Via Auster, I find that Michael H. Hart has made Understanding Human History freely downloadable here. Auster’s review is here, Sailer’s is here, Tyler Cowen compares Greg Clark’s Farewell to Alms to it here and Arnold Kling discusses it here.
Just finished the book. Hart is not as good a writer as Diamond, making his book come of as “just a bunch of stuff that happens”. His comparison of the New World to sub-Saharan Africa is an excellent attack on Diamond’s theories though. I was surprised by how little time he spent on his own people, the jews (and more specifically Ashkenazi) given that in the final chapters he declares that his thesis is about peoples with high IQs and jews are at the top of that heap. It is also interesting that jews violate his general rule of higher IQ peoples coming from the north (not only were jews originally just a normal semitic people from the middle east, but they cluster with southern europeans genetically). It is also interesting how little attention he pays to the Industrial Revolution compared to Greg Clark who considers it “the one event that happened in history”, to put it most crudely. There is a lot of information in the book I didn’t know before, some of which is just his conjecture but still interesting conjecture, and if you wanted all of human history in one book you could do worse.
December 1, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Looks like just another iteration of the same old crap from people like Rushton, which has been thoroughly discredited all over the place, for instance here. here. I can’t see the point of recycling the same garbage over and over again.
But, opinions differ. It is interesting that this question is so radically polarizing, how little middle ground there is, and how much the view of what is allegedly a scientific question correlates with political belief.
[Note from TGGP: There was something wrong with the last hyperlink you posted and I thought it might screw up the html, so I removed it]
December 2, 2007 at 2:24 pm
What’s your position? Where do you think Hart goes wrong?
December 2, 2007 at 8:12 pm
My position is that there is such a thing as human genetic diversity, and some of it may be linked to intelligence, (if that could be defined precisely somehow), but almost all writing about it is crap, on both sides. In Hart’s case the crappiness of the argument is indicated by his lack of qualifications in the fields he is writing about, and the reliance on discredited hacks like Rushton. So, his thesis may be plausible but I would not waste my time reading stuff like that, when there is plenty of real science being done on human population genetics.
December 2, 2007 at 8:18 pm
That seems sensible enough.
January 25, 2008 at 8:34 am
And, of course, blacks aren’t really the best athletes are they?
So much evidence on racial difference, accumulated by explorers and scientists over centuries, has been unfairly suppressed to promote the unfair political agenda of equality.
Isn’t it time the evidence was given a fair hearing?
(Thanyou for the free download).
January 25, 2008 at 9:11 am
unfair political agenda of equality
That’s funny.
(Thanyou for the free download)
Thank Michael H. Hart, who also wrote it. I only linked to it.
And, of course, blacks aren’t really the best athletes are they?
I guess it depends on the sport. They tend to be at a disadvantage when it comes to swimming.