I once watched a doco on prehistoric man, and it was argued that if you took a baby of prehistory parents and transported that baby to the present time. If that baby was given a fully rounded modern education by modern day parents then when that child grew up it would not be a 'grunting caveman', but just as likely as anyone else in this modern world to be a doctor, lawyer or astrophysicists. All to do with environment and previous learned experiences and not genealogy. Also seems the Neanderthal man was not as dumb as we once thought he was.

Dear Cossomby,

Possibly, another factor in Jewish intellectual predominance is selective breeding. In many Christian communities the brightest boys would be encouraged to become celibate priests, In general they remained celibate and were removed from the gene pool. In Jewish communities the brightest boys would be encouraged to become rabbis. They were provided for by the community or a prominent man who was proud to have such an individual for a son-in-law. The bright, young rabbi was encouraged to marry young and have many children.

One can swim in the gene pool or the secretarial pool.

David, that's an interesting observation.

Of course, the 'celibate' catholics weren't all that celibate in practice, from place to place and time to time.

But the Jewish practice simultaneously culturally encouraged intellectual pursuits and selectively bred for intellectual abilities.

david f, thanks for the superfluous "lesson" in Chinese history.

I'm well aware that the Chinese had an advanced civilisation.
I never claimed otherwise.

But that is *their* civilisation.
We may have borrowed this or that from them.
They borrowed this or that from us.

But our distinct peoples and cultures remained largely unchanged, certainly our genetics did.

Using gunpowder, Arabic numerals or believing in Jehovah doesn't change your genetics.

"None of the early centres of civilisation were in Europe"

And where are they now?
Rubble or slums.

"civilisations can advance and decline"

And if you fill ours with people who couldn't sustain their own, what do think will happen to ours?

"In my view faith breeds ignorance"

Yet you have faith in a utopian fantasy, hoping that if you chaotically mix everything together, somehow you'll end up with better results than any of the existing flawed but self-consistent cultures/civilisations.

SteeleRedux "It is the modern world fellas, move on."

Modern = Western = White.

Yes it is the modern world, so what's with the peasant romanticism of multiculturalism?
Party like it's 1399?

If you're just "modern", like Australians, you are deemed to not have a culture!

"or in Shocker's vernacular yellow, brown and white"

That's not my vernacular, honey.
When have I ever referred to a Yellow or Brown race?

"White" [with at capital] is a term commonly used by myself and others as a descriptor.
Not so with the other two terms.

I would call them technicians.

And guess where all that technology began?
With the work of European scientists going back centuries.

While the Asians were eating monkey brains and killing their newborn daughters.

Paul1405 "the 'extreme right' will not accept that such people are worthwhile, or a beneficial part of the human race."

Being part of the human race does not require them to be part of *our* population/society.

They can make their "equal, and in some cases, a superior contribution" from their own homelands.
Far, far away.

Cossomby "I would usually avoid claiming scientific expertise."

Then don't.

If you're really so learned, you would know that the more distant the genetic strain, the more likely you will create *outbreeding depression*.

If an Irish-English man mates with an Italian-German woman, their children will still be within a common ancestral lineage (going back to the Indo-Europeans).

An Irish-English man breeding with a Zulu or Korean woman has no recent precedent, only some prehistoric ancestry from 100,000+ years ago.

You don't know what deleterious combinations you might produce.

And you are utterly ignoring the social/psychological turmoil such mixed people experience.

It only takes 13 generations to have 6000 different ancestries.
Imagine being that kid.
What the *&$# am I?

No, don't answer "human". That isn't a definition/identity with any meaning or context.
"Humans" must have a context. They can't live in a vacuum.

Shockaholic wrote: " Cossomby "I would usually avoid claiming scientific expertise." Then don't.

Thank you for confirming my scientific prediction about posting behaviour! (But in fact I do have some scientific expertise, which enables me to analyse inexpert scientific claims.)

For example, 'outbreeding depression'. A controversial theory that seems to be an example of confirmation bias by racists ie set up a theory, cherry-pick data that seems to support it and ignore data that contradicts it