Browncoats Engine of Choice

[Skipjack]

Well that depends on how you look at the story.
You have the observation then you have the deduction, thereafter the theory and then you conduct an experiment to proof your theory.
The observation was correct: People that enter the valley get sick.
The deduction and the theory were both wrong: Evil spirits hounting the valley. The experiment unfortunately proofed this wrong theory here.
Problem is, that it could have been a number of things. The theory was based on a wrong theory in the first place (there are spirits).
There is a funny story that Carl Sagan brought in his Cosmos series (he himself was wrong more than once too, but he admitted his failures).
For the longest time, people thougt that Venus was covered by swamps and oceans. That all was based on a single observation (or lack thereof).
The first astronomers looked up into the sky at Venus and saw... nothing. No surface features, nothing. Their deduction was: The skys there are covered with thick clouds and water vapour. They did not stop there though, oh no... So they figured "if there are clouds, there must be water, probably oceans, or huge swamps. It was very swampy on earth at the time of the dinosaurs, so maybe there are not just swamps, but also dinosaurs".
Those were "serious" scientists (and tons of scifi writers would pick up on that too, afterwards of course). I mean it is quite ridiculous if you think about it:
Observation: I cant see a thing.
Conclusion: Dinosaurs!
Brilliant!
This is why it is important to establish the facts first, then go on from there. Never base deductions and conclusions on to little fact.

Thanks for the kind words regarding my English. I am doing my best, but sometimes still fail miserably (a-moralic, yeah, should have thought that out better).

[Skipjack]

Oh on that theory of mine. There are several reasons why I dont like talking about it. One is that I do not have enough facts to base it on (there are some, but they are insufficient) and therefore I prefer keeping it to myself. The other is that it might be considered politically incorrect.
I do think however that it is just as valid as the theory proposed by some here, that says that christian religion allowed for this growth in scientific knowledge.

[Betruger]

So go ahead and suggest it.. You've already qualified it.

[MSimon]

Oh on that theory of mine. There are several reasons why I dont like talking about it. One is that I do not have enough facts to base it on (there are some, but they are insufficient) and therefore I prefer keeping it to myself. The other is that it might be considered politically incorrect.
I do think however that it is just as valid as the theory proposed by some here, that says that christian religion allowed for this growth in scientific knowledge.

Progress started to come (faster) when Christianity fragmented. It became harder to be declared a heretic. Think of it: Darwin died of old age not burned at the stake.

[Skipjack]

Well, as that would be more speaking for what I have been saying (christianity held science back).
Anyway, according to my theory, there are multiple factors at play here:
1. People had to be more inventive here, due to less favorable environmental conditions. This could have had a favorable genetic impact on creative thinking. I dont have that much evidence for this theory (and much of it is circumstancial) so I really dont want to get nailed for having said that.
2. It slowly got warmer and less rainy again after the middle of the 17th century. This helped farming. Also the wider acceptance of the potato helped with keeping people better nutritioned. There have been several studies on the positive effect that good nutrition (especially during childhood) has on intelligence (kinda logical, if you think about it).
3. The french revolution helped reduce the power of christianity in france.
4. The invention of the modern book printing technique helped a lot. Books became much cheaper, information became available to more people. Before that it was pretty much limited to clerics who handwrote and printed (using handcut sets) most books also. The oldest and biggest libraries in my country are still in the hands of the catholic church. Yes up to this date...
And yeah these things happened in a different chronological order from what I wrote here and most of them over a long period of time.
E.g. it was not like: Book Printing invented and the next day everyone had a library at home.

[MSimon]

1. People had to be more inventive here, due to less favorable environmental conditions. This could have had a favorable genetic impact on creative thinking. I dont have that much evidence for this theory (and much of it is circumstancial) so I really dont want to get nailed for having said that.

I have no such compunctions. Genetic Northern Europeans are between one and two standard deviations smarter than Genetic Africans - on average.

You can't say it of course. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life created a lot of heat on the subject and shed a little light.

Here is a good article on the wealth production vs. IQ.

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft2.htm

Here is one about how fast human IQ can change: in a stressed population about 1 standard deviation in 500 years. That is a lot and fast too.

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/ashkenaz.htm

Here is a book on the subject.

Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis

The IQs of the races…can be explained as having arisen from the different environments in which they evolved, and in particular from the ice ages in the northern hemisphere exerting selection pressures for greater intelligence for survival during cold winters; and in addition from the appearance of mutations for higher intelligence appearing in the races with the larger populations and under the greatest cold stress. The IQ differences between the races explain the differences in achievement in making the Neolithic transition from hunter-gathering to settled agriculture, the building of early civilizations, and the development of mature civilizations during the last two thousand years. The position of environmentalists that over the course of some 100,000 years peoples separated by geographical barriers in different parts of the world evolved into ten different races with pronounced genetic differences in morphology, blood groups, and the incidence of genetic diseases, and yet have identical genotypes for intelligence, is so improbable that those who advance it must either be totally ignorant of the basic principles of evolutionary biology or else have a political agenda to deny the importance of race. Or both.

The book's central finding: the world average IQ is no more than 90, and declines from north to south. An IQ of 90 is equivalent to the mental age of a White14-year-old. (Standardized IQ tests are normed to 100, the mental age of the average white 16-year-old.). Lynn also draws attention to the fact that a north-south IQ continuum has evolved, apparently through selection for survival in cold winters.

These findings in Lynn's latest book have profound geopolitical significance. They imply it may simply not be possible to transmit Western-style democratic and economic systems to the populations of Latin America and Moslem North Africa and the Middle East, let alone sub-Saharan Africa. They mean that the world's long-term problems will stem from its populations' capabilities-much deeper and more intractable than any "Clash of Civilizations"-style competition between different political concepts.

[KitemanSA]

These findings in Lynn's latest book have profound geopolitical significance. They imply it may simply not be possible to transmit Western-style democratic and economic systems to the populations of Latin America and Moslem North Africa and the Middle East, let alone sub-Saharan Africa. They mean that the world's long-term problems will stem from its populations' capabilities-much deeper and more intractable than any "Clash of Civilizations"-style competition between different political concepts.

I find this part to be a bit strange since the "Western Style..." were brought to the west over the restrictions of the Catholic Church of the age by the very same North African Moslems who are appearantly now not able to understand it.

Personally, I think what we are measuring with our IQ tests is the effect of the recent gene mutation that brought on the ability to generate symbolic record keeping (writing). The discoverer of the mutation who was hounded about it by PCness suggests it appeared in the middle east / south-central Asia about 5 thousand years ago and has not yet spread through all the world. I think one of the reasons that it is so spread thru Europe is the feudal custom of droit de seigneur (the lord's right). My suspicion is that those that had the mutation were better able to become the feudal lords, and thus pass along the mutation. Just a thought.