Welcome to the jungle: Unamusement Park explores the Congo (part 4)
Nov 12th, 2011 by Unamused
Welcome back to the jungle. Let’s review.
In part 1, we held our noses, tried to hold our lunches, and took a queasy look at life (short and miserable) and love (nonconsensual) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: airborne crocodiles crashing planes, penis theft by gold-ringed sorcerers, the protective powers of Pygmy sodomy, Congolese military tactics (with an emphasis on shooting 5-year-old girls in the vagina), epidemics of AIDS, malaria, measles and diarrhea, and a typically African birth rate that ensures the cycle of slaughter need never cease.
Good times.
In part 2, we sat down for a second sickening serving of “unimaginable brutality” (in the words of a UN human rights expert) on the part of those incorrigible Congolese. Whether it’s fistulas or forced incest, cannibals or child witches, sex slaves or soccer sorcerers, or even just a herd of innocent goats languishing in prison on trumped-up charges, the fun truly never stops in the DRC.
Did I say fun? I meant torture.
By the third installment of the series, we’d had our fill of cataloging the utter horribleness of the DRC, and moved on to wild theorizing.
Specifically: given that the Congo is the way it is (horrible in every way imaginable, and a few other ways besides), why is the Congo the way it is?
Two theories occur.
Blame Belgium
First consider the purely environmental theory of Congolese horribleness: “Today, the Congo sucks because many years ago it was colonized by Belgians, who screwed everything up for everyone.” (It is easily generalized to a theory of African horribleness.)
To this admittedly oversimplified explanation, we may generously add every other conceivable environmental factor besides Belgian colonialism: “Furthermore, the Congo sucks because it’s hot and sticky and full of diseases and brain parasites and airborne crocodiles and venomous vipers and carnivorous flowers and whatnot. Basically, it’s like Jumanji in there. But the really important thing to remember is there are no genetic factors involved whatsoever. Screw the genes. They don’t mean shit.”
According to this theory, you can just forget about nature, because it all comes down to nurture (if you want to call paying $50 to have your child tortured by an exorcist “nurture”). The Congolese are Noble Savages with a Blank Slate between their ears, wholly defined by their environment. They are exactly like us in every way, only (1) darker and (2) so hampered by the legacy of colonialism, the venomous vipers, the humidity, and so on, they’re forced to imprison innocent goats, cast spells on soccer players, torture child “witches,” and devour each other’s hearts.
When is the environment not “environmental”?
At this point, we must distinguish between
- environment as proximate cause, such as a parasite that crawls in your ear while you’re sleeping, burrows into your brain and lays thousands of eggs there, impairing your cognitive ability and eventually causing your head to explode, to pick one obvious example; versus
- environment as ultimate cause, for as a general evolutionary principle, different environments act upon genetic diversity (which is present in all species) through adaptation (or natural selection, popularly known as “survival of the fittest”) to produce observable differences, which correspond to genetic differences, between reproductively isolated populations.
“Observable differences caused by genes?” The pure environmentalist recoils in horror. “That, sir, will not do.” Environment-as-ultimate-cause clearly does not belong in the purely “environmental” theory.
Nevertheless, it must be accounted for. The Congo is a very different environment from, say, northern Europe or south-east Asia, either now or thousands of years in the past. We should therefore expect (again, as a general evolutionary principle) that the human populations of the Congo, northern Europe and south-east Asia (etc.), evolving for thousands of years in near-total reproductive isolation, would diverge in both phenotype (observable traits) and genotype. Eventually, these populations would qualify as distinct subspecies.
In fact, this has already happened. We just call them races.
Race
As the famous population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza wrote in 1977 (via the anthropology blog Evo and Proud),
[human] races could be called subspecies if we adopted for man a criterion suggested by Mayr (1963) for systematic zoology. Mayr’s criterion is that two or more groups become subspecies when 75 percent or more of all the individuals constituting the groups can be unequivocally classified as belonging to a particular group. As a matter of fact, when human races are defined fairly broadly, we could achieve a much lower error of classification than 25 percent, implying, according to Mayr, the existence of human subspecies.
A 25 percent error rate? That sounds feasible. Consider this passage from Neven Sesardic’s “Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept” (p. 156):
a study that covered 17 populations over the world and that relied on 34 different measurements managed to assign 98% of the specimens to their correct major racial group.
(That study: A.M. Brues (1990), “The once and future diagnosis of race,” in Skeletal attributions of race, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, Albuquerque.)
Another more recent study had a success rate of 80% in distinguishing between American Whites and Blacks, although it used just two variables. With seven variables, however, it reached the reliability of 95%, and with 19 variables the probability of correct classification rose to 97%.
(That study: S. Ousley et al. (2009), “Understanding race and human variation: why forensic anthropologists are good at identifying race,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139:68–76.)
Also, estimating generally the reliability of attributing a given data point to one of the five racial categories, another team of experts calculated that under some realistic conditions it is sufficient to use as few as 13 characteristics to have the posterior probability of the correct classification attain the value of 99%.
(That study: L.W. Konigsberg et al. (2009), “Estimation and evidence in forensic anthropology: sex and race,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139:77–90.)
Yes, the human races are subspecies of Homo sapiens. They diverged over tens of thousands of years as human populations adapted to their environments (our ancestral geography).
That is why black people, who evolved in sub-Saharan Africa, differ genetically from white people, who evolved in Europe (see for yourself). Again, this is merely what we should expect from general evolutionary principles.
Among black people, those of West African descent, who include virtually all the world’s top sprinters, differ genetically from those of East African descent, who excel at marathon running instead (see for yourself).
Among the natives of the Congo, who are of course black, members of the Kongo tribe (or “ethnic group,” if you prefer) differ genetically from, say, members of the Baluba people, also known as the Luba (see for yourself — they’re way at the bottom).
Race differences in genotype, which we know exist, explain race differences in phenotype (observable traits), differences that would be quite mysterious if race were merely “skin deep” or a “social construct.” Apart from skin color, the heritable traits that differ between races include hair color and texture, facial features (such as the nose, lips and eyes), height, build, bone structure, physical maturation rate, lung capacity, resistance to diseases, frequency of fraternal twins, blood types, lactose intolerance, body odor and brain size. See Michael H. Hart’s “Understanding Human History,” available free here.
Intelligence
The aforementioned traits are all physical, of course, but behavioral traits are heritable too. Evolution does not stop at the neck. The functional development of the central nervous system, like every other system, is based on a genetic blueprint. It may be modified by the environment, but there are limits. In case you haven’t noticed, children are generally capable of learning language, but kittens are not — no matter how nurturing their environment.
How shall we fix the kitten achievement gap?
In particular, intelligence is highly heritable. This goes a long way toward explaining the observed race differences in the distribution of intelligence (in particular, average intelligence), which we also know exist.
The average IQ of a black African is approximately 70, which is more than two standard deviations below the white average of 100. That is a huge difference in cognitive ability. It is certainly part environmental. It is almost certainly part genetic as well.
Not only is there direct experimental evidence for a genetic component to race differences in intelligence, there is also the fact that black Americans, who inhabit about the best environment available (and average 17–18% white ancestry, according to molecular anthropologists) have an average IQ no more than 85, still one standard deviation below the white average (the so-called IQ gap).
It may actually be as low as 78, since the black Americans with the lowest IQs are probably under-represented in many samples. (Would you volunteer to perform tests of cognitive ability in the ghetto?) See, for example, Rushton and Jensen’s 2010 article, “Race and IQ,” which puts the heritability of group differences in intelligence at “between 50 and 80%.”
The average IQ in the Congo is approximately 65. (This estimate is the median of five observed average IQs, all between 62 and 68. See part 3 and Lynn and Vanhanen’s 2006 book “IQ and Global Inequality.”) Again, some of the gap between the Congolese and white people (or, for that matter, between the Congolese and other Africans) is certainly due to differences in environment (e.g., the aforementioned hypothetical ear-burrowing brain parasite). Again, some of it is almost certainly not.
Don’t blame Belgium
Unlike races, borders are not genetic. There is no Congolese race. But the genetic makeup of the Congo, the distribution of alleles in that population, is not the same as that of neighboring Uganda, and even less like the distributions in France and Mongolia.
This leads to the part environmental, part genetic theory of Congolese horribleness: “Today, the Congo sucks, in part, for the same reason it has always sucked, and will continue to suck forevermore (or at least for several thousand years to come): because it’s full of Congolese people, who are not the same, genetically speaking, as French people or Mongolian people (etc.). So give the Belgians a break already! Geez.”
These competing theories — one purely environmental, one part genetic — were basically what British Member of Parliament Greg Mulholland had in mind when he declared that acknowledging race differences in intelligence was “narrow-minded, intellectually bankrupt and morally reprehensible nonsense” (which I must point out is a complete inversion of reality), and that “[n]ot to acknowledge that much of the problems experienced by African nations are down to exploitation by Western nations over the years and centuries is simply to ignore the reality of history” (The Guardian, 2006).
In part 5, we will see how “the reality of history” crushes, rather than supports Mulholland’s notion that any part of contemporary Congolese failure is due to Western “exploitation.”
Given enough people (7 billion by last count) and enough time (around 50,000 years) then if the heritability of group differences in intelligence is a mere .01% then it matters, tremendously. At .01%, that would be seventy million people – the number of Irish in the world.
Mencius Moldbug had an excellent post a while ago which mentioned the Congo, and featured some interesting excerpts from the NY Times in 1991, Time Magazine in 2008 and 1955. From Time in 2008:
Time Magazine 1955:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cromer-to-romer-and-back-again.html
The links to Hart’s book don’t work.
[Unamused: Quite right. It’s fixed now.]
If you have a few hours to kill, and enjoy an action-packed, nail-biting travelogue with certain death around every corner, then don’t miss:
Democratic Republic of Congo: Lubumbashi to Kinshasa
Two naive young Belgian SWPLs with a taste for adventure set off on a road trip through the DRC in a little 4-by-4, through lands no white has seen for generations. Beautiful full-color photos: breathtaking landscapes; hostile, violent, corrupt locals; Euro-built infrastructure sinking into ruins. Don’t know if it cured their SWPL-ism; if I’d had any left it’d have surely cured mine. I stayed up ’til 4 a.m. to finish it (couldn’t “put it down”). A real slice of life….and death. Highly recommended.
Unamused,
I noticed you use standard deviations a lot. Perhaps a lesson on normal curves would be in order?
The average White IQ is 100. IQ is designed to have 100 as the average. On a normal curve 68.2% of the population should be WITHIN one standard deviation of the norm. That’s 34.13% up and 34.13% down.
So having a standard deviation of negative one (also a Z score of -1.0) would put someone at the bottom 15.87% So of course any deviation lower than that would be bad. At -2 standard deviations the population at or exceeding that mark is at or below the bottom 2.5% of the barrel.
So a person (of any race) who attains a 115 IQ is still better than 84.13% of the population (no deviation of 50 + one’s Z score on the normal curve, for negatives subtract from 50) and a person attaining two standard deviations is better than 97.5% of the population.
This is off-topic, but there are interesting parallels between Africanized Honey Bees and Africanized Human Beings:
Killer Bees (By Judy Hedding, About.com)
“Killer bees are really Africanized Honey Bees. They have come by their “killer” moniker because they will viciously attack people or animals that unintentionally stray into their territory. The Africanized Honey Bee (“AHB”) colony does not have to be disturbed to provoke the bees; even simple noises or vibrations have been known to cause an attack.”
Africanized bee (From Wikipedia)
“Africanized honey bees, known colloquially as “killer bees”, are hybrids of the African honey bee, A. m. scutellata, with various European honey bees such as the Italian bee A. m. ligustica and A. m. iberiensis. These bees are far more aggressive than the European subspecies. Small swarms of Africanized bees are capable of taking over European honey bee hives by invading the hive and establishing their own queen after killing the European queen.”
@M.G. Thank you for that amazing link! everything you said about it is absolutely spot on. Excellent visual & written account of dangerous adventure travel.
Quit spoiling part 5, Kiwiguy! Psh.
Anyway the link to Hart’s book is fixed now.
Thank you W74, that’s very helpful.
Some American blacks descended from the Congo area. I believe the Niger River and Congo River areas were the prime source areas for the slave trade to North America. Many people do not know Colonial American history to know that the islands were prized real estate while the North American mainland was considered a distant 2nd. The best slaves were often bought at island ports. The French slave trade route changed of course with the Haitian revolution, but prior to that, New Orleans was the final stop for many French slave ships.
Also, this series is great. Thank you for this.
…there is also the fact that black Americans, who inhabit about the best environment available …
Or we might note Rhodesia under white minority rule versus Zimbabwe under black majority rule. Under white rule, the country was prosperous and reasonably stable. Under black rule, it has become a combined despotism and failed state.
Same environment (unless a glacier moved south of the Zambezi in the last couple of decades), same majority black populace (aside from those massacred by Bob Mugabe’s minions), but you take whites out of the equation and you end up with a debacle.
That’s “liberation,” folks.
Oh well, maybe Greg Mulholland and his fellow DWLs will care to move to Congo and show us how to develop the country under black majority rule.
M.G.: save those pages, before they go to the Memory Hole. I have a feeling about this.
It recently occurred to me, someone should rewrite Tintin in the Congo, scrubbing it of its hurtful, racist, colonialist stereotypes and present a more accurate image of the Congolese people. I’m sure those critics of the book would be much appreciative.
Somewhat O/T
Any British citizen concerned about immigration should sign this petition:
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/19658
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MG, that travel blog is fascinating. Totally aside from the fact that the two Belgians are lunatics for traveling through Africa (Congo specifically) as they did, their impressions and opinions are a fascinating mix of standard DWLs being smacked in the face by a reality they do not want to acknowledge. They’re careful to note that their opinions and actions were those at that specific time and place in response to specific events, but they can’t help but admit that they were tense and nervous throughout their trip, the people were unfriendly and unhelpful in general, and the begging mixed with resentment was nonstop. They note that the entire subject of foreign aid is complex at best (they admit all prices for Whites are jacked up and that Westerners paying what they feel is a “fair” price distorts the local market). They condemn the endemic corruption but refuse to step beyond there to note that the people make the place. It’s another case of “Whites must help blacks” (the eternal refrain; see SBPDL’s commenter Mr. Evergreen for yet another illustration) and they make certain to note they’ll always remember what one Congolese (locally derided as a madman) prophetically noted – that black, White, red, yellow, our blood is all the same. Pious platitudes substituted for scientific proof of dramatic differences in human subspecies – racism in a nutshell.
A bit off topic, but related to Californian’s comment:
MG,
Thanks for the link to the travelogue. It was fun to read.
Lots of lib rationalization here but a large newspaper reports on the congolese problems with none of the gory details from your series.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15775445
“In part 1, we held our noses, tried to hold our lunches, and took a queasy look at life (short and miserable) and love (nonconsensual) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
So according to the altconservatives, a black rapist is a rapist, but a white rapist is just a poor sap trying to have a good time who, tragically, gets caught up in the jaws of feminism’s misandrist agenda. Am I wrong?
what the fuck are you on about now? yes, you’re wrong. I have never suggested any such thing — consult the “[anti-]feminism” category in the sidebar — nor have I heard anyone else suggest it
Lets face it for africa to ever become a livable place it has to go back to colonization.
1.whether the country likes it or not, every african country will be auctioned off to the highest bidder.
2. the country or corporation that wins the africa country can suck all the minerals it want for free but has to pay the people a small percentage to help build roads school hospitals(the stuff africans should have been doing for the last 50 years.)
3. all police and government officials(whom are all very corrupt anyway) are to be put in jail and a board of directors are put in their place(of course no africans!!)teach them not kill each other and teach them basic skills.
run the country like a company– practical, cost effective,rational.
if they do this I guarantee within one generation,these countries will be very livable.
Someday, white guilt will become a hate crime. I’m almost half serious.
Just wanted to stop in and compliment you on an extremely thoughtful, well written and researched blog.