Taiwan 13th Smartest in World, 4th in IQ

Illegal immigrants to USA are virtually all non-Mexican.

Singapore is simply very lucky that thereā€™s not a regional hegemon like China that is trying to destroy them.

Obviously. But again: so what? Why on earth would we all need to grow exactly the same things? As I said earlier, itā€™s been a common habit for farmers to develop their own landrace varieties, with differences arising from deliberate selection even across a few dozens of kilometers.

Worth mentioning that solar insolation and water supply across roughly 30% of the African continent would permit biomass output far in excess of Western Europe. Thereā€™s a reason European settlers were enamoured with (eg) South Africa.

Just read the book, itā€™s a classic. I read it over ten years ago.

Itā€™s not about genetics because anybody who actually studies genetics knows that there is more human genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else in the world.
Not only that there are also Eurasian genes from reverse migrations.

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Thank you.

Also: There is more variation in ā€œIQā€ within groups than between groups. So IQ explains, pretty much jack squat.

High IQ doesnā€™t mean smart in all aspects thats for sure.

Iā€™m guessing tropical diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness have had major impacts on civilisations developing in Africa.

also corruption and mismanagement by African leaders when the countries are returned to themā€¦

Much as I like Jared Diamondā€™s work, Iā€™m pretty confident I know way more about agriculture than he does. This hypothesis not only makes no sense, itā€™s contradicted by the behaviour and experience of real-world farmers.

The disease-burden theory has a lot more empirical support.

Thereā€™s a small possibility that neanderthals or some other human species contrbuted certain genes to modern Eurasian populations that affect intelligence (and remember they could make you dumber too by saving energy by being lazy and therefore could spread in a population lol), but I havenā€™t seen any research backing that.
Even if there was some genetic difference it wouldnā€™t necessarily be causal.

Is anybody here going to offer a plausible hypothesis explaining how a population of intelligent people could theoretically produce the hopeless clusterfuck that is modern Africa?

corruption

So, basically, theyā€™re smart, bad people?

Culture. Environment. Luck. All that stuff.

Some power greed and money from the dictators yes

Probably environment has a lot to do with it. Now remember Africa has had great civilisatIons in the past such as the Egyptians and the Carthaginians .
So did the Americas. So did South East Asia e.g. Khmer.

Environment maybe you can argue that itā€™s too hot so people just lay around and donā€™t work as much. If it was 40 degree outside I also wouldnā€™t want to be slaving away.

But as far as plants, the rainforest is some of the most biodiverse environment and then around those latitudes some crops also grow very wellā€¦

I would hazard a general cashing cheques and geopolitical interests might be more salient.