Posted: Fri 03 Jun 2005 19:10 Post subject: Ashkenazic Jews and Intelligence
Quote:
June 3, 2005
Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes
By NICHOLAS WADE
New York Times
A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability.
The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility, the researchers say in a paper that has been accepted by the Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press in England.
The hypothesis advanced by the Utah researchers has drawn a mixed reaction among scientists, some of whom dismissed it as extremely implausible, while others said they had made an interesting case, although one liable to raise many hackles.
"It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is," said Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, noting that it argues for an inherited difference in intelligence between groups. Still, he said, "it's certainly a thorough and well-argued paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright."
"Absolutely anything in human biology that is interesting is going to be controversial," said one of the report's authors, Dr. Henry Harpending, an anthropologist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
He and two colleagues at the University of Utah, Gregory Cochran and Jason Hardy, see the pattern of genetic disease among the Ashkenazi Jewish population as reminiscent of blood disorders like sickle cell anemia that occur in populations exposed to malaria, a disease that is only 5,000 years old.
In both cases, the Utah researchers argue, evolution has had to counter a sudden threat by favoring any mutation that protected against it, whatever the side effects. Ashkenazic diseases like Tay-Sachs, they say, are a side effect of genes that promote intelligence.
The explanation that the Ashkenazic disease genes must have some hidden value has long been accepted by other researchers, but no one could find a convincing infectious disease or other threat to which the Ashkenazic genetic ailments might confer protection.
A second suggestion, wrote Dr. Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a 1994 article, "is selection in Jews for the intelligence putatively required to survive recurrent persecution, and also to make a living by commerce, because Jews were barred from the agricultural jobs available to the non-Jewish population."
The Utah researchers have built on this idea, arguing that for some 900 years Jews in Europe were restricted to managerial occupations, which were intellectually demanding, that those who were more successful also left more offspring, and that there was time in this period for the intelligence of the Ashkenazi population as a whole to become appreciably enhanced.
But the Utah researchers' analysis comes at a time when some geneticists have suggested natural selection is not the reason for the Ashkenazic diseases after all. Two years ago, Dr. Neil Risch, a geneticist now at the University of California, San Francisco, proposed a different genetic mechanism known as a founder effect, which occurs when a population is reduced for a time.
He found that all the Ashkenazic diseases had similar properties, including having arisen within the last 1,100 years. Therefore they had all arisen through the same cause, he argued, which must be founder effects, because it was unlikely that all could be due to natural selection. Last year, Dr. Montgomery Slatkin of the University of California, Berkeley, came to much the same conclusion for different reasons.
The Utah team agrees with Dr. Risch that the diseases all arose in historical times from the same cause but say natural selection is more likely because none of the non-disease Ashkenazic genes they tested showed any sign of a founder effect. They say the clustering of four of the diseases in the same biochemical pathway could only have arisen under the influence of natural selection, and calculate that the odds of a founder effect producing such a cluster are vanishingly low.
The four diseases, all of which are caused by mutations that affect the cell's management of chemicals known as sphingolipids, are Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher, and mucolipidosis type IV. A second cluster of diseases affects repair of DNA.
Turning to the possibility that some infection was the cause of the selective effect, the Utah researchers noted that Ashkenazim and Europeans lived together in the same cities and were exposed to the same microbes. If disease were the agent of selection, the Utah team argues, the European population would have developed a similar genetic response.
Ashkenazi Jews occupied a different social niche from their European hosts, and that is where any selective effect must have operated, the Utah researchers say. From A.D. 800, when the Ashkenazi presence in Europe is first recorded, to about 1700, Ashkenazi Jews held a restricted range of occupations, which required considerable intellectual acumen. In France, most were moneylenders by A.D. 1100. Expelled from France in 1394, and from parts of Germany in the 15th century, they moved eastward and were employed by Polish rulers first as moneylenders and then as agents who paid a large tax to a noble and then tried to collect the amount, at a profit, from the peasantry. After 1700, the occupational restrictions on Jews were eased.
As to how the disease mutations might affect intelligence, the Utah researchers cite evidence that the sphingolipid disorders promote the growth and interconnection of brain cells. Mutations in the DNA repair genes, involved in second cluster of Ashkenazic diseases, may also unleash growth of neurons.
In describing what they see as the result of the Ashkenazic mutations, the researchers cite the fact that Ashkenazi Jews make up 3 percent of the American population but won 27 percent of its Nobel prizes, and account for more than half of world chess champions. They say that the reason for this unusual record may be that differences in Ashkenazic and northern European I.Q. are not large at the average, where most people fall, but become more noticeable at the extremes; for people with an I.Q. over 140, the proportion is 4 per 1,000 among northern Europeans but 23 per 1,000 with Ashkenazim.
The Utah researchers describe their proposal as a hypothesis. Unlike many speculations, it makes a testable prediction: that people who carry one of the sphingolipid or other Ashkenazic disease mutations should do better than average on I.Q. tests.
The researchers have identified two reasonably well accepted issues, the puzzling pattern of diseases inherited by the Ashkenazi population and the population's general intellectual achievement. But in trying to draw a link between them they have crossed some fiercely disputed academic territories, including whether I.Q. scores are a true measure of intelligence and the extent to which intelligence can be inherited.
The authors "make pretty much all of the classic mistakes in interpreting heritability," said Dr. Andrew Clark, a population geneticist at Cornell University, and the argument that the sphingolipid gene variants are associated with intelligence, he said, is "far-fetched."
In addition, the genetic issue of natural selection versus founder effects is far from settled. Dr. Risch, whose research supports founder effects, said he was not persuaded by the Utah team's arguments. Dr. David Goldstein, a geneticist at Duke University who was not connected with either Dr. Risch's or the Utah study, was more open on the issue, saying Dr. Risch had made "quite a strong case" that founder effects could be the cause, but had not ruled out the possibility of selection.
Dr. Slatkin, though favoring a founder effect over all, said he agreed with the Utah team that this would not account for the cluster of sphingolipid diseases.
As for the Utah researchers' interpretation of Jewish medieval history, Paul Rose, professor of Jewish studies at Pennsylvania State University, said, "I think that some of their conclusions may be right though they still need a lot of work to be persuasive to historians and others."
Dr. Gregory Cochran, the first author on the Utah team's paper and a physicist who took up biology, said he became interested in the subject upon learning that patients with a particular Ashkenazic disease known as torsion dystonia were told by their physicians that "the positive thing is that this makes you smart."
"When you're in a hurry and have strong selection, you have a lot of genes with bad side effects," he said. The Ashkenazi Jewish population seemed to fit this pattern, he said, since they married only inside the community, making selection possible, and they had an urgent need for greater intelligence. Evolution had therefore selected every possible mutation that worked in this direction, despite their harmful side effects when inherited from both parents. "In a sense, I consider this a very boring paper since it raises no new principles of genetics," Dr. Cochran said.
Posted: Sun 05 Jun 2005 23:46 Post subject: Ashkenazic Jews and Intelligence
Why should anyone be alarmed or put off by the proposition (unproven) that Europe's "white" Jews emerged from a millennium of oppression with a racial trait for superior intelligence? Does anyone oppose this tale playing into, supporting, the legend of "superior I.Q." Nordic "whites" allegedly purebred in Ice Age isolation about 12,000 years ago? (See Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Scribner's 1916), Part II, Chap. 6.)
http://www.churchoftrueisrael.com/pgr/pgr-toc.html
I think we should examine this idea. Let's assume hypothetically that the University of Utah researchers' conclusion is true. What might it mean?
Basically, the University of Utah scientists found evidence which they interpreted as showing the European Ashkenazic Jews actually evolved higher intelligence within the last 900 years under European anti-Semitic pressure, some 36 generations of it.
First considerations, I think, are to ask if intelligence and collective group I.Q. scores truly connect to one another? Alfred Benet's original 1905 "intelligence" test was for the purpose of identifying and helping individual retarded French school children. Pooling I.Q. scores of a racial "group" (i.e., sample-testing a "race") is a whole different idea.
Another problem is defining and isolating two "races." Numerous "bell curve" style publications blithely report testing "the races." But I think the integrity of measurements will be hopelessly compromised by the absence of logical edges of "races," to say nothing of alleged biological "races" defined merely as someone's arbitrary choices of how many and where? Finally, how can the measurements not be suspect if all the "races'" "bloods" have been freely mingling ever since the start of Life on Earth! (Notice that our human race ["roots"] is billions of years older than our species, if the latter characterizes what we look like now.)
I think there is a question whether the I.Q. intelligence purportedly measured in Ashkenazic Jews is an inherited advantage? High intellect might carry overhead limiting its general suitability. Maybe that explains why it is not more commonplace? The Utah scientists acknowledge a connection of the alleged inherited intelligence to Jewish inherited diseases. Is that an advantage? For argument let's assume it is.
This brings us to the nub of our hypothetical: Is anything "wrong" with finding an insular population (here Ashkenazic Jews) with an evolutionary advantage over everyone else?
First, do Ashkenazi Jews now face the same "white" man's "threat" of "racial genocide" by "amalgamation" with the primitive "blood" of us low-brow gentiles? Someone like Richard Mcculloh of "Nordish" Racial Compact would surely understand this fear. McCulloh still defends the Jim Crow segregation scheme that was erected after Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), to protect the "racial integrity" of "white blood."
http://www.racialcompact.com/ The "anti-miscegenation" logic of Jim Crow was this: that "amalgamation" would destroy evolved "white supremacy," especially alleged higher I.Q. intelligence. This "race genocide" notion is not even gone away. It rears its ugly head in every "Bell Curve" type of book, such as was popularized in 1994. (Herrnstein & Murray, New York: Free Press.)
I disagree. Fear of "amalgamation" reflects ignorance. It envisions a naive view of inheritance, genes, and evolution, that analogizes "race mixing" to pouring together black and white buckets of paint. This analogy is wrong because genes are digital components of inheritance -- not continuous analogue -- not simple "drops" of paint-like "blood." Genes are not destroyed by "mixing" in sexual procreation with another human being. Indeed, genes almost immortal. They pass on and on indefinitely. Basically all that ever stops them is the death of their last host. Therefore, under the natural selective pressure of evolution any gene giving its host an evolutionary advantage (assuming high I.Q. is), will relentlessly survive. It will outlive less advantageous genes.
Is anything "bad" about a human sub-group (in the insular sense of a "blood race") evolving a superior gene? When was the last time we saw this happen? Don't we have evidence of a special Homo erectus group breaking through to Modern Humans in Southern Africa about 50,000 years ago? Didn't the first evidence of Modern Man (us) arise with this group in the form of higher functioning intellect I.Q. style? This was the appearance of the first cave art, of religious artifacts, ritual burials, evidence of music making, improved weapons, and so on, in a wave coming out of Africa.
Are we gentiles now modern "Neanderthals" threatened with extinction by Ashkenazic Jews? A law of evolution states two species cannot inhabit the same niche. The inferior goes extinct. Neanderthals may have had grounds for fear if they truly were a different species from our ancestors -- who certainly outlived Neanderthals. American Negroes, too, had grounds for fear historically recently, because of the eugenic fear that their racial "blood" will somehow retard "white" evolutionary progress. Thousands of "black" men were lynched in the South for this "white" hysteria about the urgent imperative to retain a "pure stock" for "white racial destiny." Anyone interested can read up on this "imperative" in Richard McCulloh's impassioned plea for "Nordish" segregation.
http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol2no4/rm-race.html
Again, different species cannot inhabit the same evolutionary niche together. One goes to the wall. But two "races" the same species are not "different" in this sense. Therefore, one does not go extinct at the other's feet. All that happens is that any disadvantageous genes will tend to be outlived (over multiple generations) by any new more advantageous genes. (I think this is continuous evolution. It goes on always.) It may be that Neanderthals faded this way over many generations into Modern Man. This is controversial. But as certainly as anything, Modern Man's genetic advantage, first spotted in South Africa about 50,000 years ago, did not comprise a totally different species from its own near neighbors in South Africa then. The prevailing "Out of Africa" theory describing spreading Modern Man clearly is not an adventure yarn of a magical mystery mutant tribe -- the "sudden" New Species of Man that sprung up from nowhere -- kicking butts and spearing to death everyone else in the world then. Instead, I think we see a very foreshortened view of a stream of incremental genetic advantages, perhaps quite similar to the Utah U. Scientists' Ashkenazi Jewish I.Q. spike (allegedly), which came pouring into the human genome by the continuous evolutionary replacement process from its South African point of origin.
Evolution is an irresistible force. It is not fragile. It is not slowed even momentarily by "races" "mixing." In fact, that's how it works!
The "white supremacy" proclaimed by Madison Grant (1916) attributed a mechanism of I.Q. improvement to "whites" bred of their survival in rigorous Ice Age Northern Europe around 12,000 years ago. Whether true or not is unsettled. Every human evolutionary environment tests survival to the limit. The link of icy winters and I.Q. is unclear to me. I suggest Madison Grant should have tried surviving in Africa. Grant's bigotry was believing that "black" people's "dominant ape genes" would spoil delicate, recessive "white supremacy." (Richard McCulloh raves on about this.) I have explained why this thinking is dead wrong. There is no reason to protectively hoard genes. They cannot "dilute" away.
In conclusion, I believe there is nothing to fear. If Ashkenazi Jews actually came up with an evolutionary advantage via the poetic justice of their millennium of European oppression, then in the generations to come all of our human racial descendants are going to share it, too!
George
I think the danger of such studies is how they could be used against Ashkenazic Jews, forcing them into a position as different from the rest of humanity. That said, Jews have been inter-marrying with gentiles for years. Just look at Hollywood and the number of Jews who marry non-Jews: Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, etc. So, how many Jews still carry a full set of these "hi IQ" genes? Does this lead to the same problem many Asian Americans have of being the model minority? Expected to outperform everyone else because of a genetic advantage but subject to scorn and ridicule if they don't. How does an alleged genetic advantage take away from someone's successes if those successes are dismissed because "those people" are naturally gifted at this or that?
Genes can't be deluded, they can only be passed down or mutate, etc.
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