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.
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
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.
That wasn't the paper, that was an article about the paper. The article is here.
I think the correlation the author tried to present had two variables that may be related but don't necessarily relate one for one.
Well it doesn't really matter what you think, because this guy actually researched it. His research is more important than your uninformed opinion. Not saying you're wrong, but I'm saying you don't know, so you cannot dismiss it.
- Jax
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Don't believe me? Arthur Jensen, an intelligence researcher who started talking about a genetic component for intelligence back in the 60s, received death threats for his work. Pinker outlines in his most recent book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, how much grief and ostracism other researchers have suffered for any implication that intelligence is not 100% environmental.
I just got a Master's in gifted education, and when I interviewed for a PhD program in Learning Sciences I had at least two different professors tell me (very enthusiastically) "Giftedness! That's so politically incorrect! I love it, we need someone who's brave enough to study that here! You know everyone's going to hate you, don't you?" And that's just for implying that smart people have different educational needs than other people, not even saying that it's innate. My professor in gifted ed here spends a lot of her time defending herself in the media, a lot more time than someone researching, say, reading would have to spend.
If you think this isn't a horrifically politically charged issue, you obviously haven't been anywhere near the field.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
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.
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.
Except that the authors showed mechanisms whereby the genes that cause these diseases could also cause increased intelligence. The sphingolipid cluster has a side effect of promoting axonal growth and branching as well as dendritogenesis. The DNA repair cluster are involved in regulating the proliferation of neurons during fetal development.
The authors also addressed the "bottleneck" theory (a group of people who had genes for these diseases just happened to survive by chance). This is the leading theory today as to why Ashkenazik Jews have such a high prevalence of numerous genetic diseases. In my opinion, they did a very good job of disproving that theory. Bottlenecks lead to severe decreases in genetic variability, and they demonstrate that Ashkenazik Jews are similar in variability to other populations including Europeans in general.
Here is my summary of the paper.
They demonstrate evidence that:
1) Ashkenazik Jews have higher IQ's as a group, but only in the mathematical and verbal subportions of IQ tests. They score lower than average on the visuospatial portions. This difference may be disappearing in recent times.
2) Post-Diaspora Jews were often persecuted and restricted to occupations that the majority (whether Christian or Islam) wouldn't do. In Christian lands, this included lending money for interest, whereas in Islamic areas, this avenue wasn't available, and only the most menial jobs were available to Jews there.
3) A very high percentage (up to 85 percent of adult males) were involved in a very narrow occupation range, mainly that of moneylender or other occupation that involved complex transactions involving money.
4) Those of higher intelligence got richer in these narrow range of occupations.
5) The richer you were the more children survived to adulthood.
6) Ashkenazik Jews were genetically isolated from the surrounding population by self selection.
7) Many of the genetic diseases that are at high incidence among Ashkenazik Jews cluster into only a few "types".
8) Two of these "types" (the sphingolipid storage type and the DNA repair type) are known to have positive effects on neural proliferation and growth.
Thus their conclusion is that these genetic mutations increase intelligence and the situation with Ashkenazik Jews is that the selective pressure towards intelligence was more than enough to outweigh the deleterious effect that these genes have on fitness otherwise. They suggest as a test for their theory, within Ashkenazik populations, heterozygotes for these genes should show increased intelligence relative to those who are not carriers.
It bothers me somewhat that this paper comes out of a Department of Anthropology. When addressing genetics, the quality of researchers in this area can be very widespread. However, I don't see that they have made any errors with respect to the genetics or the neurobiological aspects. It is very common to see in populations that a strong selective pressure at first yields mutations that are negative in some other way, but whose benefit outweighs the negative aspects. Subsequent selection yields compensating mutations (typically in other genes) that temper or eliminate the negative aspects.
In this case, the selection pressure has been removed, Jews are no longer restricted in their choice of profession, so it is likely that the negative aspects of these genes will push back and their incidence among Ashkenazik Jews will diminish, especially if carriers of the most devastating genes (such as Tay-Sachs) choose not to have children at all or fewer of them (such as couples who are both carriers and who have one healthy child deciding not to push the odds with more).
I find it interesting that because of the need for social and verbal ability among financiers, the other sorts of genes related to autism that also often increase intelligence weren't selected for among Ashkenazik Jews.