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[–] Joe_McCarthy [S] ago 

For a more strictly environmental account of human accomplishment the popular go to guide is Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. I found it fairly compelling even as an avowedly anti-racist effort. It's a book that should definitely be read and pondered seriously.

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[–] Walk1 ago 

I have heard about Jared Diamond's book and read about how geographical positioning, climate, et cetera led to the rise of certain Empires and that was it happen chance(not to mention humanist ideas coming back in from Syria into Italy(transfusion of Aristotlean and Platonic ideas and translations of the Greek thinkers and scientists back into Europe), but think its all fraudulent.

Africa is in a perfect situation, geopolitically and so is East-Asia, if you think about it, and neither made the leaps in technological and intellectual advancement that Europe did, even though China was responsible for inventing many practical inventions and inventions in ballistics and gunpowder. Its not as if these peoples did not have the opportunities and resources(Africans) and did not have this plus the capacities(East-Asians), but they lacked technical and intellectual skill on par with Europe. Native Americans had their own Confederacies and had their own civilizations and were in good positions geopolitically(maybe not resources, but there were plenty at their disposal in North America) and they never came close to even having a society by the Medieval period that reflected the degree of development and advancement as seen in Europe.

I think geography and resources and having the appropriate climatic and environmental conditions are important to harnessing geography, resources, and the inventions that have come from the external world to new heights, but I think they are drastically overplayed and I think you will see that come to fruition as North America becomes more race-mixed in the future. Our geography and resources(how much we depend on outside forces for our existence) will not matter because we will essentially cave and collapse and become like a modern day Atlantis. I don't think Jared Diamond's book can be taken too seriously, even though its a decent book.

I think it essentially boils down to race in the end and there is no concrete evidence or proof as to why(but we already know that Europeans are genetically distant from other non-white races by similar/same margins and all the other races are broken out into different species types that are about as distant from each other, as Europeans are distant from them.

We know race exists, we just don't know how it exists and what constitutes it at the core, but I suppose we might not know until there is a new scientific finding or new technologies come out to make a discovery that shakes the world(and most scientists would not want that because they think it would give white supremacists the grounds to clear the world of certain races).

In the end, it seems that those with sophisticated and rationalistic arguments win, as in the case of Jared Diamond, but he makes arguments that very generic/superficial and plastic reasons are responsible for the rise of civilizations and at the base core there are simply to many other complex factors at work(perhaps one can size it up to luck, psychological factors/environmental pressures/specific historical events-religious ideas-et cetera that drove Europeans into being ambitious, developing products, and changing the world). At the end of the day, we will never be able to come to a fruitful conclusion unless more evidence is presented to us and if people continue to hide it then whites will be forever left in the dark. I think one has to also account for the fact civilizations are basically products of the need to survive and there are also anthropological/mento-symbolic/practical reasonings for the rise of civilizations that again don't seem to have to do with the racial(the racial explains why certain civilizations progress and develop to the extent they do and the consistency of their development over a period of time, but I can certainly see why some believe archaic Europeans were a bunch of "backwards" hunter-gatherers without much civilizational ingenuity and development, unlike Middle-Easterners, who were very crafty in this department. At the end of the day, its also a matter of habitat(climate, environment, and how necessity drives societies to form and orient that explain everything and this argument could be used to explain why archaic Europeans did not develop substantially(cold and harsh climate) as much as it is used in another sense to explain their rapid development and progression.

I guess some would say its only a couple hundred years until we see an African Mozart, Kant, or Einstein, but that will never happen or not on the same scale and impact as it happened in Europe(perhaps its because Africa is insignificant and great men are a product of their society and the doings of their society(their notoriety), but I don't think this is the case(I think its basically what I chalk Jared Diamond's argument up to). It can be spun around and we could make arguments East-Asians are a superior people based on his model(they have great intellectual and technical achievements of their own, but never pushed it into the next phase of development, even though they had the potential to).

In this case, it becomes, and I believe Jared Diamond says, this a matter of mentality/ideo-religious influences, but how does that work when Europe is importing intellectual and cultural ideas from the Middle-East and when it has already diffused large parts of its culture, social hierarchy, and economy, from ancient times(Neolithic) from the Middle-East. It makes no sense and I think one is left to say there is something mento-symbolic about the ideo-religious and something about social pressures(one group of people pushing against each other as they advance due to the ideo-religious) that leads to development(its through competition which never has existed in East-Asia), but how does that explain the advent of so many geniuses in Europe from the 16th to 20th century and that very few geniuses and inventors are in fact of East-Asian descent, even though their societies permitted it to a certain extent(then it becomes a political question of whether their societies were too conformist and statist, which gets is again more of a racial quandary that has not been solved, but it certainly ties back to the ideo-religious-symbolic aspect).

I don't think its a serious book and I would take a book that uncovers the hidden depths of race and its truths or makes some great finding or uses some great new technology to uncover the essence of race then to read Jared Diamond's book, because even though it is sophisticated it is very cheap at best. As I said, at the end of the day, why did Europe produce so many great geniuses and inventors and East-Asians have not even come close in the modern era(the only other group that has come as close is Jews and they are part Western European).

Its something to be fathomed at the end of the day and it should not be considered lightly either, since great geniuses, inventors, and even explorers/discovers tend to be the product of a certain quality of mind that somewhat goes beyond the mere intellectual and technical, but integrates itself back into it and its a level of thinking that I don't think East-Asians can master on a large-scale(it boils down to race).