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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!
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.
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.
If there wasn't any benefit these genes gave, common sense would suggest they'd have died out long ago.
I am trolling
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.
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(){}'
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
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.
The thing is that intelligence is not a single dimensional quantity like height is. We pretend it is by assigning an IQ value to some measurement of it, but even scientists who study it will tell you that a major problem in the field is a lack of understanding of just what intelligence is.
I am sure that some people are smart than other because of some genetic trait. The problem comes when you take information about a group and apply it to the individual.
There are brilliant people that are not Jewish. There are stupid people that are.
We need to stop wanting to lump people in groups to judge. That is bigotry.
I frankly I see more of that on Slashdot that just about any where else.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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
Einstein's brain was actually the product of a genetic defect.
A genetic variation does not necessarily constitute a "defect." Are blue eyes a defect? Generally, the term defect is used when there is some kind of significant pathological consequence.
Well... OK, let's run with this for a second.
:)
I'm not entirely unsympathetic to this particular definition ("intelligence is measured by its expression") because I have experience with this too: I drive a race car. My success at any given event is in very large part an expression of my performance at that event. Some days, I'm so good I'd make you weep at the sheer beauty of it. And other days I couldn't drive sheep.
It's hard to boil this down into a single "talent" number to compare against other drivers. For sure, there are a rare few who seem to have much less variability in their performance (they are consistantly at the top of their game, where I occasionally have a "sheep day") but when I'm really "on", I'm the equal of even these lucky few. (and I'm convinced that my variability could be eliminated with the proper coaching)
So lets say that intelligence follows a similar pattern. Some days you express well; other days, not so much. There is some variability to the expression of your intelligence depending any number of outside factors.
Well then, that makes determining a link between genetics and intelligence DOUBLY hard, because now you have to account for expression performance.
I have seen an entire field of drivers have a "sheep day" all at once, where *everybody* is off his game, and if *anybody* rises to just an "average" performance he'd wipe the field. So it's possible that Group A has a good day, and Group B has a bad day, and now you have data showing that A is smarter than B, when really what you measured is that A expressed better than B.
Now you could make the argument that, by virtue of expressing better, that at the time the test was taken that A *really was* more intelligent than B. By your definition, I agree. But that doesn't prove that A's intellectual genetics are superior to B's - in fact, if we assume the variability ranges overlap, on a retest B might be smarter than A, or they might even be tied.
So either way, we are making life very difficult for anybody seeking proof of a genetic link to intelligence. Taken the first way, the test doesn't really measure intelligence. Taken the second way, it does - but "intelligence" is highly variable and hard to nail down. Either way, it makes any study claiming a direct link between some factor and intelligence highly suspect.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
But seriously, Einstein was just one man. Yes, he was a genius, but just one of many geniuses we've had over the years. I'm not sure how much we can learn just by looking at his brain in a pickle jar. And whatever this defect was, they missed it the first time -- I wonder if they (the people who look at his brain in the pickle jar) are just finding what they wanted to find?
So what? I don't let what is PC dictate my actions. If you want to, that's fine, but I don't. (I do try and let courtesy dictate my actions, but that's different.)In any event, it's relatively scientifically established that fat people don't live as long. Is stating that or researching that politically incorrect?
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."
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.
"Researchers find that Intense Selective Pressure from Murderous Christian Bigots against European Jews has Resulted in Mean Jewish Intelligence being Significantly Raised"
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.
There are genetic components to intelligence just like there are genetic components to athletic ability. Take two people with different genetics and have them follow the same workout. They will not be equal in speed and strength. The same is true with regards to intelligence. You can study and work all you want and chances are there will still be someone smarter than you who may not even have worked as hard.
How about you are born with a liver that's only half the size, but that could process blood in a different/more efficient manner that compensated for this and also aided in immuno-response. This would be a defect, in that your liver is malformed from the norm, however a result of whatever caused the defect makes your liver still function like a normal one, and has an added benefit.
I would class this as a genetic variation rather than a defect, because there is no pathological consequence.
The point is just that you are born with some mutation, but there is a positive side-effect to the mutation. This effect must happen for evolution to take place.
All differences are the result of mutation at some point in evolution. So I suppose that one could regard a human being as a "defective ape," but that is not how the term is commonly employed. The term "defect" is used for a variation that has some kind of significant pathological consequence.
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.
"Ignorance is natural too, but I don't see anyone arguing that people who've learned nothing should be considered equal to those who have studied extensively and developed important intellectual skills."
"One man, one vote" anyone, uh?
It's taboo because the differences, if they do exist (which is likely, I admit), are minor enough that they are far overwhelmed by variation in individuals. Pointing out the very slight differences usually does not serve any useful purpose and will only inflame racial discrimination. If people weren't so stupid when it comes to race, then it wouldn't be a problem. But for some reason stupidity becomes rampant when race is an issue. For that reason, it's better to leave it alone.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Also, the converse of your argument would then be that a lack of intelligence shows a lack of hard work. This is typical Protestant work ethic thinking. It makes it a lot easier to point fingers at poor people and call them lazy.