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

The GNAA disagrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Muh? Bah?

it is true

[KingRamsis]

I truly feel sorry for the numb Americans sitting on their getting-fatter-as-I-type asses while Zionists are raping their country, making them fight wars on their behalf , bombing their ship in false flag operation, yeah keep eating those super sized big macs, keep getting dumber and dumber while the Zionists fuck up your country and pony ride it to their goals... supporting Israel is now an official American value...
And finally this article the last straw, maybe it has some truth in it maybe Americans are really stupid ?

Completely ridiculous

[br00tus]

It's fitting that this was called politically incorrect because this paper is both political and incorrect. People act as if it is something new for papers such as these to be submitted, these types of papers are submitted all of the time, but I think one look at the name of this obscure journal, "Journal of Biosocial Science" would give a real scientist a whiff of the "scientific" value of this. I mean, really, any journal with the word social in it is usually BS, forget about "biosocial" or "biosocial science".

As others have said here, evolution does not take place over decades or centuries, but over millions of years. Thus, human variation is minor, as is well known, variation among say the Han Chinese is much larger than individual variation between say a random Han Chinese and a random Native American in South America. There's not much difference among human population - different skin color based on climate, immunity to certain diseases, plus things like narrower Asian eyes, curlier African hair.

I won't even go into the nurture not nature points about how Jews and Christians in Europe were raised differently. Or how "interbreeding" would have brought this gene out into the gentile population. That Jews in such a short period of time changed their brains profoundly and that this has been detected by scientists is just utterly absurd. Scientists understand next to NOTHING about the brain. As Noam Chomsky points out, a Caenorhabditis elegans nematode worm has only 302 neurons, and scientists who have been studying its brain for decades understand next-to-nothing about its brain. Thus, if you expand this scientific understanding of a species with 302 neurons to humans, which have 100 billion neurons, this shows you the vast expanse of lack of knowledge scientists have of how the human brain functions.

Economic and political systems spit out all kinds of output, including "scientific" papers like these which of course get highly publicized (I read about this on mailing lists before seeing it here). This paper is from England, if one goes back over the years, there have been many "scientific" papers showing how the Anglo-Saxon race was superior to those genetically dumb, drink-prone, criminal Irish on the next island, as well as most of the other races. The Cold Spring Harbor Lab, which Nobel Prize DNA co-discoverer James Watson came back from England years ago to preside over, was called the Eugenics Record Office right up until we went into World War II and Hitler's boosterism of eugenics made it seem less cool or patriotic.

Of course the other side of this coin, is that while the powers-that-be are always trying to bring out material like this - the Bell Curve, this and whatnot, they also actively work to sabotage, discredit and so forth research on things like climate change. I know less about this subject than I do about biology, but I do know of cases where oil companies have donated money to congressmen who went after funding for studies into this, among other things. I also know oil companies have set up their own labs to try to disprove the theory, the scientific value of which I would hold in as high regard as scientists working for Greenpeace. Also, some people can't handle the fact we evolved from a common ancestor with monkeys, so they fund intelligent design research to try to get evolution out of the schools. Thus, there's bad science all around. As I said, different political-economic systems spit his stuff out - the Soviet Union did not have these specific problems but it had its own set of problems with so-called scientific studies by Lysenko and so forth. The same principle, although different fields, political and economic factors dictating science.