Posts with Comments by ruth
Natural selection and the collapse of economic growth
so number of children is due to "genotype"? funny, i thought it was largely dependent on socioecnomoic and cultural factors. but don't mind me, i'm from a dying genetic branch (my great-grandmother hat seven children, my grandmother had one and i have none -- lots of mutations going on there apparently).
mind you i'm not saying that current trends in differential reproduction are unproblematic. but if your argument hinges on premises this flawed, nobody who knows anything about population will take you seriously.
Ethnic America, 1830
...although, having just read some amazon reviews, i have to say that at least some of the one-star reviews do have a point.
Razib, from your post it seems you haven't read Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks, White Liberals. Do. It's good.
England 2007/2008 GCSE Results by Race/Ethnicity
Steve: "In England, no gender differences were found for mathematics or science overall at either grade." (says the 2007 report, apparently the third/highest level of the test was not done in Britain).
Steve, I checked TIMSS (International Test of Maths and Science) in Germany, and the results for population III (highest level) flatly contradict the Thuringia statistics I cited above: Girls score about 1/3 sigma lower than boys. (Find it hard to believe that says anything about fundamental maths abilities, though, as I did the TIMSS tests a while ago for fun and they were ridiculously easy.)Wonder if you can find British data.
To see the top end of the educational gender distribution in Germany in greater detail (and find out whether girls maybe cluster in the low end of top-level schools), I checked Gymnasium finals (Abitur, similar to British A-levels) results by gender (hard to find as German educational statistics normally don't include gender or ethnicity info). I did fid stats for the land of Thuringia. There, girls outperfom boys on average and mean results, and in both German and mathematics when those two subjects are singled out, although the difference is smaller in maths (but in one single maths subcategory, variance towards the upper end was slightly greater in boys than in girls). Ethnicity must be practically 100 % German because Thuringia is ex-GDR and has few immigrants. Note: Social gender equality was far greater in the GDR than in WEstern Germany (eg, more women working, a greater number of women studying technical subjects; cf the current chancellor, Angela Merkel, who is from the ex-GDR and a physicist.)I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers looked different in old Western German lands because of girls conforming to social expectations. url:http://www.kompetenztest.de/download/Abiturbericht_2006.pdf
There is a similar gender difference in Germany, as can be seen from statistics showing the gender distribution in different school types. In Germany, children get seperated into different types of school at around ten years according to their academic achievement or non-achievment so far. I just checked the data for the state of Hessen (usually representative of all of Germany).
With an overall gender distribution slightly skewed in favor of boys, Hessen has 213 854 children in the top-end schools (Gymnasia), of which 113 699 are girls. In the very low-end schools, "Förderschulen" (special needs) and "Hauptschule", there are ca 20% fewer girls than expected. (Link see below) Looking only at the low end, one might assume what one sees is the effect of the supposed greater male variability in IQ, but that doesn't fit the high-end data at all. And David ;), girls have a wild phase in puberty, too. Or used to have, in my day.
Link: http://www.statistik-hessen.de/themenauswahl/bildung-kultur-rechtspflege/landesdaten/bildung/allgbild-schulen/schuelerinnen-und-schueler/index.html
With an overall gender distribution slightly skewed in favor of boys, Hessen has 213 854 children in the top-end schools (Gymnasia), of which 113 699 are girls. In the very low-end schools, "Förderschulen" (special needs) and "Hauptschule", there are ca 20% fewer girls than expected. (Link see below) Looking only at the low end, one might assume what one sees is the effect of the supposed greater male variability in IQ, but that doesn't fit the high-end data at all. And David ;), girls have a wild phase in puberty, too. Or used to have, in my day.
Link: http://www.statistik-hessen.de/themenauswahl/bildung-kultur-rechtspflege/landesdaten/bildung/allgbild-schulen/schuelerinnen-und-schueler/index.html
Are doctors this clueless?
(PS) matt: thanks for all that, sounds plausible.
Yes, doctors often are this clueless. One story of a dozen I could tell you: A very pregnant woman in the hospital bed beside mine had been diagnosed with asthma. She was prescribed an asthma medication, and I witnessed a doctor instruct her in the use of it which took maybe a quarter of an hour. All the while the patient was sitting on the side of the bed facing the doctor, with her pregnant belly clearly showing on her slim frame. When the demonstration was over, the patient asked: Are you sure it's okay to take this with the pregnancy? After which the doctor looked at her, said, oh, you are pregnant, then checked the instruction leaflet, then told her that no, as a matter of fact she could not take this while pregnant.
Is your mother a slut?
Jaakkeli, may I inform you that I am a *left atheist* (and a pacifist to boot), and I am absolutely and categorically opposed to the racist, anti-secular, aggressive rhetoric and actions of belligerent Islamic fundamentalism that have become so frighteningly common during the past 20 years. Contrary to your assumptions, in my experience this is true of most of my ilk, at least in my central European country (Germany).
I do, however, believe that it is strategically very unwise to adopt an aggressive rhetoric in turn. If you keep shouting how horrible and dangerous fundamentalist Islam is, and print and reprint Muhammad caricatures, of which by the way most (except the one about the heavenly virgins, which is great) are rotten and unfunny as caricatures, for the sole purpose of kicking Muslims in the butt, you do not help our communal cause of protecting our free secular societies in the least.
Don't misunderstand me, publishing a Muhammad caricature is fine and should be done as part of the days?s work if you happen to have a good one to publish. What I find unhelpful is expressly ordering and publishing such material en gros as a provocation ? like in ?let?s show them we can do it and have a right to do it and don?t care a shit about their fucking sensibilities? (How about ordering a set of 10 anti-Jewish caricatures if that is so great? These Gush emunim types in Israel would surely be a good target.). Such a media provocation, which already presumes the point it sets out to prove (namely, Muslims are aggressive and intolerant) is bound to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our hard-core fundamentalist enemies certainly won?t be convinced of the errors of their ways by war cries. What war cries achieve is instead a gut reaction of rallying behind their tribe in many religiously naïve and uninterested immgrants who in other circumstances would care far less about Islam (or Turkish nationalism) than about living their lives in peace and bringing up their children in a benign, affluent society than about any kind of ideology or identity politics.
The thing to do if you want to live in peace with your neighbours, which we swarthy-people-loving lefties do (in my German case after rightie governments brought those immigrant neighbours here in the sixties and are still attracting more every year via spouse immigration by their rightie family value politics that give you lots of state money for every child when the mother stays home, sorry for that OT), is to stress those things that unite you, or could unite you, and if you find reason for critique, you try to criticize the other in a respectful, cautious way that leaves common ground and will not abort all dialogue.
And that is the upside of Razib?s observation in his post: Immaterial things and ideological packaging do matter, and if you find a way of describing reality in a way that makes all sides happy, or makes the losing sid
More....
I do, however, believe that it is strategically very unwise to adopt an aggressive rhetoric in turn. If you keep shouting how horrible and dangerous fundamentalist Islam is, and print and reprint Muhammad caricatures, of which by the way most (except the one about the heavenly virgins, which is great) are rotten and unfunny as caricatures, for the sole purpose of kicking Muslims in the butt, you do not help our communal cause of protecting our free secular societies in the least.
Don't misunderstand me, publishing a Muhammad caricature is fine and should be done as part of the days?s work if you happen to have a good one to publish. What I find unhelpful is expressly ordering and publishing such material en gros as a provocation ? like in ?let?s show them we can do it and have a right to do it and don?t care a shit about their fucking sensibilities? (How about ordering a set of 10 anti-Jewish caricatures if that is so great? These Gush emunim types in Israel would surely be a good target.). Such a media provocation, which already presumes the point it sets out to prove (namely, Muslims are aggressive and intolerant) is bound to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our hard-core fundamentalist enemies certainly won?t be convinced of the errors of their ways by war cries. What war cries achieve is instead a gut reaction of rallying behind their tribe in many religiously naïve and uninterested immgrants who in other circumstances would care far less about Islam (or Turkish nationalism) than about living their lives in peace and bringing up their children in a benign, affluent society than about any kind of ideology or identity politics.
The thing to do if you want to live in peace with your neighbours, which we swarthy-people-loving lefties do (in my German case after rightie governments brought those immigrant neighbours here in the sixties and are still attracting more every year via spouse immigration by their rightie family value politics that give you lots of state money for every child when the mother stays home, sorry for that OT), is to stress those things that unite you, or could unite you, and if you find reason for critique, you try to criticize the other in a respectful, cautious way that leaves common ground and will not abort all dialogue.
And that is the upside of Razib?s observation in his post: Immaterial things and ideological packaging do matter, and if you find a way of describing reality in a way that makes all sides happy, or makes the losing sid
More....
Clark’s Survival of the Richest meets Mokyr’s Industrial Enlightenment
The genetic explanation seems highly dubious to me. One might just as well assume that in premodern societies, with their low social mobility, selection for intelligence was relaxed among the rich, while it was very fierce among the poor. I donÂ’t know about britain, but certainly todayÂ’s descendants of the ex-nobility in germany and austria are not renowned for their intelligence (nor was the last kaiser).
what happened before the industrial revolution in germany (and a number of important inventions and discoveries there) is that in the late eighteenth century, highly gifted male individuals from the lower classes had the chance to enter the scientific community in significant numbers for the first time because of a more universal and improved educational system that was equipped to recognize their talents (at least if they were outstanding) and sent them on to higher education. The mathematician gauss, for example, came from a very poor family.
To me, a far more plausible hypothesis for the acceleration of technical progress during industrialization would be that a large pool of hitherto unrecognized talent in the lower classes was opened up. That process, by the way, went on in the early nineteenth century and continued essentially up into the nineteenfifties in Germany. At that time my father, a highly gifted individual, was singled out by his teachers for higher education and a scholarship despite his working-class background. his grandmother was also highly intelligent, which in her case (a backward, transsylvanian rural community, late 19th century) had the effect that the teacher decided that she had had enough schooling when she was ten (because she already knew everything the teacher knew). she went on to become a maid. The man she married, my great-grandfather, could converse in seven languages without formal training, yet was an extremely poor artisan’s assistant whem she met him. they went on to have seven children who all survived into adulthood, while upper class people at that time seldom had more than two or three children – the effect of the “demographic transition” (reducing the elite’s fertility) which must have strongly worked against any genetic ascendancy the upper classes might have had at that time.
The book must be based on some sound statistics at least for the earlier centuries, but IÂ’d like to see them. in germany, even in the city states, 17th-century elites were very small and I would suspect too small to make that much of an impact upon the gene pool (apart from the highly dubious question whether they really were more intelligent at a time of low social mobility). fertility must have been higher among the elites (earlier marriage age of women being one factor, better nourishment another), but the effect surely wasnÂ’t all that large. At least in the German city states the elites had horrid child mortality rates just like everyone else. Eg, the elite
More....
what happened before the industrial revolution in germany (and a number of important inventions and discoveries there) is that in the late eighteenth century, highly gifted male individuals from the lower classes had the chance to enter the scientific community in significant numbers for the first time because of a more universal and improved educational system that was equipped to recognize their talents (at least if they were outstanding) and sent them on to higher education. The mathematician gauss, for example, came from a very poor family.
To me, a far more plausible hypothesis for the acceleration of technical progress during industrialization would be that a large pool of hitherto unrecognized talent in the lower classes was opened up. That process, by the way, went on in the early nineteenth century and continued essentially up into the nineteenfifties in Germany. At that time my father, a highly gifted individual, was singled out by his teachers for higher education and a scholarship despite his working-class background. his grandmother was also highly intelligent, which in her case (a backward, transsylvanian rural community, late 19th century) had the effect that the teacher decided that she had had enough schooling when she was ten (because she already knew everything the teacher knew). she went on to become a maid. The man she married, my great-grandfather, could converse in seven languages without formal training, yet was an extremely poor artisan’s assistant whem she met him. they went on to have seven children who all survived into adulthood, while upper class people at that time seldom had more than two or three children – the effect of the “demographic transition” (reducing the elite’s fertility) which must have strongly worked against any genetic ascendancy the upper classes might have had at that time.
The book must be based on some sound statistics at least for the earlier centuries, but IÂ’d like to see them. in germany, even in the city states, 17th-century elites were very small and I would suspect too small to make that much of an impact upon the gene pool (apart from the highly dubious question whether they really were more intelligent at a time of low social mobility). fertility must have been higher among the elites (earlier marriage age of women being one factor, better nourishment another), but the effect surely wasnÂ’t all that large. At least in the German city states the elites had horrid child mortality rates just like everyone else. Eg, the elite
More....
Gods of the sword
stuff like this is complicated,
very much so.
razib, down below you'll find more comments on individual points you made. BUt what I'd wanted to say really transcends all those details, and i wonder whether you could agree with my main point at least partly.
What it comes down to for me is the following:
We've had the Empires of Alexander the Great, of the Monoglians, of the Sassanids, the Byzantines, the Egyptians, the Romans, of the Ottomans, of Napoleon, of the British, of the Nazis, etc.etc. Some empires were very benign (Napoleon's), some relatively benign (the ottoman), some were downright vicious (the Nazi's). There were very different cultures and ideologies behind these empires, and the conquered people(s) were similarly diverse. But by and large, all of these empires were conquered by military means.
I don't really see a system behind all this that could single out the islamic empires as a special case. What I see is that at least until very recently, adding invading foreign territory was seen as an ok thing to do if you had the power to do so, and there was always some nice ideological justification to be found if you needed one.
If you still have time (this is really not very important), just some comments on what you wrote:
terms like "superior" are loaded. what about st. isidore? in any case, islamic civilization in the 8th century was surely superior to what you would find in northern europe since northern europe was savage and barely literate then. but the 5th century middle east was also superior, so the issue you are pointing to is not, i think, fundamentally islamic, but the fact that middle eastern civilization as civilized while bede was the lone light of his people.
all true. i thought i was referring to what i had understood as your idea that islam had to use war and not persuasion to spread because the people they conquered were, as christians/zoroastrians/buddhists etc, less easily persuaded to assimilate to a conquering culture than the supposedly culturally inferior heathens. maybe i had completely misunderstood you.
aside from a few outliers like the mopillas of kerala, the vast majority of the 1/3 of south asians (350 million people) who are muslims are converts from a turkic dispensation (i.e., most south asian muslims follow hanafi law, which is also the law in most turkic lands).
I don't know the first thing about India or other parts of south asia (you are not telling me that turks ever went to Malaysia, are you?). Is there evidence that these were forced conversions? (In india, they could have been because islamic laws does differentiate between monotheists --"people of the book" who can keep their religion-- and heathens who can't.
in europe they converted many.
Forcibly? Anyway, there still was a very sizable Christian (Greek, Armenian orthodo
More....
very much so.
razib, down below you'll find more comments on individual points you made. BUt what I'd wanted to say really transcends all those details, and i wonder whether you could agree with my main point at least partly.
What it comes down to for me is the following:
We've had the Empires of Alexander the Great, of the Monoglians, of the Sassanids, the Byzantines, the Egyptians, the Romans, of the Ottomans, of Napoleon, of the British, of the Nazis, etc.etc. Some empires were very benign (Napoleon's), some relatively benign (the ottoman), some were downright vicious (the Nazi's). There were very different cultures and ideologies behind these empires, and the conquered people(s) were similarly diverse. But by and large, all of these empires were conquered by military means.
I don't really see a system behind all this that could single out the islamic empires as a special case. What I see is that at least until very recently, adding invading foreign territory was seen as an ok thing to do if you had the power to do so, and there was always some nice ideological justification to be found if you needed one.
If you still have time (this is really not very important), just some comments on what you wrote:
terms like "superior" are loaded. what about st. isidore? in any case, islamic civilization in the 8th century was surely superior to what you would find in northern europe since northern europe was savage and barely literate then. but the 5th century middle east was also superior, so the issue you are pointing to is not, i think, fundamentally islamic, but the fact that middle eastern civilization as civilized while bede was the lone light of his people.
all true. i thought i was referring to what i had understood as your idea that islam had to use war and not persuasion to spread because the people they conquered were, as christians/zoroastrians/buddhists etc, less easily persuaded to assimilate to a conquering culture than the supposedly culturally inferior heathens. maybe i had completely misunderstood you.
aside from a few outliers like the mopillas of kerala, the vast majority of the 1/3 of south asians (350 million people) who are muslims are converts from a turkic dispensation (i.e., most south asian muslims follow hanafi law, which is also the law in most turkic lands).
I don't know the first thing about India or other parts of south asia (you are not telling me that turks ever went to Malaysia, are you?). Is there evidence that these were forced conversions? (In india, they could have been because islamic laws does differentiate between monotheists --"people of the book" who can keep their religion-- and heathens who can't.
in europe they converted many.
Forcibly? Anyway, there still was a very sizable Christian (Greek, Armenian orthodo
More....
Razib, your explaination sounded so elegant, I was almost convinced. But then I had second thoughts. Some things just don't fit.
Let's start with the Turks, the major motor of islamic expansion after the year 1000. "Spread with the sword"? The Turks just did what their pre-Islamic TUrkic and Mongolic ancestors did (and those who had not converted to Islam were still doing elsewhere): Keeping on the move and conquering territory, and most of what they conquered was already Islamic. Where it wasn'T, they didn't convert anyone (or did they in India? They surely didn't in Europe, expect the boys taken for imperial service), whoever did convert, eg some Albanians and some slavs in europe, did so of their own free will. I don't see how the imperialist policy of the ottomans can be said to be islamic in any way, and if so, the imperialist policy of spain, england etc, hardly a negligable factor, was definitely christian, and christianity was spread by the sword at least as much as islam, and there's nothing left to explain. At least the christian imperialists did convert people on a large scale (and many of the settlers in the later US felt they had a religious mission).
Now let's go back to before the Turks. Admittedly, I know far less about early Islam than I know about the ottomans (studied them at university). But still: To me, it seems that Islamic civilization (8th, 9th century) was by far superior to what then existed in much of the territory they conquered, eg in westgothic spain? So surely islam was a civilizing influence there? It definitely was a civilizing influence on the Jews in the west, who surely woulnd't have written their major philosophical works in Arabic otherwise, and the Jews were already pretty civilized compared with the rest of Europe then.Remember, the only people in northern Europe who could read at that time were the monks and a number of Jews, and Greek thought came to Europe mediated by Islam and translated from the Arabic.
And part of the attraction of Islam then (as under the Ottomans) was of course religious tolerance (aks the Jews, who had no fun after Spain had been reconquered by the catholics). Only early islamic spread in the east (iran etc) fits the picture at all, but wasn't the expansion of the religion itself there a peaceful process? Wasn't it simply attractive? I just don't know much about it.
I'm not sure whether generalizations like "islam was spread by the sword" (in fact many modern muslims believe it and are proud about it, just like Israeli Jews believe that the Jews always were Zionists at heart) aren't very helpful at a time when US presidents speak of crusades and try to spread democracy and freedom with the sword.
Let's start with the Turks, the major motor of islamic expansion after the year 1000. "Spread with the sword"? The Turks just did what their pre-Islamic TUrkic and Mongolic ancestors did (and those who had not converted to Islam were still doing elsewhere): Keeping on the move and conquering territory, and most of what they conquered was already Islamic. Where it wasn'T, they didn't convert anyone (or did they in India? They surely didn't in Europe, expect the boys taken for imperial service), whoever did convert, eg some Albanians and some slavs in europe, did so of their own free will. I don't see how the imperialist policy of the ottomans can be said to be islamic in any way, and if so, the imperialist policy of spain, england etc, hardly a negligable factor, was definitely christian, and christianity was spread by the sword at least as much as islam, and there's nothing left to explain. At least the christian imperialists did convert people on a large scale (and many of the settlers in the later US felt they had a religious mission).
Now let's go back to before the Turks. Admittedly, I know far less about early Islam than I know about the ottomans (studied them at university). But still: To me, it seems that Islamic civilization (8th, 9th century) was by far superior to what then existed in much of the territory they conquered, eg in westgothic spain? So surely islam was a civilizing influence there? It definitely was a civilizing influence on the Jews in the west, who surely woulnd't have written their major philosophical works in Arabic otherwise, and the Jews were already pretty civilized compared with the rest of Europe then.Remember, the only people in northern Europe who could read at that time were the monks and a number of Jews, and Greek thought came to Europe mediated by Islam and translated from the Arabic.
And part of the attraction of Islam then (as under the Ottomans) was of course religious tolerance (aks the Jews, who had no fun after Spain had been reconquered by the catholics). Only early islamic spread in the east (iran etc) fits the picture at all, but wasn't the expansion of the religion itself there a peaceful process? Wasn't it simply attractive? I just don't know much about it.
I'm not sure whether generalizations like "islam was spread by the sword" (in fact many modern muslims believe it and are proud about it, just like Israeli Jews believe that the Jews always were Zionists at heart) aren't very helpful at a time when US presidents speak of crusades and try to spread democracy and freedom with the sword.
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