Natural Habitat of Mankind; and, does the White Race Exist?

Angocachi Tuesday 29 Jan 2013

The Black Plague started in the Crimea.

West African Blacks were torn apart by malaria, resulting in the prevelence of Sickle Cell Trait (up to 40% of the population in some pockets of the Ivory Coast).

It depends on what creatures play host to the virus. If it's mosquitos, it will decimate tropical jungle people until they get a mutation going that helps them cope. If it is rats, then it can do just fine in the cold and will thrive in overpopulated European cities littered with food scraps and grain stores.

Don Johnson Tuesday 29 Jan 2013

It's true that people didn't evolve thick layers of fur and the like when they moved north. But that doesn't mean people didn't adapt to the cold. The adaptations were primarily technological and behavioral. For example, people didn't evolve fur but they evolved the means to hunt animals and use them to make clothing in cold environments.

I think you underestimate just how miserable many of these hot and tropical areas were before air-conditioning, which was only developed in the last century, made them tolerable. In much of the American South, it was too hot and muggy to do anything in the summer before air-conditioning but sit around and do nothing. Post-WWII growth in the Sun Belt was only really possible because of air-conditioning. It made living there more tolerable, but more importantly, people could actually be productive by working in climate controlled buildings.

Don Johnson Tuesday 29 Jan 2013

Blacks did better demographically in parts of the South and were better farm workers due to greater disease resistance and heat tolerance:

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/the-biology-of-slavery/

You can see why slavery might pay, but why African slavery? There is reason to think that they were more productive farm workers than Europeans in the American South , largely because they were significantly more resistant to a number of tropical diseases. Almost all people from central and west Africa are Duffy negative and are highly resistant to vivax malaria. A number of different mutations common in those same populations, such as sickle-cell, Hemoglobin C, G6PD deficiency,etc. etc. give substantial protection against falciparum malaria. Although the genetic details are at this point not understood, people from sub-Saharan Africa are also resistant to hookworm and are more likely to survive yellow fever. One would suspect that they also have greater heat tolerance.

Niccolo and Donkey Tuesday 29 Jan 2013

Don Johnson

Good stuff.

Even in Europe in the late 19th century, there were parts of the Mediterranean where people simply feared to go due to diseases. These were mostly swamplands and river deltas that eventually got drained and turned into highly productive farmland.

CLAMOR Tuesday 29 Jan 2013

Yes, Fernand Braudel discusses this in The Mediterranean.

Lee Kuan Yew, when asked once for the secret of Singapore's success, disclaimed credit for the rise of the city, and instead credited the inventor of air conditioning. He was not entirely facetious. The 'New South' which rose in the 1960s-1980s to become a credible industrial/capitalistic competitor to the North for the first time, was in large part reliant on these very high level adaptive technologies.

At the same time, Mesoamerica is a fiendish tropical environment, yet was one of the independent cradles of civilization, though not a terribly sustainable one.

Bronze Age Pervert Tuesday 29 Jan 2013

Angocachi said: ↑

Whites and Northerly Asians have many adaptations for living in cold, gloomy climes that tropical races do not... and that put them at a disadvantage in the tropical regions.

Lighter pigmentation allows for more vitamin D production with less UV, which is ciritical, but allows skin aging, burning, and cancer in the sunny zones. Flat hair preserves heat, kinky hair gets rid of it. The different limb and torso proportions of northerly populations preserve heat. Thinner lips, smaller or sharper noses and nostrils, this preserves heat and keeps the respiratory system warm. The different fat distribution northerly races have compared to tropicals gives them an advantage in the north and a disadvantage in the south, again, heat preservation vs distribution. There are many more benefits northern races have that tropical races don't, that become disadvantages when they're thrown in alien lands.

Whites have, since the end of the ice age, been moving away from gingerism. Out of the Baltic the ability to turn pale in the winter, but then develop a deep golden tan in the summer, has been advantageous to them... they can get their UV when it's in short supply and then produce the melanin to protect their skin from radiation when the sun returns. Unfortunately for the inhabitants of the British Isles unaffected by Scandinavian, Norman, Roman, etc genetic inflow they're still in large ratio untanning, freckly, redheads.

I already conceded that some slight cold adaptation took place in whites, but the effect is very slight. What you and other posters are saying is that these slight effects at the individual level end up having an evolutionary reproductive advantage over many generations; that may be so, and that's how evolution supposedly works. But the effect is still slight. I don't see how you can call an animal "cold-adapted" when it will die if exposed for one single night in a cold climate. The same is not true for a white who spends a night without shelter in a tropical or subtropical climate. I think this fact is basically unanswerable and final as regards to what is a natural climate for mankind, including whites and N. Asians.

As for the origin of white skin and other characteristics of the European peoples, the truth is that we really don't know why they look the way they do; this stuff about adaptive advantage is just a plausible theory, but it's just plausible. It's just as plausible that they look this way because of sexual selection, because of random changes that confer no advantage, or for other more mysterious natural reasons that we don't yet understand (some recent findings show that Lamarckian evolution does indeed take place; but there may be other mechanisms we don't know about). A reasoning along the lines of Schopenhauer above, a kind of natural "bleaching" that doesn't confer any advantage, may end up being right. We just don't know yet.

Niccolo and Donkey Tuesday 29 Jan 2013

CLAMOR said: ↑

Yes, Fernand Braudel discusses this in The Mediterranean.

Lee Kuan Yew, when asked once for the secret of Singapore's success, disclaimed credit for the rise of the city, and instead credited the inventor of air conditioning. He was not entirely facetious. The 'New South' which rose in the 1960s-1980s to become a credible industrial/capitalistic competitor to the North for the first time, was in large part reliant on these very high level adaptive technologies.

At the same time, Mesoamerica is a fiendish tropical environment, yet was one of the independent cradles of civilization, though not a terribly sustainable one.

Vuk Alex Broseph Bronze Age Pervert Roland

Croatia's richest farmland is the Neretva River Delta around Metkovic and Opuzen. The soil is so black and rich that they harvest there three times a year. For most of history, that land was a malaria-filled swamp that few dared to enter except for those seeking to hide out from Greek/Roman/Byzantine/Turkish troops. Sometimes they would lure them in there to their deaths.

In the mid-19th century, the Austrians drained the swamp and the shepherd-warriors came down from the mountains and began planting citrus groves and setting up farms.

[IMG]

We also know about how Mussolini drained the Pontine Marshes :

In 1928, the population of the marshes was 1,637. They were people who lived in shanties across the fields, herded, practiced agriculture, and were in poor health most of the time. The Italian Red Cross relates that, during the malaria season, 80% of those having spent one night in the marsh became infected.

Starting in 1922, the Italian government's Department of Health, working with the Opera Nazionale Combattenti, [note 1] developed a new initiative to combat malaria called the bonifica integrale . [24] [note 2] It featured three stages, the first being the bonifica idraulica , which would drain the swamp and control the waters. Mussolini and his party called it "the battle of the swamps" because it required the recruitment, deployment and supply of an army of workers. [25] In the second stage, the bonifica agraria , homesteads with stone houses and public utilities were to be constructed and the land was to be parcelled among settlers. The third stage, bonifica igienica , took measures against the mosquitos ( Anopheles labranchiae ), such as screens and whitewash (so that mosquitos could be easily identified and killed), and against malaria, such as distributing quinine and setting up health services. [26]

In 1922 also, Benito Mussolini was made prime minister by the king. In 1926, the Department of Health undertook a pilot project of the new strategy in the delta of the Tiber river , reclaiming land and creating 45 new homesteads with great success, after which Mussolini climbed aboard. At his request of the Director-general of the Department of Health, Alessandro Messea submitted a plan for the Pontine marshes. In 1928, Mussolini brought it before parliament; it became "Mussolini's Law", and began to be implemented in 1929. In 1939, at the incorporation ceremony of the last new city, Pomezia , the project was declared complete. [25]

Beginning in 1930, the bonifica idraulica cleared the scrub forest, [note 3] constructed a total of 16,500 km (10,300 mi) of checkerboard canals and trenches, dredged rivers, diked their banks, filled depressions, and constructed pumping stations to change the elevation in the canals where necessary. The final channel, the Mussolini Canal, empties into the Tyrrhenian Sea near Anzio . The project reached a peak in 1933 with 124000 men employed. The previous agrarian population was moved out under protest in the name of progress. Workers were interned in camps surrounded by barbed wire. The camps were overcrowded, wages were low, hours were long, food was bad, sanitation was poor, healthcare was missing, and medical attention was lacking. Workers could quit. The turnover was high. In 1935, at the completion of the phase, they were all dismissed without notice. Many were infected with malaria. [27]

The government placed about 2000 families (most from northern Italy and of unimpeachable Fascist background) in standardised but carefully varied two-storey country-houses of blue stucco with tiled roofs. Each settler family was assigned a farmhouse, an oven, a plough and other agricultural tools, a stable, some cows and several hectares of land, depending on local soil fertility and the size of the family. Mussolini used the ten-year operation for propaganda purposes. Mussolini was often photographed between workers, shirtless with a shovel in his hand, or threshing wheat at harvest time - these occasions were regularly filmed by LUCE for inclusion in nationally shown propaganda newsreels. [28]

The new towns of Littoria (1932, now Latina ), Sabaudia (1934), Pontinia (1935), Aprilia (1937), and Pomezia (1939) were founded, side by side with several other small borghi (rural villages). The carefully differentiated architecture and urban planning aspects of these towns is striking even today.

Bronze Age Pervert Tuesday 29 Jan 2013

Inkarri said: ↑

BAP imagines the tropics as some easy breezy place of hammocks, coconut juice, and beach boys but the reality is far from that.

If the harsh brutality of the despairing jungle has taught me anything is that no matter where you live in the world you will still face the inevitable day where your existence as a mortal and physical being will be terminated. There is no escape.

Even though the tropics are immensely biodiverse and teeming with life I can think of a no better or suitable place that brings you closer to and allows you to bond and form a better relationship with that dark figure we all have heard of but never quite fully meet...

To achieve hochkultur humans should pursue lives of ease, luxury, abundance, and tranquility in order to be able to actually focus on higher things instead of just their mere survival or getting through a day alive with enough nourishment. This is the main thing that seperates us from all the other animals on this planet after all.

In sum, deh tropix sux...

OK Herzog...

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/3xQyQnXrLb0

Nice cribbing :confused:

But really, you can also die from a hurricane or typhoon in the tropics. How does this disprove what I'm saying? The weather itself, the seasonal average, will never kill you. The heat may get uncomfortable in a tropical or subtropical region, but not kill. If you spent one night outside where I am now, you die. Cold adapted animals don't. My only point is that there's a natural climate for mankind, and the tropics or subtropics is it; that includes the white race, which in my opinion is not nearly as "cold-adapted" as some say.

As for the last thing you say, true, but I agree with Schopenhauer that it is in the difficult areas of the world where civilization and high culture developed, and for the reasons he says (read the end of the long passage I quoted). By contrast, despite the dangers in tropical regions, in fact life there is quite easy insofar as the necessities of shelter and food; in Afreaka and elsewhere finding food involves literally picking it up off the ground or from a tree year-round. So I'd say that civilization didn't develop in these places for the opposite reason, that life was too easy and there was never any necessity to move past the grass hut level.

Bronze Age Pervert Tuesday 29 Jan 2013

Roland said: ↑

Before I respond, I would like to make clear that I regard the following statement as a personal attack:

Outrageous.

Now, the rest of post adds some interesting points, but taken in conjunction with the Schopenhauer quote, I'm not convinced that the point you're making is entirely coherent. I think there is a confusion here, stemming from Schopenahuer's latent Platonism, about what adaptation means, and about what the human species is; but the point you're trying to make, as far as I can tell, is that the tropics are our natural home, where we can survive without technology, whereas cold climates are not natural. I don't agree with this.

Schopenahuer says that the skin color of the original humans was black. The first bipedal hominids had light skin with dark fur, which means that anatomically modern humans had to leave the rain forest and evolve dark skin in the sun, on open plains like the Serengeti. This doesn't mean that they evolved in cold weather, but it does mean that brown skin was actually an adaptation equivalent to the evolution of white skin.

Schopenhauer clearly states that white skin in Europeans is a result of adaption to a colder, harsher climate. In addition to Angocachi's posts, we may add body fat distribution, pathogen resistance, respiratory system development, and numerous differences related to endocrine system development. Humans are actually adapted to live wherever they've adapted to live. (There are other adaptations that Inkarri mentioned that result from cultural selection, or as traits derivative of direct adaptation).

Sub-Saharan Africans have pervasive skin and respiratory problems in cold weather climates, and would likely be incapable of surviving without modern technology. They would have to occupy intermediate zones for thousands of years and adapt to a four-season cycle before moving into the harshest northern climates, which is what humans did.

Similarly, Northern Europeans experience respiratory problems in humid, high-pressure environments because their sinuses and nostrils have adapted to cold, dry air. The Northern European tendency to develop a thicker layer of subcutaneous fat also means that Northern Europeans are poorly adapted for regulating heat in warm weather, relative to tropical people. If thrown into direct competition with natives of the tropics, minus modern technology and the creative and intellectual powers of Europe, white Europeans would be bred out of existence within a few generations by those adapted for tropical climates.

Finally, the most obvious evidence that Northern Europeans are not meant for the tropics is pathogens. Year-round warmth and rain means an endless supply of devastating diseases like Malaria. (Incidentally, the pathogen load of Africa is the latest environmentalist hypothesis for low average African IQ). It's important to remember that Africa wasn't even colonized until the 19th century, after the Industrial Revolution, and after the discovery of quinine.

And the areas where Europeans have thrived as colonists (prior to the 20th century) always correspond to temperate zones, e.g., Mexico, southern South America, South Africa, and Eastern and North-East Africa.

I think the truth is that humans are adapted to live wherever humans are adapted to live. It is a basic truism that humans will die in any extreme environment, cold or hot, without technology, which leads to the most fundamental point: human intelligence and technology are the adaptations that allow humans to not be tethered to a specific clime.

At any rate, I think something like the golden mean applies here, which explains why the greatest civilizations emerged around the Mediterranean. I prefer temperatures between 50 and 70 degrees F, but I also prefer having four seasons, and I don't mind the weather when it's cold or hot.

I've already addressed some of these objections above. To summarize, the adaptations, if that's what they are, exist in a way that is very slight; so slight that only modern HBD could somehow discover them, but they seem to be unknown to previous generations of thinkers on race.

The knockout argument for me is that you die in the north if you spend one or two nights outside without shelter, whether you're white or anything else; whereas the same is not true in a tropical or subtropical climate:

"In point of fact, however, color is not the essential thing at all and its difference has no other origin than the greater or lesser distance and the earlier or later removal of a stock from the torrid zone where alone the human race is indigenous. Therefore outside that zone, it can exist only under artificial care by hibernating in hothouses like exotic plants; but then it gradually degenerates first of all in color."

We're no more adapted to the cold than a tropical plant that requires a greenhouse in cold weather.

Whether in fact whites have any evolutionary advantage to live in the cold beyond their intelligence is questionable; again, there's no certain evidence, only plausible theories, that white skin, the shape of the nose, etc., or any of these other qualities confer any advantage for living in this kind of weather. And I would dispute that whites would be wiped out or do badly when they go in tropical or warm climates; in fact, as Schopenhauer says, the upper class of many tropical peoples is lighter in color, and probably so as a result of immigration/conquest.

I myself reject Darwinian account of evolution (which you cited in another thread when I brought up this passage...haha do you remember...), and what you say about Schopenhauer's latent Platonism may be the fundamental disagreement here, especially as regards the nature of what a species is. I myself believe there is a natural type for human as such. I don't believe that the eskimo or pygmy are legitimate types just because (we think) they look the way they do because they're adapted to their environment; I think they're degenerations of a natural type.

Bob Dylan Roof Tuesday 29 Jan 2013

Hippocrates wrote about the relationship between climate and what we would call "racial" differences, so the notion is hardly new. The medieval Arabs also wrote extensively about the connection between climate and the dispositions of slavs and Africans.

As I mentioned in the shoutbox, humans did exist for much longer in warm climates before living in cold climates. But the ancestors of many Northern Europeans lived for roughly 70,000 years in very harsh, cold environments. I don't see how requiring a few animal skins or soft bedding and some dry shelter to survive in the cold automatically precludes the significance of 70,000 years of adaptation to cold weather and renders a preference for cold over extreme heat an affectation.

That's not true. If a population has more subcutaneous fat, on average, than populations from the tropics, then that population is better adapted to the cold than populations from the tropics. Each population will not require the same level of external heat to survive in the cold. Whether or not the distribution of subcutaneous fat was "caused" by adaptation to the cold is irrelevant. What is at issue is your argument that people cannot prefer cold weather because no population possesses significant physical advantages over others for surviving in cold weather. But we know this isn't true.

Why is there no certain evidence? These theories are supported by a wealth of quantitative and historical evidence. I agree that the extreme discrepancies between skin color are not only explained by the UV theory, but it is not in dispute that light pigment confers an advantage over dark skin in northern environments.

I don't believe races have ontological status. But I do believe that there are functionally relevant differences between populations that arose for several reasons, among which are temperature and exposure to the sun.

Natural Habitat of Mankind; and, does the White Race Exist?

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