Is There Anything Good About Men?

the other cause which you I'm sure you're thinking of is better systems of writing, publishing and central system of goveranance - I'd agree with you there that european systems were better at the time. having said that europe as a whole was'nt that far ahead of india/china before colonialism began.

2. India was politically united in 300BC, about a 1000 years before the UK was in 700A.D. Hugo Grotius in discussing international law around 1600 talked of India as a single entity. the muslim empire around 1600s still had India politically united. culturally and even linguistically India has always had great inherent unity - contrary to the image sometimes portrayed in the west. India was not united by the British - they divided into innumerable princely states and sundry other divisions. It was Sardar Patel who united India after its independance despite all the efforts of the British for the opposite effect and hopes of getting India again once they were out of bankruptcy dues to WW2. You cannot grasp this until you read history of that period very carefully. America helped a bit - basically out of its own selfish motive so that the markets that were captive by the British would open up for itself.

Anyways thanks to Nehru and Gandhi most Indians (at least middle/upper classes) don't have much sting left of the British period of history. Different parts of the world that used to be apart were joining together and there was upheavel that accompanied it which could be expected. But the continuing pain in the peasants and less fortunate classes is very real. Nehru in his biography penned the feeling of loss that Indians feel when they visit America and see how rich it is- and wondered if India would not today have had a sunnier disposition if the British had not turned things so much upside down once they gained political control. He also thought that the loss of American colonies made the British even more vengeful in India, which I think is true.

All that does make it hard to hear the narrative of how Indian success owes itself to British - I mean wow, that really takes the cake does'nt it.

The British didn't 'resort to colonialism to build their way to modernity.' At that time, Britain defined modernity in a way to which no other country has come close since. Colonialism wasn't nice or good, but implying that the Brits alone relied on it to keep up with the rest of the world is nonsense.

Europe patently was pretty far ahead. Not necessarily in one particular area (although I would argue that, at the time, Europe was the world's hub of invention and innovation), but taken as a sum Europe was very far ahead of the rest of the contemporary world. Evidence for this can be seen in the influence Europe had over Africa, America, India and China at the time compared to the influence India and China had over it.

2. When the Brits found India, it was fragmented into several different princedoms and cities. To say that it was in any sense united is misleading - before the Brits got there and for a time while the Brits were there, wars between neighboring sultanates and empires were commonplace. When they left, they left a united India. Those are just cold hard facts that cannot be argued with - India may have been politically united in 300BC, but it sure as hell wasn't in 1700. At the bitter end, if the Brits had really, really wanted to leave India divided, it would not have been a difficult thing to accomplish. The will and attention simply was not there after Britain had bankrupted itself fighting the two largest wars the world had ever seen, right on its own doorstep.

Indians shouldn't feel any sense of loss when they visit America - those that do so are deluded, unless they believe that India (who had no united navy or army at that time) should have discovered it first (despite no history of exploration and settlement in the way of the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and Italians). If Indians should feel a sense of loss about any country, it should be Australia. It was on India's doorstep!

As for what-might-have-been-because-we-could-have-been-united: to say that Indians feel loss upon visiting America is similar to saying that Russians or Chinese should also.

If you want an objective viewpoint of history, you should refrain from choosing positions from an autobiography of one of the key players!

(Why is it that India's positives are due to certain men - Nehru and Ghandi are mentioned liberally throughout the arguments on this thread - but the downsides to British rule in India is due to 'the British', rather than Clive, Hastings or Mountbatten? Is that evidence of bias?)

I certainly haven't said that India owes its success to the British. I do think that some of modern India's plus points have their roots in the structures and technologies brought by the British - and conversely, a lot haven't. Both yourself and the OP seem very sensitive about that. The original point in the conversation to which I replied was that the British empire was an overwhelming force for evil.

Simply, it wasn't; as a matter of pure fact, it may have been the most benevolent imperial structure ever to have existed. It did bad things, but not all the things it did were bad and it can certainly be argued that, in balance and in net, it was a force for good.

Sleeping with more than one man may decrease a woman's time-spent-not-pregnant by a small factor. But no matter how many women a man is already sleeping with, adding one more will always increase his reproductive success by the same amount. The potential gain due to "cheating" is much higher for a man's genes than for a woman's because he has no downtime.

That has nothing to do with cultural norms, it's just biology.

There are certainly examples in the animal kingdom -- female dominant, where females maximize their genetic 'success' by successfully having children of many males.

Yes, the inverted world scenario could have happened with humans, as it has in a few cases (lemurs, bonobos, and hyenas).

But I think you're misinterpreting why it comes about in those cases. There is no suggestion that it emerges because it in any way increases the probability of a woman getting pregnant; to the contrary, that's the easy part, most researchers think female dominance is more related to ensuring that adequate resources are available to ensure the survival of the mother and offspring, which is a different issue altogether.

In those types of societies, we should (and do!) find that male reproductive risk seeking is more muted, because such risk seeking no longer carries with it significant evolutionary benefit - with females in control of the hierarchy and (limited) resources, and quickly impregnated when they're able, a male maximizes his potential success by staying alive, playing nice, and working to make sure the children survive. There's no contradiction there with what I've suggested: if you change the environmental constraints (social, developmental, and physical), the optimal evolutionary responses to those constraints change, too.

Such a society would be quite different in many ways, and the evolved differences between the sexes would be much smaller (lemurs display very minor sex differences compared to most mammals). But we should not pretend that the very real evolutionary pressures humans evolved in response to are not there just because things worked out the opposite way for a tiny fraction of mammals, and in the absence of a female dominant social structure, male risk seeking tends to have a significant evolutionary payoff. When we see evidence of it in humans, I don't see anything wrong with recognizing the incentives that lead to its expression.

So a better question to ask is "why did that not happen with homo sapiens sapiens?"

To put it bluntly, we can ask the question, but it's trivial to answer: female dominance is such an aberration in the mammalian world that it's probably selected against. 3 known examples out of more than 5000 species is under .1%, small enough that we can assume that in the evolutionary space and ecological habitats that we exist, female dominance has not been an optimal reproductive strategy. Even if it was neutral, we should be seeing more instances due to drift.

That's not a moral value judgment, or a justification, or anything like that - we're not slaves to our genes, we have the ability to overcome our instincts and emotions, and we should do so whenever they lead us astray. I think most reasonable people these days agree that dominance in any form is a primitive trait whose expression we should be trying to eradicate from our society.

But the current trend in some circles is to claim that in humans, most sex differences are purely social constructs, and hence are not influenced in any meaningful way by our genes or evolution. Which is bollocks - genetics and society are highly intertwined in most species, performing a delicate coevolutionary dance where one can't move without the other compensating accordingly, and this is something that any evolutionary biologist sees every day. Like nature vs. nurture, socialization vs. genetics is an argument for the fools, they happen together, and it's supremely naive to argue for one to the exclusion of the other.

1. jordan0day was wrong and Saturn expanded on Silverstorms rebuttal in a meaningful way.

2. It would be nice if people owned up to being wrong. Especially when they're "that" wrong.