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.""

Comments

Let's see. . .

[smooth wombat]

This paper says that a subset of a religious group is more intelligent due to genetic factors and that's a good thing.

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?

Re:Let's see. . .

[mwvdlee]

In doing so, the team's research challenges claims that Jews are a special, chosen people and that Judaism can only be inherited.

So, the issue in that case wasn't whether the article's results were PC. People have reported such results in the past and it was published. The issue was that the authors were using the result to grind their own political - rather than scientific - axes.

So challenging a claim which basically says "we're better than you, because our moms and dads were better than yours and you can never be as good as us" is politically incorrect?

Re:Let's see. . .

[spiritraveller]

You do have to wonder how much research is never published for fear of a lawsuit....

How about none, zip, zero.

In the US there is no basis for suing someone who insults your race or religion. First of all, it's simply not a claim; slander or libel do not apply to huge groups of people. Second of all, the constitution prevents it.

A French Jewish organization discovered this a few years ago when it sued Yahoo! for selling Nazi paraphernalia. The Jewish group won in the French courts, but Yahoo! had no assets in France. A federal court in the US refused to enforce the French judgment because it said that to do so would violate the First Amendment.

You still have freedom of speech. Political correctness is just other people reacting to your speech, which they also have the freedom to do. That's not a legal problem per se. It's more of a social and cultural problem.

Re:Let's see. . .

[SpacePunk]

The paper is just a way for the Jews, and supporters to perpetuate one stereotype and one racist outlook.

The stereotype is that Jews are victimized. This time by 'God', 'Mother nature', and/nor 'selection'.

The racist outlook is that Jews are naturally more intelligent than non-Jews, therefore superior racially.

Einstein's brain was flawed, too...

[Anonymous Coward]

Einstein's brain was actually the product of a genetic defect. From wiki:

"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."

Re:Einstein's brain was flawed, too...

[k96822]

Hey, this explains my GPA then. Of course, none of my lobes got bigger to compensate, but, at least now I have an excuse!

Seriously, these kind of things disturb me when I read them (what the quote said, not what the poster said). It implies that intelligence cannot be achieved through hard work, which is totally wrong. The brain is like any other muscle and the brain bearer can develop it, just like any other muscle. They don't need a genetic defect to outdo Einstein, they need courage and the willingness to sweat to build it up.

When people turn around and then say, "Well, you're smart because you're defective," then it diminishes both the person and the journey to become a more intelligent person. Some people use this excuse to explain away their own laziness or they'll take the smart person's flaws and blow them out of proportion until the smarter person is just bad enough to no longer be superior.

I'm convinced this tendency in people also creates an expectation from people who are intelligent that affects the intelligent's person behavior. "All the world's a stage. And all the men and women merely players", Shakespeare observed. What role we play is often the role we think other expect us to play. So, if a person is intelligent, people expect that person has no social skills, and they live up to expectations because they are looking for clues for how to play their role.

It is still "politically correct" to belittle both intelligent and fat people in today's society too.

Because something is politically incorrect...

[Ignignokt]

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).?

It's possible

[udderly]

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.

Being a Jew ...

[your_mother_sews_soc]

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.

I don't buy it

[dj28]

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.

Re:Politically incorrect, Humbug

[smallpaul]

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.

The argument in a nutshell

[goombah99]

To answer your question you have to understand the thread of the argument.

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.

Re:I'm Not Much of a Geneticist, But

[managerialslime]

You are closer to the truth than you might know. For more than a thousand years, Jewish males became part of the community when, at age 13, and after seven or more years of study, they demonstrated their literacy skills by publicly reading the bible (torah) and conducting a religious service. (Today called a Bar Mitzvah.) Illiterate males were not seen as "desirable" and so may have had a tougher time finding a mate and reproducing.

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.