/sci/ - Science & Math

Everyone in this thread needs to read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.

There. I just provided the answer to all of your questions and arguments, while simultaneously showing you that anthropology has a place in the scientific community.

Just gonna recommend this book for everyone.

/sci/, I need some decent non-fiction books to read. The exact topics are unimportant, but what I'm looking for are books which back up their discussions with robust sources and research. I would ask for 'pop-sci', but I don't exactly want to be pandered to. Theses aren't that much help either. If you've read anything recently that has made you think about the topic seriously afterwards, it's worth a mention.

Pic related: Read it a few months ago, and I appreciated not only the points it made, but how it made them. Reading 'The Black Swan' by Nassim Taleb at the moment and I can't say its doing it for me.

Also called the big book of nigger excuses. But it's pretty good.

It comes down to location, location, location. Africa doesn't have the natural resources to accommodate agrarian farmers, while the middle east had a suitable environment. The middle east also had the highest number of domesticated animals than any other area in the world. With animals comes disease(most of our diseases comes from cows and chickens).

I was just reading this book and it said that modern industrialized society is getting genetically less intelligent than modern tribal or hunter-gatherer societies because no factors in our environment select for intelligence; pretty much everyone gets to reproduce now. I feel like this can be proven or disproven simply by talking about the rate at which intelligence changes can happen- does anyone know that? Is it even possible for the actual average intelligence of the population to change in a few thousand years?

Do we even know how genetics affect (or effect) intelligence at all?

Read Jared Diamond

read this
also why did you sage your own thread

You mean like right now?

Guns, Germs and Steel

Pretty good if you ask me.