Patrick Turner wrote:
> Aborigines didn't invent the wheel, or independently
> evolve to build a city like Paris on the shores of the
> Yarra River
> where Melbourne is.
>
> When a blackfella living in the old style way in a group
> up the bush,
> he'd marry and bonk his missus as much as possible like WT
> bonk their
> White Wives.
> But black and white men were pretty clueless about what
> caused babies
> for a heck of a long time
> since we evolved into conscious rational thinking wise
> beings.
> In ancient times, if a black, brown, pink, white, yellow
> bloke didn't
> bonk his missus,
> which was so rare its hard to imagine,
> she still became pregnant.
> So it obviously wasn't bonking that caused pregnancy.
> Of course what was going on to lead to this logical
> conclusion was that
> the missus
> belonging to the bloke would feel so ****ing ***** and
> randy while out
> gathering nuts, grubs,
> and edible plants that she'd wander past the neighbours
> and a single
> bloke in that mob
> would see her with that look and follow her awhile, and
> ****ge ****ge,
> wink wink,
> and """AAAHHHHHHH, OOOHHHH, that feels BETTER!!!"""
> And boy, that was easy to do and easy to get away with.
> What did abos think about 300 years ago? ***, food, ***,
> food, ***,
> food.
> Everyone was ****d, mainly young, lean and ***y and fit
> (while they
> lived.)
> There was hardly anyone else in the world, and plenty of
> big paddocks
> and trees and bushes to hide behind.
> The world was then a natural Rooter's Paradise, a
> Fornicators's Heaven.
> No condoms, no coppers, no lawyers, divorce settlements,
> and no complex
> silly social rules.
>
> So a bloke had a real job to keep stray semen out of his
> missus's fanny.
>
> But maybe he was not aware of what was going on. Wives and
> husbands sure
> broke all the tribal rules when it suited them. Always
> have, always
> will,
> and people are doin it and doin it right now.
> If the abo saw another bloke rootin his missus, maybe he'd
> just get
> riled and
> spear the **** right on the spot, and his missus too.
> I doubt he'd know why he got so riled, but he would get
> VERY cranky. He
> didn't much know why,
> or why so many tribal wars went on either, but they did.
> Anyway, the few people who did make it to old age seemed
> to transfer the
> wisdoms of the tribe forward in an unwritten and verbal
> way,
> and that takes some very real intelligence.
> Getting to old age was more likely if you were
> intelligent.
> The dumb ones died early.
>
> Had the rest of the world away from Australia not existed,
> and hadn't
> evolved science and doctors et all then perhaps I'd not be
> here to
> discuss this,
> and I'd be dead if I was an abo, because life expectancy
> was rather
> short,
> one could die anytime, and nobody really knew why. So
> marriages didn't
> last
> because death intervened so often. Pregnancy was a death
> sentance for
> many ****elas.
> Anyway, there was lotsa irregular rootin goin on, at least
> while you was
> young.
> But anyway, without the rest of the world existing,
> perhaps in another 25,000 years someone in Oz might have
> decided to
> invent
> agrriculture, the wheel, culture and civilisation like in
> ancient Iraq,
> about 10,000 years ago.
> The fact that I would be a member of a race such as
> aboriginies in Oz
> wouldn't make me
> unintelligent with low IQ because I didn't know what
> caused babies.
> If I'd been an abo, perhaps I'd have been a smarter one,
> but the abos
> never
> reasoned there was a need to have a test for it, or some
> reward for high
> scores, " dat white fella BS."
> When we see how complex the aboriginal culture and its art
> actually is,
> then we see that you have to be pretty intelligent to
> follow the thought
> of the previous owners of Oz.
Anthropology is, or maybe was coz you don't hear much about
it these days, an interesting subject.
Engels' "The Family, Private Property and the State" is a
readable eye-opener. Pioneering and hence necessarily
speculative in terms of detail, not rigorous by today's
standards, no longer so cheap since the withdrawal of Soviet
literature subsidies, and rather out of fa****on, it is
nonetheless recognised as an im****tant contribution.
Part of its intent was to counter the common assumption of
romantic socialists and Christians that the world was once a
garden of Eden, where happy and beautiful natives lived in
harmony. Naturally Engels wanted to work towards a better
future rather than dream of returning to the past. Unlike so
many namby-pamby liberals and fire-and-brimstone
fundamentalists, he believed in progress.
The revelation is in its methodology, which it shares with
astronomy and geology, and other parts of science that are
not amenable to classical experimental techniques or
analysis. If you look at the sky you can see many different
kinds of objects, behaving in lots of different ways, and
it's tempting to assume that so much variety must have been
created by some clever being with a lot of imagination. But
if you look for long enough you begin to notice changes, and
this leads you to think in terms of processes. One day you
are struck by a notion which becomes obvious as soon as it
hits you: it's all the same process; and you see that the
variety illustrates stages of development. Once unravelled
and placed in order of time, you have an illustrated history
of the universe.
So it is with the history of people. At the time of the
emergence of anthropology, though sadly perhaps no longer,
you could travel round the world, if you were very rich and
curious, and see a great variety of forms of social
organisation. As with geology with its rock formations and
astronomy with its heavenly bodies, it became apparent to
those able to tear themselves away from received wisdom,
that it all fell into place once a timeline was introduced.
Engels would have regarded native Australians as savages,
but the word had a different meaning then ("The Noble
Savage"). IIRC, societies that didn't know how reproduction
happened tended to be matriarchal: men may have been good at
hunting but were totally useless at making the babies that
you needed to look after you when you got too old to fend
for yourself.
Anyway, diversity and recombinant hybridisation adds vigour.
There's progress, and backsliding, but no standing still.
Thank god for black Americans. I remember when Eysenck was
hounded from the platform at the LSE for saying that people
of African decent had low IQs. His defence was that it's
true, which rather missed the point. It was, and is, a truth
of little significance for any purpose other than racialism,
and he became the darling of the neo-fascists who wished to
wrap the idea, that black people are by nature unfit for
high office, in language that seemed like respectable
science.
If you test dolphins, they have an average IQ of 100. So do
elephants, Japanese people, Australians as a whole, and
native Australians. Any group you test has *by definition*
an average IQ of 100. Mix them into one group, and the
average will still be 100. If you test a group, you cannot
validly come to any conclusion about how sub-groups compare
with each other: it's either a group or it isn't, you can't
have it both ways.
There is nothing clear about the meaning of intelligence
either, and it can't be expressed as a number, obviously.
Anyone who brags about his IQ is deluded in the saddest way
I can think of. Bret probably has a big one, too. Doesn't
stop his head being full of ****.
Ian
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