceEthnicityAndConfoundingInCase-ControlAssociationStudies.pdf
Just a thought. Fjordman asks whether genes play a part in culture.
Let's take the Serbs as an example.
Are the genes of the Serbs alive today the same as the genes of the Serbs of 500 years ago?
Whichever way you answer sort of disproves the idea.
If you say 'no, they're the same', then you need to explain why Serbian culture is today so different.
If however you say 'yes, they are different', then that can explain why the culture is different, but at the same time it nullifies the idea of the connection between genes and culture, because with each century genes come and go, so the idea of a 'national gene' is baseless since the genes are constantly changing.
This doesn't even take into the account the inter-ethnic marriages between say Serbs and Greeks, or Hungarians, Macedonians or whatever.
But it can be applied to any ethnic group.
As for the transplanting of Islamic people into Western Europe and expecting the same result, well obviously you won't get it. But this is because the Islamic people (Pakistani's for example), have different ideas and values about life and reality than say the British do. This seems to be a mentality issue. If you took a White person and raised them in an Islamic country from birth, chances are they'd be exactly the same as any other person there. (excluding the inbreeding issue in Islam). The reason Muslims fail to become 'British' or 'French' it seems to be more a failure of policy and weak culture than anything genetic.
If you are right, and culture and genes are linked, the technically you're admitting that Muslims have superior genes since they're pretty much taking over our culture.
What do y'all think?
Also remember that the biological difference between a man and a woman is much greater than the difference between two members of differences 'races' of the same sex.
"As for the transplanting of Islamic people into Western Europe and expecting the same result, well obviously you won't get it. But this is because the Islamic people (Pakistani's for example), have different ideas and values about life and reality than say the British do. This seems to be a mentality issue. If you took a White person and raised them in an Islamic country from birth, chances are they'd be exactly the same as any other person there. (excluding the inbreeding issue in Islam). The reason Muslims fail to become 'British' or 'French' it seems to be more a failure of policy and weak culture than anything genetic."
Okay, how about we agree that the next person who says something like this tells us what studies indicate these “chances,” how well such studies have held up to criticism, and whether there are other inquiries which have produced different results. There are many studies which indicate that genetics affect how a person acts more than environment. To start, I direct you here, and to any of the relevant genetic articles here.
If you took two identical English twins, both with and IQ of 115*, and put one with an Oxbridge family in the midlands and the other with an imam in Pakistan, you would certainly observe differences in adult personality. The imam’s child would have been raised in an environment promoting, among other things, bigamy, misogyny, and sectarian violence, so we could expect him to have some psychological scarring. However, the genes he carries would not be the result of centuries of what an earlier poster called Islamic dysgenics, which encourages chauvinism and inbreeding**. Because this twin is intelligent, (indeed, he has an IQ more than 2 SDs greater than the Pakistani average) we could also expect that he would apprehend the illogicality supporting the ideas which have been forced upon him since infancy. And, since more intelligent people tend to be less impulsive and less violent we could expect that, even if our twin were not to reject Islam, he would even then not become a jihadist or a rapist. Maybe he would still hate the West, but whatever measures he took against it would not be so boorish as those of your typical Islamic extremist, wherever he or she was raised, but more refined and subtle***. I do not think it a coincidence that the brightest anti-Zionist/pro-Palestinian academic, Edward Said, was not a Muslim but a Christian, and therefore not the product of “Islamic dysgenics.”
I focused on intelligence because it’s easier to discuss than possibly innate behaviors like courage, cowardice, and aggression. But mentioning people’s subconscious preference for people who are genetically like them would add to the discussion as well.
*Approximately the average IQ of a college grad. I estimate the English IQ at 100 and the Pakistani at 80 based on Lynn’s estimate of India at ~81. So even if my hypothetical twin were thoroughly average he would still be >1 SD above the average Pakistani.
**For inbreeding and IQ you might want to look here here
***Which likely wouldn’t be a good thing, obviously.
Human races are much closer than horses and zebras.
If I have the data right, Europeans and Congoids are more than twice as far apart (0.23%) as chimpanzees and bonobos (0.103%), which can interbreed but are recognized as separate species. The two species of gorilla only differ by 0.04%.
Europeans differ less than half as much from Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (0.08%) than from Congoids.
If the USA really is a "proposition nation", membership must be limited to people who can and do accept the proposition. Muslims and a lot of blacks don't, many probably because they can't.
Dear Hythloday, you wrote:
"The reason Muslims fail to become 'British' or 'French' it seems to be more a failure of policy and weak culture than anything genetic."
... it is, of course, both, but at different time frames.
Upronging and cultural effects (your "twins" example) work in a short term, as with your twins example. It can even work on adult persons, via the brainwash converts and women marrying muslims are exposed to in their mosques-centered "communities". Interestingly, the brainwash works gradually, hence the fresh oh-so-liberal muslim converts, gradually sinking into deeper levels of islamic mentality; and even more interestingly, it affects not only values, but also reasoning, as one cannot reconcile functioning brain and islamic dogmas.
Genetic effects and consequences of islam are the long term-ones.
Besides inbreeding (catastrophic but logical consequece of the system, where everybody is supposed to act brotherly, but nobody trust anyboby else), the dysgenic prerequisities include
a) Limited role of consious female choice in pair establishment. In social species, including humans, creating pair bond (which we humans call "love") involves interplay of both his and her minds. Exclude one, you will get higher frequency of dysharmonious couplings, with consequences for family life.
b) Limited role of female inteligence in male choice. Our brain is our largest sex organ, and there is growing consensus that humans to a large degree "have bred themselves to be intelligent". Smart men (and women) selecrt tend to chose smart women (and men) - if they have a chance to estimate this. In islam, the men often have not.
c) Selection against independent (~ rebellious, "manly", dominant) women during upbringing and married life. So called "honour murder" is what geneticists call hard selection - independently thinking women get killed. There is soft selection as well - independently thinking woman tends to be punished often and ends up stressed, bearing less children, or bearing distressed children. Both way, the genes of rebellious women are gradually washed up from populations ... and with them, the genes predilecting for independency, rebellion, resourcefulness are lost as well. Meek and stressed wifes cannot bear strong-minded sons.
Let me repeat that I described extreme, model situation. Islam prevents it by constant enslaving newly subdued women. But had it been victorious globally, the effects would show up in a few generations.
"Also remember that the biological difference between a man and a woman is much greater than the difference between two members of differences 'races' of the same sex."
Well, that depends upon which differences you are interested in.Of course, men are different from women biologically, but those differences are irrelevant in this discussion.
For example, average IQ is an important difference in this discussion . But there's no difference between the average IQ of males and females belonging to the same ethnic group.
He is sometimes good but not here - obviously Bantus were less civilised than Europeans but is this for genetic reasons? The British and the English were much like Bantus 2000 years ago. Always hard to weigh up nature and nurture but he scarcely attempts to do so. He is right that bringing people from the 3rd World is disastrous though.
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