Review
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
Product Description
Understanding Human History is a history of humanity, beginning about 100,000 years ago and going through the 20th century. It includes discussions of developments in every major area of the world. Unlike other books on world history, it explicitly discusses racial differences in intelligence, and explains how, why, and when they arose. The book also discusses the many consequences that those differences have had on human events, starting in prehistoric times and continuing to the present. The book includes an abundance of data and tables, together with sixteen maps, three tables, an extensive bibliography, and a thorough index.
by Richard Lynn
by Richard Lynn
