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Talk:Human Accomplishment

Please see WP:NOTFORUM. You and User talk:Friendship & Rainbows have touched on some interesting points, but article talk pages are not for discussing the merits of books. Please just go ahead and find the secondary sources, and then improve the article. There's a few reviews linked at the bottom already. Thank you. Drmies (talk) 14:03, 28 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Reconstruction Of Our Discussion

Hi, Jjc2002. Here's a reconstruction of our previous discussions with no words altered or removed except for some some grammatical corrections (including my shameful anger rants), just like you asked. I've reconstructed the section "Ignorance Of Black Accomplishments", will do the rest once I get back from work.

By the way, how do you know I'm young (you're right, I'm not even 30 years old yet)? Friendship & Rainbows (talk) 23:25, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

And here's the rest of our previous discussion, as well as my latest add-on, as seen on your User Page. Friendship & Rainbows (talk) 05:28, 29 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ignorance Of Black Accomplishments

"Who is to say that the achievements of Europe, China, India, Japan, or Arabia are “better” than those of Polynesia, Africa, or the Amazon?," (page xiv). That's simply not true. Charles Murray clearly hadn't studied sub-Saharan African history when he wrote this book. Many books, which attempt to rediscover previously suppressed Black accomplishments, have been written in recent decades. Please note, before screaming Afrocentrism, that I am Chinese, not Black.

- Blacks were the first to domesticate animals; cave paintings in Birnin Kundu, Northern Nigeria, depicted humans with cows and sheep.

- Blacks were the earliest people to build complex, multi-story buildings. See Hausa Tubali and Sahelian architecture for some examples. One common theme throughout traditional sub-Saharan African architecture is the use of mathematical fractals.

- Blacks built the Great Wall Of Benin, which is four times longer than the Great Wall Of China, and used a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid Of Cheops.

- The oldest known calendars originated in sub-Saharan Africa; with the first calendar known to human beings being found in South Africa. It is around 200000 years old.

- Remains of advanced civilizations have been found throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Nok was an extremely advanced society dating back to at least 900 BCE. It had one of the most complex judicial systems of the time. It is a known fact that the Nok's judicial system pre-dates European judicial systems. Other advanced sub-Saharan African civilizations include the Axum Empire, the kingdom of Ghana, the Malian Empire, the Songhai Empire, the Ethiopian Empire, the Mossi Kingdoms, and the Benin Empire.

- A primitive form of democracy existed in sub-Saharan Africa long before ancient Greece; if a Black king or chief implemented a law which displeased the people, the people would remove them from office. A continent-wide system of constitution existed in sub-Saharan Africa long before such things were known to Asians, Europeans, or Middle Easterners. See Destruction Of Black Civilization - Great Issues Of A Race From 4500 B.C. To 2000 A.D. by Chancellor Williams (page 26-27).

How come these facts are all mostly unknown to the general public? Given what I've posted, how can anyone still claim Charles Murray is a good historian (i.e. many reviews on Amazon gave Human Accomplishment five stars)? - Friendship & Rainbows 05:55, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

You begin by quoting a question and then say, “That's simply not true”. A question can’t be true or false. It may be misleading, it may be silly, it may be nonsensical, it may beg the question but, as it’s not an assertion of fact, it can’t be not true.

You state that “Blacks were the first to domesticate animals; cave paintings in…Northern Nigeria, depicted humans with cows and sheep.” How old are these paintings? How did the animals get there? Domesticated sheep are generally understood to be descended from wild sheep in South West Asia. Did Sub-Saharan Africans go there and somehow bring wild sheep back with them or did they go there, stay long enough to domesticate a species of wild animal and then bring them back? Or is there another explanation?

Cows are descended from wild aurochs native to Eurasia and North Africa. Same questions.

You state that “Blacks were the earliest people to build complex, multi-story buildings. See Hausa Tubali and Sahelian architecture for some examples.” How old are the oldest buildings or ruins there? Are they older than the oldest passage graves in Europe or the pyramids in Egypt or Mohenjo-daro or the Ziggurat of Ur?

You refer to “advanced civilizations…found throughout sub-Saharan Africa” and go on to list some. Now to describe something as advanced is only meaningful if you can describe something comparable as less advanced or backward. Lionel Messi is a great footballer. If everyone could play like him he’d just be a footballer but because there are totally talentless people like me we can call him great. Compared to what were the civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa advanced? Were there more advanced contemporary non-sub-Saharan African civilizations compared to which they weren’t as advanced?

You state that the “Nok…had one of the most complex judicial systems of the time. It is a known fact that the Nok's judicial system predates European judicial systems.” How do we know this? Did they or someone else leave a written record?

You state that “A primitive form of democracy existed in sub-Saharan Africa long before ancient Greece; if a Black king or chief implemented a law which displeased the people, the people would remove them from office. A continent-wide system of constitution existed in sub-Saharan Africa long before such things were known to Asians, Europeans, or Middle Easterners.” Again, how do we know this? Did they or someone else leave a written record?

You refer to Chancellor Williams’ book which I admit I’ve only glanced at (but, based on that glance, it won’t be top of my reading list). The removal from office to which he refers on pages 26 and 27 refer to British laws so therefore to events after the British had subjugated the king in question. It doesn’t necessarily follow that it applied when a king held power in his own right and had an army to back him up. I wonder how many votes there were during the Mfecane.

I understand that Chancellor Williams was one of those writers who claimed that Ancient Egypt was predominantly a black civilization. This was always a dubious proposition and recent DNA analysis of mummies make it even more dubious.

A cottage industry exists producing works that make exaggerated, feel-good claims about precolonial sub-Saharan Africa. I don’t question the sincerity of such authors. I do question their objectivity.

You ask how people can take Murray seriously as a historian. Murray doesn’t claim to be a historian. I don’t know if you’ve read the book but it’s based on his analysis of other people’s work. That’s like if someone compiled a list of the bestselling records of all time around the world and I complained because my favourite album wasn’t listed. - Jjc2002 23:36, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

I haven't finished Williams' book yet, so please forgive me if I appear a bit ignorant at times. Here's my take on it:

- I'm not an expert in zoology, but here's the painting I was talking about: http://cdn1.theodysseyonline.com/files/2015/10/30/635818166701305346-1303370231_birnin%20kudu.jpeg

- South Africa had an advanced structure (the Enkis calender) 75000 years ago, older than structures anywhere else on Earth.

- By "advanced", I mean about as sophisticated as the alleged "leading civilizations" (China, Europe, India, the Middle East, etc). Ancient European scholars of the past actually proudly claimed they finished their education in Ethiopia, similar to how modern Asians proudly claimed they were educated at an elite Western university. If this won't convince critics that Blacks were at least as advanced as their glorified Eurasian contemporaries, I don't know what will.

- Oh yes. Plenty of written records have been left from ancient Nok times. The Nok belived that crimes can attract curses which can devastate the family (a bit similar to the Indian concept of karma), and the truth must be ascertained to avoid the curse, hence the judicial system. http://rightforeducation.org/2017/04/ancient-west-african-history-the-nok-kingdom/

- Try taking a closer look at my sources. From Chancellor Williams' book (I've omitted the irrelevant text, such as "the presence of two or three Blacks in the class"): "Some of the most fruitful sources came quite unintentionally from White scholars. Professor Madden was pointing out in his lecture how difficult -- and even impossible -- it was to rule African in view of their “wild and most primitive system of democracy”. For just as fast as African kings or chiefs undertook to carry out British laws which displeased the people, “the people would remove them from office”, therefore, this “primitive African democracy had to be destroyed” before the British system of Indirect Rule could be effective." The sneering remarks by this White professor unintentionally gave away the fact that Blacks had an ancient form of democracy (which Williams' later discovered predates Greece).

- No, Williams did not claim that ancient Egypt was "predominantly a Black civilization". What he claimed is that Egypt was originally a Black civilization, founded by Blacks such as Narmer and Khufu (seriously, take a look at their statues, it's hard to believe they were Caucasian). But Egypt was later invaded by Caucasians. Added to the confusion is that at times, Egypt was divided between several warring states, with each state possessing its own pharaoh. But what White scholars of the past have done is omitted this fact, and only mention the White (Saite pharaohs) states as legitimate Egyptian states while neglecting the Black controlled territories, despite the fact that this makes about as much sense as claiming the kingdom of Chu or Wei during the Chinese Warring States period is the only legitimate Chinese state. For instance, prior to the conquest of Lower Egypt by Menes in 3100 BCE, Whites only controlled one-fourth of Egypt (namely Lower Egypt), with the other three-fourths of Upper Egypt under Black rule. Oh, and Upper Egypt was much more advanced than Lower Egypt at the time.

- Let's not pretend that pro-Black scholars are, on average, less trustworthy than pro-White scholars. Pro-White scholars are still known today to claim things like the Hamites and Cushites were never Black. When it's impossible to deny Black accomplishments that were, at times more advanced than that of Whites, White scholars of today (even while claiming to shun the racial theories of the past) are still known to claim it was due to White influence, even if imaginary. Take the American Historical Association's number fifty-six publication for example.

- Yes, I have read the book. And no, it's not as simple as that. Steve Sailer's review of the book: "In the sciences, 97 percent of the significant figures and events turned out to be Western. Is this merely Eurocentric bias? Of the 36 science reference books he drew upon, 28 were published after 1980, by which time historians were desperately searching for non-Westerners to praise. Only in this decade has the most advanced non-Western country, Japan, begun to win science Nobels regularly." Really? If historians after 1980 were so desperate to find non-Westerners to praise, then why does Human Accomplishment doesn't mention Charaka or Sushruta at all, while Hippocrates and Galen are so high in the Medicine list, despite the fact that we now know that eminent Greek intellectuals like Pythagoras and Democritus traveled to the Indus Valley Civilization (modern day India) to learn from Indian physicians (Perceiving In Depth, Volume 1: Basic Mechanisms by Ian P. Howard and Brian J. Rogers)? Considering that some of Sushruta's innovations, such as nose surgery (invented in 6th century BCE), in which European nose surgery would not even come close in sophistication until the 18th century CE, I'd say that's a major oversight.

- Just flick through an English language book on the history of science and technology. Even a recently published one tends to contain mostly European contributions, even if recent evidence have disputed those claims. To be fair, Chinese language reference books are pretty much the same, with an arguable unjustified amount of attention devoted to China's accomplishments, even if proven to be false (e.g. paper is actually a European, not Chinese, invention). Clearly Murray isn't relying on actual accomplishment, but merely on the amount of attention lavished on the people on his lists. - Friendship & Rainbows 02:21, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

With respect to the painting it may be of cattle but how old is it? Again my question is, how were sub-Saharan Africans the first to domesticate animals whose wild ancestors came from Eurasia?

Is the reference to "Enkis calender" a reference to the Blaauboschkraal stone ruins? Their Wikipedia page attributes them to "people who settled the region in the 16th century". Where's the evidence they're 75000 years old?

Which ancient European scholars proudly claimed they finished their education in Ethiopia? I'm not saying there weren't any. I'd just like to know who they were and what the sources are.

Your link doesn't provide any evidence of "Plenty of written records...left from ancient Nok times." What script did the Nok use? If it was ancient was it original or borrowed? Was it alphabetic, syllabic or logogramic? What is the oldest document referring to their legal system?

I've only glanced through Chancellor Williams' book and have no particular desire to read it but your "sources" seem to comprise one anecdote.

Some people are vested in the racial makeup of ancient Egyptians. I'm not one of them, I'll go with the DNA evidence. It suggests that a sub-Saharan component was there but was small (less than the South West Asian component) and was less than that of current Egyptians.

As a rule I'm not interested in pro-Black or pro-White scholars. I'm interested in pro-evidence scholars who seek theories to fit the facts not those who seek facts to support their theories.

You asked: "why...Human Accomplishment doesn't mention Charaka or Sushruta at all, while Hippocrates and Galen are so high in the Medicine list, despite the fact that we now know that eminent Greek intellectuals like Pythagoras and Democritus traveled to the Indus Valley Civilization." The Indus Valley civilization had collapsed about a millennium before they were born. We have reasonable grounds to believe either or both travelled to India but I don't think we "know" that. Presumably the reason they aren't mentioned is that Charaka and Sushruta aren't mentioned sufficiently in the sources. I'm quite prepared to believe that there is an element of Western bias in the sources but I think its effect is only marginal. Vesalius, Jenner, Lister, Pasteur, Koch, and Flemming are products of a tradition that looked back to Hippocrates and Galen. Who are the comparable figures who look back to Charaka and Sushruta?

I've flicked through a number of English language books on the history of science and technology. One is National Geographic's Concise History of Science & Invention: An Illustrated Time Line. It has Timelines for Europe, The Americas, Asia & Oceania, and Africa & the Middle East. As the years go by the width of the Europe column gets wider and the entries in the other columns get fewer and often more trivial. The reason why this and other books contain mostly European contributions is because most contributions were European.

You state "paper is actually a European, not Chinese, invention". What is the basis for this claim?

How could Murray have done what he tried to do better? - Jjc2002 21:21, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Okay, I've been reading through some books on sub-Saharan (Black) African history, and I guess my claim that Black Africans domesticated Eurasian animals first was incorrect. That being said, there is evidence that Black Africans domesticated elephants before anyone else; they used elephants in warfare.

Okay, so I misremembered my sources: ancient White scholars of the past proudly claimed they finished their education in Egypt, not Ethiopia. Such scholars include Pythagoras, Thales, Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato.

The language used by the Nok was Nsibidi, if I'm not mistaken.

You'll be surprised at the incredible amount of bias in the sources, even in recent decades, especially when it comes to sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is wrongly depicted as a backwater, where slaves are harvested, and nothing else. Even many liberal Whites and Blacks still believe today in the old racist line: "You belong to a race of nobodies. You have no worthwhile history to point to with pride."

Even as late as the 2010s, the study of the history of sub-Saharan African science and technology is still in infancy. But, even the little amount which have been uncovered speak volumes.

- In 1879, Dr R. W. Felkin, a British medical doctor, visited the Kingdom of Banyoro (modern day Uganda). He witnessed a Caesarean section performed on a pregnant woman. During this time, Caesarean sections performed in Europe had a 100 percent death rate for the mother. But, the African surgeons were able to successfully extract the child, and ten days later, both the mother and child were healthy. This extraordinary (for that time) procedure was recorded in the 1884 edition of the Edinburg Medical Journal.

- 18th century manuscripts from Ethiopia written in Ge'ez and Amharic correctly claimed that bites from a rabid dog was often fatal. 19th century Ethiopian manuscripts proved that Ethiopians were aware that the incubation period for rabies was 40 days.

- Black Africans were aware of variolation (perhaps learned from the Chinese, or equally likely to be independently invented), and successfully inoculated their people against smallpox. They also attempted to inoculate themselves against rabies and syphilis. It may come as a surprise, but the fact is that many African slaves were inoculated against smallpox BEFORE they were shipped out of Africa.

- Black Africans were aware of the concept of quarantine. Should their inoculation techniques fail, they controlled the spread of epidemics such as smallpox, cholera, typhus, and influenza by isolating the infected. In extreme cases, they even burned the infected alive in their houses.

- The Dogon were a non-Islamic people from modern Mali. Back in the early 1200s CE, the Dogon were aware that the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn synchronize every 60 years. They knew of a star they called "Sirius B". Sirius B was claimed to be a star that orbits Sirius, and was claimed to be the smallest and densest type of star in our galaxy. Both of these claims have been confirmed by modern astronomy. Professor Charles Finch said: "It is the Dogon who deserve credit for having discovered Sirius B and the white dwarf as a category of star". But what is truly amazing was that Sirius B was invisible to the naked eye. This implied that the Dogon had invented some kind of telescope back in the 1200s. Of course, not every scholar was intrigued. The astrophysicist Carl Sagan unsuccessfully tried to prove that the Dogon must have been taught these ideas by a European. MIT scientist Kenneth Brecher was equally blunt, claiming that the Dogon "have no business knowing any of this".

- By 1400 CE, medieval scholars at the sub-Saharan African university Timbuktu knew about the rotation of planets, the details of the eclipse, and had calculated the orbits of the planets well over a century before Copernicus and Galileo. They also had algorithms on how to determine leap years. Said algorithms were as accurate as anything modern mathematicians have, when tested against the modern computer based approach.

- Black Africans were very advanced in agriculture. Their farmers routinely practiced the manure of crops and crop rotation. Unfortunately, this was one of the reasons why Blacks were enslaving each other and selling their compatriots as slaves to Europeans; due to the great demand of Black slaves because of their knowledge of tropical agriculture.

- The Empire of Axum (also known as the Empire of Abyssinia) at its height was an important naval force. They had some of the most advanced ship building technology in the world. Some of their ships reached 70 tons in weight. Advanced Black African shipbuilding dated back to the 1st century CE, and was mentioned in the famous Greek guidebook, The Periplus Of The Eritrean Sea. Historian Basil Davidson said "East African sailors were attacking their ships against the wind, up to an angle of 35 degrees, long before Europeans had learned the necessary technique. The Africans who manned, and still man these vessels, are the Swahili..." Most amazingly, coins that originated in the sub-Saharan African city of Kilwa 1000 years ago were recently found on a Northern Australian island. A scholar named Tim Stone stated that this is likely evidence of the Kilwans there 1000 years ago than of "somebody carrying them together and losing them in one spot". If Stone is correct, then this may rewrite Australia's early history.

With just these few new discoveries in mind, how can one take Murray's claim seriously that 97 percent of significant scientific and technological breakthroughs occurred in the West?

As for your claim that many great physicians of the past looked back to Hippocrates and Galen, but not Charaka or Sushruta, that claim is again resting on the assumption that well-known equals to similarly great contributions. As I said earlier, much of the inventions of Indian physicians would not be matched by their Western counterparts until the 18th century CE. One being Sushruta's idea of cutting a piece of skin from the forehead and placing it on the nose to repair an amputated nose; whereas European nose reconstruction, even as late as the 17th century CE, were much more primitive. It was not until British surgeons visited India in the 18th century CE and brought back Sushruta's ideas that European nose reconstruction finally caught up with Indian nose reconstruction. Even today, the most widely used nose reconstruction method is known as the "Indian method". If the criterion were based purely on medical contributions, Charaka and Sushruta would likely have been mentioned multiple times in Human Accomplishment.

And that's not all. This very website claimed that Galen was "arguably the most accomplished of all medical researchers of antiquity", yet in Human Accomplishment Hippocrates topped Galen by a full 19 points. Also, in mathematics, Murray himself claimed that Carl Friedrich Gauss would top the lists if the criteria were pure mathematical genius, as much of what is attributed to other mathematicians was in fact discovered by Gauss first. But, unlike many other mathematicians, Gauss was reluctant to publish, and it was only long after his death that his notebooks were read and his discoveries came to light. The same can be said of Henry Cavendish. This shows the problem of assigning the importance of an individual merely on the amount of times they were mentioned in some books; the ones with the most attention lavished on them, not necessarily the ones who contributed the most, would come out on top.

As for my earlier statement that paper was actually a European, not Chinese invention, that claim was based on the common claim that paper was invented by the Chinese court official Cai Lun in 105 CE. But, what Cai Lun actually "invented" ("innovated" would be a better word to describe what he did) was a refined form of papyrus (which was invented by the ancient Egyptians millennia before Cai Lun); namely mulberry bark mixed with hemp, rags, and water, mashing them into a pulp, pressing out the liquid, and hanging it out to dry in the sun. Not to disparaged Cai Lun's innovation, as it was a significant breakthrough, but the fact is – what we today call "paper" – a sheet of material made of wood pulp and chemicals, was actually a European invented material. It took another 17 centuries after Cai Lun before French scientist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur came up with the idea to make paper from wood. Later, in 1838, German inventor Friedrich Gottlob Keller took de Réaumur's idea and perfected it by 1845, the year in which he filed a patent for a wood-grinding machine. This was the origin of modern paper. It was only later in the nineteenth century that the final chemical composition of modern paper was finalized.

Finally, maybe what Murray could have done is actually note who the encyclopedias claim made the greatest contributions, and then assigning them each a score, instead of just reading through the encyclopedias and then assigning the figures scores based merely on how many times said figures were mentioned. To be fair, this would have made the project much more difficult and laborious, and the book may have never been finished. Murray is just one person, after all, and one person can only do so much. - Friendship & Rainbows 08:10, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

"...there is evidence that Black Africans domesticated elephants before anyone else; they used elephants in warfare". I know that the now-extinct North African elephant was so used but what's the evidence from sub-Saharan Africa? If they were used for war, were they used domestically? If so when/why did they stop being used?

Wikipedia describes Dr Felkin as a "Ceremonial Magician". Did any non-magician observe such a Caesarean?

Thanks for letting me know about African inoculation.

As regards the Dogon-Sirius issue I would make these points. 1) It's disputed whether they held the belief ascribed by some authors and I doubt they called any star by its Latin name. 2) Even if they did hold the belief it doesn't necessarily follow that they had telescopes. In Gulliver's Travels (1726) we're told that the Laputans have discovered 2 moons of Mars. Now Mars does have 2 moons, they were discovered in 1877. 14 years before the Titanic a novel told the story of world's largest liner, considered unsinkable, sinks after hitting an iceberg. The ship is named Titan. (There are lots more similarities). Sometimes coincidences happen. 3) If they had telescopes, they'd have had to have a glass industry and presumably spectacles. Any evidence of these? If they had telescopes capable of seeing Sirius B, what other discoveries did they make?

You refer to the "university Timbuktu". I know this term is used just as it is claimed that al-Qarawiyyin is the world's oldest university. But a madrasa isn't a university any more than a cathedral school is. I think a community of scholars would be a better description. You state they knew about "the rotation of planets". Is that rotation about the sun or rotation about their axes? You state they "had calculated the orbits of the planets well over a century before Copernicus and Galileo". If it was heliocentrism what's the evidence for this? You state they "had algorithms on how to determine leap years". Leap years are calendrical conventions not astronomical facts. These scholars were Muslims and the Islamic calendar is lunar not solar with a year of 354 or 355 days without intercalcations and set rules for the 355th day. So, what were these algorithms doing? Something akin to the Metonic cycle?

"Black Africans were very advanced in agriculture". Compared to whom? I think the main reason for the great demand for Black slaves was their greater resistance to tropical diseases.

I don't find it that amazing that coins from Kilwa were found on a Northern Australian island. All sorts of things show up in all sorts of places. A Viking hoard on a lake island in Sweden contained an Indian Buddha, an Irish crozier and a Coptic ladle. It doesn't mean their owner/thief had been to these places. There was plenty of Indian Ocean trade for centuries. I think the best measure of the state of African sailing prowess is that the world's fourth largest island, about 400 km from Africa, was settled by Austronesians from about 6500 km away.

Murray's 97% figure may be too high but ask yourself, how many non-Westerners discovered a law of nature, produced a great maths' proof or isolated a chemical element? What was the last important machine or scientific instrument to be invented outside the West and how many have Westerners invented since then?

My claim isn't that well-known = similarly great contributions but rather the predecessors of those was gave us germ theory, antibiotics, antisepsis, anesthetics, vaccination etc. will, other things being equal, get more mentions than those from other traditions.

"If the criterion were based purely on medical contributions, Charaka and Sushruta would likely have been mentioned multiple times in Human Accomplishment". Agreed.

It's undoubtedly true that a prolific publisher (and Euler was remarkably proficient) will have an advantage over a reluctant one given Murray's methodology but otherwise you'd have a different book. Instead I think what Murray has done is given us an objective if imperfect yardstick against which we can compare our subjective evaluations.

On paper I think you should have used the term "modern paper". What the Chinese came up with was good enough for Gutenberg, the First Folio, the Principia and the Declaration of Independence. I think it significant that the West began to progress once it had access to the Chinese version.

On our earlier exchange, are you still of the view that "Enkis calender", whatever that is, is 75,000 years old? Have you any evidence of "Plenty of written records...left from ancient Nok times." - Jjc2002 20:06, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

"Blacks were the earliest people to build complex, multi-story buildings. See Hausa Tubali and Sahelian architecture for some examples. One common theme throughout traditional sub-Saharan African architecture is the use of mathematical fractals." I thought that "the neolithic proto-city of Çatalhöyük was a multi-story complex that flourished around 7000 BCE". Also, a place like Shibam in the Middle East is considered to be the oldest skyscraper city in the world. I think that the innovations in architecture under the Romans really helped to spearhead architecture of multi-story buildings, no?

"The oldest known calendars originated in sub-Saharan Africa; with the first calendar known to human beings being found in South Africa. It is around 200000 years old." What is the evidence for that? Modern humans only emerged about 300000-200000 years ago. At that time there were no Europeans or other races. This seems highly dubious by the way. From what I've found: "A Mesolithic arrangement of twelve pits and an arc found in Warren Field, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, dated to roughly 10000 years ago, has been described as a lunar calendar and was dubbed the "world's oldest known calendar" in 2013."

"Remains of advanced civilizations have been found throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Nok was an extremely advanced society dating back to at least 900 BCE. It had one of the most complex judicial systems of the time. It is a known fact that the Nok's judicial system pre-dates European judicial systems. Other advanced sub-Saharan African civilizations include the Axum Empire, the kingdom of Ghana, the Malian Empire, the Songhai Empire, the Ethiopian Empire, the Mossi Kingdoms, and the Benin Empire." True. A lot of people don't realize that who haven't studied ancient sub-Saharan African civilizations like I have, though I haven't studied it in great depth. I'm really glad you researched ancient sub-Saharan African history, I've seldom met people here aside from myself that's looked into it. It's very interesting, and it does clear up certain misconceptions people have, when they make statements like, "Obviously the first developments happen in sub-Saharan Africa but once homo sapiens spread beyond there virtually all innovation occurred outside of there", doesn't it?

You know what's funny though? Many people (most of whom are White or Asian) I've talked to dislike the fact that black people were actually so much more advanced than the layman generally gives them credit for, that they will argue in the exact same fashion as the Afrocentric pseudohistorians whose objectivity they question, and deny all of the history, and deride the historians who have studied sub-Saharan African history. Most of these people haven't actually studied sub-Saharan African history at all. Very few people, in my experience, are that objective minded and studious. - an anonymous contributor 04:52, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

As the person who wrote, "Obviously the first developments happen in sub-Saharan Africa but once homo sapiens spread beyond there virtually all innovation occurred outside of there", I'd be obliged if you would point out what misconceptions I have with respect to my assertion.

What do you consider to be the greatest innovation to come out of sub-Saharan Africa in, say, the last 10000 years? In an earlier post I gave an off the top of my head non-sub Saharan African innovations, "plant and animal domestication, writing, the wheel, pottery, maths, cities, running water, paper, printing, logic, science, the compass, the waterwheel, the windmill, the steam engine, the electric motor, the internal combustion engine, the wheelbarrow, the cart, the car, the train, the plane, linear perspective, the clock, the computer, antibiotics, and assorted things ending in -scope and -meter". Now for my assertion to be a misconception there should be a longer list of equally important sub Saharan African innovations. Although I’ve engaged with a number of interlocutors since I made my claim none have come up with even one such item.

You refer to "advanced" sub-Saharan African civilizations. Advanced in comparison to whom? Was there ever a time when the leading sub-Saharan civilization was more -- or even as -- advanced as the leading Eurasia one of its time? The only other major civilizations were the Stone Aged ones of the New World that not merely failed to develop iron technology but also lacked draught animals and used the wheel only for children's toys (on the plus side they lacked the mosquitoes, the tsetse flies and the locusts that did so much to hold sub-Saharan Africa back). Yet they produced Machu Picchu and the Mayan calendar. So, I ask advanced in comparison to whom? - Jjc2002 12:59, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for the compliment, it means a lot to me; especially since for all the talk that we live in a "post race" era, the actions of the people sure don't seem to match up with that statement. Take the Jjc2002 fellow I am debating. Notice the following:

- "You state that the “Nok…had one of the most complex judicial systems of the time. It is a known fact that the Nok's judicial system predates European judicial systems.” How do we know this? Did they or someone else leave a written record? Your link doesn't provide any evidence of "Plenty of written records...left from ancient Nok times." What script did the Nok use? If it was ancient was it original or borrowed? Was it alphabetic, syllabic or logogramic? What is the oldest document referring to their legal system?"

Hmm, when it is impossible for them to debunk what I've written (likely due to their ignorance of sub-Saharan African history), they instead demand more and more evidence, while providing little to no evidence themselves to debunk what I wrote. The saying: "First understand, then criticize, not the other way around" comes to mind.

"Wikipedia describes Dr Felkin as a "Ceremonial Magician". Did any non-magician observe such a Caesarean?"

The fact that White people during Dr Felkin's time were incredibly racist and distrustful that cultures other than their own could accomplish much, still believed that the claim was valid enough to be published in a prestigious medical journal, doesn't say much, does it?

"You refer to Chancellor Williams’ book which I admit I’ve only glanced at (but, based on that glance, it won’t be top of my reading list). A cottage industry exists producing works that make exaggerated, feel-good claims about precolonial sub-Saharan Africa. I don’t question the sincerity of such authors. I do question their objectivity. As a rule I'm not interested in pro-Black or pro-White scholars. I'm interested in pro-evidence scholars who seek theories to fit the facts not those who seek facts to support their theories."

Okay, by this statement, they imply (by default) that they are an objective person. But, as I've pointed out on this talk page, there are numerous errors in Human Accomplishment (plus some more which I haven't mentioned), yet Human Accomplishment is still an "objective if imperfect" book. But, just ONE error (the claim that ancient Egyptians were Black) was enough to warrant that Chancellor Williams' book is completely unreliable? How interesting. Also, I couldn't remember where I read it, but it was originally this very dehumanization of Black people that caused them to fantasize they were the Egyptians. As an online commentator put it: "When you strip away the ability for someone to love themselves and whatever they see as worthy of preserving, what do you end up with? I say you end up with a creature with a warped sense of pride that overstates his accomplishments in order to compensate for a natural right that was taken away from him." A members of a race that used to, and still, dehumanizes Black people, I'd say me (Asian) and Jjc2002 (White) have a moral duty to correct our ancestors' transgressions against Black people. But apparently Jjc2002 does not share this sentiment with me.

"If they had telescopes, they'd have had to have a glass industry and presumably spectacles. Any evidence of these? If they had telescopes capable of seeing Sirius B, what other discoveries did they make?"

Okay, Blacks must be totally incapable of anything other than living in mud huts and manufacturing primitive stone tools, right? Oh wait, besides other Black civilizations, the Yoruba capital of Ile-Ife during the sixth century CE also had a thriving glass industry? Besides that, the Dogon also had knowledge of another companion star to Sirius, Sirius C, and that they also had a notion of "big bang" derived from singularity? Never mind, it must be just liberal propaganda, right?

"I think the best measure of the state of African sailing prowess is that the world's fourth largest island, about 400 km from Africa, was settled by Austronesians from about 6500 km away."

I'm no expert on Black culture, so I couldn't comment on this, but we must also not forget that 1) The indigenous people living at the base of Mount Everest were great mountaineers, but because they viewed Everest as sacred, they did not climb it until Europeans arrived, and 2) British cities were still using gas street lighting in the 1920s, long after American and German cities had converted to electric street lighting, because British municipal governments had invested heavily in gas lighting and placed regulatory obstacles in the way of the competing electric light companies.

Okay, rather than ascribing the failure of Blacks to settle Madagascar to maybe some cultural or other factor, that must surely mean they were totally incapable of any long range sailing, right?

"Although I’ve engaged with a number of interlocutors since I made my claim none have come up with even one such item."

Wow, just, wow. I suppose my admittedly short list doesn't count? Variolation, advanced Caesarean section, the world's most advanced judicial system, and the discovery of the white dwarf as a category of star, must all be garbage, right?

Note that despite all their claims to the contrary, encyclopedias on the history of science and technology, were highly Eurocentric; and in more recent decades, highly Eurasian(including North Africa)-centric. For this reason, people still believe things like the Chinese invented the world's first compass (which is wrong), Fleming was the first to discover antibiotics (wrong), Eurasians were the first to use electricity for purposes other than as intellectual curiosity (wrong), Europeans were the first to come up with effective anesthetics (wrong), anatomy developed little from Greco-Roman times until the sixteenth century CE (wrong), and headaches being caused by an excess of blood in the arteries in the brain or on the surface of the head was first discovered by Eurasians (wrong).

I have no doubt that the reason why non-Eurasians have been so underrepresented is because of their lack of power (both financial and political). It is still Eurasians who decide what is "right"; until Blacks and other non-Eurasians stand up for their rights, Eurasians are probably going to continue to oppress them. If not physically, then by teaching them that without Eurasians, the modern world would be unrecognizable, but without non-Eurasians, the modern world would look perhaps a little different, but still pretty much the same. - Friendship & Rainbows 13:09, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

The Jjc2002 fellow here.

For all the talk that we live in a "post race" era some people think that members of a race that used to, and still, dehumanizes Black people, have a moral duty to correct our ancestors' transgressions against Black people. Isn't that ascribing group guilt to individuals on the basis of their skin color as opposed to their actions? And guilt for the actions of their ancestors not of themselves? If you wanted to know my beliefs you could have asked me instead of conflating values and facts. Is does not imply ought. (Incidentally as you're Chinese I'm not sure how much transgressing your ancestors did against Black people. If I had to guess -- and it is only a guess as I don't claim mind-reading powers -- I suspect that some older members of your community have very negative attitudes towards black people and that you're trying to (over?)compensate. As a descendant of enough Irish peasants who survived Cromwell, various famines or being shipped off to the Caribbean as indentured servants to produce me I'm not sure how many of them had opportunities to do much transgressing either.)

Part of the reason why we disagree is that we may differ in our objectives. You appear to me to be on a mission whereas I am on a quest. You seem to be trying to right past and present wrongs while I'm trying to lessen my ignorance. Also, you appear to me as someone who might be given to evaluating evidence in the light of your belief, whereas I try evaluating my beliefs in the light of evidence.

With respect to the Nok I wasn't trying to debunk what you've written. I was asking questions. Questions about detail. Questions you didn't answer. I'll ask another one, Thomas Sowell's Third Question: What hard evidence do you have?

I'd be quite happy to accept something like this.

https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/manden-charter-proclaimed-in-kurukan-fuga-00290

Perhaps you might debunk my non-debunking by providing some evidence -- never mind further evidence -- rather than assertions about it, "Enkis calender", etc.

Now to a debunking.

Like the Indians and the Chinese, the Yoruba produced glass beads like these:

https://www.livescience.com/59462-early-glassmaking-west-africa.html.

But the West produced this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_Saint-Denis#/media/File:Saint-Denis_(93),_basilique_Saint-Denis,_abside_3.jpg

If the Dogon did make lenses, presumably they made spectacles, what the Persians called "Frankish glasses". Where's the evidence for that? And what happened to all that advanced technology? Where are the ruins of their observatories? Did they produce texts like De Revolutionibus or the Principia?

If they did find Sirius C, they must have had a hell of a telescope because the Hubble Space Telescope looked for it and couldn’t find it. There was a theory that Sirius C existed but that has fallen out of favor e.g. https://www.drewexmachina.com/2017/04/06/new-hubble-observations-of-the-sirius-system/

Is the roughly 2500-page Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures an acceptable source for you? The 2nd edition states, "Unfortunately, while West African astronomical traditions have not as a whole attracted much attention, an inordinate amount of publicity has surrounded exaggerated claims for an advanced state of knowledge on the part of the Dogon people of Mali. Based on their fieldwork conducted in the 1930s, Griaule and Dieterlen (1950, 1965) reported that the Dogon were aware of Sirius B, a small star invisible to the unaided eye. Such was the fuel for Temple (1975), among others, who claimed for the Dogon a heliocentric model of the solar system and independent knowledge of the satellites of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. Thanks to television series such as “In Search of …” (1979) the Dogon have entered the popular imagination. Penetrating criticism by respected scientists and a field evaluation of Griaule’s reportage, determining many elements, including the astronomical portions, to be either misconstrued or altogether unsupported by ethnographic evidence, have done little to stay the proliferation of misinformation on Dogon cosmology (Van Beek 1991)."

You refer to errors in Murray's book. I think flaws or weaknesses would be a better term. The reason I described it as objective but imperfect is that Murray set out a method of measuring rather than compiling a subjective list like Hart’s The 100. I think the word error should be confined to any failures of his in how he applied his method, if he said two and two are five, whereas weakness might describe the relative rankings of Euler, who published a great deal, and Gauss who published little. I never said that "Chancellor Williams' book is completely unreliable". That was you putting words in my mouth. I have no particular interest in, or knowledge of, African history. The Rise of the West/The Great Divergence are my real interests but I’m more than happy to read pieces like this

https://aeon.co/essays/yacob-and-amo-africas-precursors-to-locke-hume-and-kant

Or this.

https://lithub.com/on-the-kidnapped-african-boy-who-became-a-german-philosopher/

So, no, I don’t think that "Blacks must be totally incapable of anything other than living in mud huts and manufacturing primitive stone tools". Again, that was you putting words in my mouth. (Or, perhaps, were you putting someone else’s words in my mouth?)

Again, I never said that Blacks "were totally incapable of any long range sailing". Again, that was you putting words in my mouth. I was making the point that this was an area in which they lagged in comparison to some others. I could also have pointed out that many islands off the west coast of Africa e.g. Cape Verde, Madeira, the Azores, the Selvagens Islands, and São Tomé and Príncipe were first discovered by Europeans.

"Variolation, advanced Caesarean section, the world's most advanced judicial system, and the discovery of the white dwarf as a category of star, must all be garbage, right?"

My remark was about major innovations. The fact that variolation was practiced in sub-Saharan Africa doesn't of itself make it a sub-Saharan African innovation. It was recorded in China earlier than anywhere else. If some sub-Saharan African doctors were better at Caesarean sections than anyone else at the time good for them. But being good at Caesarean sections isn’t a major innovation. It’s not writing or the wheel or the other items I mentioned. I notice that the Nok system has now become "the world's most advanced judicial system". Perhaps you should notify UNESCO so they can put it up alongside the Manden Charter. You might also let us know what is the best evidence for it predating common law and being more advanced than, say, the Codes of Justinian or of the Tang. If, for one moment, I believed that anybody, anywhere, black, white, or purple with orange spots could see a star that Hubble can’t, I’d buy a hat so I’d have a hat to eat. But given the choice between (A) the Dogon had a better-than-Hubble telescope or (B) someone had a book or TV show he wanted to sell and/or an agenda to advance, I’ll hold off on the hat. - Jjc2002 11:45, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

Okay, sorry. I was just mad that you seem to be skeptical of my every claim of Blacks being more than primitive tribesmen, while making assertions that Blacks have historically accomplished very little. As we have seen, that is not the case. I'm just an amateur at sub-Saharan African history, and even I can see the problem of claiming Africa being historically a "dark continent". The fact that variolation was recorded in China earlier than anywhere else, in my opinion, does not make it solely a Chinese accomplishment. Several other cultures may have independently invented it, and if it was indeed them, and not the Chinese, who passed the knowledge to Europeans who then improved on it and invented vaccination (arguably one of the most important inventions in history), surely these cultures deserve just as much, if not more, recognition than the Chinese, no?

You're right: I think I try to be as objective as possible, but the fact that White and Chinese people used to, and still to some extent, see Blacks as "a race of nobodies" really ticks me off. But, to quote your quote of Thomas Sowell: "What hard evidence do you have?" What hard evidence do all those skeptics of past non-Eurasian greatness have to support their assertion, other than some (even I have to admit) poorly researched encyclopedias on the history of science and technology? Books that don't seem to keep up with the latest research? Take your claim, for instance, that Amerindians never worked with iron. Funny thing is, it rarely makes into history books that the Polar Inuit who lived near Baffin Bay mined iron and used it to make blades.

Remember my closing statement "people still believe things like the Chinese invented the world's first compass (which is wrong), Fleming was the first to discover antibiotics (wrong), Eurasians were the first to use electricity for purposes other than as intellectual curiosity (wrong), Europeans were the first to come up with effective anesthetics (wrong), anatomy developed little from Greco-Roman times until the sixteenth century CE (wrong), and headaches being caused by an excess of blood in the arteries in the brain or on the surface of the head was first discovered by Eurasians (wrong)"?

Fact is, many obscure inventions by non-Eurasians seem to have a hard time gaining acceptance in this Eurasian dominated world of ours. Chinese invented the first compass in 206 BCE? Hmm, how about this: the Olmec are known to have discovered that a lodestone will align itself in a magnetic north-south position, and they are credited with developing a compass before 1000 BCE? So much for one of China's "four great inventions". Yet, Chinese writers today continue to claim the compass is their peoples' invention.

Amerindians were also highly advanced in medicine. The Aztec dissected primate and sometimes even human corpses, and developed a very advanced science of anatomy that some scholars claim were unsurpassed in their time. They also knew of antibiotics, and dressed wounds in agave sap to inhibit infection, centuries before Fleming discovered the antibiotic properties of penicillin. They also had what some claimed to be the world's first effective anesthetics, cocaine, which the Eurasian world didn't knew the anesthetic properties of until much later. In fact, Amerindians were so advanced in medicine that Spanish conquistadors reportedly preferred to seek treatment from Aztec physicians rather than their fellow European barber-surgeons.

The Moche people of South America are known to have developed a primitive form of electroplating around 200 BCE, predating the earliest (alleged) Eurasian claim to electroplating, the Baghdad Battery, by about four centuries.

Why have these facts escaped the attention of most encyclopedias on the history of science and technology? The mainstream academics might question their objectivity, but to paraphrase an earlier comment of mine: "You treat them (non-Eurasians) like dirt, and you expect them to not be emotional over it?" - Friendship & Rainbows 13:36, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Jjc2002, are you still there? I have been shifting through the literature, and I must say, it is disappointing to see that the history of non-Eurasian (especially sub-Saharan African) science and technology is so poorly documented compared to the much more voluminous tomes on Eurasian accomplishments.

For every book which mentions some paltry sub-Saharan African achievements, there are dozens more books which document extensively the accomplishments of Eurasians. And before you say again this is because sub-Saharan Africa is a historically backward place, even the books which claim that sub-Saharan Africa really was a backwater have some major clues that Black people may not be the backward savages that so many Eurasians ascribe them to be.

- The capital of the ancient Ghana empire, Kumbi-Saleh, had schools and centers of learning by the 11th century CE (and perhaps earlier). During the 14th century CE, the Malian Empire had two major centers of learning, one at the city of Timbuktu and the other at Djenne. The Songhai Empire during the 16th century CE had at least three such places of learning – Timbuktu, Djenne, and Walata. These places of learning taught art (such as building and crafts), astronomy, geography, grammar, mathematics, and law.

- Ahmed Baba, the last chancellor of the Sankore University at Timbuktu, wrote over 70 books, which include dictionaries and books on law.

- Scholars at Timbuktu recorded the appearance of comets, eclipse, and earthquakes in the region. Their writings indicate that they were long familiar with such phenomena.

- Many sub-Saharan African cultures had sophisticated numerical systems of their own. The Yoruba word for one million was egbeeberun. The Ganda and Fang even had words for numbers as high as 20 million.

- Magic squares (a mathematical recreation game where one arranges numbers into a table using each number only once so that each row, column, and the two diagonals all add up to the same number) had entertained Chinese mathematicians for thousands of years, but sub-Saharan African mathematicians had also been familiar with magic squares. A Hausa mathematician from Katsina University published a book with magic squares in it.

- Timbuktu astronomers used the cosine, tangent, cotangent, secant, and cosecant functions of trigonometry.

- In 8 April 1939, a British newspaper reported on the Ife Bronze Heads, which it described as "African art worthy to rank with the finest works of Italy and Greece".

- In 1420 Aben Ali, a Songhai physician, successfully treated a French prince (who would go on to become King Charles VII) when everyone else failed. Songhai historical records mentioned the use of locally made soap. A 16th century CE Timbuktu manuscript contains a formula for making toothpaste and noted that regular brushing of one's teeth keeps bad breath at bay. Many other surviving manuscripts contain details of chemistry, traditional sub-Saharan African medicine, and pharmacopoeia.

- Sub-Saharan Africans traditionally used local anesthetics and had treatments for asthma, bronchitis, diabetes, malaria, and muscle pain. West Africans used herbs with anti-sickle cell properties.

- There is indeed evidence to support my claim of Blacks being "very advanced in agriculture". They had many indigenous farming techniques, such as agroforestry and multistory farming, that were well suited to tropical climates. When foreigners tried to use what they presume were more advanced (Western) farming techniques in tropical Africa, they found it failed miserably, often causing soil erosion and loss of fertility. Thankfully, around the 1980s to today there is a renewed interest in traditional sub-Saharan African farming techniques.

These examples tell us something of the sophistication of ancient sub-Saharan African civilizations. Now how could a civilization with access to such knowledge and technology possibly not try to build on it and come up with improvements? It doesn't make sense to claim that sub-Saharan Africa was historically a backwards continent, especially given that so little attention (mainly because most people simply don't care) have been devoted to sub-Saharan African accomplishments.

I'm trying to lessen my ignorance.

I try evaluating my beliefs in the light of evidence.

What hard evidence do you have?

Ever heard of the saying "the burden of proof lies on those who assert"? You seem have been asserting that sub-Saharan Africa was a backwater where nothing much came out of since homo sapiens emigrated from there. I, on the other hand, have provided dozens of examples that sub-Saharan Africa was in fact more advanced than you give it credit for. Now, I don't mean to be mean, but where is your hard evidence that sub-Saharan Africa truly was a backwater where not much came from after 8000 BCE? What caused them to be allegedly so backwards that in spite of all the knowledge and technology at their disposal, they never bothered to come up with improvements?

I never said that "Chancellor Williams' book is completely unreliable"

Okay, I may be wrong, but what are you implying with these: "You refer to Chancellor Williams' book which I admit I’ve only glanced at (but, based on that glance, it won’t be top of my reading list)… I understand that Chancellor Williams was one of those writers who claimed that Ancient Egypt was predominantly a black civilization. This was always a dubious proposition and recent DNA analysis of mummies make it even more dubious... A cottage industry exists producing works that make exaggerated, feel-good claims about precolonial sub-Saharan Africa. I don't question the sincerity of such authors. I do question their objectivity… I've only glanced through Chancellor Williams' book and have no particular desire to read it".

I have no particular interest in, or knowledge of, African history. The Rise of the West/The Great Divergence are my real interests

Then maybe you shouldn't be making bold claims like "Obviously the first developments happen in Sub-Saharan Africa but once homo sapiens spread beyond there virtually all innovation occurred outside of there" without knowing what you're actually talking about.

As a rule I'm not interested in pro-Black or pro-White scholars. I'm interested in pro-evidence scholars who seek theories to fit the facts not those who seek facts to support their theories.

Then why are you still accepting (and defending) Human Accomplishment, a work by the known anti-Black scholar Charles Murray, as valid? See the following article:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/07/why-is-charles-murray-odious

If they did find Sirius C, they must have had a hell of a telescope because the Hubble Space Telescope looked for it and couldn't find it

No, I DID NOT claim that the Dogon could see Sirius C. That was you putting words in my mouth. I just claimed that they had knowledge of such a star, which may not be impossible if they could see Sirius B. Remember that astronomers knew Pluto existed before anyone actually saw it because they could indirectly verify its existence through gravitational fluctuations.

Finally, I couldn't help but notice your tendency to readily accept any Eurasian (especially Western) inventions and discoveries as historical facts (Fleming discovered antibiotics) while challenging every sub-Saharan African innovation or attempting to downplay their importance by claiming it isn't a "major innovation". For example, it doesn't take a physician to realize that advanced Caesarean section can be considered a major milestone, as it would have required extensive knowledge of human anatomy. - Friendship & Rainbows 13:46, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm still here but I'm on sick leave. Nothing too serious hopefully. I will get back to you. - Jjc2002 09:40, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

"it is disappointing to see that the history of non-Eurasian (especially sub-Saharan African) science and technology is so poorly documented compared to the much more voluminous tomes on Eurasian accomplishments."

Maybe because both qualitatively and quantitively there's less to document. Yes, there were centers of learning in Timbuktu etc. but what was the greatest innovation to come out of them?

You refer to "the Sankore University". I think madrasa would be a more accurate description. Ditto Katsina. Universities were corporate institutions not just centers of higher learning like cathedral or monastic schools.

Any idea when those Yoruba, Ganda and Fang words entered their languages? Were they put to use in their maths?

"Timbuktu astronomers used the cosine, tangent, cotangent, secant, and cosecant functions of trigonometry."

None of which they had discovered.

The Ife Bronze Heads are very fine works of art, as are the Benin Bronzes. (Both are made from brass rather than bronze. "Copper alloy" is I understand the preferred museum description).

I'm quite happy to accept that in various parts of the pre-modern world various medics had certain remedies and treatments for local illnesses, some of which helped.

With respect to agriculture I'm quite happy to accept that certain African techniques would work better in Africa than certain European ones and vice versa. But your claim was of Blacks being "very advanced in agriculture"." But you didn't answer the question, advanced in comparison to whom? Were African techniques more advanced for Africa than, say, Chinese techniques were for China?

"how could a civilization with access to such knowledge and technology possibly not try to build on it and come up with improvements?"

Ancient Egypt had a civilization that lasted millennia. How many improvements did it produce pre-Alexander? Byzantium lasted over 1000 years and had access to ancient Greek works and neighboured the Islamic world in its Golden Age. What did it produce? How much innovation has the Islamic world produce in the last 6 centuries?

Ever heard of the saying "the burden of proof lies on those who assert"?

Actually, I hadn't, at least not in that wording, before you used it, but I'm familiar with the idea.

"Blacks were the first to domesticate animals" and "European scholars of the past actually proudly claimed they finished their education in Ethiopia" are two assertions you made but have now retracted. But you've made other assertions for which you've provided no proof e.g. "South Africa had an advanced structure (the Enkis calender) 75000 years ago", "the Dogon had invented some kind of telescope back in the 1200s", "the Dogon also had knowledge of another companion star to Sirius, Sirius C", "the discovery of the white dwarf as a category of star", "Blacks were the earliest people to build complex, multi-story buildings", "It is a known fact that the Nok's judicial system pre-dates European judicial systems", "Plenty of written records have been left from ancient Nok times".

You say you "have provided dozens of examples that sub-Saharan Africa was in fact more advanced than you give it credit for". Now unless you're over, say, 35 I've been reading and listening to the likes of Basil Davidson since before you were born. I've never questioned the existence of sub-Saharan African civilizations. Nor do I think that they were incapable of innovation. What I do question is whether any of these were as advanced as the most advanced Eurasian civilization of their day. I also argue that they weren't major centers of innovation.

Look at the "off the top of my head" list I posted on 9/4/19. Or consider other advances. Certain elements e.g. gold and iron were known to the ancients but most had to be discovered. Were any discovered in sub-Saharan Africa? Over the centuries various laws of nature have been discovered. Were any discovered in sub-Saharan Africa? How about advances in maths? Now a 75000-year old calendar and a 750-year old telescope would be a short list but they'd be a list. If they existed.

I'll skip over the ad hominims directed towards me.

"why are you still accepting (and defending) Human Accomplishment, a work by the known anti-Black scholar Charles Murray, as valid?" See the following article: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/07/why-is-charles-murray-odious

I had already read this article as, from time to time, I try to seek out the case for the prosecution. I reread it to refresh my memory.

Nathan Robinson doesn't like Murray, doesn't like his policies and doesn't like his results. Murray may or may not be odious. But even if he is that doesn't of itself invalidate his work. I note that Robinson is editor of the publication in which this piece appeared. I wonder did he give Murray a right of reply?

Tellingly what Robinson doesn't do is provide any evidence the Murray the social scientist fiddled his figures -- as Gould wrongly accused Morton of doing -- to understate sub-Saharan African accomplishment.

Nor does he provide any evidence that Murray the public figure advocated discriminating against people based on their skin color.

Nor does he provide any evidence that Murray the private figure discriminated against people based on their skin color.

He does point out that Murray's method favors literate societies and ones that record individual accomplishments but what he doesn't do is suggest a better method.

He's particularly aggrieved that Murray's method didn't give enough credit to African-Americans undoubted contribution in the field of music. Music played on instruments many of which were invented in the West, that we can write out in a system devised by Guido of Arezzo and can record on the descendants of Edison's phonograph.

Robinson is like a prosecutor who tells the jury that the defendant is a terrible person and that he should be convicted of something without producing evidence that the accused actually committed a crime.

You're the person who uses the phrase "Fleming discovered antibiotics". I do think the scientific development of antibiotics -- as opposed to various culture's folk remedies that accidentally included antibiotic properties without knowing of the existence of bacteria -- is one of the great human accomplishments.

If someone can show that a given invention or discovery has been misattributed to Eurasia, I've no problem with that but I want to see evidence not assertions. (What I would suggest that you do, if you haven’t already done so, is to go the relevant Wikipedia pages, edit them where you consider it desirable, and debate the merits of your case on the relevant talk pages.)

Was I wrong to challenge your claims about animal domestication or Ethiopia? Am I right to challenge "the Enkis calender" and Dogon telescopes? If you make a series of claims, some of which are fantastic, then you should expect all of your claims to be queried.

Much of what you've written isn't about sub-Saharan African innovation but rather saying that they also practiced what others had developed elsewhere. Perhaps you might list what you think were the major sub-Saharan African innovations. - Jjc2002 22:17, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

I agree with you that many of the Chinese poster's claims are extraordinary, and as they say "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." That being said, you were also wrong when you made the statement: "If some sub-Saharan African doctors were better at Caesarean sections than anyone else at the time good for them. But being good at Caesarean sections isn’t a major innovation. It’s not writing or the wheel or the other items I mentioned."

I spoke with a genealogist about this, and her response was thus: "Did other Europeans see the same thing and note what Dr. Felkin noted? No doubt the medicine men did perform some C-sections in order to save the life of the baby (and by miracle the mother). I have a hard time believing many mothers lived at all. I would give the Ugandans credit if that were indeed the case. However, a claim by one person does not constitute proof. I've done some research into this claim, and as far as I can tell, Dr. Felkin didn't give much details other than the woman was sedated with banana wine, and the operators used fresh water to avoid germs. In what was supposedly the doctor's account, he told what happened in a haphazard way without many details. What did they use for sutures to close the wound? How did they make this material? Why didn't the doctor ask a few more questions? Historically C-sections have been used in the most extreme cases and usually at the cost of the mother's life. Had the Ugandans had a good way to deliver babies safely, then why didn't the doctor find the recipe for banana wine and do them himself? Why such a dearth of written witnesses on this topic? This would have been a major medical breakthrough for the doctor and the world." (my emphasis) - an anonymous contributor 07:30, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

China Incapable Of Advancing By Itself?

"China forms the largest volume of civilization which the world has seen. There is no reason to doubt the intrinsic capacity of individual Chinamen for the pursuit of science. And yet Chinese science is practically negligible. There is no reason to believe that China if left to itself would have ever produced any progress in science. The same may be said of India," wrote Alfred North Whitehead in 1925.

I'm not sure about this, can this be verified? See "Qing conquest theory". - Friendship & Rainbows 02:21, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

I'm responding to this on the assumption that the "this" to which you refer is to the accuracy of the idea behind the quote and not to the accuracy of the quote itself.

I don't know if such an idea can be verified in the sense that it can be proven but I think a strong case can be made that it's likely to be correct. I take it that you objection is not to the notion that "China forms the largest volume of civilization which the world has seen" but rather to the notion that "Chinese science is practically negligible. There is no reason to believe that China if left to itself would have ever produced any progress in science". My quibble would be with the word "any".

Let me first address the "Qing conquest theory". While it has some merit I don't think it made the crucial difference. Yes China under the Song and the Ming produced Whitehead's "largest volume of civilization" and, by the standards of the day, great wealth but there were things they didn't produce, one of which was modern science. For many centuries China lead the world in most areas of technology but its great era of invention ran out of steam long before the Qing conquest and, more importantly, long before it would have been able to invent a steam engine. Adam Smith noted that the descriptions of China in his day were basically the same as those given by Marco Polo nearly 500 years earlier. But the Europe of Smith was very different to that of Polo.

One technical area where China lagged the West was in glassmaking. And you need good glass if you’re going to make spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, thermometers and all those glass instruments used in labs.

Before the Qing conquest the West had produced Copernicus, Vesalius, Kepler, and Galileo. They had invented the "mother of machines", the mechanical clock with a metal escapement, a miniaturized version of which I have strapped to my wrist, something you can't do with a water-powered timepiece. They not only knew the Earth was spherical; they had not only heliocentrism but also the laws of planetary motion. Educated Chinese thought the Earth was flat.

I think the key difference was in their world-view and in their "other world"-view. The men who gave birth to modern science believed in a creation whose Creator had given laws of nature that could be revealed through thought and by observation. They had Aristotelian logic and Euclidian geometry to help them. They weren't looking for qi or the balance of yin and yang.

Needham, the great champion of Science and Civilization in China wrote that "Though physics has often been regarded as the fundamental science, it was a branch of natural knowledge in which Chinese traditional culture was never strong... one can hardly speak of a developed science of physics". Sivin, another China expert, wrote that the Chinese "had sciences but no science, no single conception or word for the overarching sum of all of them".

I suspect that you have a far greater knowledge of Chinese history than I do so I’d like to ask you a few questions.

What do you think was the greatest scientific discovery made in China, and when?

What do you think was the greatest scientific device made in China, and when?

What do you think was the greatest law of nature discovered made in China, and when?

What do you think was the greatest equation discovered made in China, and when? - Jjc2002 23:05, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Where did you get those ideas from? Okay, it may be partly my fault. What I meant was that "Was China Capable Of Advancing If It Weren't For Manchu Colonialism?" While it's true that China never came up with modern science by itself, in the decades preceding the Manchu conquest of China, Ming dynasty China was experiencing a Golden Age of thought. Many scholars challenged the traditional Chinese culture of submission to authority (such as not questioning their teachers), as well as importing many thousands of books from Europe and translating them into Chinese. Among these were the works of Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Ptolemy. Hence, Ming dynasty Chinese knew of logic, and they also knew the Earth was round. Chinese scholars had also imported Galileo's invention – the telescope – and were using it to conduct experiments like observing solar eclipses. I can literally list a dozen encyclopedias by Ming dynasty scholars, including Xu Guangqi, Li Shizhen, and Zhu Zaiyu, who came up with new ideas (such as using steam and fumigants to prevent the spread of infection), introducing European ideas to China (such as the idea that all laws of nature can be expressed in precise mathematical language), as well as plans to start many scientific projects (including manufacturing telescopes and building astronomical clocks). All these show that China was on the throes of a scientific revolution, and was certainly not far behind Europe, as you seem to be suggesting. - Friendship & Rainbows 12:08, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. Broadly speaking this is my understanding (which I would say is a pretty standard view in the Anglophone world):

- in technology for well over a millennium China led but by say 1300 Chinese inventiveness had largely run its course. From then on Europe took and held the lead. Since ancient times comparatively little was invented elsewhere.

- in science since the ancient Greeks while there was the odd individual advance here or there it was only from the 16th century on that modern science took off and only in one place -- Western Europe.

I'm no expert on Chinese history (or anything else for that matter) but either you're putting too much emphasis on the Manchu effect or I'm underestimating it. In the same way we Irish sometimes blame our own failings on the long-term effects of centuries of British misrule it may be a convenient excuse.

You mention importing books from the West. Was this the result of latter-day Xuanzangs going in search of them or rather was it Jesuits and later others bringing them with them? (By the way Galileo didn't invent the telescope). In saying "China never came up with modern science by itself" and accepting the importance of Western ideas are you not supporting Whitehead's assertion that, "There is no reason to believe that China if left to itself would have ever produced any progress in science"? As I said I would quibble with the word "any". To your question "Was China Capable Of Advancing If It Weren't For Manchu Colonialism?" I would ask "Was China Capable Of Advancing If It Weren't For Western imports?"

I ended my prior post with four questions. I note none were answered. - Jjc2002

- You said that it is a standard view in the Anglophone world that by 1300 Chinese inventiveness had largely run its course; and that it was only from the 16th century that modern science took off, and only in Western Europe. May I ask, where did those views came from? They are certainly not true. From 1573 to 1644, Chinese scientific accomplishments compared favorably with those of the West. In fact, during said period, Chinese scholars were emphasizing the importance of logic, research, reexamination, re-measurement, and placed considerable importance on quantitative validation; all symptoms of the coming of modern science. For example, they no longer blindly trusted the claims of ancient scholars, and instead argued that the wise intellectual should seek the truth for themselves via reading and research.

- Yes, I do not question the fact that China wouldn't have been able to advance if it weren't for Western imports. My main beef with Whitehead's assertion is his claim that "Chinese science is practically negligible" and then people taking that to mean that Chinese science really was "negligible" and China totally had no potential back then. Please bear in mind that it wasn't until after World War II (largely thanks to Needham's introduction of the history of Chinese science and technology to Western audiences) that many Western scholars seriously took an interest in Chinese history. Hence, Whitehead and other Western scholars of his time likely didn't know of Shen Kuo, Zhang Heng, Liu Hui, and many other great Chinese scientists. During the Cold War, for example, when someone decided to name a crater on the moon after Zu Chongzhi, not one American scientist on the team knew who he was.

- In a way, it was both. At first, Chinese scholars during the Islamic Golden Age traveled to the House Of Wisdom in Baghdad, studied the books there (some of which were the works of Greco-Roman scientists), and translated them into Chinese. Later on, Jesuits came to China, bringing with them even more books on Western science and philosophy.

- You said: "I ended my prior post with four questions. I note none were answered". You know, after saying "I can literally list a dozen encyclopedias by Ming dynasty scholars, including Xu Guangqi, Li Shizhen, and Zhu Zaiyu...", I thought that would have sparked your intellectual curiosity and prompted you to look into it yourself, but no. Hence, here are the answers to your questions:

1) Polymath Xu Guangqi emphasized that all knowledge must be based on experimentation. He has been compared to a contemporary, Francis Galton.

2) Xu Guangqi's book on agriculture, Nong Zheng Quan Shu, contained many new ideas, such as irrigation, that were more advanced than any other nation of the time. For example, it described a newly designed complex water conservation instrument.

3) Wu Youxing came up with the idea that some diseases were caused by transmissible agents.

4) Zhu Zaiyu innovatively described the equal temperament via accurate mathematical calculation in 1584.

Oh, and by the way, sorry for the slow reply; I had to save up my pocket money to buy some books on African history. The books just arrived today. I will reply to your post above once I have read them. Oh, and I nearly forgot: can you please link me to some studies on ancient Egyptian DNA? - Friendship & Rainbows 13:28, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

No need to apologize for a delay in replying. We all have lives to lead.

You ask where what I called the standard view came from. I'm not sure I can answer that question but wherever it came from it's a standard view. I compiled tables of the distribution of inventions from a number of books breaking them into 250 year blocks covering 751-1750 AD. While different authors give differing dates and locations for some discoveries there is a clear pattern.

The Smithsonian Visual Timeline of Inventions (Richard Platt 2001) lists 76 inventions over the period.

From 751 to 1000AD, 6 from China, 1 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

From 1001 to 1250AD, 1 from China, 1 from the Islamic world, 1 shared between the two, 3 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

From 1251 to 1500AD, 1 from China, 16 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

From 1501 to 1750AD, 0 from China, 46 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

1001 Inventions That Changed the World (Jack Challoner, 2009) list 69

From 751 to 1000AD, 5 from China, 2 from the Islamic world, 1 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

From 1001 to 1250AD, 5 from China, 3 from the Islamic world, 1 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

From 1251 to 1500AD, 4 from China, 7 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

From 1501 to 1750AD, 0 from China, 41 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

The 2003 Almanac of the Encyclopaedia Britannica lists 24.

From 751 to 1000AD, 2 from China, 1 shared between China and the Islamic world, 1 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

From 1001 to 1250AD, 1 shared between China and Europe, 1 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

From 1251 to 1500AD, 1 from China, 4 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

From 1501 to 1750AD, 0 from China, 13 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

Murray lists 22.

From 751 to 1000AD, 1 from China, 0 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

From 1001 to 1250AD, 1 from China, 0 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

From 1251 to 1500AD, 0 from China, 1 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

From 1501 to 1750AD, 0 from China, 19 from Europe, 0 from the rest of the World.

Before he died Needham in the Conclusions section of Science and Civilization in China Volume 7 Part 2 lists 257 "Chinese Inventions and discoveries". Only 17 are after 1300 and none are at the level of silk, porcelain or tea much less paper, gunpowder or the compass. The next section, the last section of his monumental work, is "Modern science: why from Europe?"

You say, "From 1573 to 1644, Chinese scientific accomplishments compared favorably with those of the West." The West of Galileo, Kepler, Brahe, Descates, Pascal, Fermat, and Harvey? The West that invented the microscope, the telescope, and the barometer, that discovered the laws of planetary motion, the circulation of blood, and the rings of Saturn and that gave us Cartesian geometry and tables of logarithms? What was the comparable Chinese accomplishment?

You make a good point about Whitehead being pre-Needham and may not have been aware of the great individuals you name. But bear in mind that these were individuals centuries apart. The West developed an "apostolic succession" in various fields e.g. Copernicus to Brahe to Kepler and Galileo to Newton and Halley.

Could you kindly give me a link to Chinese scholars visiting the House of Wisdom? By Chinese are we talking about Han Chinese or, say, Uyghurs?

The reason I posed the 4 questions is that I wanted a Chinese person's view. I'm restricted to English-language works. You presumably have the advantage of me there.

To the best of my knowledge Chinese civilization didn't uncover a law of nature, discover a chemical element or prove a great equation (I don't mean to disparage Zhu Zaiyu's achievement but it's not exactly F= ma). This wasn't because of a lack of Chinese genius but perhaps as Sivin wrote, "there does not seem to have been a systematic connection between all the sciences in the minds of the people who did them. They were not integrated under the dominion of philosophy, as schools and universities integrated them in Europe and Islam. They had sciences but no science, no single conception or word for the overarching sum of all of them."

You asked for a link on ancient Egyptian DNA. See https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694 and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_history_of_Egypt - Jjc2002 13:59, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Was China Really Disdainful Of Foreign Ideas?

It is a common misconception in the West that Chinese, especially imperial-era Chinese, have no interest in learning from the cultures of others.

In Human Accomplishment (page 270), Charles Murray quoted a passage by David Landes:

"In the beginning, when China and others were ahead, almost all the transmission went one way, from the outside to Europe. That was Europe's great virtue: unlike China, Europe was a learner... Later on, of course, the story was different: Once Europe had invented modern science, the current flowed back, though not without resistance."

Likewise, in Faustian Man In A Multicultural Age, Ricardo Duchesne wrote:

"why did Europe embrace the invention of telescopes and microscopes? And, conversely: why did China, Mughal India, and the Ottoman Empire not show curiosity for these quintessential instruments of scientific discovery? These instruments were actually brought to China and India, but their elites showed little enthusiasm for them."

I'm not sure whether Mughal India and the Ottoman Empire really showed no interest in the telescope and microscope, but China, contrary to Duchesne's claim, certainly did. In this article, I will attempt to debunk a myth concerning China which seems to be prevalent in the West.

The assumption that all Chinese held a disdain for foreign ideas ignores the huge gulf between the average Chinese intellectual and the ruling elites. Ancient Greek elites, for example, regularly disparaged non-Greeks as "barbarian", but most Greek intellectuals don't begrudge other cultures their accomplishments.

In reality, the Chinese have a long and rich history of eagerly borrowing from other cultures. During the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), the process of cataract surgery, which was invented by the Indian surgeon Sushruta, was bought to China via the Silk Road. Chinese physicians readily borrowed the idea and complimented it with native treatments such as acupuncture. Many Chinese scholars traveled to Arabia during the Islamic Golden Age (622 CE-1258 CE) to learn from Arab scholars. They brought back ideas such as Arabic art which, again, were eagerly accepted by native Chinese, and became popular in China as "Muslim blue".

During the Jesuit contact with the China in the 17th century CE, most Chinese scholars eagerly accepted and translated many Western books, including the works of Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Ptolemy, thus introducing logic and the concept of Earth as round to China. They also imported the Western invention of the telescope, and were using it to conduct experiments such as observing solar eclipses. Western clockmakers were invited to China to teach their craft to Chinese horologists.

The later apparent disinterest by Chinese in Western science was not due to lack of interest, but due to other factors. When Britain sent Lord Macartney to China in 1793 to try to open diplomatic relations, he presented clocks and watches, as well as a telescope and planetarium, to the court to demonstrate European inventiveness. But the Chinese were already manufacturing such objects, learned from the Jesuits, and were not particularly impressed. - Friendship & Rainbows 13:28, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Errors In Human Accomplishment

I've noticed many, MANY errors in this particular book, but attempting to list them all here will take too long, not to mention occupy a lot of space on this talk page. So, I'll just list some of the accomplishments which Human Accomplishment misattributed to certain cultures in the chapter "The Events That Matter I: Significant Events", despite the author's claim that "the idea that undiscovered scientists or artists or philosophers who actually contributed important works have failed to get consideration does not square with the mind-numbing level of detail included in contemporary reference works." (page 109)

- 1668 England: Robert Hooke proposes that fossils can be used as a source of information about the Earth's history.

Long before Hooke, ancient Greek thinker Xenophanes concluded from his examination of fossils that water must have once covered all of the Earth's surface.

- 1672 England: Isaac Newton describes the light spectrum, and discovers that white light is made of a mixture of colors.

Alhazen and Kamal al-Din discovered this during the Islamic Golden Ages.

- 1884 Austria: Sigmund Freud and Carl Koller use cocaine as a local anesthetic.

The Inca were the first to use cocaine as anesthetic. It was not until Freud and Koller's experiments that the non-Amerindian world knew about the anesthetic properties of cocaine. Soon after Freud and Koller discovered this, cocaine became a popular sedative among Western physicians. Also, several other Amerindian civilizations, such as the Aztec, also had effective anesthetics, such as lotion made from root of peyote. Prior to 1847 (when ether was discovered), non-Amerindian surgeons did not have anesthetics as potent as those used by the Amerindians. Consequently, surgery in the non-Amerindian world was often a last resort and a barbaric practice; some physicians famously resorted to knocking patients out before surgery. Before the discovery of ether, alcohol and opium were the most reliable ways non-Amerindian surgeons had to numb their patients' pain. The high dosages of alcohol or opium required to dull pain sometimes killed the patients.

- 1839 USA: Charles Goodyear invents vulcanization, revolutionizing the utility of rubber.

The Olmec, who were also the first to tap and utilize rubber, invented a vulcanization process very similar to Goodyear's around 1700 BCE. They cured rubber by building a fire of palm nuts. The smoke from these nuts, most often from the uricuri palm, contained acetic acid and phenols that cured the rubber.

- 1514 Poland: Nicolas Copernicus's Commentariolus is the first statement of the heliocentric theory. It culminates in the publication of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium in 1543.

Greek astronomer Aristarchus presented the first known heliocentric model millennia before Copernicus's time.

- 1853 England: George Cayley invents a glider that accomplishes the first unpowered, manned flight in a heavier-than-air vehicle.

The Chinese were the first to fly heavier-than-air vehicles, namely kites carrying humans. In 550 CE, Emperor Kao Yang experimented with the such first successful manned flight. He ordered some of his defeated foes to be fitted with kites and cast from the top of the Tower Of The Golden Phoenix. One of them, Yuan Huangtou, survived after flying for 2.5 kilometers.

- 1789 France: Antoine Lavoisier's Traite Elementaire de Chemie, a founding document in quantitative chemistry, states the law of conservation of matter.

Lavoisier was a great scientist who made many original contributions, but this was not one of them. During the Islamic Golden Ages, Persian scientist al-Biruni discovered that the mass of matter always remains the same, even though it may change its shape or form. In fact, Lavoisier cited al-Biruni's works frequently in his papers.

All this lead to a conclusion that Murray's book, despite being intended for adults, is more appropriate for high schoolers. It contains so many errors that a university student of history would have been embarrassed to include in an essay of theirs (see European Dark Ages, pages 9, 14, 32, 33, 262; the Chinese had a culture that makes Europe look primitive, page 9, emphasis mine, as well as Murray's claim that China was not a learner unlike Europe, see my section "Was China Really Disdainful Of Foreign Ideas" on this talk page). It is clearly alarming that such scholarship has mostly positive reviews. Murray is free to make his arguments but must do so with rigor. - Friendship & Rainbows 12:12, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

While you make some interesting observations, I think you're missing the central point. Murray's discussing Events, not Inventions, not Discoveries, Events.

Let me give an example other than one of the ones Murray listed and you discussed. John Philoponus (c.490-c.570) described an experiment using falling bodies with different weights that disproved Aristotle's theory on this matter. Yet for the next thousand years Aristotle's theory held sway and Philoponus's experiment was largely ignored. But when Galileo did something similar people took notice. Philoponus -- or a predecessor whose work he may have been describing -- made the discovery but Galileo's was the significant event.

Xenophanes may have predated Hooke by a couple of millennia but Hooke was part of an idea whose time had come as witnessed by the fact that he was a contemporary of the like of Nicolas Steno and John Ray.

I know that Alhazen/Ibn al-Haytham in particular and Kamal al-Din al-Farisi did important work on optics (as did the latter's contemporary Theodoric of Freiberg) but my understanding is that basically while they showed how rainbows are made Newton showed how a spectrum could be recomposed into white light, deduced that there was a problem of chromatic aberration and invented the reflecting telescope to overcome the problem.

With respect to Freud and Koller Murray said that they used cocaine as a local anesthetic. He didn't say they invented or discovered its use.

With respect to vulcanization much might depend on its definition. Olmecs processed rubber but that doesn't meet every definition of vulcanization. Either way the Olmecs didn't make tyres because they didn't have the wheel.

I would be surprised if Murray was unaware of Aristarchus's theory. He should have said something like "restatement" or "modern statement" but again we're in Philoponus/Galileo territory.

With Cayley we might be back in definition territory. Were the Chinese born aloft by kites inside them (i.e. inside a vehicle) or were they hanging beneath them? The Wright brothers acknowledged the influence of Cayley the first person to identify the four aerodynamic forces of flight (weight, lift, drag, and thrust). How much did they owe to people thrown off towers?

It would have been better had Murray used a different term to "Dark Ages", but it's hard to know what to use in its place, "Early European Middle Ages" perhaps?

I think Murray is basically correct that, unlike Europe, China wasn't a learner. That’s not to say that China learnt nothing nor that there weren't individual Chinese willing to learn but that there wasn’t a culture of learning. Take what I consider the most important and influential textbook of all time in any culture, Euclid's Elements, a textbook that was in use for over 2000 years. The first half of it was translated into Chinese by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci and his Chinese helpers. Now China had been in contact with the Islamic world for nearly a millennium at that point and Islamic scholars knew their Euclid. In my opinion the Elements would have been a more useful an acquisition than "Muslim blue". Islamic scholars also knew that the Earth was a sphere, something that had been known in Western Eurasia for nearly two millennia before the Jesuits brought this late-breaking news to the Chinese elites. These events predate the Qing conquest.

You mention that the Chinese already had things that the Macartney brought with them. But there were things you don't mention, things the Chinese didn't have such as hot-air balloons and diving equipment. A half-century later the British came with steam-powered gunboats to force the opium trade on China. Balloons would have been handy to spot them coming and the diving equipment would have been helpful to see if anything could be salvaged. My understanding is that the reply to Macartney had been drafted before he arrived i.e. the establishment had made its mind up in advance.

Compare that attitude to that of the Japanese who, even in their period of self-imposed isolation when the only contact allowed with the West was the once a year arrival of a Dutch ship, insisted on being kept abreast of "Dutch Knowledge". - Jjc2002 13:55, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

while they showed how rainbows are made Newton showed how a spectrum could be recomposed into white light, deduced that there was a problem of chromatic aberration and invented the reflecting telescope to overcome the problem.

This is not relevant to what Murray wrote: "1672 England: Isaac Newton describes the light spectrum, and discovers that white light is made of a mixture of colors." Hmm… discovered "that white light is made from a mixture of colors"? I thought he wasn't the first to discover this.

With respect to Freud and Koller Murray said that they used cocaine as a local anesthetic. He didn’t say they invented or discovered its use.

I spoke with some medical students, and they pointed out that Freud and Koller mostly just rediscovered cocaine as anesthetic, as well as made some minor improvements. But, this pales in comparison to the Inca's discovery of cocaine as anesthetic, one of the first, if not the first, reliable sedatives that allow surgery to be performed without having to perform surgeries quickly (due to having a patient that is likely to be awake and screaming), thus revolutionizing surgery, allowing surgeons to work more slowly and carefully on the patient. Besides, didn't you pointed out that the Chinese's experiments of heavier-than-air flying were not nearly as significant in comparison to Cayley's?

With respect to vulcanization much might depend on its definition. Olmecs processed rubber but that doesn’t meet every definition of vulcanization. Either way the Olmecs didn’t make tyres because they didn’t have the wheel.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the point isn't that the Olmecs didn't make tyres, but that they, besides tapping and utilizing rubber, had invented a process of curing rubber using acetic acid and phenols, long before Goodyear patented "his" discovery (which the Olmecs had known for millenia by then).

I think Murray is basically correct that, unlike Europe, China wasn't a learner. That's not to say that China learnt nothing nor that there weren't individual Chinese willing to learn but that there wasn't a culture of learning. Take what I consider the most important and influential textbook of all time in any culture, Euclid's Elements, a textbook that was in use for over 2000 years. The first half of it was translated into Chinese by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci and his Chinese helpers. Now China had been in contact with the Islamic world for nearly a millennium at that point and Islamic scholars knew their Euclid. In my opinion the Elements would have been a more useful an acquisition than "Muslim blue". Islamic scholars also knew that the Earth was a sphere, something that had been known in Western Eurasia for nearly two millennia before the Jesuits brought this late-breaking news to the Chinese elites. These events predate the Qing conquest.

May I ask, have you studied Chinese history? No offense, but you sure seem to be lacking in that particular area. What you and Murray seem to be implying was that imperial China was a civilization with little interest in learning from others (which, as I've said, is true for the elites, but not for the average intellectual), while Europe conversely was a "learner" (which wasn't necessarily the case).

For example, during World War II, Chinese forces, who had more experience in fighting the Japanese than the British, tried to impart some ideas to the British. The British scoffed and turned down the offer, saying they don't need to learn from "yellow people". That attitude lead to the lost of some British colonies, such as Singapore, to the Japanese.

Also, contrary to what you seem to be implying, the Chinese had absorbed many European ideas from the Muslims, such as Aristarchus' theory of heliocentrism. So why did they not improve on it? The answer was not because the Chinese had no interest in learning from others, but because due to the dominance of Confucianism in Chinese thought (which remained unchallenged until the Ming dynasty), the Chinese were very practical, not theoretical, minded. They were largely disinterested in the heliocentric vs geocentric or round Earth vs flat Earth debates then raging in India, the Middle East, and Europe. They just wanted to be able to predict eclipses and other astronomical phenomena with good accuracy. The Chinese also had access to Western chemical nomenclature, such as the Greek Four Element theory: air, water, fire, and earth. So why did they still used the wuxing theory (water, wood, fire, earth, and metal) by the 19th century CE? Again, it was due to cultural differences, not a haughty disdain of non-Chinese ideas. While some Muslim and European scholars had tried to convince the Chinese that their wuxing theory was flawed, they made the mistake of missing the point: the wuxing were never regarded by the Chinese as "elements" in the Greek sense of pure materials from which all other substances are made. Instead of abandoning their traditional wuxing theory entirely, the Chinese used the Greek Four Element theory alongside wuxing, as during that time, the Greek theory was not superior to the Chinese one in terms of explaining phenomena.

You claimed that "Islamic scholars also knew that the Earth was a sphere". May I ask, was this actually true? According to the religious leader of Saudi Arabia, Sheik Abdul-Aziz Ibn Baaz, in 1993: "The Earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment" (Muslim Edicts Take on New Force). Also, as recently as October 2007 on Al-Fayhaa TV in Iraq, a Muslim scientist also declared that the Earth is flat as evidenced by Qur'anic verses and that the Sun, which is also flat (my God, even the Chinese during their flat earth theory years knew this isn't true), is much smaller than the Earth and revolves around it (Iraqi Researcher Defies Scientific Axioms: The Earth Is Flat And Much Larger Than The Sun (Which Is Also Flat)).

You mention that the Chinese already had things that the Macartney brought with them. But there were things you don’t mention, things the Chinese didn’t have such as hot-air balloons and diving equipment. A half-century later the British came with steam-powered gunboats to force the opium trade on China. Balloons would have been handy to spot them coming and the diving equipment would have been helpful to see if anything could be salvaged. My understanding is that the reply to Macartney had been drafted before he arrived i.e. the establishment had made its mind up in advance.

Again, this is simple ignorance of Chinese history. The ruling power in China at the time was the Manchus, not the Han Chinese. The Manchu emperor Qianlong was the one responsible for rejecting the Macartney Embassy in advance. Also, the backward Manchus, in their zeal to crush any opposition to their rule, restricted the Chinese from much new knowledge and technology, such as cannons and firearms. Most Chinese simply weren't aware of the new ideas; they thought the British only brought things they already had. While a few Chinese, such as Dai Zhen, who were aware of the new European advancements had expressed interest in learning from the foreigners, they were largely powerless in stopping the Manchus from prohibiting the new inventions and discoveries from flowing into China; because the Manchus were worried that the knowledge can be used by the disgruntled Han Chinese against them. In fact, so ferocious was their censorship that even a Chinese scholar named Zhu Fangdan was executed because he had adopted and expanded upon Galenic medical science and came to the conclusion that the brain, not the heart (as is traditionally believed by the Manchus), is the center of thought.

It would have been better had Murray used a different term to "Dark Ages", but it's hard to know what to use in its place, "Early European Middle Ages" perhaps?

Murray's claim that Europe was backwards, stuck in a "Dark Age", is completely false. Fact is, the so-called "Dark Ages" was actually a period of great thought (see The Twelfth-Century Renaissance by R.N. Swanson), such as with the invention of Carolingian miniscule, Occam's Razor, eyeglasses, and the adoption of gunpowder. Also, Murray's claim that China was more advanced than Europe during medieval times is also untrue. As you probably know, Europe had Archimedes' screw, concrete, concept of Earth as sphere, heliocentrism, and many other inventions and discoveries that China didn't had until Muslims or Europeans introduced the Chinese to them.

I would be surprised if Murray was unaware of Aristarchus's theory. He should have said something like "restatement" or "modern statement"

Yes, but what Murray said was Copernicus's was the first statement of the heliocentric theory. He had shown his ignorance again and again, and yet you continue to defend him and his book Human Accomplishment. Why? - Friendship & Rainbows 11:08, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

Hi,

Many thanks for your reconstruction and sorry about the delay in replying but "life". I didn’t know you were young (I still don't you could be a ninety-something transsexual Pygmy for all I know and for all you know. I could be also but I work on a good faith assumption) but you write with the idealism and impatience of youth. You and I may be at opposite ends of a scale. I see you as far too willing to uncritically embrace arguments that supports your cause whereas I know I can be too skeptical at times. Let me give you an example of where I'm weak. Perhaps the most astonishing discovery -- to me anyway -- in my lifetime was that of the "hobbit". Supposing there had been a volcanic explosion on Flores that buried all the evidence before it could be shown to the rest of the world. I'm sure I'd have dismissed the "discovery" as either a hoax or an honest mistake, that the bones were those of a monkey, an ape or of a deformed human, not those of a meter-tall hominid that was probably still alive when modern humans reached Australasia. I'm too likely to dismiss the evidence of the highly improbable. You strike me as too eager to embrace if it tells you what you want to hear.

I have the feeling that the discussion you're having with me is one you'd prefer to have with some older authority figure(s) in your life. It's my impression, perhaps false and unfair, that many Chinese people have negative attitudes towards black people and it's also my impression that this is something you might be reacting to.

I'm old enough to remember debates on whether smoking causes cancer and one of the arguments advanced by the tobacco apologists would be along the lines of "my uncle smoked a hundred a day and lived to be ninety and it never did him any harm".

Some of your points have an element of that about them. When I argue, which is a pretty standard Western argument, that the West was more open to outside ideas than was China, pointing to a specific instance where some Westerners weren't open or to where some Chinese were doesn't refute the underlying point. If someone says that men are on average taller than women pointing to a tall woman or a short man does not refute the assertion. (If someone said all men are taller than all women then pointing to the tall woman or the short man would be valid). You make some good points (which have made me revise my views somewhat but not a lot) but they're mixed in with assertions sub-Saharan Africans being the first to domesticate animals or the Dogan and Sirius.

I come back again to Euclid's Elements. This was the most influential textbook in the West for over 2000 years (I suspect my late father, born in 1918, learnt his geometry by the same Book and Proposition numbers that Julius Caesar, al-Khwarizmi, Thomas Aquinas, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and any educated child in Western Eurasia would have done). The Chinese were in contact with people who used it for almost a thousand years before Ricci yet it wasn’t translated. That may not say much to you but it says a great deal to me. (By the way, would you happen to know roughly when Aristotle's Logic was translated into Chinese?).

One of my main interests in history is the question of "why the West?" But to answer that you have to answer the question "why not China?" I think the answer lies not in raw ability or in raw resources but rather in the differing mental models Chinese and Western intellectuals had of how the world worked.

Aristotelian logic, Euclidian geometrical thinking (not the geometry itself but the building up brick by brick from solid foundations) and the Christian belief in a world governed by laws -- God's, man's and Nature's -- gave Western scientists and discoverers a mental tool kit that wasn't available to the Chinese intellectual. If we look at the laws of nature or the great equations these were discovered by Westerners. Similarly, if we look at chemical elements some were know in ancient times, e.g. gold and iron, but most had to be discovered through chemical experiments. Again, they were discovered by Westerners. Now, this wasn't because of a lack of smart people outside of the West but it's hard to discover a law of motion or of planetary motion if you think it depends on the balance of ying and yang or the whim of Allah.

To answer another of your questions I don't know a lot about China or Chinese history but I do know about the difference between Han and non-Han dynasties. I think you place too much emphasis on blaming the Manchus. The evidence is that in terms of inventiveness and in the development of scientific knowledge China was overtaking by the West before the Manchus worsened the situation. Remember what Ricci said about the state of natural philosophy in China in pre-Manchu times. (By the way, is it true that there is a Chinese term for what some Westerners call the Middle East that also translates as "The Middle East" in Chinese because that was the way Jesuit map-makers described it?) It may be that excessive Manchu-blaming is something that some Han engage in the way some American Democrats go on about Russian interference in 2016 rather than admit that Hilary was a bad candidate.

I take it that you speak or at least read Chinese and there you have a huge advantage over me. I’m confined to books in English and I’d love to be able to read a history of the world or of science written from a Chinese or Indian or Islamic or Latin American or African perspective but I don’t know of any good ones translated into English. - Jjc2002 13:48, 9 March 2020‎ (UTC)

No offense taken. Yes, I agree I can be too trusting, and not just of sources which say what I want to hear, but too trusting of anything in general if it seems well-argued. I once believed that NASA may have deceived the world with the "so called moon landings" and that the Holocaust was a massive hoax. This wasn't because I have anything against America, Jews, or the West, but because the people making the arguments seem to be respectable, rational people; in contrast to their opponents, who seems mostly interested in shouting down facts they don't like. See the following book. As you can see, to a young Chinese who knows little about European history, that book seems valid. Thankfully, I have since learned that both those claims (moon landing denial and Holocaust denial) are full of crock.

https://barnesreview.org/product/the-holocaust-hoax-exposed-debunking-the-20th-centurys-biggest-lie/

That being said, I guess it's true what they say, that all people are fundamentally hypocrites. To quote yourself, you are occasionally guilty of what you criticize.

Take your passage, for instance, that Chancellor Williams' book won't be on top of your reading list, and then immediately after that you claimed that Chancellor Williams was a writer who claimed "that ancient Egypt was predominantly a Black civilization", "a cottage industry exists producing works that make exaggerated, feel-good claims about precolonial sub-Saharan Africa", and that you "don't question the sincerity of such authors", but you "do question their objectivity". Those passages clearly showed that you refuse to read Chancellor Williams' book because you believe it is unreliable, and that you question its objectivity. But when pressed about this, perhaps realizing that you have made a grave mistake with those claims (but not willing to admit you had made a mistake), you claimed you never said Williams' book was completely unreliable. On the side, notice that your claim that "being good at Caesarean sections isn't a major innovation" have since been shown to be just as emotional and non-factual as my Dogon/Sirius claim.

Please educate me, but (as someone who spoke and read Chinese since as long as I could remember) to the best of my knowledge, outside of a few select intellectuals (e.g. Mengzi) and the elites, Chinese people in general DON'T have an aversion to learning from others. As I pointed out above, the reason China was slow to embrace certain ideas (such as round Earth and what would become modern element theory) wasn't due to a haughty disdain of non-Chinese ideas and accomplishments, but simply because they were too practical minded to understand/appreciate these ideas. In fact, Chinese history is awash with countless examples of borrowing from others, but what IS conspicuously absent is teaching others Chinese ideas. Several Chinese Buddhists throughout history have observed (usually with disappointment) that China had borrowed and incorporated a lot of Indian ideas, such as Indian chess, yoga, Indian philosophy, and Indian martial arts, but India had borrowed little from China.

On page 234 of a book you cited, Encyclopedia Of The History Of Science, Technology, And Medicine In Non-Western Cultures, the following stood out to me: "Al-Jabarti's French contemporaries voiced frustrations at the difficulties they faced in their occupation, from continued uprisings in Cairo to disappointing responses to marvels like the montgolfiere balloon. Edme Francois Jomard was present at the first balloon's launch, and his assessment is often quoted to show the lack of curiosity or even antagonism toward science among the local population: “The Africans, uneasy to show emotion and well-guarded against the arts of the Europeans”, were seen walking along al-Azbakiya square “not even deigning to lift their heads”. However, al-Jabarti's report was quite different. He claimed that, “The people, as usual, raised a great din about [the announced balloon launch]. On the afternoon of this day the people and many Frenchmen assembled to observe this marvel”." Now, if Al-Jabarti's account is to be believed, that would imply that much of the non-Western world's (including China) supposed disdain for foreign ideas was invented by colonial-era Westerners, while Europe's eagerness to learn from others may have been exaggerated, in order to justify colonial-era Westerner's view that non-Whites were inferior.

Also, why did Europeans considered negative numbers as useless until the 15th century CE, even though they had been in contact with the Muslim world for centuries by then? Medieval Muslim scholars not just acknowledged, but also had rules for adding and subtracting negative numbers, which they picked up from the Chinese and Indians. Why did this knowledge failed to illicit the interest of European scholars? Is it because Europeans didn't have a culture of learning? Or is it because European mathematics was founded on geometrical ideas, and that lengths, areas, and volumes resulting from geometrical constructions necessarily all had to be positive?

You seem to have misunderstood me and my beliefs somewhat, so let me clarify here:

- I do not deny that around 1300, the West began to overtake China scientifically and technologically. In fact, I've known about that fact since I was a child. What I do question is whether China would have fallen so far behind if it weren't for Manchu invasion and censorship. In fact, the evidence indicates that China could have caught up with the West without the burden of Manchu censorship.

- My main beef is with the book Human Accomplishment. It contains so much errors and shortcomings that would put Chancellor Williams' book to shame (in terms of being wrong). Yet, you continue to accept and defend it, while (apparently) still refusing to even give Williams' book a chance. You claim you are just trying to lessen your ignorance. Well, if that's true, then you would tossed Human Accomplishment aside for the poorly researched junk that it is.

Finally, to answer your questions, 1) Aristotle's Logic was first translated into Chinese during the Ming Dynasty. The Chinese had access to Indian philosophy for millennia by then, but due to cultural differences, the Chinese had trouble understanding and adopting Indian logic, 2) The Chinese term for West Asia is zhongdong (中东), which literally translates as "middle east". Friendship & Rainbows (talk) 13:25, 14 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Again, apologies for the delay in replying, but again "life". I hope you and yours are keeping well.

As someone old enough to remember the moon landings and someone who made the effort to visit Auschwitz and Birkenau, I find it hard to understand how anyone intelligent can question their historicity but Bobby Fischer was Holocaust denier and he was Jewish and a genius. I'm not trying to make an ad hominem attack or talk down to you but, given your earlier comments, you seem to me to be someone looking for some, any established truth to be proven false.

A good question to ask oneself is "if not X, then what?" Let me give you an example. James Hanratty was hanged in the UK in 1962, convicted of rape and murder. Many people, myself included, believed he was innocent and many people, including John Lennon, campaigned for a posthumous pardon. I remember that, when the DNA test was invented, I hoped that his innocence would be proven. I was shocked when it turned out the DNA evidence proved his guilt. Some supporters argued that, because the evidence was kept together, Hanratty's DNA could have gotten onto the key item. But if that happened there would have been two men's DNA on it. If Hanratty was innocent, where was the real killer's semen? If the Nazis didn't kill about 6 million Jews, where did they hide all these years? If the US faked the moon-landings, why didn't their Cold War opponents expose the hoax?

If the achievements of Sub-Saharan Africa was as great as some argue, where is the hard evidence? Yes, some Europeans did terrible things in Africa and, yes, some Europeans denigrated the actual achievements of Africans. But some Europeans did nasty things in the Americas but they accepted the achievements of the Stone Age, wheel-less, horse-less Maya, Aztecs, and Incas. Iron Age Africa has no Machu Picchu, no Teotihuacan, no Chichen Itza. Great Zimbabwe isn't that great.

I don't think all people are fundamentally hypocrites. I like to think I'm not, but maybe I'm fooling myself.

With respect to Chancellor Williams' book, I would say I declined to read it rather than refused to. I've only skimmed through it but that skim doesn't recommend it to me. On page 72 there's a picture of the pyramids. On page 74 there’s a very inaccurate drawing of the Sphinx, complete with nose. Why not a picture and let the readers make up their own minds? What evidence is there of what the Sphinx's nose looked like? What evidence does he provided that the pharaoh in question was Black? The Africa book that's on my very, very long "to read" list is John Reader's "Africa: A Biography of the Continent". Compare the quality of the reviews on Amazon, favourable and unfavourable, to those of Williams's work. Compare the bibliography and notes in Reader's book to the lack of same in Williams's book.

I’m quite prepared to read a book that challenges or contradicts my views. My name is John Carr. Here are links to a couple of my reviews on Amazon

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R1D9CXP5C61GKB?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R27PT0UEABX2WP?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

I've read those books and others with which I disagree to challenge my own beliefs but these are books where I can check the authors' assertions. In glancing through Williams' book, I see this and that assertion and found myself asking "how does/can he know this"?

When he goes on about rights and constitutions does he address the issue of cannibalism? The right not to be eaten? I don't believe I've made a mistake, grave or otherwise, in my remarks about his book, but I'm open to correction. The reason I claimed I never said Williams' book was completely unreliable was because I never said Williams' book was completely unreliable.

With respect to my comments on Caesarean sections I perhaps didn't express myself clearly enough. The reason I don't consider it a major innovation is the same reason I don't consider heart transplants a major innovation (as opposed to a considerable achievement) – they don't save large numbers of lives as say antisepsis, anesthetics and vaccinations do.

With respect to my comments on China I'd make two points. One is the issue of tenses. I'm not arguing that Chinese people in general have an aversion to learning from others (present tense, which is what you used). I'm arguing that comparatively speaking Chinese civilization in general had an aversion to learning from others (past tense). This isn't an original idea of mine but I would say was an impression gained over the decades by reading various English language works. Secondly, I am talking about the elites. Throughout recorded history the average man, an illiterate peasant, was less interested in scientific questions than in the important questions, "will the harvest be good enough?", "will my overlord allow me to keep enough of it to feed my family" and "will my overlord be strong enough to prevent some outsiders stealing my food and my womenfolk?" My understanding is that imperial China was run by mandarins educated in the Confucian classics and little else, not a recipe for a scientific or industrial revolution.

With respect to Murray's book I suspect that never the twain shall meet. You refer to it as "poorly researched junk". Murray spent 5 years working through 183 encyclopaedias, dictionaries of biography etc. How much more would he have had to do to produce adequately researched junk? I think you should separate the research, the judgements, and the conclusions. Members of juries listen to the same evidence and sometimes come to differing conclusions. Consider the 3 Chinese lists about which I assume you know more than I. Does Murray's method produce list that are at least reasonable? It seems to me that those lists about which I have a layman's knowledge seem sound. As regards his judgements e.g. as to what are significant events etc. I would have some criticisms and you would obviously a lot more. But there's a difference between disagreements and "errors". Finally, there are his conclusions about Europe, gender, Jews, and Christianity. Here I find myself in broad agreement with Murray, not because I was persuaded by them but rather that he came to the same conclusions I had.

Is your real complaint about the book is that he reached conclusions that you can't reconcile with your world view? - Jjc2002 13:01, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

My apologies, my English isn't perfect. I should have said, "Chinese people in general DIDN'T and DON'T have an aversion to learning from others". Take one more look at my past posts, including "Was China Really Disdainful Of Foreign Ideas"? As you can see, what I meant was average Chinese intellectual vs ruling elites. Again, please educate me, but China was (usually) very eager to accept new ideas from outside (elites notwithstanding). As I said, the reason why some ideas, such as Euclid's Elements, was slow to reach China has less to do with lack of interest, but more due to cultural differences. Take another look at my post about how Europe was slow to embrace negative numbers. Was it due to "no culture of learning", as you seem so eager to conclude in the case of China, or simply due to cultural differences?

My issue with Murray's book was with his errors, not disagreements with it. Take another look at our earlier exchange. For example, one of the first, if not the first, potent anasthetics (Inca achievement) doesn't qualify as a "significant event", but a mere rediscovery with minor improvements (Freud and Koller) is? A mere rediscovery by Goodyear of something the Olmecs have known for centuries (the same for Lavoisier and al-Biruni), is a "significant event", but the original inventors/discoverers aren't? Europe was stuck in a "Dark Age"? Aren't those all examples of poor research on Murray's part? Friendship & Rainbows (talk) 03:51, 26 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Is The Author Of Human Accomplishment A Reliable Scholar?

Murray, the author of Human Accomplishment, the book which we have extensively discussed about, has made various bunkum statements, such as:

1) Ashkenazi Jews are genetically more intelligent than other races,

2) Blacks are less intelligent than Whites, the reason of which is likely to be at least partially genetic,

3) The Chinese language, with its thousands and thousands of unique characters, was likely created by a race of people who were unusually gifted in visuo-spatial intelligence.

Claims number 1 and 3 were posted in the following article, while claim number 2 was written in The Bell Curve, which he co-authored. Thus, he all but outright said that some races must be genetically smarter, and some dumber. Are you seriously even considering entertaining ANY of these three claims (I'm no expert on Jewish or Black culture/history, so I cannot address the first two, but I've refuted claim number 3 below)? I certainly hope not.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/charles-murray/jewish-genius/

Going by his logic, my race, the Chinese (average IQ 105-108, according to contemporary IQ literature), should be genetically more intelligent than any race except the Ashkenazim (average IQ 110). Yet, I can personally testify that my race is not more intelligent than other non-Ashkenazi races, and is certainly not the most intelligent in visuo-spatial intelligence. The real reason why the Chinese language was created the way it is isn't because Chinese people have unusually great inborn visuo-spatial intelligence, but because since the dawn of China, China was composed of people who spoke many different languages, such as Mandarin, Hakka, and Cantonese. They had to create a written language based upon ideas rather than sounds, and thus were able to unify the thousands of different languages into one single language with the same idea. Then, if you're Chinese and couldn't understand another Chinese's different dialect, you can just write it down. Finally, it is VERY common for even Chinese who have known the language well their whole lives to regularly forget how to write a certain character, and had to look it up. This strongly suggests that the high IQ of Chinese people is a cultivated, rather than an inborn trait.

Friendship & Rainbows (talk) 12:50, 28 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid I'm going to dash your hopes. For the moment I'll just address the Ashkenazi issue.

To simplify matters for the purposes of my argument I'm going to treat anyone with one Jewish parent as Jewish and assume that all Jews in the West are Ashkenazi. (When I refer to Jews in this context, I'm referring to ancestry not religion so it would include the likes of Wittgenstein who had a Catholic funeral).

As I say, these are simplifications but given the figures I'm about to give even if you divide each in two my point will still stand.

Please go to the page

https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/news/nobel-laureate

where CCNY give details of an Irish-American alumnus who won a Nobel prize. Scroll down to the list of previous alumni who won Nobels. Look at the years they graduate and look up their family backgrounds. They were all Jews who graduated between 1933 and 1950. Now CCNY was the first free public institution of higher education in the United States.

The great wave of Jewish emigration to the US was in the quarter century before WW1. They were overwhelmingly poor Eastern European Jews who didn't speak English and who collectively held very, very few professional qualifications. They also tended to dress differently, have distinctive names and many were subject to open discrimination. (Look up restrictive/exclusionary covenants). Many would change their name and/or religion to escape discrimination. But they didn’t change their genes.

Of the 9 Jewish winners one emigrated as a child the others were the children or grandchildren of emigrants. Why CCNY? Back then Ivy League colleges had restrictive quotas on Jewish admissions. (Columbia refused Richard Feynman). As these restrictions lifted more and more Jews could go to Ivy Leagues colleges and get their Nobels from there. So, for CCNY, no Nobels for the first third of the twentieth century, then 9 in 18 years (all Jewish) as the children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants reached college age, then 1 non-Jew since, even though I'm sure they've had lots of emigrants and the children of emigrants through their doors during those 70 years.

If we look at the USA, Jews form about 2% of the population, about 6% of the House of Representatives, 9% of the Senate, 33% of the Supreme Court and about 35% of the Forbes wealthiest list.

In the 2011 UK census Jews formed 0.4% of the population. In the 2019 UK General Election they won 2.5% of the seats in the House of Commons (down from a high of 7.2% in the 1974 elections; while the number of Jewish MPs in the Conservative Party has remained relatively steady the number in the Labour Party has been dropping like a stone). A 2010 survey of wealth in the UK showed that the median Jewish household was roughly twice as wealthy as the average Christian, Hindu or Sikh household (these 3 being roughly on a par) but ten times as wealthy as the average Muslim household.

I don't know of any objective metric for deciding who exactly qualified as a Russian oligarch following the break-up of the USSR but if you look at the leading candidates about half of them were Jews. This in a country where Jews formed less than 2% of the population and with a history of anti-Semitism. These men would have come up through the Soviet education system the same as the rest of the population but were able to grasp a hugely disproportionate amount of wealth and influence as soon as the opportunity arose.

Worldwide Jews, Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi, form less than 2% of the population of the developed, rich countries of the world. They've won 39% of the Nobel prizes in Economics, 26% of the Nobel prizes in Physics, 26% of the Nobel prizes in Medicine, and 20% of the Nobel prizes in Chemistry. They've won 25% of the Fields medals in Maths. There have been recognized World Chess Champions since 1886 with one 2-year interregnum and one 13-year period with rival claimants. Call that 145 "title years". Jews have held the title for 69 of them.

I would suggest that all of the above (and I could add more if required) are, at least in part, manifestations of above average intelligence.

Now, I -- and, if I may speak for him, Murray -- don't claim all this is down to genetics. I think things like family structure and attitudes towards education play a part.

Can you please explain how it's "bunkum" to believe that genes can also play a part? I can understand how it's repugnant to many to hold such a belief, or how many may worry about the implications of such a conclusion. But not wanting something to be true isn't grounds for concluding that it isn't true.

P.S. Can you tell me do you get notified when I reply or do you have to check in? - Jjc2002 12:42, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

I have to check in, even though I've opted to watch this page, I don't get informed for some reason. But I don't mind; I've learned a lot thanks to my discussions with you. Thanks for the stats, but I've long known about the Jewish (especially Ashkenazi Jewish) over-representation in intellectually demanding fields, and their tendency to have received a disproportionate amount of rewards (I own a copy of Richard Lynn's The Chosen People: A Study Of Jewish Intelligence And Achievement, and I've read literature on high Ashkenazi IQ). Also, as I've noted in my original post, I am aware that Murray believe that racial differences in intelligence is not 100 percent due to genes, but "is likely to be at least partially genetic".

That being said, I find it hard to believe that intelligence differs between the races. Over-representation in intellectually demanding fields doesn't necessarily indicate having a higher genetic intelligence. Throughout history, various ethnic minority groups have been over-represented in various fields compared to the general population of their country/state, yet we don't generally claim these groups have/had a genetic advantage in intelligence. The exact reason is still unknown, but based on evidence, it seems highly unlikely its due to nature, but is instead due to nurture.

In Czarist Russia, though Germans constituted 1 percent of the country's population, 40 percent of Russia's army high command were ethnic Germans. The Indian state of Hyderabad was under Indian rule, while at neighboring Madras a very genetically, linguistically, and religiously similar people lived under British rule. Though these people were all but indistinguishable prior to British colonialism, their different histories under two different sets of rulers turned out to result in very severe economic, social, and political differences that persist till today. In 1870, the Burgher people of Sri Lanka, though numbering less than 1 percent of the nation's populace, were the great majority of doctors and surgeons of the nation.

Hence, the "Ashkenazi advantage" doesn't seem to be even partly due to genes, but is instead due to culture, upbringing, education, and attitude.

Finally, intelligence researcher Stuart Ritchie has noted in his book Intelligence: All That Matters that as of now, we don't know the real reason between differences in measured intelligence between the races, as the whole "race differences in intelligence" discipline is a minefield that few researchers and research funding like to go near. Friendship & Rainbows (talk) 13:49, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Why do you "find it hard to believe that intelligence differs between the races"? Is there some logical reason for your difficulty or is it that you don't want to believe it? Can I take it you accept that in the field of sports at least that genes play some part in the vast disparities in the levels of success between certain groups? When it comes to differing male vs female outcomes in certain non-physical fields (e.g. men dominating in fields such as maths, theoretical physics or chess playing) do you think nature plays a part or is it all nurture and social conditioning?

It is true that throughout history, various ethnic minority groups have been over-represented in various fields compared to the general population. But look at the examples that you give. They were in pre-modern times, in non-democracies where most of the populations were illiterate. Many countries operated discriminatory or caste systems. In Ireland a few hundred years ago all the top positions were held by Protestants for the simple reason that Catholics were legally barred from them.

Czarist Russia was backward compared to its Western neighbours so it made sense to import an officer class some of whose sons would go into the family business and get jobs from members of their own class/ethnic group. Bad rule can do real damage. Eastern Germany is still trying to catch up with western Germany despite massive cash injections. I know little about the Burghers but being part-European they presumably formed a go-between class between the natives and the colonial masters. I suspect a far higher proportion of them were literate and could speak a European language and be Christian. What opportunity would a native Hindu or Buddhist peasant have had to become a surgeon?

Hence, I don't think your "hence" even probably, never mind necessarily, follows from your examples.

Once legal discriminations were removed in country after country Ashkenazis have overachieved in the same fields by massive and not just marginal amounts. And they did it under very different political systems. In Russia/the USSR about half their World Chess Champions and half their Nobel winners for Physics/Chemistry/Medicine/Economics were Ashkenazi Jews. Why? And if genes play no part why don't non-Ashkenazi Jews achieve at comparable rates. What's so distinctive about Ashkenazi’s "culture, upbringing, education, and attitude" that makes it so different from those of non-Ashkenazi Jews and of gentiles so as to fully account for these massive disparities, while excluding a role for genes?

I think the reason that the whole "race differences in intelligence" discipline is a minefield that few researchers and research funding like to go near is pretty obvious. The funders are afraid of a possible answer.

Image if you will there exists a Magic Measuring Machine (feel free to use this idea if you find it useful). It can give a definitive answer to all sorts of questions. Who's the greater compose, Beethoven or Mozart? Whatever.

Imagine this is applied to the troubled question of "race differences in intelligence" and people on both sides of the debate agree beforehand that this test is so definitive that they will accept its results either way.

Now suppose the test proves conclusively that nature plays no part. What awaits the tester? Fame, fortune, a Nobel Peace Prize and getting to pick which better looking than they are Hollywood A-lister plays them in the film or mini-series.

But suppose the test proves conclusively that nature plays some part. What awaits the tester? Being called a racist, having the validity of the test retrospectively questioned and being played by Steve Buscemi, even if the tester is female.

The is a course at Harvard called Math 55. It is notoriously difficult and famous or infamous for its high dropout rate. (The class size can shrink to half its original size or less before the semester is over). It is by the end sometimes a male-only class. (In 2015, no women completed Math 55a).

The Harvard Crimson has had a number of articles about its sex ratio over the years e.g.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1994/10/20/in-math-department-its-mostly-male/

There is one comment on this article.

"Everyone knows the reason. No-one is allowed to say it." - Jjc2002 07:59, 6 August 2020‎ (UTC)

The reason why I take the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence with a grain of salt isn't because I dislike it, but because of scant data pointing that way. Please take a closer look at what I wrote. Notice this: "as of now, we don't know the real reason between differences in measured intelligence between the races, as the whole "race differences in intelligence" discipline is a minefield that few researchers and research funding like to go near".

I'm no expert on Jewish culture, so let's talk about something I do know about: Chinese culture and achievement. Year after year, PISA scores show Chinese societies (China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore) or societies heavily influenced by Chinese culture (Japan and Korea) score the very top in math. Also, year after year, Northeast Asians dominate the International Math Olympiad. These were not one-time or tiny differences: Northeast Asians, as a group, have utterly smashed the competition year after year. Are you going to say that this is partly because Northeast Asians are the most genetically gifted in mathematical ability? Or could it be instead that Northeast Asian culture value math and science proficiency, and thus we are instilled at an early age to take heavy interest in these subjects?

Also, the case of Hyderabad/Madras is more than just a legacy of bad rule. The people of Hyderabad to this day underperform compared to the people of Madras, even when the two are brought and raised in the same location and with the same socioeconomic status. It's so bad that the local government is constantly under intense pressure to provide benefits to the underachievers (affirmative action). Could this be partly due to genetics? Remember that the only difference separating these people are a few centuries under different rulers, and thus very similar genetics (as I mentioned earlier), but very different cultures. Overachievement in intellectually demanding fields is a VERY crude, and at best, rather unreliable measure of genetic intelligence.

Finally, if there really are racial differences in intelligence, don't you think modern race scientists like Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, and Helmuth Nyborg would have spotted them long ago? These people seem awfully eager at going after every measure which shows racial differences, from IQ scores to brain and head size. We now know that dogs are genetically more intelligent than cats, as they have more neurons in their cerebral cortex (530 million in dogs vs 250 million in cats). Why have these scientists been unable to show similar differences in the cerebral cortex between human races? All they can do is point to the fact that Northeast Asians have the largest brains, followed by Europeans, with sub-Saharan Africans at the very bottom. But, we now know that the complexity of the brain and brain folds, and not necessarily its sheer size relative to the body, are important for intelligence. Friendship & Rainbows (talk) 17:54, 13 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Can you clarify where you stand on genes and heritability when it comes to differing male vs female outcomes in certain non-physical fields and between certain races in certain sports? Do you accept or reject a genetic component to these?

Another question I'd like you to answer, at least to yourself is, "what would it take to change my mind?" For me it would be if someone came up with a test with the predictive powers of the current tests but without group differences, I’d go back to the opinion I used to hold when I was your age.

With respect to the International Math Olympiad I notice that the US has won 4 of the last 5 but certainly East Asians score highly. I think a huge part of the explanation is cultural but that doesn't rule out a genetic element. The top teams come from high IQ countries. But there's something else. If we look at the names of multi-ethnic teams e.g. the US and UK, they appear to me to be overwhelmingly of European, East Asian, and South Asian origin as opposed to African, Arab, or Hispanic origin. The most recent Irish team has 3 of 6 with what I take to be East Asian names -- a hugely disproportionate number -- but none that appear to be of African or Arab origin. Now the descendants of immigrants are in part the product of the culture their ancestors brought with them but increasingly of the culture of the host country. But they still have the genes they brought with them.

One aspect of Chinese culture is the emphasize on scholastic success in part because of the exams for the civil service. But over the centuries this may have had an effect on the gene pool. In times of famine, strife etc. wouldn't the children of mandarins have a better chance of surviving to pass on their genes?

Again culture-only explanations have to come up with some significant cultural differences between Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Jews sufficient to account for their differing levels of achievement while making a genetic component unlikely.

If you know little about Jewish culture, you can take it I know less about Indian. Perhaps you could give me a link to your sources. In particular to evidence of genetic similarity. Is it merely an assertion, or has hard evidence been obtained?

China and India differ in one important respect. As Reich points out in Who We Are And How We Got Here, "The Han Chinese are truly a large population. They have been mixing freely for thousands of years. In contrast, there are few if any Indian groups that are demographically very large, and the degree of genetic differentiation among Indian jati groups living side by side in the same village is typically two to three times higher than the genetic differentiation between northern and southern Europeans. The truth is that India is composed of a large number of small populations."

I can't speak for Rushton, Lynn, and Nyborg but I suspect they felt that they had spotted something.

IQ scores aren't perfect but they're the best measure of intelligence we have. I'm old enough to remember when the argument was that they were culturally biased. And indeed, there were avoidable flaws in some. But even after they were removed the differences remained. In contrast, when the tests were being devised, testers found that there were some kinds of questions on which females outscored males and vice versa. It was possible to come up with meaningful tests producing the same average score (though not the same standard deviation). Yet for over a century no one's been able to come up with a meaningful test that eliminates race differences.

In 1996 Stephen Jay Gould produced an expanded second edition of The Mismeasure Of Man billed as "the definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve". In the introduction to that edition he wrote,

"May I end up next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the devil's mouth at the center of hell if I ever fail to present my most honest assessment and best judgment of evidence for empirical truth."

And goes on to say,

"I have chosen to leave the main text essentially "as is" because the basic form of the argument for unitary, rankable, heritable, and largely unchangeable intelligence has never varied much, and the critiques are similarly stable and devastating. As noted before, I have deleted a few references topical to 1981, changed a few minor errors of typography and fact, and inserted a few footnotes to create a bit of dialogue between me in 1981 and me now. Otherwise, you read my original book in this revised edition."

Not quite. There is one thing he doesn't mention.

In the Postscript to Chapter 3 it reads:

"The immutable obtuseness of the brachycephalic southern European might veer toward the dolichocephalic Nordic norm in a single generation of altered environment (Boas, 1911).

In 1970 the South African anthropologist P. V. Tobias wrote a courageous article exposing the myth that group differences in brain size bear any relationship to intelligence..."

However, in my well-thumbed copy of the 1981 first edition it reads:

"The immutable obtuseness of the brachycephalic southern European might veer toward the dolichocephalic Nordic norm in a single generation of altered environment (Boas, 1911).

Yet the supposed intellectual advantage of bigger heads refuses to disappear for assessing human worth..."

Followed by more than three pages of examples until reaching:

"In its eighteenth edition of 1964 the Encyclopaedia Britannica was still listing "a small brain in relation to their size" along with wooly hair as characteristic of black people.

In 1970 the South African anthropologist P. V. Tobias wrote a courageous article exposing the myth that group differences in brain size bear any relationship to intelligence..."

As Ian Deary says of the second edition in Intelligence, A Very Short Introduction:

"...the sections on brain size are out of date and he has refused to correct this despite being sent newly available published data by researchers. People in my research field have severely criticized his account of the statistics of mental measurement. A flawed book, but a great read."

So, between the time when Gould wrote the first edition and the time when he produced the second, when faced with new evidence rather than present an honest assessment and the best evidence for empirical truth, he pressed the Delete button -- without mentioning it.

Rushton is dead, Lynn in his 90's, and Nyborg in his 80's. When they were in their prime what chance would they have had to examine differences in the cerebral cortex?

Of course, it's open for those who argue for nature-only to carry out the relevant tests to show there is no difference. Don't hold your breath.

Coming back to the Ashkenazi case there is a testable argument set out in a 2005 paper by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending titled "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence".

As Wade points out in A Troublesome Inheritance.

"...it is a great virtue in a scientific hypothesis to be easily testable, as the Utah team's theory is. The theory implies that people carrying one of the Ashkenazic mutations will be found to have higher IQ scores, on average, than people who do not. Anyone with access to a population of Ashkenazim could test the prediction that high IQ is associated with the Ashkenazic mutations. Strange to say, no one has yet done so or, if they have, they have not published their findings."

If by any chance you have any influence with anyone of influence you might urge them to fund such a test. On the plus side if it disproved the Utah hypothesis it would give support to the nurture-only side. On the downside if it supported the Utah hypothesis it would provide ammunition to those who considering entertaining bunkum statements. - Jjc2002 12:59, 24 August 2020‎

I do not believe that there are genetic differences in ability regarding male vs female intellectual outcomes in life. Remember that it was once asserted that females are less intelligent genetically -- yet today, this so-called "less intelligent" gender has been able to dominate certain tests (see the following link), and also in the US at least, been able to dominate certain scientific fields like veterinary medicine, psychology, and pharmacy.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/oct/11/how-fair-is-britain-data

Regarding the thing about racial differences in athletic ability, it has been pointed out that even if this is true (Blacks, for example, are said to have denser bone structure, giving them a small disadvantage in swimming), it only matters at the top level of competitive sports. In everyday life, this difference is practically undetectable.

I'm no expert on cultural differences in Jewish populations, but some on YouTube have alleged that due to their differing histories, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews have traditionally preferred more practical occupations like business and agriculture, while Ashkenazi Jews have traditionally preferred more intellectual fields like law and academics. They claimed that today, this difference has resulted in different attitudes towards academic success; with the Ashkenazim placing more importance on this than the non-Ashkenazim. I don't have any data to back this claim up, so I would like you, a Westerner who (presumably) know more about Jewish culture than me, to give your opinion.

I got the claim about Indian similarity in terms of population genetics from one of Thomas Sowell's books (I have too many of his books, so I couldn't remember which one I got that particular claim from). It could be wrong, so I'm open to suggestions.

David Reich, the world-class geneticist you cited, has claimed that there could possibly be cognitive and psychological differences between Black and White Americans since these groups were separated for about 70000 years, but he has also said that he does not believe these differences are large -- only a fraction as big as the variation between individuals -- and also that to date, no scientific research has been able to show any average genetic differences between racial groups that go further than those that are linked to survival, such as those that prevent a geographically prevalent disease (Superior: The Return Of Race Science by Angela Saini). He certainly does not believe that the huge differences in IQ scores we observe is primarily due to genes.

Indeed, it is highly probable that the differences in IQ between races is almost entirely -- if not entirely -- due to environment. Arthur Jensen has pointed out back in 1969 that Black children's IQ scores rose by 8 to 10 points after he met with them informally in a play room and then tested them again after they were more relaxed around him. He did this because "I felt these children were really brighter than their IQ would indicate" (https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2002/10/01/race-and-iq-n1000028).

Maybe Rushton, Lynn, and Nyborg have had no opportunity to examine differences in cerebral cortex between the races back in their prime, but considering how active Lynn and Nyborg still are in race research (Lynn's latest book came out in 2019), this still raises some questions. Could it be that NO such differences exist?

Again, the burden of proof lies on those who assert, unless substantial evidence passes the ball to the other court:

"The thesis of Natural History Of Ashkenazi Intelligence has multiple problems, tottering at one theoretical step after another. Each step must support the theory, or it fails. The main criticisms are: (a) Contrary to Natural History Of Ashkenazi Intelligence's argument that the inherited conditions are due to selection, population bottlenecks and drift remain strong explanations of their frequency, and consistent with historical information. (b) In Natural History Of Ashkenazi Intelligence, less than half of all inherited conditions have even a suggested pathway to higher intelligence. (c) The inference that genes which stimulate aspects of neural growth are linked to 35 higher intelligence is pure speculation predicated on a simplistic view of neurological development. (d) The claimed connection between three specific conditions and higher IQ has virtually no empirical support whatever. (e) The demonstrated IQ advantage of Ashkenazi Jews as a whole is less than asserted. (f) The multi-point IQ boosts proposed for specific genes by Natural History Of Ashkenazi Intelligence are very inconsistent with current research on the genetics of IQ. (g) Even within the mainstream of IQ research, which emphasizes geneticibiological bases, the extent of Ashkenazi IQ advantage are easily accommodated as due to environment. (h) The "Talmudic Tradition" of emphasizing learning and abstract reasoning provides a clear cultural explanation for higher IQ among Ashkenazi. In Ashkenazi history, Natural History Of Ashkenazi Intelligence's assumption that higher intelligence led to greater income is contradicted by (I) a rigid system of social stratification, G) the critical importance of capital, social connections, and political patrons in amassing wealth, and (k) the absence of any evidence that success in business required anything more than average intelligence. (How Jews Became Smart: Anti-"Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" by R. Brian Ferguson)

By the way, thanks for giving me your name, Carr. Do you have a Twitter account? Mine is this: https://twitter.com/kuan_yih Friendship & Rainbows (talk) 10:21, 18 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

With respect to male and female outcomes I believe the logical, scientific position to hold is that they are differences that are in part genetic.

While there isn't a "male brain" and a "female brain" there are demonstrable average differences and not just in size. There are differences in the ratios of grey matter to white matter and in the wiring (in females there are more connections between the 2 hemispheres, in males there are more connections within each hemisphere). Some of these differences manifest themselves in the womb, long before the babies are stereotyped. Computers can identify the sex of a brain with 80%+ accuracy. Even adjusting for size (men have bigger brains) computers can identify the sex of a brain with 60% accuracy.

There are average differences in the reactions of newborn babies to certain images and objects depending on their sex. It is interesting that, when experiments are done with young monkeys and toys, the male monkeys will tend to play with boys' toys and female monkeys with girls' toys. Maybe toy manufactures know something about their end users.

Basically, men show more of an interest in things than do women and women show more of an interest in people than do men.

Look at the professions/occupations at which women outnumber men -- teaching, child care, medicine (both nursing and doctoring) etc. Many are people related. Look at the ones you mentioned -- veterinary medicine, psychology, and pharmacy. They're people (or pet) related.

Now go and get a car or a computer or a smartphone replaced or repaired. It's odds on it'll be a man that'll do it. Or travel by bus, train or plane. It's odds on the driver/pilot will be a man.

I run my own spreadsheet on the sex of Nobel prize winners. If we look at the science ones, women have more for Medicine than for Chemistry and Physics combined. Again, this falls into a pattern and makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. The sex that does most of the caring is more interested in caring.

There is also the issue of the different Standard Deviations in IQ tests. Males have a higher SD. The further you get away from the average in either direction you get a higher male to female ratio. As one female scientist put it, men produce more dumbbells and more Nobels. (http://www.edge.org/annual-question/2008/response/10670).

On the question of differences in athletic ability you use the phrase "even if this is true". Have you a doubt about its truth? If so, I suggest you look at the starting lineup for the Men's 100 Metres at the last Olympics. And the one before that. And the one before that. And the one before that. And the one before that. And the one before that. And the one before that. And the one before that. (The one before that was affected by a boycott).

In American Football each team has 2 cornerbacks. I understand that you have to go back to about the year 2000 to find a regular starting cornerback for a major league team that was white. In 2017 not only were all 64 starting cornerbacks were black but all their backups were also (it may well be the same for other years for all I know).

I don't agree that, "it only matters at the top level of competitive sports. In everyday life, this difference is practically undetectable". (I've gone into many a store where the guy behind the counter is East or South Asian and the guard on the door is black, I don't think I've ever gone into one where it was the other way around). But even if it were the case remember we're talking about Human Accomplishment and Murray's writing about Du Fu and Shakespeare not you and me.

If you’ve any interest in sports you have to be in serious, serious denial of the evidence of your own eyes not to accept that there's a genetic component to athletic success along racial/whatever-euphemism-you-chose-to-use lines.

I'm no expert on Jewish culture but I'll make a few comments.

Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews spent centuries under Ottoman rule where there were precious few opportunities for intellectual development for anyone. I understand their IQ scores are average.

My understanding is that within Israel, after its foundation, there was an effort to produce an egalitarian state (among the Jewish population anyway). Nevertheless, I think I'm correct in saying that every Israeli Prime Minister has been Ashkenazi and that there are differences in educational and socio-economic outcomes. e.g. with native Mizrahi lagging behind Russian Ashkenazi immigrants who'd undergone generations of communist education.

Ashkenazi Jews have traditionally preferred more intellectual fields but preferring something doesn't necessarily mean you're good at it. Exposed to it, Pygmies may like basketball but they're never going to be any good at it. Perhaps the Ashkenazi preference is in part for something they have a talent for.

I think you can plausibly -- though not conclusively -- put the high level of success of certain groups (e.g. overseas Chinese) down to culture alone, but I think that the differential level of achievement by Ashkenazis is so great, in so many differing but related fields, in so many differing countries and systems (communist, capitalist) that to believe that genetics probably plays no part isn't to reach a dispassionate conclusion but rather to believe it because you're appalled by the implications of the opposite conclusion.

I'd read Ferguson's piece before you quoted it and was unconvinced by his arguments. Take his first point, "(a) Contrary to Natural History Of Ashkenazi Intelligence's argument that the inherited conditions are due to selection, population bottlenecks and drift remain strong explanations of their frequency, and consistent with historical information." If there is a genetic component then whether it's caused by selection or drift it's still a genetic component.

There's a blind spot common to many on the nurture/environment side of the argument. They'll assert, "the burden of proof lies on those who assert", which is fair enough but they seem to think that assertions are only made on the nature plus nurture side, seemingly oblivious of the fact that they too often make assertions.

If it is fair to point out the Lynn etc haven't found their smoking gun then I think it's fair to point out that the other side haven't found theirs either. Perhaps because it doesn’t exist.

IQ tests have been around for over a century. When they were first being devised women were subject to many forms of discrimination. Yet early on testers were able to come up with meaningful tests that showed no significant difference in average intelligence between males and females (though not one with the same distribution of IQ). Why has no one come up with a meaningful test that manages to show that innate intelligence is equal across groups? Fame and fortune awaits whoever comes up with it. If it's possible. Could it be that NO such test exists?

The organization that's probably done more testing than any other is the US armed services who in effect won't accept anyone with an IQ below 83. Why? Because experience has taught them that their tests measure something real. Low IQ soldiers are a danger to themselves and their comrades. I understand that their tests produce similar results to IQ tests. Even when recruitment is below the desired level they stick with these tests. Why? Because experience has taught them that their tests measure something real.

I admire Thomas Sowell greatly, mostly from YouTube and columns so I've a lot of his books to read.

I like to take people at their word unless I've reason to believe otherwise (as I do with Saini) and Reich may believe exactly what he says, no more, no less. But he may believe more. Look at what happened to Larry Summers, James Damore, Stephen Hsu, Razib Khan, James Watson etc. Reich may, just may, have gone as far as he thought he could go without risking his career.

While it's true that between group differences are often only a fraction as big as the variation within groups that doesn't mean that such differences aren't significant. The difference in height between the world's tallest and shortest women is far greater than the average difference in height between men and women but there are reasons why there are separate events for men and women in the high jump.

(With respect to the Jensen anecdote I don't doubt than there is an environmental/nurture element to the gap but I believe there's something more. I'd be curious to know where this incident took place. Remember up until the mid-1960s education in many parts of the US was segregated and the children might at first have been uneasy around a strange white man.)

I'm old enough to remember arguments about the link between smoking and cancer so I like to think I'm attuned to what I think of as "cigarette company arguments".

Saini writes "although I look nothing like the white British woman who lives next door to me... it's perfectly possible for me to have more in common genetically with her than with my Indian-born neighbor... downstairs". Now, taken by itself we could put such an obviously untrue statement down to ignorance or sloppy thinking but she's either being dishonest or she's really stupid and I don't think she's really stupid. She uses Lewontin's finding that that human genetic variation is mostly within and not between human populations and draws the same incorrect conclusion from it. But she also notes that his argument was subject to "one critique", without giving details or a link. There's a difference between Lewontin's finding, which is valid, and Lewontin's conclusion, which isn't. Saying Lewontin's work was subject to "one critique" is a bit like saying the Titanic was subject to one delay.

Edwards's "one critique" gave rise to the term "Lewontin's fallacy".

Supposing you divide the death certs for a population between smokers and non-smokers. If you compare a death cert from each bundle there's a fair chance that a given smoker will have outlived the non-smoker in the pair. The "tobacco argument" is that because of this you can't draw a conclusion about a link between smoking and cancer. Lewontin looked at traits individually but not at their correlations.

If you take one marker each from Saini, her English neighbour and her Indian one there may be a 30% chance that Saini's marker is closer to the English one. But as you look at more and more markers the percentage becomes zero just as if you look at enough smokers and non-smokers collectively the pattern becomes clear. Saini's genes will be closer to her Indian neighbour's genes than to her English neighbour's ones, though I hope for her downstairs neighbor's sake there aren't genes for honesty.

Saini also writes that, "much heat still surrounds the nation’s apparent black-white IQ gap". There's nothing apparent about the gap. The heat is about its causes and what can and should be done about it but she doesn't tell the reader that.

As I've mention before there's an industry providing PC answers to certain questions and, while I don’t question Saini's sincerity, I do question her understanding and objectivity.

My given name is John, Carr is my surname. I know in certain cultures the family name comes first and the given name last so which way round are you?

I'm not on Twitter and wouldn't even know how to tweet. It's something that seems to bring out the worst in people. You and I disagree civilly and in good faith. Maybe that's possible on Twitter but I don’t know enough about it. While little I put up on the net whether here, or on Amazon or in comments I like to put up under my own name. I don't want to run the risk of being attacked by the sort of people that sewer rats would try to avoid. - Jjc2002, 23:17, 30 November 2020‎

My personal name is Kuan Yih, Lee is my family name.

I think you missed my point regarding male vs female outcomes in life, which, I admit, is partly due to my fault. I should have said: "I do not believe that there are differences in absolute intellectual ability between the sexes." I have long known that men and women have different talents. For one, men are better at visuo-spatial tasks, while women are better at discerning different colors. My point was, I do not believe that there is difference in intellectual potential (other than the aforementioned men more interested in things and women more interested in people) between the sexes.

Take your claim, for instance, that women produce on a per capita basis less geniuses and dullards than men. But, women have long outnumbered men at universities and as advanced degree holders. If I'm not mistaken, most of the new recruits into medical research are women. Might be just a few decades before women make up most of the winners of medicine Nobels. So, men have a higher IQ standard deviation? I don't think so.

https://newsfeed.time.com/2012/07/16/why-women-finally-have-higher-iqs-than-men/

I stand by my claim that differences in athletic ability between the races are very small, and only matter at the top end of competitive sports. You've got a point that, on average, Blacks do better than Asians in sports, and less well than Asians in academia. But, if I'm not mistaken, modern Black American (and other Western Blacks, like Black British) culture has, due to the dominance of the Left in the West, degenerated. Modern Black Westerners tend to be fiercely anti-intellectual, viewing stuff like education and proper speech as "acting White". Like I said on Twitter, how could a culture that takes such pride in ignorance produce much great intellectuals?

As a friend of mine from China, after reviewing the evidence, said: "I've taken a look at the head start programs as well. What they all seem to have in common is: 1) Disadvantaged Blacks or other minorities get signed up for an early education program, 2) They tend to show a noticeable improvement compared to control groups who did not attend head start, 3) After the end of head start, they tend to regress to their group mean. What many people, including Jared Taylor, is to take this as an example of why head start is a failure. But what never seems to be explored is why do the children show improvement until they leave the program? I believe the program increases the children's interest in learning, but once they go home, the negative influence from Black culture pulls them back down. There's your problem! What you need to do is make Blacks shake off their anti-intellectual, promiscuous, self-pitying culture, THEN we will start seeing real improvement."

Been reading up on Ashkenazi Jewish culture, and from what I can tell, Ashkenazim tend to be fiercely loyal to their culture/group, partly due to their long history of being persecuted. That's why, despite severe persecution that would have dissolved most cultures long ago, Ashkenazim are still able to maintain a unique identity within their host populations. Such a people would undoubtedly have ferocious influence by their culture to succeed. Due to their history, they would likely view themselves as needing to be twice as knowledgeable as a gentile in order to be hired for a job (a phenomenon also seen in Malays vs Chinese in Malaysia). Even when these discriminatory practices are removed, these previously underprivileged groups tend to retain their culture of excellence, and thus were able to soar far above others in intellectual pursuits.

Yes, you're right that no such IQ test exist which would show similar scores between different groups. But, as I've said, you simply cannot conclude this is primarily due to genes until sufficient cultural differences are eliminated. Some races (Ashkenazim and Chinese) simply culturally prefer more intellectual pursuits, while some (Black Westerners) prefer more athletic/get-ahead-in-life pursuits. If I'm not mistaken, the average IQ of Black Westerners is 85, while the average IQ of Whites is 100. Assuming what Jensen claimed is true, that would mean Black Westerners vs Whites IQ difference would be a mere 5-7 points (versus the often claimed 15), far less than what differences in current accomplishments between these groups indicate (Blacks having far lower graduation rates, for example).

Sign, John, please tell me you weren't lying to me. Please don't tell me you were hoping I wouldn't look too closely at your sources. Reich clearly started in his book, Who Are We And How We Got Here, which you cited, that we cannot guess what the average genetic differences between races are based on "traditional racial stereotypes". He is also openly critical of Natural History Of Ashkenazi Intelligence, claiming that the genes which supposedly arose due to selection for high intelligence is almost certainly due to bad luck rather than selection. Reich also criticized one of the paper's authors on his obviously false claim that Blacks have no propensity to work when they don't have to, and also claimed that no genetic evidence for lower Black intelligence exists (page 260-263).

Finally, maybe it's just me, but you seem a bit fond of questioning others' objectivity (but not sincerity). Which is a bit strange, considering you sometimes seem sincere but not objective yourself. Notice in "Errors In Human Accomplishment" your earnest desire to prove Murray's book is reliable, and that China was not a learner, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. To be fair, like I said, all people are probably fundamentally hypocrites. I myself am occasionally guilty of what I criticize. Friendship & Rainbows (talk) 13:46, 21 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Happy New Year, Kuan Yih.

Males do have a higher Standard Deviation on IQ tests than do females. Look at Variability under

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence

or if you want it graphically

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-differences/201101/how-can-there-still-be-sex-difference-even-when-there-is

This is something that has shown up repeatedly over the decades.

Can we at least agree on an established fact? There's greater male variability in IQ just as there is in height.

In time women may win most Nobels for Medicine but they're not making such progress in high IQ subjects.

www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-college-major-and-gender-ratio/

There are differences in male and female brains. Scientists can sex brain tissue by differences in protein content.

You point to a study by James Flynn, RIP (the person on the 'other side' I have most respect for) showing females outscoring males. I could point to other that show the reverse or no difference. In either case I don't think a difference of a few points makes much of a difference. I do think the fact that there are more high scoring males does.

I don't know how much sports you watch or how far down you define 'the top end of competitive sports' but my point about security men stands.

Where we and your friend can agree is the damage being done by anti-intellectualism in certain communities. The Left has a lot to answer for and, because of its self-centred smog of smugness, thinks it’s doing good rather than harm.

My unscientific, subjective opinion is that this anti-intellectualism is far worse amongst African Americans than amongst Black British just as it seems to be worse amongst African Americans of Southern slave descent than amongst those of more recent Caribbean or African origin.

With respect to IQ tests remember that they are designed to be tests of intelligence, not of education or general knowledge. And the results show up time and again in differing guises e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm74dm0l7Uk

NO. The 'mean Black Westerners vs Whites IQ difference' IS 15 points. Remember that for every White with an IQ of 95 and a Black with an IQ of 90 there's a White with an IQ of 105 and a Black with an IQ of 80. The mean White IQ is 100. The mean Black Western IQ is 85. 100 - 85 = 15.

I haven't concluded this difference is primarily due to genes. I take it to be about 50:50. It's a conclusion I'm as entitled to make as you are yours, absent evidence to the contrary.

Just how could sufficient cultural differences be eliminated?

There is a way around this. There have to be genes that contribute to intelligence. Either they're evenly distributed or they're not. All that's needed is for a sufficiently rich individual or institution to fund the research into the topic to prove me wrong.

I'm not holding my breath.

I'm pleased to tell you that I wasn't lying to you. I'm not pleased that you would suggest the possibility. How could what I said be a lie?

What I said about Reich was that he 'may believe exactly what he says, no more, no less. But he may believe more.' On page 258, speaking of populations, he writes, "it seems a bad bet to argue that there cannot be ...average differences in cognitive or behavioural traits." Saini writes that he, "thinks some categories may have more biological meaning to them" and that, "He suggests that there may be more than superficial average differences between black and white Americans, possibly even cognitive and psychological ones, because before they arrived in the United States, these population groups had this seventy thousand years apart during which they adapted to their own different environments." In today's environment I think that's about as far as he could go and keep his position.

By all means check my sources. If I've made a mistake please point it out to me.

Again, I make the point if Ashkenazi have a higher number of higher intelligence genes whether they got them by accident or selection they still have them. Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending produced a falsifiable hypothesis. So far no one has falsified it.

I probably am "a bit fond of questioning others' objectivity (but not sincerity)." But only under certain circumstances. I very much go out of my way not to question sincerity unless I have really good grounds to do so. On objectivity I'm not so overly generous.

Obviously, there are areas were objectivity isn't an issue such as in areas of taste. But it does come into question in areas of fact.

I used to believe as you do. I think I did so for two reasons (1) because it was and is the dominant narrative and (2) because it's what I wanted to believe. I still want to believe it. But I don't. I think it's reasonable to concluded that if someone believes something they don't want to, especially if it's an unfashionable belief, it's because he's been persuaded by the evidence.

I don't claim any powers of mindreading but I very much get the impression that you're arguing a case you very much want to believe. If we take some earlier assertions you made, such as about animal domestication or the Dogon, they don't strike me as objective assessments.

On Murray, as I said, I suspect that never the twain shall meet. I think Murray's big picture conclusions are credible. That doesn't mean he gets everything right. I consider Lionel Messi is the best footballer I've seen. I've also seen him cheat. I've also seen him miss open goals. Great golfers sometime miss short putts. Great tennis players sometimes make unforced errors.

Some of your arguments strike me as being akin to ‘Messi missed an open goal/Hale Irwin missed a tap-in so how can you call them great?’ Quoting 2 Islamic idiots who think the Earth is flat doesn’t disprove my assertion that, "Islamic scholars also knew that the Earth was a sphere". FYI The International Flat Earth Research Society is still on the go (https://ifers.123.st/). Does this bring into question my assertion that modern scholars also know that the Earth is a sphere?

I would have some criticisms of HA, you have many more but what in the big picture, not in detail but in his overall conclusions, did Murray get wrong? Was it in reaching conclusions you don’t like?

On China, if I’m wrong, I’m wrong in the company of several Western writers. In one of the admitted few China books on my shelves, Harry Gelber’s ‘The Dragon and the Foreign Devils’, he writes of the China of Ricci as, “…a society where fear of punishment was often great than the prospect of reward for innovation. As another Jesuit…wrote…the Chinese are more fond of the most defective piece of antiquity than of the most perfect of the modern’”.

And later, “… by the…mid-seventeenth century the Chinese and the Europeans had vastly different impressions of each other. The Westerners were far more interested in China than the Chinese were in the West. They were also much more respectful.

… there is no evidence that European thought or practice had any influence on the beliefs of the Chinese governing and literary classes.”

What's Your Take On Human Nature?

Hi. Been reading some books on human nature, most notably Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. Do you agree with these authors that humans are basically good? Or not? Friendship & Rainbows (talk) 13:46, 21 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

My first take on human nature is that there is such a thing as human nature, we're not blank slates or just social constructs. I've glanced through Bregman's books but haven't read them. (I find it hard to take an advocate of open borders seriously). I have heard a lengthy interview with him. I was aware of the story of the shipwrecked boys long before Hunankind came out.

An author can pick the anecdotes that suits his narrative. The shipwreck of the Tongan boys tells a story that suits him. The shipwreck of the Batavia shows another side of human nature. And no concentration camp ever had to close due to staff shortages.

My working assumption on interacting with someone is to assume goodness on their part, unless I've reason to believe otherwise. But I've tried not to be too trusting (I've allowed myself to be foolishly taken advantage of too often).

I think we're a mixture of good and bad in differing dosages and I think nuture counts for an awful lot in which comes to the surface. But just as some people are born deaf or dumb I do think that a small number of people are born with a strong disposition toward evil.