Clearly, the African continent is home only to the most primitive peoples. It's not a place that would birth historically powerful, flourishing civilizations whose large-scale engineering feats would be regarded among the "wonders of the world" millennia later. Oh, wait...

It seems to me that genetic diversity and cultural diversity would be related. In other words, cultural isolation and genetic isolation tend to go hand-in-hand.

Therefore, if the argument is that economic development is correlated to genetic diversity, then it is also necessarily correlated to cultural diversity. This now frames the issue in a more intuitive way; The more ideas and ways of looking at the world you bring to the table, the more diverse your solutions and creativity, and the more developed your economy becomes. This seems to be broadly supported by history as well, since the most prosperous trade often occurred when and where cultures mingled freely.

And now that the genetic element has been effectively abated, the controversy evaporates. You're welcome.
=Smidge=

If you missed that part of the summary, you might try leaving the fertile crescent and seeing if it makes sense afterward.

That is said in regard to hard sciences. Not the soft, "social" sciences. Trying to equate the two is to try to muddy things.

a)If this is the case, then, the most economically successful (based on the premise described in the Slashdot article, I haven't read the paper) would be the Native Americans on the East coast, as they came from Africa, through Asia, across the Bering Strait, and then across what is now the United States, putting them about as far from Africa as you can get. While the American natives had a far more advanced culture than classic stereotypes portray, I'm not sure you could call it more economically advanced than the Europeans had when they landed here, as the Europeans had already invented such advanced economic developments as usury, debtor's prison, embezzling, and insurance fraud. I have not heard of any Native American cultures having developed those vital economic tools prior to contact with Europe, but I will accept I could be wrong.

b)I'm absolutely certain the xenophobic far-right will seize with gleeful delight on a study that says "exogamy, multiculturalism, and mixing of ethnic groups/continual intermarriage is the key to success". (That was sarcasm.)

c)Given that, I'm not sure why the left, which presumably favors multiculturalism, mixing ethnic groups, etc, would OPPOSE a study that says, "Yes, the more genetically diverse your population is, the better off you're going to be."

d)"Argument from consequences" is a severe logical fallacy. If the paper is factually wrong, then, prove it wrong -- but don't say, "This can't be true because it would be BAD if it was true." That's the equivalent of saying, "I know my spouse isn't cheating on me, because I'd be utterly heartbroken if they were. That proves they're not."

Well that sounds pretty epic ... also, very confusing. "Cure the human condition"? "Manipulation and force"? What does any of that have to do with this paper? Also, I find it counter-intellectual to take a paper that has been submitted for peer review and renounce it along with colonialists, eugenicists, public health officials and political idealists just because it contains correlated determinism. You're free to attack it based purely on what it says but to say that just because it suggests determinism in humanity's history doesn't mean that they are Nazi scientists and Ku Klux Klan members.

Curiously the article accompanying this paper leaves out a key detail. From the paper:

(emphasis mine) Okay, after reading the article I would have said this study is obviously overlooking the British Empire that came back and started to systematically colonize the world despite it being further from the cradle of civilization than the very people it was colonizing. So 1500 CE was prior to a lot of the counter examples I could think of but I also feel like China and Japan had to be fully operational at these points in time and I wish I could pull up GDP numbers for 1500 but, gosh darn it, they weren't very good at record keeping at this point in time.

I think that if these authors had placed their time frame in pre-Holy Roman Empire or pre-Zoroastrian times they would have met with less kick back from their academic community. Personally, I feel like we as humans by 1500 CE had already transcended the epoch period where our intelligence removed us from the uncaring hand of nature. Granted, that was a long struggle, but I think it's foolish to say that "At not time in humanity's history has our genetic diversity played a role in our survival." We are of the animal kingdom, the mistake this paper made was trying to bring that too close to the present. We had already had inventor-geniuses. History had already shown that technology like the Romans roads could be critical in enforcing dominance on other cultures.

Welcome to academia. I mean, when it comes to publishing papers on historic events you can't exactly take their experiment and run it 50 times in your own lab to independently verify your results, can you? So I would imagine that economists, social sciences, historical studies and the like are filled with disagreeing camps that can't rectify their differences.

Or perhaps if you publish something about the past and you make flimsy assumptions, you can almost guarantee your "colleagues" will roast you alive.

So you're saying an author is being attacked for his theories not being 10

For arguments based on racial/genetic makeup, a couple thousand years don't matter (significant genetic changes and the timescale for the initial "out-of-Africa" spread of humanity are over tens of thousands of years). Over the time scale of just a couple millennia, accidents of history unrelated to underlying racial makeup will be the dominant source of fluctuations in where the centers of geopolitical power (and corresponding economic advancement) lie. If Africans a couple thousand years ago were producing world-leading centers of technology and culture, that is a strong indication that the present-day underdevelopment of the African continent is due to factors besides racial/genetic disability (such as centuries of colonial exploitation following the shift of the regional center of power from Egypt to Rome, and eventually Northwestern Europe).

Economists have just about the worst track record of any major specialty in terms of quality research.

In this case, diversity is far less likely to do with it than the fact that Africa is less than a century out of independence from various European powers. Look what Europe was like until relatively recently. Corruption is still rampant and there isn't a lot of investment that's going on there.

> That is said in regard to hard sciences. Not the soft, "social" sciences. Trying to equate the two is to try to muddy things.

I can see how creating a false dichotomy helps clear the muddiness.

In reality, though, "hard vs soft" is not a meaningful distinction. Social sciences can make concrete falsifiable hypotheses just as easily as any other, just as "hard" sciences can make untestable extrapolations to untestable systems.

For example, if I take the GP to be referring to climate science (with models oft describes as being a consensus), then scientists can test effects in the lab (e.g. carbon dioxide's greenhouse effect). And while they can make modes and extrapolate from them, they can never conclusively test CO2's effect on the Earth because there is only one Earth.

Compare and contrast to a psychologist that runs a scientific study. They can then use their data to make a model, but they cannot fork all of civilization into two separate universes and change one target variable; all they can do is model it and make some reasonable estimations.

All it comes down to is that the "soft sciences" are a hell of a lot _harder_. There are so many more variables to account for and almost no ability to control them. Chemistry? Easy: you can create almost perfectly isolated systems and test as much as you want. It's pretty rare to see arguments over things (esp with modern tech). You can though: was that glassware contaminated with some metal ions that catalyzed something? etc. There it's a lot easier (and less expensive!) to retest. Sociology? No dice. Studies are expensive and variables are numerous. It's not that it's some kind of lesser science, it's just that so much work needs to be done (and even when it is, it can become outdated quickly as environmental factors change that you can't change back). Maybe you are willing to write it off as impossible and call it "soft science", but that doesn't mean it's not science and that the problems it faces aren't identical to those faced by every other branch of science.

The Egyptian pyramids, and the lighthouse of Alexandria were both considered to be Wonders of the World [wikipedia.org], and both are/were located in Africa.

You have to be kidding. The very definition of hard sciences is in the rigour. Things like testable predictions, controlled experiments, quantifiability, etc., are the hallmarks of the hard sciences.

It's not that the soft sciences are without any rigour, but it isn't to the same degree because we can't do it to the same degree.

Also, in the last paragraph, there are two problems. First, the whole paragraph is an argument that hard vs. soft is a meaningful distinction that is more prone to the science being settled, which was exactly the GPs point that you were arguing against, so you paradoxically just started arguing against yourself.

Second, you say

. It's hard to tell whether this is meant to be cute wordplay or you're really equivocating, but you should say "more difficult" instead of "harder". I would agree that it's more difficult to come to a consistent conclusion in the soft sciences. I would disagree that they are simply more difficult -- the fact that you can take more steps in physics and chemistry is an invitation to take those steps. All the sciences are beyond humanity's grasp so they are all basically equally difficult on their frontiers.

It's exceedingly difficult for me seeing that people are still doing that. The genetic difference between homo sapiens and Chimpanzies is vanishingly small, yet some portion of the population continues to believe the outward physical differences between Blacks, Caucasians, and Orientals are significant. Why haven't we outgrown that crap yet?

Alexandria is in Africa. Egypt was the world's first superpower. Ancient Uganda was a superpower. The Zulu were a superpower. Africa's had a few lousy centuries mostly due to the bullies (European empires and various slavers) that surrounded them. Now they've finally been shaken off, I expect greatness from Africa in the future (if they can fend off the Chinese).

I wish I'd gone off grid and stayed in Khartoum. :-( Sigh.

Using colonialism as an explanation for lack of economic progress isn't supported by the evidence. The African country with the longest and most pervasive colonization was South Africa. The country with the least was Ethiopia, which maintained its independence except for a few years of Italian control in the 1930s. Yet South Africa is near the top of the African economic pile, while Ethiopia is near the bottom. There are plenty of other examples. Countries with long periods of colonization, much interaction between the locals and the colonists, and lasting European-style laws and civil institutions, are doing far better than countries where colonialism was less influential.