Understanding Human History
VDARE.COM - http://vdare.com/sailer/070812_hart.htm August 12, 2007 A Real Diamond: Michael Hart's Understanding Human History By Steve Sailer The ambitious History of Everything book has been an important genre at  least since Sir Walter Raleigh's The Historie of the World. The most popular example of recent years: Jared Diamond's 1997 bestseller  Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond attempted to explain the always-interesting  question of who conquered whom over the last 13,000 years without mentioning  differences in average intelligence among human groups-a factor that he  ruled out, a priori, as too "racist" and "loathsome" even to think about. Now, there's another entry in this genre: Michael H. Hart's Understanding  Human History: An analysis including the effects of geography and  differential evolution (Washington Summit Publishers, pp. 484, $24.95). Hart's book serves as a comprehensive refutation of Guns, Germs, and Steel.  It's an impressive and insightful attempt to provide a more careful and  powerful answer to Diamond's question about why some peoples came to rule  other peoples. Unlike Diamond, Hart is also interested in a second, less bloodthirsty  question: who gave what to the entire human race in terms of science,  technology, and the arts. This is a fascinating topic-but one that the Diamonds of the world shy away  from, since measuring contributions rather than conquests don't present an  opportunity for the competitive moralism, the public white-guilt  breast-beating afforded by the European expansion of 1400-1900. Over the same period, as everyone knows deep down, virtually every advance  that is now the shared patrimony of humanity was made by Europeans or their  offshoots. These days, that's a rather inconvenient truth. Hart sums up: "The central hypothesis of this book is that genetic differences between  human groups (in particular, differences in average native intelligence)  have been an important factor in human history." Hart is a polymath: a rocket scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy who worked  at NASA and was a physics professor at Trinity University in San Antonio,  Texas. Along the way, he picked up a law degree. Every decade or two, Hart publishes a book for a general audience. His  best-known: 1978's The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in  History. (Hart's top six, by the way, were Muhammad, Newton, Jesus, Buddha,  Confucius, and St. Paul. I'm sure your ranking would differ, but that was  the fun of Hart's book: it was a great argument-starter. His complete list  is here.) Now, in Understanding Human History, Hart changes his focus from individuals  to racial groups. He begins with a quick (130 pages) but close to  state-of-the-art overview of the human sciences relevant to history-physical  anthropology, linguistics, population genetics and psychometrics. This  section alone would be worth the price of the book. Hart has mastered the  scientific literature through at least 2005. For instance, Hart, who is  Jewish, devotes three pages to the fascinating theory published two years  ago by genetic anthropologist Henry Harpending and physicist turned  evolutionary theorist Gregory Cochran that European Jews evolved their  higher IQs just over the last millennium. After reviewing the human sciences, Hart moves on to perhaps the most  concise history of the world from the Stone Age to the late 20th Century  imaginable. Many of the famous "big histories," such as Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall  of the Roman Empire, Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England, Kenneth  Clark's Civilization, and Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence  are  suffused with their authors' personalities. But Hart almost never stops for  a self-indulgent aside, which allows him to race through in fewer than 500  pa --http://vdare.com/sailer/070812_hart.htm