Slashdot Mirror
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.""
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
"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.
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.
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'm sure everyone has heard the phrase "I don't want to know". Sometimes I wonder if there are some things that scientists should avoid studying. For example, what if it could be scientifically proven, without a doubt, that race A was in many ways superior to race B? The scientist may be perfectly capable of accepting this without it affecting his actions towards others, but the rest of the world may see this as an excuse or reason to treat race B as inferior.
Alternatively, the opposing view would be that yes, this should be allowed to happen, because it's the truth, and we should learn to adapt to this knowledge. Perhaps this is the more correct answer. But I think it all depends on your values, and I don't think there can ever be a correct answer to this question. But exploring both sides can be valuable insight.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
Maybe then we can get past the "everyone is equal" and "anyone can achieve anything" crap which has been holding Americas schools back.
I have never met a single person who believes that everyone has exactly the same innate intelligence, musical ability, etc. Everyone knows that different people have different talent.
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.
Sorry, now you're the one spouting bullshit. Of course you may never be able to draw like Leonardo Da Vinci. But with time and effort you can learn to draw to some level better than you do today. Similarly, except for actually disabled children, anyone can learn some geometry. I don't think it is politically correct to point out that the human brain is specifically designed to allow people to acquire new skills and that neither drawing nor geometry are outside the normal range of learnability. Maybe you hate drawing, as I do, and therefore don't want to put in the effort to achieve even minimal skills. Or maybe your teacher taught it incorrectly (I'm told that there is a very good technique for teaching non-drawers to look beyond objects at shapes) but you could learn it if you felt it important.
I don't find the rest of your rant compelling at all. Most people who are depressed are so because of biochemical imbalances and not because their teachers overpraised them as children.
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.
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
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.
There are some interesting facts in the article about IQ and other things.
1. The IQ average in the middle of the bell curve wasn't much changed, but in the top end, it was 4/1000 vs 23/1000.
2. 3% of the US population hold 27% of its nobel prizes.
3. An Israeli clinic devoted to treating people with Gaucher's has vastly more engineers, scientists, accountants and lawyers on its books than would be expected by chance.
So here we have 3 ways of measuring "intelligence". IQ, exceptional achievement, and occupation. Now the paper was trying to make a link between the genetic diseases and intelligence, and while there is no direct proof that these diseases increase intelligence, the numbers do tend to indicate it.
I don't think this paper has gone out to say that and entire race is superior to another, and I don't think you can say they based all their ideas on IQ tests alone.
And yes, as long as people try to define intelligence in hundreds of different ways, it will be impossible to call a paper like this conclusive proof.
No France
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.
This makes a nice point: single-test evaluations are unscientific. I always remember a prof talking to a group of first years in a lab. He was a Chinese guy with a very direct approach, and he told them: "You got this desk. I ask you how wide it is. You take tape measure and measure it like this. You write down number. You hand it in. You do that, I fail you. You never measure anything just once."
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Even worse, at the same time, many countries made it a crime for Jews to marry non-Jews, and so the poor, illiterate Jewish male had little chance of finding a mate.
During the dark and middle ages, the majority of the population of Europe was illiterate (the royalty and the church the general exceptions).
[Off-topic sidebar:] We owe a great debt to the Catholic Monks of Ireland who, during this time, transcribed not only bibles, but classic texts from the Roman, Greek, African, and Mid-Eastern civilizations that are the base of Western Civilization. See the special on PBS or The History Channel, or buy the book on Amazon, "How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History) by THOMAS CAHILL. Without the Irish, there may have never been a renaissance, then an industrial revolution, and then the era of slash dot and online pr0n. [/End off-topic sidebar]
During this same period of time, many countries' laws prohibited Jews from becoming tradesmen, artisans, or farmers. As a result, banking and trade, professions that require math and literacy, became the Jew's primary source of income. A Jew without math and language skills had a much tougher time of making a living and supporting any mouths he might reproduce and so was further discouraged from marrying.
SOoo....
From within the community, illiterate Jews were seen as undesirable matches. They were often outlawed from marrying non-Jews. In addition, at a time when non-Jewish peasants could be illiterate farmers, the Jews could not. The pressure on lower-intelligence Jews NOT to reproduce or at least minimize the number of offspring was enormous.
From the isolation of the Jews around 70 AD through the renaissance, there were approximately 70 generations. This was more than enough time to depress the proportion of illiterate adults in the community.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
IQ tests don't actually test intelligence though. They test your ability to solve problems.
Give me a problem including a load a number sequences and I can solve it by arithmetic means. Give me a problem involving shapes and I can solve it by scrawling notes.
Give me a problem involving how to move half a tonne of wooden poles with 2 lengths of rope and a group of teenagers and not only can I form a plan in a minute or two, but I can do it safely and quickly. This isn't tested in a classic IQ test, so therefore because I can't 'just do' the maths puzzle without resorting to stepping through the solution I'm less intelligent.
IQ tests don't really give any kind of indication of intelligence in situations it may be useful.
Disclaimer: My tested IQ is 143, and so far I've been overseeing the lifting of heavy pioneering poles for 4 years with only one casualty (a rope burn).
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
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...:-( )
Don't confuse physical ability with mental ability. While there is a physical aspect to mental development, it doesn't play as much as a role because of the brain's unique ability to adapt. A short brain can become tall, so to speak!
/disadvantage/, and I'm looking for a plane trip to anywhere this isn't true. If you value knowledge, you're a nerd and people hate you for what you achieve because it makes them feel bad about themselves. Financial gains aren't based on intelligence here either: they are based on the willingness to hurt others. Some people confuse this with intelligence, though. For example, people will often, at first, consider the unethical behavior of Bill Gates negatively, and then switch when they say the words, "But, see how rich he is?" In America, money is morality.
I would like to know where you live, because in America, intelligence gives you social
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.
Simple. They gave them an easier test the second time. Or maybe they did give them the exact same test again.
Not that I think that's what happened, just saying...
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."