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Study Links Genetic Diseases to Intelligence
FleaPlus writes "The Economist, Sun-Sentinel, and FuturePundit report on a controversial study by Gregory Cochran and others which proposes a link between certain genetic conditions and above-average intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews. The 40-page study, published in the Journal of Biosocial Science, analyzes data on unusual patterns of genetic disease and relates it to a number of intelligence metrics. Although the intelligence data have traditionally been attributed to cultural factors, Cochran proposes that due to the unusual selection pressures the Ashkenazi faced between 800 and 1600AD certain genes developed which promote intelligence as single copies, but lead to particular diseases when somebody inherits two copies. According to Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, "It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is... [though] it's certainly a thorough and well-argued paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright.""
How can we argue the opposite end of the spectrum?
Are we willing to talk about that?
1) Intelligence leads to geeks. ....?
2) Geeks sit in front of computers or large machines which go 'bang'
3)
4) Cancer!
Mod's on crack?
I was reading the paper and I read "Bummer dudes". That isn't what I would like to see in a technical paper. As for one thing, the author doesn't investigate (enough) alternative methods of crippled smart people. I would have theorized that during the medieval ages that warriors would have went after healthy combatants instead of slaughtering passive crippled people. If the crippled people were smart enough to survive then the smart people would have carried on. I think the correlation the author tried to present had two variables that may be related but don't necessarily relate one for one.
However, when a paper is presented which says that jews and palestinians are genetically the same, that's a bad thing.
If the paper had said that this subset of the jewish religion was dumber than others due to genetics would people still have the same reaction or would they have dismissed it as anti-semitic?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Why the hell is this paper "politically incorrect"?
"His brain was preserved in a jar by Dr. Thomas Stoltz Harvey, the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Einstein. Harvey found nothing unusual with his brain, but in 1999 further analysis by a team at McMaster University revealed that his parietal operculum region was missing and, to compensate, his inferior parietal lobe was 15% wider than normal. The inferior parietal region is responsible for mathematical thought, visuospatial cognition, and imagery of movement."
it must be wrong?
According to Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, "It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is... [though] it's certainly a thorough and well-argued paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright."
Am I reading this wrong, or is this implied in his statement (i.e. we might not be able to dismiss it outright, but it will eventually be disproven because it is politically incorrect and, therefore, cannot be correct).?
This is one of those things that drives me crazy. You have people telling us that we're evolved beings and yet on the other hand it's been taboo to even mention the possibility that an isolated group (or groups) of people may have evolved with more or less intelligence.
I'm not saying that it's that way, but it's definitely within the realm of possibility. But, if you want to get shut down, just mention that you think that it's a possibility.
Sometimes the truth just is what it is, and not what we want it to be.
Not only do the minority of smart people have to defend themselves from the masses who wish to see them cut down to size but they've got to save themselves from themselves. A battle on many fronts while they do great things for us.
I saw this at least a week ago. And it's not politically incorrect, because the only way to study crap like this is to pick a really specific ethnic group. You wouldn't exactly say, OK EVVYBODY LES STUDDY DEM BLACK FOLKS AND SEE IF THEY'S INTELGINCE MAKES EM SICK!
This has always been a touchy subject. It does seem that our friends and relatives seem to be pretty smart, but it is something you don't want to raise in public or even among friends, since it smacks of ethnocentrism. But along with the benefits, there seems to be a high prevalence of depression, cancer, and other ills. Whether or not this is true, Hitler, the Moral Majority, and other movements have made it even harder to talk about something sensitive like this that may, in fact, have a scientific basis after all.
My user name was a mistake. Input wasn't restricted, my bad.
This guy's got balls.
I, for one, am glad that there are enough sane people out there to actually have what it takes to put out a paper that singles out a race and shows its genetic differences when compared with the rest of us... But, if we have gathered that there are inherent differences between Ashkenazi Jews and other races, then what are we comparing against? Are some races less intelligent than others? With info like this, you could easily turn around and say that caucasians are (small percentage) less intelligent than the "rest of us" because you are including the more intelligent Ashkenazi Jews. This kind of information needs to be handled delicately, and a proper "anchor point" must be established to create a proper "litmus test" between races. In short, comparing one race or culture against an "average" of all other cultures is dangerous and inaccurate.
"Its a grey area". "How grey?" "Somewhat of a charcoal shade"
Their are probably thousands of studies that could be done linking ethnic or social groups with intelligence, physical aptitude, obesity, disease, or just plain bad luck.
But they will not see the light of day due to the politically correct, media-charged world we live in today. Such a study would be be spun into outrage by minority or activist groups, calling the researchers racist or worse, regardless if they are correct.
Science must never be politically incorrect. It should be the truth, nothing more and nothing less. If you start to use political correct terms you water down the meaning. I'm not going "Say he's a nigger, you know he is", because that's outright wrong, but theres no need to use incorrect terms (AKA African-American if you're not from Africa) to please some minority who seems to think everyone needs a "nice" label and we can't just ignore that people's skin shade can't be controled and means nothing.
I like muppets.
The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility.
Here's an alternative explanation : one family had the defective genes and because the jews were locked into ghetto's and thus had limited breeding choices they speread into the entire population (like it happens with domesticated animals)
Why are they so smart ? Upbringing - probably the fact they are made to memorise religious texts and learn not only hebrew but the language of the country they're in would lead to great mental agility.
See, no eugenics needed.
it's a boy. There are no genetic abnormalities that we can detect... so we can safely say that your son will probably fail to graduate high school and end up working some dead end job and spawning many healthy stupid grandkids for you, or he may become the next president of the US!.... talk about a grim outlook!
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
If there wasn't any benefit these genes gave, common sense would suggest they'd have died out long ago.
I am trolling
They have to be smarter so they can come up with cunning methods to protect the Torah scrolls from theft.
The full paper is here, and makes for a very interesting read:
n ce/
http://kinoko.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~duraid/stolen_scie
(probably best to get it while you can, because I don't think the publishers will be happy to find it.)
This being Slashdot, I haven't read the article, let alone the paper it refers to, but I'm going to throw my hat in the ring anyway. Is it possible that children with genetic disorders are treated differently by their families, or are more likely to focus on activities that don't involve physical exertion? Either of those things could lead to different performance in intelligence tests without there being any direct connection to the genes in question.
We could use about 100 more such politically incorrect studies to be published, correct or not Maybe then we can get past the "everyone is equal" and "anyone can achieve anything" crap which has been holding Americas schools back.
I never did well in art classes, even though I tried harder in that class than others. Other kids just dominated in those classes, yet my teachers claimed that it was all about how hard you worked. Bull Crap! We are each born with a range of potential abilities in each area, and our effort/training determine where in that range we land. We have limits, and we are all different. Some of us just will never be able to draw, and some of us will never be able to handle geometry. Accepting this is critical to helping kids achieve greatness.
Also, when kids fail or really stink at a content area, we need to let them know that they suck! Instead many people want us to give them empty praise, over inflating their ego. Then, later in life, they find out that they cannot achieve anything, and they are not perfect (their peers will point this out). Soon they can be found plotting harm to their peers, and suffering from depression. Hmmm, could it have something to do with their self-image, which our culture and schools built for them?
No spelling and grammar neve were my strong suite either. Sorry for becomming slightly off topic, but I hate political correctness.
Wouldn't it me more surprising if there were no statistical links between "intelligence" and genetic diseases?
And talking about "intelligence" without breaking it down to memory, logical reasoning, creativity, inferential reasoning, empathic ability, etc. is a little like talking about "IP" without patents, copyrights, trademarks, contracts, licenses, or trade secrets.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Intelligence really is a trait related to genetic breeding? Some people in fact really are more stupid than others and that genetics is the reason why?
Its fascinating this story didn't become public until it pointed to the supposed superiority of Jewish intellectual abilities.
If this same study had come out saying White Europeans are smarter than Black Africans because of some genetic reason the authors would be shot.
The hypocrisy!
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Great. So they're saying I should have children by girls just for their big tits and tight pussies? Damn my Askenazic heritage. Theres quite a lot of Sephardic in there too, maybe I'd be allow to try for girls who can read.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Sometimes, science will be politically incorrect. That does not mean that it should not be pursued.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I once read a study that correlated intelligence with political party affiliation and voting patterns. Democrats didn't do so well - the "Dumbocrat" appellation isn't exactly inaccurate. :-)
FWIW, that's not surprising as there is a positive correlation between intelligence and affluence (i.e., smart people are more successful - no surprise there). Since there is also a positive correletion between affluence and Republicanism - once again for pretty obvious reasons - it's no surprise that there's a positive correlation between intelligence and Republicanism, if only because smart people tend to be more successful and therefore more affluent and therefore more likely to vote for the party that claim they will lower taxes.
Of course, I've never found that link again. And we know Google would purge that type of info as soon as they find it...
Go here:
. html
n ce/The_Origin_of_Palestinians_and_Their_Genetic_Re latedness_With_Other_Mediterranean_Populations.pdf
http://www.forward.com/issues/2001/01.11.30/news7
Then, and only if you feel like breaking the law, click here:
http://kinoko.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~duraid/stolen_scie
How can one say that
(a) a few hundred or thousand years of persecution can accelerate genetic evolution quickly enough to provide increased intelligence? Obviously I must have been wrong, but doesn't evolution require many many generations (thousands? I dunno) to fully play out?
(b) just the Jews (and not even all of them...just one segment of the Jewish population?) have this apparent "improvement" over everyone else? Jew jokes notwithstanding, but they have been far from the only persecuted race in human history, and comparing hundreds to thousands of years should not be sufficient to justify increased intelligence.
Oh Jesus, this discussion will be a hard one to endure.
There aren't many comments yet, but already most of those seem to lead into the direction of praising this study and lashing out against so called political correctnes, that they alledge of surpressing studies like this.
Here's a newsflash for you:
Quit your whining, this study and similar ones have not been surpresed, otherwise they wouldn't be here up for discussion.
What's also amazing is how many people seem to readily accept the findings of this study, while being ready to lash out against anyone who critisizes it (Though critic is, gasp, normal in the scientific community)
Mind you, I'm not saying that the study isn't correct, but let's say from reading about it it seems to be a little to simplistic and monocausal.
According to Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, "It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is... [though] it's certainly a thorough and well-argued paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright."
Take a different example...
If (HUGE IF) you can show than allowing for all factors (Very Difficult) that Etheopians run faster than Europeans, is the conculsion invalid because it's racist ? Or would it mean in this PC world that we should give Europeans a head start in any Marathon where there are Etheopians running ?
I'm not sure of the immediate use for their research, but in general all knowledge about genetics has the possibity to lead cures, and to at some stage in the future, embyro selection.
Anyone want to see where that goes ?
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
The issue isn't that anyone is more or less intelligent because they are of a particular race, religion, or anything else. The point is that because of the unique genetic circumstances surrounding Ashkenazi Jews, specifically their extended genetic isolation, they have developed particular genetic traits.
It doesn't have anything to do with politics... the point is that anyone can develop these particular traits, provided that they carry and propogate these particular genes. It's only because of their isolation that the differences are great enough to be significant.
It's like saying that it's politically incorrect to ask new mothers whether they have Jewish ancestry, and give them lots of extra tests if they do. It's just science... a particular population has a greater incidence of certain genetic traits, some of which are diseases, and one of which happens to be that they tend to score better on IQ tests. The politically incorrect thing here would be to make out of this something it's not.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Hmm. So the Ashkenazis have more than their 'fair' share of chess and Nobel prizes?
They should be limited to an appropriate politically correct level to give me more chance of getting one!
below-average intelligence isn't dumb after all since they try to avoid the disease?
I am harvesting funny/good quotes. Please help by putting them in your sigs
Historical conditions created an environment for the Ashkenazi Jews where a higher IQ meant greater reproductive success. Therefore a high IQ became a dominant genetic trait. So much so that the genes linked to higher intelligence would overlap and therefore cause genetic diseases.
Conclusion: A cultural/historical created selection of a certain genetic trait over others may be a bad thing[tm].
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Sorry, that came out as more of a joke than it was meant to - I was angling more at the fact that people of greater intelligence are more likely to lead active lives - this in turn will lead to exposure to a greater variety of environments/selection criteria, resulting in a) possible carcinogenic/alien material exposure (you go exploring, sit in a desert, eat any old shit) b) decreased gene pool due to persecution (as detailed in this paper) - results in inbreeding, and mutation.
Basically clever people get themselves into more trouble generally.
Small, isolated (due to culture or due to geology) groups tend to have similar DNA. This fact, I don't think I was taught until high school biology.
That one of these small, isolated groups would have higher than average intelligence is hardly surprising.
Free MacMini
I guess most people will accept the following two statements.
;))
-The level of intelligence can be influenced by genes (this has been proven by comparing separated-at-birth identical twins amongst other research).
-Genetic diseases are causes by genes. (try to refute that one!
Than wouldn't it be logical that a link between genetic diseases and intelligence is possible?
Down Syndrome is evidence that a link between lowered mental abilities and health issues can be caused by a single genetic mutation.
So why shouldn't it be possible in some other mixture?
Considering the simple fact that intelligence isn't completely environmentally determined and that humans are 100% the product of their genes, it all sounds terribly logical to me.
Either way; whether a theory is politically correct or not should have absolutely no value in science.
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According to wikipedia, Irish-Americans have the same prevalence of Tay-Sachs as do Jews in America. However, I wouldn't consider Irish-Americans any smarter than the white population in general in America. Furthermore, French Canadians and the Cajun community in Louisiana have the same prevalence as Ashkenazi Jews.
This is a bogus study trying to link the two together.
I just finished reading Stephen J Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393 314251/
which discusses exactly this. Plus I have some real-life experience.
The biggest problem is that, independant of what point you wish to argue (group X is abnormally intelligent, group Y is sub-par) it's so bloody hard (if not well-nigh impossible) to actually measure intelligence. Even something as simple as measuring brain size turns out to be fraught with difficulties.
But IQ tests in particular suffer from no end of problems, especially on the lower end of the scale. Did person X score low because they lack intelligence, or because they lack education (not the same thing) or because of other factors.
I went to a Canadian Military College, which had very high standards of admission. Part of the admissions process was an IQ test of sorts (I don't know if it attempted to generate a classic IQ number, but the questions on it were of the classic "IQ" type)
As you can imagine, given that 1) I didn't know how much weight this test had on my admission and 2) my whole future depended on getting admitted, taking this test was pretty stressful. I did not do well at all, came close to panic several times during the test, and didn't come close to finishing.
Happily, I was admitted after all. About a month or two after arriving, we were given the test again. (The local psych department LOVED to give us tests; we were a population tailor-made for testing all sorts of theories) This time, we were told that we were being retested as a way of checking the validity of the test.
Well after two months of military boot camp, my stress tolerence was much higher. Furthermore, I knew that the results of the test would have no impact on my career. And taking the test was a lot more relaxing than marching around the parade square.
End result? I aced it. Finished with time to spare. No problem at all. And my peers all reported the same thing.
Now one could look at the "before" and "after" scores on this test, and conclude that military boot camp raised intelligence, often spectacularly. And you'd be wrong. I and my peers didn't get more intelligent; we got better at handling the stress associated with the test.
I have serious doubts that intelligence can ever be successfully measured in a rigourous, scientific manner - and that means ANY theory of genetic intelligence, be it high or low, pro or con, can ever be proven out.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
...is that it's just a hypothesis, based on relatively meaningless survey-based data. One of the most important principles of experimental science is that correlation does not imply causation. Just because the people who play violent video games end up committing more violence doesn't mean the games caused the violence; it's just as reasonable to say that violent people like violent games. This "research," if can be so called, basically comes up with an interesting idea, and then never actually tests it. If they conduct a study where they compare the presence of the relavent genes to the IQs of subjects, then maybe they'll have a case. But merely saying, "Ashkenazi Jews have these diseases, Ashkenazi Jews are smart, therefore these diseases have intelligence as a byproduct" is a false (in the sense of not actually true) conclusion.
I'm friends with Cochran. One of his interests is in using this research to find out methods of copying pharmecutically what these genes are doing naturally. (The genetic disease occurs for most of these genes when a person has two copies of the gene. The intelligence advantage comes from just one.) In other words, he wants to create a "smart pill" to raise IQ.
I don't think it's been proven yet that higher intelligence of homo sapiens is a sustainable trait in the long run.
And if that's not enough of a downer for you, then consider the possibility that what we call intelligence, all the higher thinking that has allowed us to consider mathematics and science, might just be an artifact of an evolutionary development of deviousness and deception (the back door man).
Have a nice day.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Here is an interview I had with Cochran about the possibility that homosexuality is caused by a virus:
Interview Interview Extras
Wow, telling someone you disagree with on a discussion site that his opinion doesn't matter because those he disagrees with are actual researcher is an amazing discussion strategy.
/. blurb would make you believe.
To the original poster:
Read the economist article, the claims the study makes are actually a little bit more complicated than the
But what's best, they claim to be able to make a clear and testable prediction. Let's see what will come out of this.
Um, you do realise the amount of immoral things the Israeli government have done in the name of zionism? I'm not being anti-semitic here but Israel's government isn't exactly a beacon of goodness.
The selection would only apply to people who are heterozygous for Tay-Sachs, i.e. they are carriers of the gene. Infants who are born homozygous, with two copies of the gene, only live a few years. All die by age 5. There is no cure.
So, as you can see, there wouldn't be a whole lot of people crippled with Tay-Sachs running away from the Cossacks....
"Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
How many fathoms in a VAST?
Or is it drams in a VAST?
Perhaps, VASTs in a firkin?
I can never figure it out.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Exactly.
But it's a lot easier to push statistics with random correlations (even if true) than really distinguish causes and effects.
At least we can recognize that it isn't an easy task.
Anybody is just a product of lots of interactions that are impossible to disentangle.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
So, for 900 years they were moneychangers which allowed them to increase their intelligence. Can you imagine what will happen after 900 years of stock or bond trading? Genius will prevail! I do have to wonder if there is a corelation as children who have grown up with calculators are unable to make change when they work at grocery stores.... Buy something for $4.98, hand them a $10 and they are amazed that you can tell them how much money you will get back before they can punch in the numbers. And this dumbing down only occured in the past 30 years that calculators have been used in schools.
"I'm not saying that it's that way, but it's definitely within the realm of possibility. But, if you want to get shut down, just mention that you think that it's a possibility."
/.:
So has this study been published, or hasn't it?
Oh, it's published, so why are you whining?
Btw., I have a hard time reconciling:
"I'm not saying that it's that way, but it's definitely within the realm of possibility."
with
"Sometimes the truth just is what it is, and not what we want it to be."
So how has this been suddenly elevated to be the truth? Amazing, I thought it was a scientific hypothesis, silly me...
Btw.:
Amazing technology
Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 5 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
http://bar.baen.com/
or
http://bar.baen.com:8080/
In the "The New Guy" conference. This requires registration prior to access.
He's not much on talking about his work. I'm surprised he finally published. I suspect he's gotten a patent on the IQ boosting drug he's stated he's been working on.
He did post a link to the NY Times article on the 7th.
NY Times article
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
it goes like this. In medieval times jews were not allowed to own land, grow crops, or compete in the labor force. Thus you starved to death and could not support a family unless you are able to work in a management job or as an advisor. In some places, handling loans was considered un-christian and this was relegated to jews. So in other words there was a huge premium of basic survival for above well above average intelligence (that is most people are laborers so to be a manager chosen based on merit--since people did not particularly like jews--you had to have added value not just seniority to be manager.)
Thus we have an extraordinary selective pressure for intelligence. But this arose over a very short time on human reproductive cycles so nature could not be too selective about picking the best solution from a longevity standpoint. Of course, long term diseases like cancer dont affect reproductive success either. So the Jews got a gene that confers intelligence at the expence of people getting teo of these genes dieing off. Not a bad trade from a speicies point of view. Not so good for 1/4 of the individuals in a gene rich population.
So you can now see that Palestinian semetics were not subject to this selective pressure precisely because they were not jeweish. Its not the semetic heritage but the jewish religion that was persecuted.
Okay nice theory but are there other explanations. Perhaps the disease conferred a genetic advantage to some dread disease like say plague. Well first no such disease has been identified. But more significantly, jews were not an isolated population they were integrated into the general population. Therefore the selective pressure of a pathogen would have affected the general population just as much as the jews.
Okay then what about a founders effect, wherein a population is winnowed down to a few individuals creating a genetic bottleneck in which defects of those individuals are carried into the general population even if they have no benefit. They argue there is no basis for this in the genetic record.
The selective pressure that differentiated jews from anyone else was cultural.
Or so the theory goes.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Science has nothing to do with truth.
Statistics have even less to do with truth than science.
Statistics and science are two different things.
Current definitions of 'intelligence' are crude at their best, misleading most of the time.
There didn't appear to be any kind of study, and it looks mostly like historical speculation.
If scientific study revealed a link between ethnic origin and some disease, and I was a member of that ethnic group, I'd really want to know, 'politically correct' bullshit be damned.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
I agree with you totally.
On the one hand, we as people can talk endlessly about the virtues of various breeds of dogs, but apply the concept to people is taboo.
One of the reasons is that it is taboo is that no one wants to be labeled by someone else as "less then".
Another related taboo against this...a legitimate one in my book, is that no one wants to be labeled as "less then" unfairly.
Specially bred dogs have breeders, with a thorough breeding history of his/her puppies going back generations. He/she will give you a certificate and you can be fairly certain of what you will get from that puppy as an adult.
However, humans, like that lovable dog from the pound are mutts ( with the exception of certain royal families).
Even within a subgroup, there is no breeder and no breeding history that will give you a good idea of what a child will grow up to be like.
Even with isolated subgroups of people breeding is still not a good indicator with humans what a child will grow up into.
Unlike specially bred dogs, humans can ( I am not saying they do ) respond to their environment outside of their instincts. They can change their behavior to compensate for things they are born with or they can invent things to do away with their shortcomings.
So, yes, it is taboo to talk about breeding in regards to people, but it is not entirely hypocritical since the group a person was born into doesn't tell the whole story and people being people will use that information wrongly.
Dogs, specially bred or not, will not jump to conclusions about other dogs based on breeding.
Humans do.
It would be hard to argue that there is no genetic influence on "intelligence".
The trouble is that intelligence is not what many people think it is. The kind of intelligence that is genetically determined is the ability to solve the kind of problem that the testee has never seen before.
This kind of intelligence has nothing to do with peoples' ability to solve problems that they have seen before.
Therefore: intelligence != ability
The more kinds of problem someone has been exposed to, the more kinds of problem that person can solve. In other words, ability is proportional to education.
The trouble is that some right wing people think that it is a waste of money to try educating disadvantaged people because they are not intelligent enough to be educated. They are wrong. There are many examples of brilliant teachers raising their disadvantaged (inner city) students far above the average performance of their suburban (relatively advantaged) counterparts.
Bottom line: This kind of study WILL be misused to promote somebody's political agenda. It always happens.
From a quick Google (I'm an undergrad genetics major, with two minor subjects left to go), the Journal of Biosocial Science has an impact factor of only 0.449 - generally, people don't read it, and serious research doesn't appear to go into it.
Compared to some other journal impact factors:
NATURE - 27.955
SCIENCE - 23.32
GENOME RESEARCH - 9.863
and
ACTA PSYCHIATRICA SCANDINAVICA - 1.554
(I assume this is a Scandinavian psychiatric journal - hardly *THAT* common)
Btw, impact factors are just a rough guide of the number of citations - they show what journals you'd like your research to go into in order for it to be cited lots - effectively scientific currency. Some good research could go into poor journals...
www.fearthecow.net
...the research is not about the entirety of Jews, it's just about a specific genetic "branch" of Jews.
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The problem comes in when you try and take a generality (valid or no) and start to apply it to specific individuals. There's usually enough variation individual to individual to counteract the genralities, because the magnitude of the generalities tends to be small.
Let's accept your premise that Etheopians, in general, run faster than Europeans (by which I take you mean that blacks run faster than whites) Yes, this may not be true at all yadda yadda (I'm with you there - we just need a postulate to discuss and this is nice and harmless.)
So after a huge study with lots and lots of checks and balances and tons of attention to correcting all mitigating factors, we determine that, on average, blacks run faster than whites.
Now its time for the Olympics. Should white runners be given a head start? For that matter, does it make any sense (given that nationality and ethnicity are almost never completely linked anymore) for any country to even field a white runner, given that (using this example, not necassarily true in real life etc) blacks run faster than whites?
Well, Olympic runners are the cream of their crop. Whatever genetics affect their particular metier, they came out on the high side (most likely) so it is entirely possible that a given white runner has genetics the equal or maybe even superior to his black counterparts. There's enough variation within populations to counteract the trend of the general population.
For a more real-world example, black people tend to be taller than asian people (at least in my experience - I wonder if there is any hard data on this) But if we assume that is true, that doesn't preclude the existance of short black people (Gary Coleman) or tall asian people (that chinese basketball player - Yao Ming)
Height at least we can see and measure objectively. But as soon as we start talking intangibles "who can run faster" or "who is more intelligent" applying generalities (which might be true in some sense) to individuals (where they almost certainly are untrue) opens up the very real possibility of unfairly punishing (or rewarding) an individual, for the supposed shortcomings or advantages of his genetic group.
It is further complicated by the fact that "nature" isn't the whole story; that "nurture" plays an equal or greater part in the ultimate performance of an individual than his or her genes. "Talent" is a very, very small predictor of success.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
...but attaching values to those differences can be. I think it's OK to say group A is genetically different from group B, but it becomes dangerous to then draw conclusions on one group being better than the other. We must be careful on attaching value to the differences, even on things that appear clearly "better", like intelligence. Because there are different kinds of intelligence, and societies can value them differently, or perhaps something else (like athletic ability) over intelligence. Clearly there are differences between the races - we can see that just by looking at each other and noting the superficial differences. But political correctness has taught us to assume that the differences are only superficial, effecting our appearances, but not substantial things like ability or intelligence. Sorry, but evolution is blind and doesn't attach value to differences, so it has no method or ability to only allow differences that are asthetic. Years ago I read a sports article in a reputable magazine that suggested that blacks have denser bones than caucasians. This (supposedly) allows them to develop larger muscle masses which allows them to predominate in sports like short sprints, but hinders them in events such as swimming. A casual observation of the racial make-ups of our olympic teams appears to support this, although I have no idea if it is true or not. My point is simply that we should be allowed to entertain such ideas without being accused of racism, but we should also avoid making concluding judgements that one race is better than another because they each have their own strengths (eg sprints VS swimming).
In judaism the geek is the norm. The study and debate of jewish law is the finest you can do, and it is not something restricted to the elite. It is encouraged for all (men, at least). So, being a scholar, a rabbi, earns you social points, and gets you the girls so you can procreate (the first commandment in the bible!).
The finest thing a Christian boy could become was a priest. Probably took some intelligence too. Except priests didn't marry (until reformation that is, so the protestants might be catching up on the jews, but they are like 1500 years behind, so it could take a while).
Now, that is, if there was any truth at all to the idea that there is a genetical difference in intelligence between ashkenazim and the rest of the world. I doubt it. Either way, cultural factors must play an overshadowing role.
This reminds me of pigeon breeding where there are certain flight-performance traits that can be bred for (rolling and tumbling where the pigeon performs aerobatic tricks). However breeders need to be careful as certain combinations of rollers/tumblers (I forget which) create offspring that become fatalistic super-tumblers. Once entered, they never break out of a tumble and then gravity and the Earth take over. That's not to say that people are like breeding pigeons. Just the first thing I thought of.
What is music when you despise all sound?
I'm pretty sure the difference between average IQ and party affiliation is due in a large sense to racial disparity. Black folks skew Democrat, more than any other ethnic or racial group (well, Cuban exiles in Miami skew Republican, but that's local to there). For whatever reason you want to attribute, blacks do worse than whites on these tests.
For what it's worth, I am curious what the comparison would be based on party affiliation within the same ethnic/racial group.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
to make an analogy, imagine you were fastest runner in your tribe except when stressed by a tiger chasing you. You and your kind would soon berelegated to the tiger poop heap of failed genetic experiments.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The problem with averages and race/regional classifications is this: How does it help? Should it be taken into account when allocating federal funding for things like education/healthcare? What happens to the talented individual trapped in the perception of his race/region/class? Should we then take this into account when given people jobs because we have a manual on averages?
Since you're a geek I assume you do know what averages imply. The present averages for any given population is not going to be the same in another time period, but perceptions are not easily removed as they lead to conclusions.
It's hard enough to get the general population to understand technical concepts, so how do we have this kind of discussion without producing bias in the general population who for the most part have a dangerously unclear understanding of anything remotely technical.
I don't have a problem with exploring racial differences even though I'm black but i think any perception about race/region/class leaves out one of the most important characteristics of our humanity that we are first and foremost individuals. That concept is what makes a country like america great due to the fact that it enables individuals to free themselves of the shackles of racial identity and leap to heights hitherto unknown.
I'm west african and contrary to what the book says about people of african descent, I've been opportuned to know a whole lot of african eggheads and you'd be surprised at how intelligent these people are.
The implication that stupid people tend to commit crime I find issue with though. I think crime has more to do with poverty than stupidity.
I do agree that there are gene differences across different groups of people be they seperated by region/diet/race simply because we tend to adapt to our environment and that process of adaptation highlights/produces different characteristics e.g. the way dogs came to look so different from wild dogs/wolves etc was a mystery until some folks decided to domesticate wild foxes by changing they behaviour patterns over several generations only to discover that as the foxes got domesticated the chemical pathways that produced pointy ears and bushy tails changed.
In essence I think culture (which changes BTW)and the environment plays a more important role than genetics since for the most part the environment dictates genetic changes.
All straight things must come to a bend
"due to the unusual selection pressures the Ashkenazi faced between 800 and 1600AD certain genes developed which promote intelligence
He who laughs last, laughs best.
Like many of you I also have difficulty tolerating irrational political correctness. However, reports like these give dangerous ammunition to those who would subvert the truth.
Given what certain sectarian, social, and cultural groups have done in the past, it's obvious that humanity will only accept certain truths in spoonfuls...
A modicum of snuff can be quite efficacious.
I take it that they tooks lots of Ashkenazi Jews out of their natural cultural environment at birth, handed them over to random sections of society at large and then compared the intelligence of the resulting adults with the rest of society in order to rule out cultural effects? Hmm? They didn't?
Instead what they say in the study basically and with a lot of hand waving is we couldn't think of anything which might be causing this culturally and wouldn't know how to measure it anyway so it must be biological.
Deleted
- the paper guesses that the Ashk' were subject to the bottleneck between 800ce and 1600ce, which is 27-40 generations. This is plenty of generations to favor a gene, even if the stress isn't high. It is possible that the gene is always around, or that this particular mutation occurs relatively often spontaneously.
- the trades available to Jews were restricted. The irony is that the christians of these times might have actually forced Jews to act smarter, only to complain later about it. It is quite possible that everyone in the world experiences a similar effect now, although in what direction, I know not - the world wars and the automobile should have an effect.
Ssh, now. I'm sure those folks are very clever, and will be coming up with Pentium Ms, Mosix, Zend and so forth.
What's that? All the smart ones have come to America to teach in Engineering schools, leaving the Middle East looking like West Virginia---run by the wackos and fundies?
Just sayin'.
That entire series is based on premise of genetic mutations that create smarter individuals or races.
If this research is valid, then it makes that series slightly more prophetic.
You can't handle the truth.
Even people who understand and firmly believe in evolution sometimes forget that it's an ongoing process - even in humans. Actually, there are any number of processes (social and economic) that got us where we are today, and people often forget that it may be good not to interfer with these things.
Back to evolution, to admit that one group may somehow be better (in some way) than another due to genetics sounds like Nazi thinking - and it is. However, it's one thing to recognize a difference, it's entirely another to assume a superiority or to start "selecting" based on mans idea of "better". Evolution will make us "better" without our help.
From one of the linked articles discussing the paper:
I've got to state the obvious because the obvious is politically incorrect: If smart people have more babies than dumb people the average IQ will rise. If dumb people have more babies than smart people then the average IQ will drop. I'm guessing the latter is current happening. Bummer dudes.
So, if Slashdot readers supposedly have higer IQs, then it's our duty to get with it and have more babies. So GET WITH IT and have more babies!
Oh, sorry. Doh! This is Slashdot. Procreation takes two... Ha ha, my bad.
"Study Shows Orgasmic Ability Linked to Genetics" http://www.dailyindia.com/show/267.php
I know which paper *I'm* reading! Woot!
According to wiki malaria is 50,000 years old: "It is thought that humans have been affected by malaria for about 50,000 years, and several human genes responsible for blood cell proteins and the immune system have been shaped by the struggle against the parasite." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria
I my opinion, what is considered to be 'an intelligent person' is directly related to memory, but a combination of other factors as well.
I play the guitar, and the ability to play a solo after hearing it only once is directly related to the solos of other songs you have learnt by heart. People see this in action and call the person a 'genius'. You recognised the phrases you have previously learnt and just remember the order in which they occur in the solo you're working out, and you'll be 80% there. Likewise, I always do very badly at traditional IQ tests (80-90), yet I am considered 'clever' as I am a web developer, Guitarist, songwriter, record producer and a Product Manager/Designer for a small but very successful broadcast company.
At work, there is a guy who (apparently) has an extremely high IQ (~140) but is an absolute no-hoper. There's nothing really wrong with him, but despite trying, always screws everything up, doesn't listen, isn't able to focus, doesn't remember anything etc. Despite the high IQ, no one would consider him intelligent.
Intelligence is a combination of memory (normally photographic memory), ability to 'think outside the box' and social sensitivity - someone shouting in a pub that they have an IQ of 140 would be considered sad and probably quite simple!
Of course, if intelligence facilitates increased affluence, and affluence increases the survivability of those who probably wouldn't successfully reproduce "in the wild," then this should come as no surprise.
Here is concrete example. My great-uncle, known in the family for his anti-semitic views, was a physics professor at an American university. For many years, he was responsible for admissions, and he used to say that he hated to admit so many Jews but he had to because "the rascals are so clever." Wonderful. But the implication is that a Jew who did not display superior talent would systematically be excluded in favour of a similar non-Jew. Not so wonderful.
I think that you, like many other posters on this topic, assume that if something is politically incorrect, it must be factually correct. Well that is not true: remember, they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. There are several good reasons to doubt the hypothesis of this paper. Many have been mentioned elsewhere, but I'll repeat them for convenience:
Measurement Error
Intelligence is not well defined, independently of a score on a test. We all have a vague idea that some people are smarter than others, but it turns out to be hard to pin down what that means.
"Race"
What is a race anyway? The paper begs the question (takes for granted that the concept is well-defined.) But this is doubful. How can the scientists be confused on this point, you ask, when you can easily identify people of different races from their skin colour? Relax, nobody doubts that skin colour is genetically determined! But in equating it with race, you are assuming that skin colour is a good marker for other genetic differences, such as intelligence. On the whole, this is not true: there is more genetic variation within a "race" than between races. Races might still exist, but it's not as obvious as you think.
Correlation vs Causation
The premiss of the paper is that selection pressure explains the elevated occurrence of high intelligence and genetic disease amongst Ashkenazi Jews. But this is just a conjecture; there is nothing beyond correlation to demonstrate the conclusion, and there are many problems with this conclusion. Why was there selection pressure on Ashkenazi Jews but not on anyone else? Why shouldn't intelligence be a reproductive advantage to the persecutors, as well as the persecuted? In any case, Sephardic Jews have endured plenty of persecution; why haven't they experienced the same genetic outcome? And there are many other groups with similar levels of the genetic diseases identified in this paper. If these diseases are linked to intelligence, why aren't these groups also smarter?
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
Gould, while well intentioned, has been throughly debunked.
The Mismeasures of Gould.
I realize the implications of groups of people being genetically smarter than other groups, but ignoring the possibility does not change anything.
Maybe you ought to read The Bell Curve,
l
written by people who know what they
talk about, like hundreds of other
professors and scholars who have proven
Murray and Herrnstein correct. They
show you exactly why and how Gould is
WRONG and has nothing to say about
anything.
Oh, the address signed by 52
internationally known scholars, experts
within the field of intelligence:
http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/wsj_main.htm
Like another poster, I had problems with the "bummer dudes" and other informal statements in the paper. It does not strike me as terribly professional because of that and I think it will hurt how it's received.
On the other hand, I applaud anyone that will ignore political correctness in favor of scientific advance. Political correctness has its place. It's about being polite and there are places and times where it's good and necessary. But science should be blind to politeness. It's about finding facts, not what people "want" to find.
Not being PC doesn't mean being amoral either. Science shouldn't advance from amoral activities (in particular, I'm thinking of Nazi experiments on Jews during WWII), but again, it shouldn't have to stall in the face of polite society.
This is where prejudice really lies: in making judgments of individuals based on what you believe you know about the statistical characteristics group. Many hope to reduce prejudice by insisting that real statistical differences do not exist, but this avoids the real problem--it is still prejudice even if the difference is real. People are individuals, not statistics, and if you judge a person on a statistical basis, without troubling to learn what that person is like as an individual, then you are engaging in prejudice.
Moreover, trying too hard to deny such statistical differences can actually encourage prejudice, because it conveys the message, "If this difference were real, then it would be OK to be prejudiced."
The only problem with this paper is that it discounts this as a random event or better yet, a simple cooccurance. Ashkenazi jews between 800 and 1200 had a very narrow genetic pool, there just weren't many of them (a few thousand) and they intermarried almost exculsively. Suppose one of them was a) exceptionally intelligent and b) had a genetic disease. This individual would then beget (literally) this observed situation without any genetic linkage between intelligence and the disease.
As if we had a detection system for royal blood and we saw that European royal blood and hemophelia were correlated. They are, they both came from Queen Victoria, a royal progenitor and genetic hemophelia carrier.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
...report on a controversial study ... which proposes a link between certain genetic conditions and above-average intelligence
/.'ers) after his two minutes now saying: "It's not me, babe. It must be your genes (jeans)."
There is even a study that says genes control orgasm in women. I can hear it now. The guy in bed with a women (a rarity for most
It's all about the Big 'O'.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Nothing I loathe more than the fashionable cult of political correctness. I was bitterly persecuted, just a few days ago, believe it or not, for saying that having sex with a gay guy in new york city is higher risk for HIV than having sex with a heterosexual guy who's already in a committed relationship. I guess had I said having sex with a black guy in new york city, even more ominous statistics than those of the gays, is higher risk for HIV than sex with a white, in fact, more than six times as risky, I would've been even more politically incorrect and more viciously persecuted.
That I had a medical degree with a post-graduate science education, that I'm an atheist, a member of a minority, and a longtime supporter of blacks and gays with a history of work and social relations to support it, none of that mattered to my persecutor who's a member of the majority with no notable minority friends and many questionable convictions.
I loathe such ignorants.
Instead of doing something productive, they're posting long-winded comments on slashdot, so they need to justify that by blaming their teachers for having too much faith in them.
I wonder if they would be complaining just as much about how their teachers held them back, if that was the case.
Not only is the research "politically incorrect", it is also entirely based on the dubious assumption that we fully understand how to compare two different intellects and obtain data points with a resolution of 5% or less.
"Gentlemen, you are arguing in a vacum. There are no facts." - Mr. Spock.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Before reading that new edition, may I suggest an alternative reading?
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
I for one, welcome our sickly, but intelligent overloards.
Central or Northern European... so... like Germany. Ok.
Hunh?
So let's say they are testing on Ashkenazim Jews aged maybe from 5 to 60. Sound reasonable? So birthdates of 2000 all the way back to the region of 1945.
Does anyone remember from high school (and even non-USians should be able to figure this one out) what was going on from 1939-1945? Does anyone remember what orders one of the integral actors of the 1939-1945 was giving for his staff to do with regards to the Ashkenazim Jews?
Does it really take a team of scientists to realize that the more intelligent Ashkenazim are around yet today?
Wow, and I did it without violating Godwin's law!
The question is that the definition of IQ was not given to us by 'God', it values some skills over others, and the values depend of philosophies and cultures.
Most people who are depressed are so because of biochemical imbalances and not because their teachers overpraised them as children.
Depression is correlated with biochemical changes, right enough. Depressive states are accompanied by changes in serotonin & norepinephrine levels. You can induce depression with oxotremorine, for instance.
But correlation does not imply biochemical "imbalance" naturally causes depression. It's just as likely that depression causes the biochemical imbalance.
Many cases of chronic unipolar depression (and bipolar mania / depression) may very well be tied to genetics or long-term chemical changes in the body. In non-genetic cases, what caused the imbalance in the first place? Could it not be a chemical dependency caused by long-term situational depression (that is, the body just gets used to the chemical state of being depressed)?
Most cases of depression (and the ones generally referred to by the root post) are not necessarily caused by some physical problem.
Don't believe me? How many times has a perfectly good mood been changed by an outside event? Why is there such a high rate of depression in veterans? Why did we have an increase in depression after 9/11/2001?
Praise from teachers is important. The praise should be balanced with expectations, though. I loved art class; not that I was any good, but the important thing wasn't the finished product, it was the process. I learned an appreciation for great art through my understanding (not mastery) of the process.
Unfortunately, in geometry, understanding and mastery are tied together. And there are many, many people who are incapable of understanding geometry. This doesn't make them worse than those of us who *do* get geometry; it just means they'll never design bridges or houses, or teach geometry. (Okay, they *might* teach geometry.)
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
There almost certainly are links between inheritance and "intelligence". But establishing them and establishing causality is going to be tricky and will require a lot more careful work than this. This work seems to be at the level of wild speculation, and that's not a prudent thing to do when discussing sensitive issues like race and "intelligence".
I put "intelligence" in quotes because, so far, nobody really knows how to define it, other than "what people score on intelligence tests"; the connections and speculations regarding intelligence made in the paper are untenable. And causality may turn out not to be all that interesting. Rather than "overclocking", metabolic defects may simply close off most career options.
Scientists should look at this problem carefully. These people, I think, have disqualified themselves with this publication. And it might be prudent for Western researchers to pick issues that aren't as burdened with historical baggage as the success and intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews.
A hack eugenicist's review of The Mismeasure of Man? That's hardly a "throughly(sic)" debunking.
The author of that review is J. Phillipe Rushton (see also Wikipedia) who recieves much of his funding from the Pioneer Fund (Wikipedia) of which he is president. The Pioneer Fund is fairly blatanly racist and eugenicist.
"Researchers find that Intense Selective Pressure from Murderous Christian Bigots against European Jews has Resulted in Mean Jewish Intelligence being Significantly Raised"
Those who insist on political correctness usually forget that a statement such as "ethnic group A is more intelligent than B" has nothing at all to do with racism.
Suppose you have discovered that a certain gene has a very strong correlation with higher intelligence (measured in any way you like) and that this gene is present in the white people with a higher frequency than in the blacks. If you say "the whites are more intelligent" you are not saying anything about race.
Why? because the gene in question is, in all likelyhood, totally independent from the genes which control skin color and other physical traits; and its relative frequency is only determined by random genetic drift, so that if you repeat your study 100 years later you may very well find the situation reversed: more frequent in the blacks than in the whites, the black people are more intelligent.
Nothing of this implies racism at all.
To say nothing of the fact that (in all likelihood, again) these "racial" differences are much, much smaller than the individual variability inside one's ethnic group, which (obviously IMO) come from both genes AND upbringing).
A LOT of confusion regarding many issues surrounding Judaism, including the current topic, comes from the problem of defining a the Jewish people. There are Jews that are non-practicing, so it is clearly not religion or tradition that defines a Jew. There are Ethiopian, Chinese, European, and Middle Eastern Jews, so it clearly is not race that defines a Jew. What does that leave? It leaves lineage. Judiasm is simply a lineage, and a specific one at that - it only travels through the mother. So we could say the definition of Judaism is this:
"A specific tribe of people originating from the middle east that maintains it's lineage through the maternal bloodline"
Since the father doesn't have to be Jewish, that is why so many other races got mixed in over time, e.g. Ashkenazic jews, which are mainly of European genetic heritage and not Middle Eastern.
Does it strike anyone else as ridiculous that any group of individuals identifies themselves and conglomerates through maternal bloodlines, let alone religion (be it Judiasm or Christianity or Islam)? This arbitrary grouping is absurd to the extreme and is based on some magical fiction passed down for millenia. It's crazy! And it's causing SO MUCH pain for everyone involved! Why?
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Step 1: The strength of the argument is that it takes into account multiple alleles for multiple conditions. Founder effect and the like lead to a propagation of one allele for a given condition whereas the Ashkenazi have increased prevalence for several.
/budding geneticist
Step 2: Most of the genetic burden is for lysosomal storage diseases. In muscle they lead to wasting dystrophic like conditions of strangulation of nerves. The effects in the central nervous system are mostly unknown. However nerve conduction velocity is increased by the presence of fatty plaques along the axons, and these diseases alter the properties of fat distribution, it is not so difficult to imagine a carrier having more plaques, larger plaques, or more insulating plaques as a precursor to strangulation in the full disease.
Step 3: Fast brain != Smart brain. Theory purports nerve conduction increases attention and retention, but not creative thinking. Look at the stereotype of the Jewish banker, jewel smith, accountant, and, dare I say it, film producer.
Note: The Ashkenazi Jews are not the Middle-East Jews.
Further Note: Prevalence of Tay-Sachs and other genetic diseases have fallen by ninety percent in the last Ashkenazi generation due to voluntary genetic testing and voluntary eugenics such as selective breeding, artificial insemination, and pre-implantation embryo screening.
Last note: Ashkenazi Jews get a bad wrap for bad genes, but they are one of the only extensively studied populations because they funded the research. The Human Genome Project is mostly One Human's genome. Who knows what your family might carry? Nobody cares, so you're going to have to do the research yourself.
therefore these diseases have intelligence as a byproduct
That's not what the article says at all. The diseases are a byproduct of having two copies of a gene which promotes intelligence. One copy is fine, in fact it provides an evolutionary advantage.
Get it? They're saying, "Ashkenazi Jews have these genes (which make them smart), but having two copies of these genes gives them diseases, therefore their intelligence can have these diseases as a byproduct.
You are only half right. Some folks have a greater genetic potential for just about anything, and no amount of hard work by others will ever over come that. People born short for example have a tough time playing basketball. Some folks are born with more fast twitch or slow twitch muscle fibers giving them an advantage in certain sports. The same carries for intelligence.
Don't tell me you've never seen someone who regularly goes to the gym yet their body remains flabby. I have. I've also seen people who look like they go to the gym 5 times a week even though they hardly work out at all. Thats genetics. No amount of hard work can overcome that.
Also considering the societal and financial advantages of having and using a lot of intelligence if it was a simple matter of just putting the effort in, then just about everyone who goes to college/university would have a genius level IQ of some sort and most would be multi-millionaires.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
That is because you were not taking an intelligence test. A true intelligence test cannot be strictly written, it must also involve an interview with an expert that includes significant back-and-forth interaction. That is how they deal with things like the stress of the test-taker, and non-conforming problem solving skills. These things must be observed, they can never be properly examined through mere written questions.
of tumorous growth. Its value for Darwinian survival has been vastly over rated.
We're really fucking with things up and down the scale, from Jihadists (now __there's__ a survival trait for you,) to the environment.
Most of the problem come from people denying what evidence there IS and believing in evidence there ISN'T.
Now tell me that's rational.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
This is old news. I don't know if anyone noticed but there's only about 20 mil. Jews in the world which is statistically a drop in a bucket (probably around 0.2 - 0.4% of the world population) and yet Jews, especially the Ashkenazi camp has done exceptionally well producing many thinkers, philosophers, and so forth. Also Jews have a lot of power in the world, just think Allen Greenspan... Gee what could possibly have created such a group of people? Well perhaps if everyone had to suffer what we suffered through the ages, being persecuted without end, then maybe everyone else would mutate and become a higher being at the same rate as well? Oh wait, did I just make a non-PC statement? I'm sorry...
--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com/
Consider... if someone is e.g. ill, then all tests will fail. So your argument "proves" that also tests of physical strength are equally impossible!
Obviously, your argument is wrong. You can measure random factors statistically.
Well, that argument fails, but your thesis might be true? It needs that the intelligence researchers would have to be idiots or in a conspiracy, which Gould argues. It is possible, but it is a bit too similar to the position of creationists on evolutionary biology.
As an aside, if you panic while taking a simple test, then the military would not want you to make decisions that will kill people... (But you were unused to that kind of stress at that time, so it was a temporary thing. Hopefully.)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
First of all, do they claim Ashkenazi were in the the Israel / Palestine area a couple thousand years ago and that they were part of the same population as Sephardic? How could their ethnic characteristics change so quickly? (It seems more likely that the Ashkenazi were Europeans that converted to Judiasm. Second, generally, isn't this asking for a lot of change in a short time period?
How would the military have misled him about his own speed and ease with the test on the two different occasions?
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Also, the difference between some groups is not just 5 points on the test; I understand that it is closer to 20 points between different ethnic groups in the USA alone.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Has anyone started a thread on this using the Hardware vs. Software metaphor?
I have had machines that boot both Linux and that "other" operating system...the Linux always seemed to run better...hey, it has "better" software running on it.
Now, this begs the question...
What is "better"?
What are the actual limits of the hardware?
How close are we running to those limits?
and if you really want to get into a fun conversation:
How do upgrade the software (or hardware)?
and for that matter...Is it even possible?
(*grin*)
Then there is the idea of GPLing the source code, not to mention backups.
SCJ
All men are created equal - with inalenable rights. The equality stops there. Unless you are claiming to have more natural rights than someone else, you are not being politically correct.
Our founding fathers realized that God did not make everyone equal. Some were great musicians, some were great politicians. What they set up was a republican form of government where we are all equal in law, but still able to utilize our God given talents to the best of our ability. To force everyone to be equal is COMMUNISM. We all know communiusm is repugnant to the constitution, because it forces everyone to be equal. I cannot thing of a more deplorable act than to have a society strip its members of its talents. If we cannot excercise our gifts, then we are wasting what precious talents God gave us.
If God gave the Jews a gene for 'smartness' then so be it. They should use that ability to the max, but they can never use it to justify oppression or that they are more titled to something else. We are equal in rights and only rights, notin ability.
Deal.
It would be more wrong to deny the truth. We have to stop thinking that Tom Dick and Jane are equal in every sense. We know people are not equal Look at the NBA. Look at the NFL. As a 5'7" 150 person I will never be on those teams. I accept that. But I have found my talents and I use them. I bet those players wish they were as good with computers as I am. I make the most of it. Who cares if they are rated higher? Who cares if that is linked to DNA? We are defined by our actions. If i don't have the gene, I can still put my effort, even though it will be more to those things and if I cam good enough I will come out ahead, gene or not.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I am not sure how you get off calling people hacks and expect people to take you seriously. Also, if you're going to try to criticize my spelling, the least you can do is try to get your own grammar correct.
n troversies.
Racist? Provide proof. Just because they are studying the nature of intelligence and genetics does not make them racist. Many of the people who are doing these studies are gentile white males. The studies that they do often show that Jews and Asians have better traits for intelligence. That is hardly racist!
While I do not think that the issue is closed, I think the community should be able to discuss and investigate the issues without being ridiculed and called various unsubstantiated names.
This is Arthur Jensen's reply to Gould
Wikipedia also has a good section as to many of the problems people have found with his work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould#Co
Please, lets get away from the labels and petty criticisms and get on to a serious discussion.
It's like saying that it's politically incorrect to ask new mothers whether they have Jewish ancestry, and give them lots of extra tests if they do. It's just science...
/. crowd. A more wretched hive of paranoia and tinfoil-hattedness can't be found in the galaxy. Remember the dustup when it turned out Tivo knows what we're reviewing? But to your mind, it's granted that there's not just nothing wrong, but that questions wouldn't even be raised by this scenario:
Are you kidding?
This is your argument to the
OB/GYN: Mrs, eh, Fleishman, is it?
Hebess: Yes, Doctor.
OB/GYN: Sounds kinda, um, Jewy.
Hebess: Well, yes.
OB/GYN: Huh. Well, we're gonna need to run a bunch of tests. Nurse! Bleed that baby!
Personally I wish you were right. Being Irish Catholic isn't minority enough these days for special treatment, so I'd like to pretend we were all responsible adults. But pretending is pretty much what that would be.
I don't consider autism a disease, but it's certainly a genetic condition.
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The question of why someone would want to outrightly dismiss a paper like this based on political correctness is a good argument against political correctness.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
if we model the Jewish population as one which mainly inbreeds, it is virtually certain that the ancestry of every Jew alive can be traced to a relatively small subset of the total Jewish population in the era in question. It is neither necessary nor sufficient to invoke genetic fitness to produce this result. The operation of chance is all that is needed to ensure that many lines of descent die out but a few become ubiquitous. Depending on your assumptions about the marginal difference some fitness factor (say intelligence) makes on reproductive success, it is possible (likely) that chance is by far the dominant factor in this.
Based on what I know about Jewish culture, I don't think genetic factors influencing social fitness (intelligence --> status) would have a great influence on reproductive rates. First, you encourage all of your children to marry and bang out as many children as possible, not just the smart handsome ones you are most proud of. Second the community takes care of its own, especially under pressure. These practices tend to mitigate any reproductive disadvantages of particular genes.
None of which doesn't mean that Jews aren't smarter than the rest of us on average. But if the reason is genetic, it's more likely to be the operation of chance than natural selection. Likewise, appeals to natural selection aren't needed to explain why diseases become common in inbred populations. In fact they're quite dubious in a population this size over the time scale we're talking. If any single gene or small set of genes present in our core population cause a disease, we'd see that disease fairly often in our modern population of Jews.
It would be very interesting indeed if we could show that the sphingolipid disorders in question coudl account for the difference in intelligence between Jews and the general population. It's possible of course. But even if so the prevalence of these disorders has nothing to do with natural (or in this case social) selection.
In short, this strikes me as some rather dubious speculation that has a few interesting bits in it, but otherwise wouldn't attract much attention apart from its political in-correctness.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I no longer believe that talent vs effort makes a lot of sense, to me being hardworking and dedicated -is- a kind of talent.
Besides that though, I really don't think you understood the parent poster's point. You took his concept to an extreme and argued against that extreme.
It'd be like me saying to you that I hope you never become a teacher because you'd tell a kid with no legs that he can grow up to be the world's greatest soccer player if he just tries hard enough.
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"Sometimes the truth just is what it is, and not what we want it to be."
There are people on both sides who WANT the truth to look a certain way. I don't see the point of complaining about attacking EITHER SIDE'S motives. We should focus on their arguments.
Personally, I find this story annoying because I think it will be shown to be a gross oversimplification yet it will be a popular meme because it deals with ethnicity and intelligence. However, I don't use that annoyance as an argument agains the claim. I'm not saying the parent was attacking the motives either-- just commenting generally.
Wow, this is the first post I would mod as insightful.
Seems obvious, doesn't it? I'm all for thinking outside the box, but come on, social pressure to perform and a locked down gene pool make much more sense.
This is directly opposed to the situation in Texas where you get a huge gene pool and football.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
Just wondering.
If genetic group A on average were shown to be generally more intelligent than genetic group B, I don't think this would have huge negative side effects. The problem is that people go from populations to specific instances without a decent grasp of probability.
For example, light eyed people generally have worse reflexes than darker-eyed people. No baseball recruiter bases their picks on eye-color, they base it on the player's statistics, since it's already factored in. In the same way, if a person from the group with the average lower intelligence got a higher SAT score, higher grades, etc. than someone from the group with "better" genetic intelligence background, the person with the higher scores/grades should to be admitted to college/given the job/etc, just as in the baseball example (note that this decision only depends, like the baseball example, on the desire of the institution to be better, not because of a gov't program or equality concerns).
Just because a group on average happens to be better than another group, it says nothing determinate about any one member of either group. The group with the lower average intelligence may even have the smartest person as a member and the group with the higher average may the twenty dimmest.
The only reason a study like this would make a difference this would make is that from a population standpoint, people from one genetic group may have different jobs/salaries/etc than people from another genetic group. While this is trivially true right now, I don't think genetics is necessarily the explaination (or even part thereof). Probably heavily cultural. But how can we know if we don't study it?
If I say black people are generally taller than Chinese people, that's pretty non-controversial, but any other tests, people are likely to blame the ruler I'm using.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Instead what they say in the study basically and with a lot of hand waving is we couldn't think of anything which might be causing this culturally and wouldn't know how to measure it anyway so it must be biological.
This is a hypothesis, nobody claims that it's proven.
Can you prove that it's purely a cultural effect? Until then, you must also entertain the biological hypothesis.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Cochran proposes that due to the unusual selection pressures the Ashkenazi faced between 800 and 1600AD certain
Reporting about Jews from a Christian-biased perspective sounds rather unscientific. Wikipedia and Omniglot are tainted with this AD/BC crap all over.
- Roey
"Well perhaps if everyone had to suffer what we suffered through the ages, being persecuted without end, then maybe everyone else would mutate and become a higher being at the same rate as well? Oh wait, did I just make a non-PC statement? I'm sorry..."
I think claiming to be a higher being is a good way to get people to want to persecute you, and as such, just doesn't really seem that intelligent. Being dumb in a general population would have to suck, but being dumb within a specific population that is generally smart must suck a lot worse.
Although perhaps they'll find find the elusive "wants to be persecuted" and/or "extra inclined towards persecuting" genes years from now. You think we have PC problems now...
His whole point was that he observed that his family and Jewish friends seemed smarter, but that it is politically incorrect to speak of this phenomenon, let alone study it, because the subject is so politically charged. I must say I think he may have misidentified which groups in particular would squelch such research, but that's neither here nor there.
At any rate, the research in this study looks extremely preliminary at this point. I'm actually excited that people are studying neurological genetics more closely. My wife has Multiple Sclerosis, so any research on that area could lead to the next major breakthrough.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Not really, because this only applies to a small subset of Jews, not all of His chosen people.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
I'm a Jew with family from Galizia (not France's Galicia), Romania (Transylvania), and Ukraine. While I am not sure if Jews are genetically smarter, there is a simple answer to the problem. Selection (not really natural). Which is what Cochran says in his study (seems like most people commenting haven't really read the study, sadly). However, he states it a little differently than I do:
:P
:)
The smartest Christians for over 1000 years became priests. If you had 10 kids (as was common), the smartest one went on to be a priest, because they could read/write well, had good memories for scripture, and they could teach. So, the smartest Christians were taken out of the gene pool (*thinks Copernicus and Aquinas*). Repeat this process for centuries and you get a sub-par gene pool.
On the flip side. The smartest Jews went on to be rabbis and businessmen, they got the best and brightest wives and had many children. Repeat this process for centuries and you get an intelligent group.
Simple as that. You don't need a study, just common sense
I don't think I'm smarter because I have Jewish BLOOD. It's a cultural thing, those who are intelligent are respected in the Jewish community and have a lot of smart kids, and Jews of average intelligence still pursue education, because that's what is expected of them.
In the words of Richard Feynman, "Jews have a history of respecting learning: They respect their rabbis, who are really teachers, and they respect education. The Jews pass on this tradition in their families all the time, so that if a boy is a good student, it's as good as, if not better than, being a good football player."
I even experienced this as a child, and this is why I say it's a cultural thing: My second grade teacher's name was Mrs. Einstein (no direct relation), and somewhere during the course of the year I expressed my pride in the fact that Albert Einstein was Jewish and that I was also Jewish. One of the students taunted, "Why would you want to be related to a guy that looked like a toad?"
Shows what they know
"Man, I am so unbelievably stupid."
The paper may very well be incorrect, but evolution doesn't have time limits. Catastrophic environmental changes can clearly cause instant evolution.
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lol, j\k. I just love when j00s pull the anti-sem race card.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
> For example, light eyed people generally have worse reflexes [...]
Reputable source please.
You cannot have a serious discussion of biological determinism. Especially concerning people like Rushton who say that the large testicals of the African make him dumber.
Do Asians do better on tests? From most evidence, yes. Does that make the Asian 'race' inherently more intelligent? That is a meaningless question. How many Asians have to score consistently higher than how many Africans on how many tests to be considered more intelligent? What kind of tests? Who makes the tests? Who counts as Asian? How intelligent can an Asian get? If I'm half Asian and half African, will I be of average intelligence? Or do I have to get the Asian intelligence gene to be smart?
Intelligence is not something that can be measured like height. I can show you my height. I can give you a consistent, reproducible measurement of my height. You can't say the same for intelligence. It's like trying to measure 'sticktoitiveness.'
The problem is not saying, "Asians are smarter." I grant that in a given American school, the Asian kids will make up a disproportionate part of the upper percentiles of students. However, that does not mean that Asians are inherently smarter. Their families and culture may value education more. They may work harder. A genetic explanation is unnecessary and contrived.
But, if I am to accept that races are inherently different with reagrds to intelligence then I need to know,
- how a race is defined,
- how intelligence is measured,
- what I'm supposed to do with these distinctions.
The last part being the most important and the most dangerous. If Asians are smarter, what do we do with that? Breed Asians into every population? Elect them to Congress? Worship them as gods? And what about the Africans? Give them menial jobs that won't tax their limited cognitive abilities? What do we do with dumb Asians? What do we do with smart Africans?The objections to Rushton and his ilk is not PC do-gooder bullshit. It's an objection to racism veiled as science. Some of his science is good but his agenda is racist.
This report and the coverage are dangerously irrepsonsible.
1) It's sensationalism; the science itself isn't newsworthy: It's hypothesis has no supporting data (it's untested) and IMHO very speculative and discusses a somewhat esoteric issue: The potential for natural selection in certain circumstances to cause increased IQ.
2) Most importantly, by dividing people into 'races' and saying one 'race' is naturally stronger than others, ideas like this encourage people to identify with their 'races' and feel threatened by other 'races'. And racists propogandists will exaggerate and spin it saying, 'not only are Jewish people naturally smarter, as you always suspected, but as you notice they are also naturally agressive, prone to greed and evil,' implying the threat.
We are instinctively tribalistic and prone to killing each other. Nothing is more dangerous -- wars, tens of millions of deaths, devestation -- all wrought by these ideas.
It's the exact tactics of Milosovic in former Yugoslavia, Bin Laden, the Hutus in Rwanda (1 million murdered), Hindu nationalists in India, the Nazis, and countless more. It's an old, old trick with a very 'successful' track record.
I have no problem with science breaking social taboo, but the scientists are responsible for the consequences of their actions. Being anthropologists, I assume they know those consequences.
They should have taken care to bracket their report with careful statements, discouraging people from taking the ideas too far. They should (IMHO) publish more data and less loose speculation.
Consider this statement:
During the 20th century, they made up about 3% of the US
population but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes and 25% of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.
That has no meaning whatsoever -- Where are the Jewish world leaders in Go? Software engineering? I wonder why so few women, blacks and latinos win Nobel Prizes? Chess championships?
and also (paraphrase) "Saying everybody is special is just another way of saying nobody is."
Maybe we're just paraphrasing the same line. I thought that was a fairly poignant bit as well.
Who are "they"? Certain people who are in positions of control, especially teachers and those in academia, and some politicians on the political left. You don't have to believe me, but just pay attention, and be aware that most news and media has a leftist bias.
By the way, my best friend is Jewish. He's not exactly Einstein, so this study is clearly a bunch of hogwash.
Is there any benefit to having an appendix? Other than your 1 in 700 shot of having acute Appendicitis, which was deadly before modern medicine? Or any advantage of having tonsils, which are prone to infection?
Or what about the genetic predisposition to certain cancers that this study talks about? Could it be that they weren't selected out because a) most people didn't tend to live long enough for the cancer to manifest itself, or b) the cancer manifested itself long after parents passed their prime reproductive age?
The human genome is vast, human populations are large, and there are many forces at work. Saying, "Well, my gut tells me this is true." doesn't really cut it. And, anyway, what was this huge benefit that kept these genes in? 5 IQ points, on average? Whoopdee doo.
Perhaps there just wasn't enough pressure to select these genes out. The chances of two random Ashkenazi Jews having a Tay-Sachs baby are roughly 1 in 3,600. The effect of having a Tay-Sachs baby is the kid dies within a few years. Well, lots of babies die for lots of reasons. The incidence rate for SIDS is in the 2.5 per 1,000 range (but not much is known about SIDS, so it's not diagnosed as easily as T-S.) Even among parents who are both T-S carriers, each of their kids only has a 25% chance of having T-S. So a couple has a kid that dies young. Lots of kids die young (especially a few hundred years ago). That's why you have lots of kids (back then, anyway).
We may never know why these genetic diseases were never selected out. For all we know, there just wasn't enough time and in a thousand years they might be gone.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Smaller Gene pools lead to 'racial' differences - white, black, asian, mideast, pigmy, etc...
At what point would genetic mutations lead to a new species?
Homo erectus was displaced by Homo sapiens, so when is the human race due for it's next Upgrade?
Is there a timeline for evolution that would estimate the next jump for the species,
or are changes in humans and other species only dictated by environmental conditions?
"Sorry for becomming slightly off topic, but I hate political correctness."
Nothing wrong with political correctness. However, the merits of political correctness have no bearing on the validity of this guy's claim. A lot of people seem to be leaning towards that kind of thinking.
Because the invisible old man in the sky told them to. He will condemn you to eternal torment if you do not snip off the end of your son's wee-wee. But remember, God is love!
Why are Ashkenazis smarter than Sfardis? This article attempts to attribute it to antisemitism. The more likely explanation is that it is the effect of the european climate and environment. Is it a coincedence that Europeans have a higher IQ than middle eastern people, and the jews of those regions reflect the other resident of those places? This would also explain the higher intelligence of white northern americans than white southerners. A question linked to this one is, Why do Ashkenazis have lighter skin than Sefardis, and why do Europeans have lighter skin than middle eastern people. Some would say that it is a product of natural selection.However NS wouldent explain the skin color changes that happen in reletively few generations.. Ashkenazi jews and other groups who live in europe for less than 1000 years have a clearly different skin color than sfardic jews. How does this happen. It seems that genes have a way of adapting to an environment, and they are also affected by it too.
Nope, their research specifically talked about their being Jewish having a significant impact. Why? Because there has to be a selective pressure that significantly favored intelligence more in that community than in the surrounding Christian community. Theory is that 1) Jews were more likely to do things involving money, since the Catholic church forbid many of these practices, 2) being good at banking and such is helped by brains, 3) good bankers climb the socioeconomic ladder, 4) people higher up the socioeconomic ladder had more progeny reach adulthood in the middle ages, 5) being a Christian aristocrat was less likely to require brains than banking, and 6) these traits got condensed through inbreeding.
Points 2) and 4) are fairly established, I think we'd take 3) on face, 5) is a bit of an assumption, but it's fair to say that living off the backs of tenant farmers took less brains than banking. 6) is biology. 1) is known historically in general, and clearly depends specifically on the group being Jewish.
The connection to Tay-Sachs is fuzzy as author admits, but is at least intuitive - TS causes overbranching of neurons in the brain, and he's hypothesizing that having one copy of that gene might just be a cause of the elevated intelligence found in this group.
More "Jews are smarter" 'research'.
What a bunch of crap. Watch me dismiss it. "whosh". dismissed. That was easy.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'd be interested to hear what someone with real expertise says about the report, especially the section where they describe what is well established regarding IQ. I note that report comes from an anthropology dept., not psychology.
Also, slightly off-topic: Why do scientists use these pop racial taxonomies, like black, white, Ashkenazi, etc? Is there any evidence that these 'races' actually represent something? Something biological? Something cultural? Most people, AFAIK, are a mix going back tens of thousands of years (of course).
(As is often pointed out: Someone with one black and one white parent is usually called "black".)
It can be miscontrued that it is racist or anti-semitic to make a study like this of a segment of the Jewish community. I am sure that the JDL or someone will find fault. The fact remains that the Hebrew opulation/culture is genetically interesting in the same way that Gypsies (Rom) are. They are both populations that have a fair amount of outside influence due to diaspora. Of course there is the perception that Jewish people are more intelligent or more succesful. Is it politically incorrect to conduct studies of Icelanders because they are genetically homogeneous? Or of Native Americans?
make me a match?? Surprised nobody has mentioned this... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchmaker and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shidduch
If this paper were to show that people of European descent were more intelligent than, say, people of African descent, this paper would never get published. Jews would cry "racism!" and would attribute any descrepancies in IQ to social factors (the result of racist whites, of course.) But, of course, Jews are never racist, are they? When are white people going to wake up and see things for what they are?
Oh, well, I didn't need my karma anyway.
(I know, you were kidding.)
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Ignoring the fact that IQ is a seriously compromised idea to begin with and that measuring of this created value is as tricky as determining whether colorless green ideas do indeed sleep furiously, a few hundred years are NOT enough time to produce the kinds of outcomes he is talking about regardless of the strength of the selection pressure.
I remember this silly stuff popping up a few years back. Almost exactly the same conclusion, based on almost the same pseudo-reasoning. Unfortunately, I don't remember if it was the same authors pushing the pseudo-science.
I do remember that it was when Stephen J Gould was alive to debunk it (one of my favorite, and one of the smartest contemporary, Ashkenazi Jews in the biological sciences, FWIW). So I guess at least prior to 2002.
The problems with this semi-research are several:
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There's nothing politically incorrect about saying that there's something wrong with intelligent people in America, fercrissakes. I mean, look at who was elected President last time. America loves a moron and hates people who appear intelligent, saying that they're also genetically diseased will just confirm what most Americans already seem to think.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
In Maryland, one of the brilliant school Superintendents saw a statistic that kids that took Algebra in seventh grade scored better on SATS. So what did he do? Made every middle school student, whether ready or not, take Algebra in seventh grade. Brilliant, huh? On a side note, this leads me to one of the my favorite quotes, though I don't know who the source is... "Figure lie and liars figure!"
There's never any shortage of studies being done on intelligence, but an interesting documentary on CBC last night (Tuesday) discussed stupidity and how little we know about it. This is in spite of it supposedly having the third largest impact on the course of human events, behind violence and capital.
Hi
European Jewish culture tranditionally encourages being "smart". Families and communities would push children to (a) get an independent means of income so they can drop everything and easily run away from a pogrom and at the same time (b) to excel in their Jewish studies that involves Talmud/Mishna/Gemara, comprising of a challenging discipline of logic and debate.
Culling is a good way to enable evolution, but Jewish persecution (even today) is mostly indiscriminate and doesn't neccesarily allow only the "smart" to survive.
Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor has carried a page about Cochran's work for the last three years. And Jerry is no stranger to slashdotters.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
My understanding is that the genes in question would be those responsible for causing Tay-Sachs disease.
The problem here of course is that Tay-Sachs is also known to be a disease of Amish people too.
More information
I don't recall there being a lot of Amish chess champs.
- dj
Such a big deal is made of IQ of certain ethnicities, but take heart in your own smarts The ashkenazi test at about 112-115 IQ. That's usually with a ton of socioeconomic advantages (equally wishy-washy, but yes, if your mom can read, you can likely read too). Let's say this drags their true average IQ down to 107 or so. The VAST majority of slashdot readers are above a 107 Of course, having a high IQ doesn't mean you'll be rich, famous, get all the babes, or even avoid Tay-Sachs
The problem is looking at the average, there are smart Jews and dumb Jews, smart black people and dumb black people. Pinging an individual to what the average is for a race for anything is a really stupid thing to do.
It can't be scientifically proven that race A is superior to race B; superiority is a value judgement, and that's not what science does. The most science can say is that on average race A is more intelligent or whatever than race B or not.
Or is this some kind of joke? Sounds like an oxymoron to me...
The basic idea in science, is to compare hypotheses against experimental data. Typically, there will be several hypotheses under consideration and each different hypothesis will fit different aspects of the data well and other aspects of the data only with excuses. Furthermore, as more data is collected, inconsistancies will arise between the new data and some of the hypotheses that no amount of excuses can explain away.
If, however, the correct hypothesis is stumbled upon, then, almost like magic, not only will there not be a need for excuses to fit existing data but no matter how much new data is collected, no inconsistencies will be found. In summary, then, the mark of a correct hypothesis is that no excuses need to be made to fit the data.
Excuses come in two basic types. The first type of excuse violates Occam's razor in that more and more new hypotheses are addded to the original hypotheses in order to account for accumulating inconsistancies with the data. The second type of excuse relies on a vaguely defined hypothesis and interprets the hypothesis in different ways to fit different data.
The mark of a correct scientific hypothesis, then, is that it is simple and that it is precisely defined. On the other hand, in the humanities it is considered entirely valid to "prove" a hypothesis by using clever language to redefine the hypothesis and add complex excuses to the original hypothesis.
Back to the question at hand, while it could, in fact, be true that there is a sickle cell like "set of genetic traits" that occur in certain "Jewish" people that confers some sort of "intelligence", I am troubled that the authors fail to provide a precise and simple definition of their hypothesis.
In the case of sickle cell anemia, for example, there is a single precisely defined mutation that confers a specific and well defined advantage (malaria resistance) to people whose ancestors lived in regions with high incidence of malaria. In the present study, however, the authors postulate that a range of genetic conditions confers some sort of vague "intelligence" based selective advantage to people whose ancestors have a very complex and varied history.
I'm not necessarily saying the authors of the present study are wrong but their paper reads more like a humanities paper where the goal is to use clever language to argue a particular point of view than a science paper where the goal is to decide whether or not a specific precisely defined hypothesis is consistent with experimental observation.
I read the first couple of replies... perhaps I gave up too soon but seems to me (typically) that most all raving on about one flavour of the human species vs. another... as opposed to maybe the fact that research (further) opens up the possiblity that human intelligence itsself (perhaps even consciousness) is the direct by-product of the same type of gene mutation. As I said, perhaps someone does mention this - i just got tired of reading the greens are cleverer than blues debate (again) etc etc...
No way. You took the same test twice and you did better the second time around??? Whoa, how did that happen?
Male circumcision, on the other hand, was a sign offered by Abraham of his covenant with G-d. He circumcised all males in his family, employ, and his slaves. The collected foreskins were heaped into an enormous pile at the site. The name of the place of the first circumcision is Gilbearroth, which means "hill of foreskins". It is actually a real place that you can visit, and there is a small hill there, but whether it's made of foreskins is another matter.
I think it says that a particular set of Ashkenazi Jews will have really smart children if they have sex with non-Ashkenazi jews, but their children will have hereditary diseases if they have sex with Ashkenazi jews.
Since 80% of the jewish population is thought to be derived from Ashenazi jewish origins (according to Wikipedia), what this study is really trying to say is that jewish people need to marry and have children with non-jewish people or their children will be diseased. Even worse, it is saying that they will be rewarded for this behavior by having really smart children.
This situation would seem to be even worsened by the fact that many (if not all) jewish people subscribe to the belief that to be jewish you must have a jewish mother and a jewish father. In a fashion, this study just condemmened such behavior to a hereditary curse while incenting breaking jewish traditions (and falling out of pure-blood status) with the gift of brilliant children.
Damn. This study really is politically incorrect.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Appeal to Authority is only a fallacy when the cited authority isn't qualified to express the stated opinion. So says The Skeptic's Dictionary, and if they say so, it must be true.
This hit me a bit when I read it. I've known about the Ashkenazi Jews, but not from their culture, but their biology.
Amongst other diseases they seem to accumulate is Crohn's Disease, an autoimmune disorder of the GI tract. Ashkenazi's are frequently listed on all Crohn's literature.
I've had Crohn's since I was 20. As far as I know I don't have any Ashkenazi's in my ancestry in the past 200 years, and likely much more (I've studied my genealogy, my ancestry is English, Irish, with a bit of Pennsylvania Dutch thrown in the side.. hmm, maybe from there)
My IQ is nothing to sneeze at (140 plusish, who cares exactly), but I'd never considered that the two might be related.
Or I might just have both independantly and happened to come across an article that made a connection. It still gives me something to think about today...
Agreed. A test which measures true intelligence, when properly taken and administered, should always result in the same score for a given person. The score should be independent of how much a person knows and how much they have studied in preparation for the test. An IQ test satisfies none of these criteria. The only thing an IQ test measures, is how well you can take an IQ test.
Most of the comments attacking the paper attack IQ tests.
Now, go back and reread the original topic. Where does the term IQ appear? That's right, it doesn't. It's encapsulated in the phrase "number of intelligence metrics"... and the other metrics used completely defeat all the IQ-related attacks on the researchers' methodology. How many of you honestly believe that the higher IQ test results of Ashkenazi Jews, and the amazing number of Nobel Prizes they've earned, don't have a common cause? And Nobel Prizes aren't a specially chosen statistical fluke; there are TONS of other metrics of high achievement where Ashkenazi Jews are massively overrepresented.
Now, of course, that common cause doesn't have to be genetics; culture matters too. That's where the details of the research paper, and in particular, the prediction it makes, come into play. Consider several thousand Jewish families where one sibling is a heterozygous carrier of one of the sphingolipid diseases, and one isn't. Culture is statistically equalized. Random genetic variation is statistically equalized. If the carrier siblings prove to have significantly higher IQs than the non-carrier siblings, the only plausible explanation is the effect of the gene.
If IQ tests are just dependent on culture and randomness, the probability of the paper's prediction coming true is astronomically low. Thus, if the prediction does come true, you have to conclude that IQ is measuring something else as well, and that this other thing is affected by genetics. Good luck trying to argue that this other thing isn't highly correlated with intelligence, especially given that these diseases all affect neural growth.
The era of plausible deniability of genetically based group differences in intelligence is about to end. Fasten your seat belts.
For example, perhaps the Jewish belief system or values were themselves the selection force. Judaism has always been a very literate culture which stresses study, textual analysis, and interpretation. Maybe more people of a certain mind would join up or remain Jews. Data on Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews could help clarify this issue, since they would presumably have faced different selection pressures (in terms of being forced into a limited set of occupations) than the Jews of Europe.
No research has ever said that all Asians are smarter than all Africans. On average, Asians have a higher IQ than whites, whites higher than blacks. This average difference is about as large as the average difference between siblings in the same family - ie, not really that huge in the grand scheme of things. I'm sure you would not be hard-pressed to find a few black people who are smarter than a few Asian people, so any argument that this should be used for eugenics-type purposes falls apart right there. In addition, different races have different variances in IQ - blacks have less variance than whites, which means there are less blacks at the super-high-end but also less at the super-low-end.
A genetic explanation is unnecessary and contrived.
Taking out the race part for a moment, there is plenty of evidence that intelligence - as well as most personality traits - does have a significant genetic component. It's not contrived, and it's only unnecessary if you don't like to have the whole truth when it gets in the way of your worldview. There is an excellent book chapter by Abraham Tannenbaum on this, but no amount of digging through my crap is allowing me to lay my hands on it right at this moment. Suffice it to say that in order to claim that intelligence has no genetic component, you have to ignore piles of hard data - not to mention common sense. If some people's bodies can metabolize faster than others, why couldn't some people's neurons fire faster than others??
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Yeah, I'm going to believe the guy that suggests homosexuality is caused by an infection.
if this study points to why I keep finding myself attracted to Jewish girls. (Disclaimer: Poster is not Jewish) Maybe they ARE just smarter on average, and possibly there are other qualities they have that attractive to me. They seem to all share a similarly self-deprecating/silly sense of humor that's enormously appealing to me as well.
::cough::)
I just wish I could stop getting the "Oh... nevermind." response when they ask my friends, "Hey, he's cute! Is he Jewish?"
I need to just convert and get it over with already.
(Incidentally, if you are cute, female, Jewish and reading this, feel free to reply to this comment with affirmation of aforementioned attributes.
+++ATH0
I was turned down for 2 jobs in the 1970's because I failed their lie detector tests. I wasn't a smoker yet their tests said I was smoking pot. hahahaha Several days ago I had to visit a local emergency room as my regular doctor was on vacation. When I was admitted, the lady took my blood pressure. I had just walked in from the outdoor heat so I expected it to be above my norm. It was; 143 over 93. ((I've been dealing with elevated pressure for about a year now, or more, at 160/100.)) So then when they had me go to the triage curtains, this lady beside me was having an abnormal bleed situation... and was quite upset at the prospect of dying and leaving her 3 boys Mom-less right? (She was okay, just panicking & giving me a heart thing.) So after taking a short nap I awoke to this guy wanting to re-take my blood pressure. OK. It was now up to 163 over something. When I left the hospital the doctor had issued me one prescription with an added recommendation that I SEEK CONTROL FOR MY HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE. So I go to another doctor yesterday. First off, the nurse couldn't find a pulse. Not in my right wrist then not in the left wrist. hahaha Some of you were hoping eh? For the 1st time in my life a nurse had to whip out a stethoscope to find a HEARTBEAT. She said it was 46. 53 years old, Body Mass Index of 39, and my pulse was 46. hahaha Doc comes in, says my blood pressure is better than HIS at 120/80. Whew. Within a 3 day period, one doctor wants to crashcart me and another admires my new workout & diet/weightloss agenda (( on this page: http://free.seekon.com/Strongheart10/ )) And these IQ tests. I took one. Said I was 145, when everyone KNOWS IT'S REALLY 245.
Heh, serves me right for reading the article and not the paper before posting. The authors do address all of my issues in the paper.
Next they say "why not?" and claim that people not wanting to believe them, do it because of the politically incorrectness of their claims. The politically incorectness of their claims finally is used as an argument... exactly as it was the case in Bell Curve study.
This kind of speculative theory can hardly be called scientific, at least if accept the principle that scientific theories should be falsifiable. Of course we cannot falsify their claims and they can always continue saying "why not".
apol
As a corrollary, I do think there is a connection between one's intelligence and how much intellectual effort they can put towards rationalizing their beliefs. But that's not the issue at hand.
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* and I'd argue that it is a drastic oversimplification to selectively interpret some portions of the Hebrew bible very literally (ignoring other, contrary portions) and not pause to consider the amount of rabbinic interpretation and debate (including some nice rationalization and explanation) that make up much of Jewish religious teaching. Judaism is also pretty anarchic and personal, and if you ask 3 practicing Jews about their thoughts on god you'll find there's plenty of differences in the specifics of their beliefs. How Jews have related to the text over time is not something that can be easily gleaned from a literal read of these ancient texts.
I didn't, nor did I intend to say they did. But why do they talk about Asians, Africans and Caucasians? Why don't they talk about people with such and such an allele? Why do people like Rushton rank the races? And, again, who gets to decide the definition of a race? It's easy to attack such research on the statistics alone. How do you define the population? How do you define the quantity being measured? What other factors could have influenced the observed correllation? Can you prove or give a strong argument for causation?
On average, Asians have a higher IQ than whites, whites higher than blacks.Which is completely meaningless to the case for a genetic cause unless you're taken into account all environmental factors. And, again, how do you define race? On average Texans perform better on tests than Hawaiians. Genetics?
If some people's bodies can metabolize faster than others, why couldn't some people's neurons fire faster than others?Are we defining intelligence by how fast someone's neurons fire? Or is it by how well they do are standardized tests? Is it g?
You simply can't define intelligence in any meaningful objective way. You can say that children aged 10 should score this way on a standardized test and the average is 100. You cannot say that test is a measure of 'intelligence.' It may be a useful indicator of how the child compares to other children their age. You can't say that Billy scored 80 on the IQ test therefore his neurons fire 20% slower than average. You can say that Billy needs some help with schoolwork. That's what the IQ test is designed for. It does not measure an real quantity.
Metabolism is measurable. Intelligence is not. IQ is not a measure of intelligence. Even the American Psychological Association says that IQ should not be used to make inferences about a population. It's useful for evaluating individuals, especially children. It's usefulness diminishes quickly outside of school and laboratory settings. In my experience, the only people who hang on to a notion of IQ as a measure of intelligence are people who don't understand IQ, who need to quantify their intelligence for their own self esteem, eugenicists and racists.
Of course, IQ tests aren't a perfect measure of g. And whether you define g as all there is to intelligence... I think that will always be up for debate, but it is a pretty significant contributor to just about everything that is considered "intelligent" behavior in the United States, at least. And yes, I do think that the definition of intelligence can change somewhat according to culture - there is a wide range of cognitive abilities, some of which depend on g more than others; if a culture happens to value a non-g-loaded ability very highly, they may consider that to be "intelligent" behavior. "Intelligence" will also always have many colloquial definitions, even if you can settle on an accepted scientific defintion.
Personally, though, I think that for our uses of IQ scores in American school settings, g is a very, very important factor. I hope that eventually we can measure whatever it is that g "really" is more precisely. But whatever it is, I have no doubt whatsoever that it has a genetic component. The brain is just another body part, after all.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Autism is a genetic condition which has a mix of assorted disabilities and often abilities as well. Research has tended to focus on the disabilities, But there are a number of basic tests where autistics even "low functioning autistics" on average score better than average. The 'hidden figures test' being one of them.
To be completely fair, would it not be possible for the stress levels and lack of familiarity with the IQ tests be (I cringe to say) --somewhat-- standard? That is, people with specific training aside (and I do mean actually aside), if taking an IQ test is generally stressful, or, alternatively but equally imporant, generally approached as being pointless for certain people within larger populations, wouldn't the relative IQ scores still be worthwhile? By that I mean that if everyone's score is below their "actual" abilities, is it not possible that there is some regularity to the degree to which most people score below their abilities? This assumes, of course, that an IQ test taken under so-called idea circumstances has any worth.
Having writen it out, it does seem to me that there are too many variables involved. But perhaps not; we are talking about relatively extensive amounts of data (or are we not? again, I defer to the more informed).
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
Catastrophic environmental changes can kill many animals off, but it doesn't create a helpful genetic mutation. It might kill off almost everyone who doesn't have a certain helpful genetic mutation though.