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Dear LEGO,

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Unfortunately, I don’t have time to comment in detail but suggest you read the following on “The Bell Curve” :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Academic_reception

You might also like to read the following article on the concept of human “race” by R.C. Lewontin, Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Harvard University, which I find honest and unbiased :

http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Lewontin/

I have to rush off now, back next week …

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The UK has only been a nation for 400 years with a united crown in Captain Cook's century. Oz was separate colonies a century ago with many living in bark huts before that. The Churches had rituals quite different then and Prods didn't really exist before the first Elizabeth. Yet all these claim their ancient heritages. The Puritans were suppressed by the British and survived in a land west of British Ireland and are OK now.
Today the Bunjil and Ringbalin ceremonies continue in changed form but still real.

Hi Rodney. How's gay Pareee? Keeping out of the Muslim areas for your own safety, I hope?

I was aware of the fire storm of criticism from left wing academia at the time of the publication of "The Bell Curve." The best one was in "Scientific American." Anyone who dares to deny the infallible logic of racial equality is going to be shown the instruments of torture by the Thought Police, and told to shut up. The book was criticised in every way imaginable but one. Unlike the authors of "The Bell curve", no left wing cognitive metrician is ever going to produce data that proves that all races are equal in intelligence. They won't even try, because no matter how much they deny it, they know that the conclusions of "The Bell Curve" were correct. It's bit like the Church and Darwin. They knew he was right, but they could never admit he was right. To do so would encourage doubt in their infallible, morally ascendant, and absolutist ideology.

I have read "The Bell Curve" twice and I find the authors credible, even handed, (they even submit their opponents arguments and use logic to refute them) and their conclusions fair and reasonable.

I read through your last link and laughed out load. It is a perfect example of "baffle them with bullshiit." It basically says that races do not exist. Could you please tell the aborigines that they can not have any special treatment because their race does not exist?

Could I make an observation here? Race exists among leftists when they want it to exist, and race does not exist when it is convenient for leftists to deny it.

To any person familiar with recent history, the concept that races do not exist equates very closely to the socialist ideal that classes do not exist. But races most certainly do exist, and classes most certainly exist also. As a young man, one of the first inconsistencies I recognised in the socialist ideology was that the people claiming that classes did not exist, were very class conscious themselves.

All drivers are equal , some have Toyotas and some don't.
LEGO where are you going? The dominant race is the standard for the lesser races? Property owners control parliament excluding renters?
The monarch is top of the food chain?

There is an interesting article in today's Australian, page 3, on a DNA study of Indigenous Australians and Papua-New Guineans, in connection with their 20,000-year journey between Africa and PNG-Australia (which of course they would have been oblivious of, moving maybe a kilometre a year in all directions, back towards Africa, towards central Asia, Europe, etc., and occasionally in the general direction of India, Malaya and PNG-Australia.

The article suggests that people arrived here (i.e. on the PNG-Australian-Tasmanian island called 'Sahel') around 50,000 years ago, and separated into different groupings of people at around 37,000 years ago.

Then the ice Age hit about 30,000 years ago, sea-levels fell, the climate dried out, which means that of course people had to change their hunting and gathering techniques to account for the harsher environment. Then, after the end of the Ice Age, 12,000 or so years ago, PNG, Australian mainland and Tasmania separated as the sea-level rose higher than before the Ice Age started, and the climate changed again to something warmer and wetter. So of course, people's foraging techniques changed again: drier areas could be re-populated once more.

Probably the Indigenous population was much more numerous before that Ice Age, then fell to a fraction of that during the 20,000 years of the Ice Age, to rebound again and stabilise, more or less, at around 250,000, as it was when Europeans arrived.

The periodic droughts would have wiped out populations regionally while other areas may have been favoured. Re-population of emptied areas would have taken some time. After all, the key feature would have been the fertility of the women: their value was exploited by their exchange between groups.

I'm betting that across most of drier Australia, Indigenous men's DNA was/is very similar across each location but women's was very varied. But that might have been countered by a more equal distribution in the more productive areas, around coasts, ranges with permanent water and rivers.

Fascinating !

Joe

Joe, watching an interview with the professor involved with that study I was struck by his emphasis on how different was the DNA of aboriginal'people in the north and north west to aboriginal,people down south and east. He said the difference was as large as would occur between American Native Indigenous and Siberian Indigenous.
Given that study used DNA samples from modern people and only a few samples used, it would not be out of question surely that people along the north west coast had DNA from interacting with Malay and Indonesian who used to camp along the coast each dry season whilst fishing for trepang.
I know I have grandchildren who are the result of a Tiwi Island woman loaned to a group of Malay fishermen for a season in exchange for goods.