| reggin_bolas said: I appreciate it man, well said. The only issue is I think this guy would probably argue that educational institutions spring up from thriving civilizations. And these civilizations are the result of an intelligent collective that produce new technologies and inventions which make for better tools for agriculture and utilizing natural resources. If you harness your natural resources well, you improve your wealth through commerce. So I think central to his thesis is that if Blacks were equally intelligent as other people, they would have had thriving civilizations and therefore by now would have established educational institutitons on par with the Western world. I think he would also point out that Africa is the craddle of the world, they have had more time on earth than anyone who migrated to other continents of the world. Lol, that's the problem, I can't puncture his central thesis because I can't find a civilization that was once thriving and made advances in the aforementioned areas. |
It takes a single exceptional idea to transform a civilisation. Each civilisation has these at different times, but it's not a reflection on the intelligence of those within those civilisations, because it takes just one exceptional person to have that idea.
When it comes to "black" nations, what is notable is that they live in resource-sparse environments. The same can be said of those in the middle east. What was different between the two was that the middle east was a trading path between Europe and China, both of which are resource-rich. The result is that the "tribal" systems in the middle east coalesced through the influence of traders, and thus some of our greatest ideas in science actually originated in that area. African nations didn't have this benefit.
Add to this the effect of certain religious influences - the romans, the greeks, the buddhists, the jews, the christians, the muslims... these religions, by nature, emphasised the coming together of people and the exchange of knowledge. On the other hand, due to the effects of resource-sparsity, african tribes remained in a more tribal style of religion, which tended to be local.
In essence, the assertion that blacks are less intelligent is based on a complete lack of understanding of the difference between correlation and causation, not to mention a lack of understanding of the bell curve.
