The Human Development Index measures life expectancy, literacy, education and standard of living for the world’s nations.

Where are the countries with high HDI scores? North America, Europe/Russia, South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Israel, Cuba, Brazil, Chile and Argentina.

Which areas score in the middle? Half of Central and South America, most of the Middle East, Central and South Asia, Southeast Asia and China.

Which countries have low scores? They are concentrated between the Maghreb and the southern African states.

The HDI trend lines for the world’s regions are on the rise, except for Sub-Saharan Africa, which is at the bottom and is flat-lining.

In the United States people of African ancestry are on average at or near the bottom in standardized testing and educational attainment. Even with affirmative action there is still a gap between middle class Blacks and middle class Whites. After Proposition 209 was enforced in California the graduation rates for African-Americans increased, but their enrollment rate dropped considerably. Brazil has instituted an affirmative action program, so apparently they think they have a problem too.

Watson, Herrnstein, Murray and Rushton seem to think all this is linked to heredity. (I’m guessing there won’t be any more Slate articles on this specific issue, well researched or not.)

Linguist John McWhorter also thinks there is a problem, but he thinks that it stems from a culture that is characterized by victimology, anti-intellectualism and self separation. Bill Cosby also thinks the problem is cultural. Do some cultures set us up for success in the 21st century and others make it easier for us to fail? If so, how?

Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson think there is a problem. They think the problem is due to racism. But what is “Racism” in 2007 in America, in Africa?

Is there a problem? If so, what do you think is causing it?

I do not like them in a box. I do not like them with a fox. I do not like them in a boat. I do not like them with a goat. I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-am.

If it is genetic I would hazard to guess that it has to do with the pleasure center of the brain. Intellectual stimulation may give more pleasure to some races than others (Just like physical exertion gives some people pleasure).

Simple isn't it. I'd like to be involved with researching that. I also know that brain chemistry can be changed by the way you think. It has worked on trials involving OCD, drugs, and working out OCD with pure thought. So changing black culture could change their potential.

But I truly believe that the WHOLE STANDARD OF DEVIATION difference in mean IQ's is cultural/environmental more so than genetic.

I'm only going to focus on one point:

The HDI trend lines for the world’s regions are on the rise, except for Sub-Saharan Africa, which is at the bottom and is flat-lining.

Africa also has:

1. The highest rates of infectious disease. Why? Humans evolved there. In order to be a human pathogen, a virus, parasite or bacteria must evolve in concert with its host. There is usually a reservoir host in an animal as well that is not made sick. As humans migrated out of Africa, the changing environment meant they could not bring animals with them or they encountered different animals in the new climates that made poor reservoirs. So disease stayed behind. Think: why didn't the Native Americans have new diseases like smallpox and malaria to give to their European conquerers? Because by the time humans reached the Americas, crossing the Bering Strait with no animals, they had no diseases left to bring. Humans and their recent ancestors have been in Africa over 6 million years. They only got here about 10-15,000 years ago. So Africa has always been disadvantaged by higher rates of infectious disease, simply because it is the motherland. (I'm not a human geneticist, but pathogenesis IS my area of expertise, so just say the word if you want to talk about this more.)

2. Nutrition. Although starvation and malnutrition are on the wane in Africa--having lived and travelled throughout several times, I HATE the image of all Africans as miserable and starving; not my experience at all--Africa is cursed with some of the worst soil in the world, partly due to farming/grazing for so very many thousands of years and partly due to geology. See the recent NYT article on the miracle of fertilizer in Malawi for more. Surely this has negative impacts on cultural and individual development.

3. Resource exploitation. That same geology drew colonial powers to horrific acts of colonization unparalleled anywhere else in the world. John Reader's Africa, A Biography of a Continent, does an excellent job of telling the horrors perpetuated by European powers in the past few centuries for diamonds, gold and rubber--some make the Holocaust look almost friendly by comparison. But because our schoolbooks contain almost nothing of African history (yet lots and lots about the Holocaust), and most Americans couldn't tell the Congo from Botswana from Sierra Leone, few think about this.

4. Poor political structures. Because of past assumptions of genetic inferiority, most colonial powers created political structures in these countries that played one tribal group against another (British), or locked Africans out of the bureaucratic process entirely (French). After the 1960s independence movement, countries were poorly prepared for the mantle of nation-states; U.S. and Russia made it worse during the '70s and '80s by fighting proxy wars there, arming competing factions and backing despots, some of whom persist today.

Is it a coincidence that Asia has suffered far fewer of these problems and now is really beginning to rise? Or that Latin America is intermediate on the development scale, having experienced many similar historical problems--to a lesser degree; as Fareed Zakaria noted in his book The Future of Freedom, it has fewer resources to exploit and thus attracted less colonial attention and enjoyed an earlier independence. It also (tragically) lost many if not most of its natives five hundred years ago in the worst genocide ever, so has fewer tribal conflicts today.

Apparently, environment matters.

I have no dog in the larger fight, so my comments are limited to your point re disease. It strikes me that you've oversimplified the disparity in disease between Africa and, for instance, pre-colombian America by linking it entirely to the existence of non-human reservoire hosts. First, for my own education, do you have any links to articles on this subject? Second, it strikes me that the more important differences between Africa, Europe, and Asia, on the one hand, and pre-colombian America, on the other hand, would be population densities and the flow of populations via trade and migration. In other words, why ignore human hosts? Historically, imports of disease via trade routes and migration between Asia, Africa, and Europe have accounted for some of the most significant spread of diseases, and population density in these areas has allowed the rapid spread of these diseases. Am I wrong here?

I'd suggest "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. As he explains, many of the diseases that tend to be the worst killers are those with a non-human reservoir host, because even if an outbreak burns itself out by killing nearly everyone exposed, the pathogens remain in the host species, ready to cross the species barrier later on. He also discusses the role of population densities and trade routes in epidemics and the reasons that some societies such as the early Americans were nearly wiped out when the Europeans arrived, while the Europeans MAY have picked up one disease in exchange (syphilis).

Africa also has:

1. The highest rates of infectious disease.

AIDS is definitely doing a job on Africa. Africa also has a lot of nasty stuff the rest of the world doesn’t have like Marburg Disease. But I thought the big disease problems in Africa were more pedestrian like malaria, schistosomiasis, dysentery, cholera, TB, typhoid. All of these diseases exist outside Africa don’t they?

2. Nutrition.

You link nutrition to poor soil. China has poor soil, the Maghreb has poor soil, as do a lot of places that are doing okay on the HDI. Also, I thought that the spread of the African deserts were due in part to poor farming practices.

3. Resource exploitation.

The colonial powers exploited Africa, imposed monoculture on many areas, and engaged in genocides like the one in German South-West Africa in 1904. But they also exploited and abused Asia. The Viets fought continuously between 1945 and the 1980s during their long bid for independence, now they’re doing fine. The Cambodians experienced a genocide in the 1970s that destroyed many or most of the educated Khmers and destroyed the Chinese Cambodian community, but it has bounced back. The Germans tried to exterminate the Herero and Nama a century ago but Namibia, like South Africa, scores in the middle of the HDI.

4. Poor political structures.

The British pushed different ethnic groups together in other places too: India, Pakistan, Burma, and Malaysia. These places are not perfect but they are not all suffering like Sub-Saharan Africa. The French didn’t develop a native administrative elite in many of their colonies, so why are former French colonies in the Maghreb and South-East Asia not at the bottom of the HDI? The southern African racist regimes in Southwest Africa, South Africa and Rhodesia were odious but today Namibia and South Africa are in the middle range of the HDI. Zimbabwe has gone downhill since Robert Mugabe took over 27 years ago and he, not Ian Smith, is responsible for the state of that country today.

All these problems exist outside of Sub-Saharan Africa too, so why is Sub-Saharan Africa so uniquely miserable (per the HDI)? Plus, why does the African Diaspora continue to experience the problems it does even though it is outside the African environment?

Oh, sure it's oversimplified. And certainly diseases do move along trade routes--yet most still have their origins in Africa. For example, almost all mosquito-borne diseases are from there--the Latin American versions were imported along with the slave trade, and of course mosquitoes don't reach significantly above or below the 20 degree line (until lately--tropical diseases carried by mosquitoes have been spotted in Italy in recent years, probably thanks to climate change). Parasites, too, are mainly of African origin--their dual host life cycles means both hosts must be present and have BEEN present for long enough to allow the parasite to evolve. Malaria, schistosomiasis, guinea worm, trypanosomes.... Pathogens with animal reservoirs, like the hemorrhagic fevers, don't move outside the area of their animal hosts. And many pathogens that are exclusively human-to-human today came originally from Old World monkeys, including HIV.

Think of it this way: for a pathogen to kill its host is bad business; the pathogen also dies. So pathogens that kill humans usually have jumped from an adjacent animal species that DOESN'T get seriously sick, or else they have such a large pool of hosts to infect that it doesn't matter if they kill a lot of them.

Such is the case with diseases with no animal reservoir, such as measles, polio, smallpox, cholera. (Interestingly, of the viruses, the nearest relative is always from a herding animal, though.) Measles, with its 25% mortality rate, requires minimum populations of ~200,000 people. The population has "herd immunity"--the disease is endemic to the human "herd," but can't spread willy-nilly because of widespread immunity. If infected, death is still likely, but the population is large enough to withstand that and still spread the virus. Smaller populations won't survive such catastrophe--and thus, neither will the pathogen, because it's got no alternative hosts.

Clearly, civilizations can withstand diseases like this, because if they couldn't, they (and the disease) would die out. But they aren't found in small populations, and no such constraint is imposed on diseases that can be maintained in other hosts and sometimes skip over into humans. Those are mainly found in tropical areas, but less so (natively) in Latin American or Asian tropical areas.

Further, almost all of these human-human diseases have their nearest relatives in cattle or pigs, so develop as a consequence of animal herding. They were unlikely to be carried into the New World by the original Native Americans because of the changes in climate that must be crossed for such migrations (see Jared Diamond on this one).

And natural history aside, of course, many of civilization's infectious diseases cluster in Africa today because of lack of infrastructure for vaccination (requires refrigeration) and sewage systems, which can be linked to the other problems described in my post.

Let's see, further reading....I could throw out a couple of textbooks, but it'd take considerable time for me to dig up papers. I'll see if I can get to it....