You didn’t read the link.

Key paragraphs:

“Of course, most genetic variation is neutral, having no significant effect on phenotypes, so the numbers they use are totally irrelevant to the question they’re addressing. One could imagine that it might be better to have more (or less) genetic variation in cognitive or personality traits, but we don’t know enough about the genetic architecture of those traits to say diddly about who has more or less.

Lots of people – not just Ashraf and Galor – seem to think that having more overall neutral variation implies more trait variation. That isn’t the case.

A population with more total (mostly neutral) variation can easily have less variation in a particular trait. For example, hair color and eye color ( both genetically controlled) are more variable in Europeans than in sub-Saharan Africa, even though African populations have more overall genetic variation.”

1) Trait variation is the important factor
2) Africans don’t have more trait variation – in fact in several areas we know they have less

The impression I’ve always had is that Europeans, East Asians and Amerindians in particular, carry proportionately more deleterious mutations than Africans because they emerged from less diverse and smaller populations—where human genetic diversity decreases as distance from Africa increases. Statistically then, Africans may carry more preadaptations for what nature may throw at us—in a post collapse setting, where we can’t rely on prosthetics/mechanization.

Thoughts?

http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/diversity-galor/

Which raises the persisten question which occurs to me when reading this blog and which I’ve never seen adequately dealt with by NRx: sure you say there is a dysgenic trend in the industrialised nations, but you also claim that black people are intellectually inferior to “white” and asian people, and seem to imply (or claim explicitly) that the suffering of poor black people is a result of their own ignorance and intellectual inferiority. NRx’s depiction of “The Cathedral’s” ethnomasochistic tendencies may be in some ways an accurate description, however is this sufficient to refute the proposition that Western nations, populations and corporations in many cases exploit and cause the suffering of the poorest people on the globe?

The link to Handle’s comment being the sweep of industrial agriculture (driven by Western nations and businesses) across the African continent, and the concomitant impoverishment, displacement and famine that often accompanies this process. Industrial agriculture is geared towards export, displacing farmers producing for local consumption and subjecting producers to the vicissitudes and machinations of international commodity markets and traders; pesticide, fertilizer and hybrid-seed companies (headquartered in and sending profits to the post-industrial nations) lock farmers into monocultures and debt, and reliance on foreign inputs and technology, destroying resilience afforded by traditional techniques, diversification and independence, while at the same time farmers from the poor nations, often pushed into production for export, are exposed to tariffs 5x higher than those between OECD nations and are forced to compete with enormously subsidised Western industries (eg cotton and maize in the US), while their own domestic subsidies have been dismantled by the, again Western-dominated, international financial institutions. Some examples: places I lived and travelled in east Africa included the magnificently fertile Rift Valley, in which small farmers had been displaced by Dutch flower-growing companies which exported their commodities via jumbo jet to Europe, further north biofuel plantations (for export) are displacing local agriculture, to the west in Uganda villagers were being ‘resettled’ to make way for tree plantations for a German airline’s carbon offsets.

The fact that the kinds of changes described above are precisely what is foisted upon the “developing world” by what NRx terms “the Cathedral” is not lost on me. In fact this might be the most profoundly important aspect of this situation: that it is the supposedly humanitarian, politically-correct liberal-Left which facilitates the most manifest kinds of suffering inflicted upon the poor. What I’m asking NRx to acknowledge is that, yes, sometimes (often) Western, developed nations and corporations and white people do exploit and cause the suffering of poorer populations and nations.

The first photo Nick posted from the Dunhuang caves was of a painting of thousand-armed Avolkitesvara, Buddha of compassion. I suspect that Nick and Moldbug are in fact more compassionate towards those who experience the most manifest forms of suffering – physical deprivations, famine, starvation – under current conditions, than those of the supposedly humanitarian liberal-Left “Cathedral”.

Remember all that recurrent ‘microcredit’ hype? In Africa, one of the big ‘success stories’ I once read about was providing loans for the importation of nitrates and phosphorus, but it turned out it wasn’t a good controlled experiment, because they also simultaneously got the country to drop the hefty tariffs. That made a big difference, because they don’t make the stuff locally.

Industrial, Chemically Intensive agriculture is truly global, and if you can’t get the pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, fertilizers, seed supplies, and energy for irrigation, well … as the man said … things fall apart.