Keith, a couple of points. One is about the
influence of the Khazars on the Ashkenazic population of eastern and central
Europe. As you know, the Khazars were a Turkic people in the southern
Ukraine who converted to Judaism in about the 7th Century. Apparently,
they used Jewish personal names, spoke and wrote in Hebrew, were
circumcised, had synagogues and rabbis, studied the Torah and Talmud, and
observed Hanukkah, Pesach, and the Sabbath. They have been described as an
advanced civilization with one of the most tolerant societies of the medieval
period. By about the 11th or 12th Centuries, they seem to have
disappeared, and nothing I've read suggests that scholars are quite sure of what
happened to them. I've often wondered if they might have blended
into migrant Jewish populations from the west.
The other point concerns your use of IQ as something
that tends to be relatively fixed for particular ethnic or
racial groups. Thus diaspora Chinese typically have IQs of 106,
Ashkenazic Jews typically 110 to 115 and Middle Eastern Jews 90. I've
never seen anyone use as vague a concept as IQ with such certainty, and, in
fact, anything I've read on intelligence in general suggests that it is a very
illusive concept. How people think must surely depend greatly on what they
have to think about. While some people do much of their thinking
about numbers and other abstract concepts, others may have to think about
getting out to the potato field or cotton patch as fast as they can if they want
to live another year. The former would probably do very well on
standardized IQ tests while the latter would likely fail.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2003 2:54
AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Talmud vs.
Science (or Censorship thereof)
Very interesting. It's been thought for some time
that Middle East Jews, Palestinians and other ethnic groups in that region had
very similar genes (from interbreeding over centuries/millenia), and these
studies are further evidence. It's the Ashkenazi Jews who seemed to have
changed significantly by inbreeding from about 1400 onwards in central Europe.
This has not been "excessive" inbreeding by any tendentious use of the term,
but it has certainly meant that their IQ scores are significantly higher
(about 110-115) compared with Middle-Eastern born Jews (IQ scores about 90),
and also that the former have acquired fairly high levels of a few harmful
genes, such as Tay-Sachs. (I would infer from the original paper talked about
in the Guardian article below, that Middle-East-born Jews don't have any
pronounced tendency to Tay-Sachs.)
I'm now inclined to think that
Steven Pinker went too far in stressing the genetic contribution to ability in
The Blank Slate. The several hundred genes that are involved in the
formation and development of the human brain are indeed important and I
wouldn't quarrel with the "70-80% contribution" as being a rough-and-ready
description when thinking of the abilities required in modern industrial
society. But what is being increasingly realised from neurological research is
the considerable shaping effect that takes place in the rear cortex during the
very earliest years of childhood (that is, the death of millions of brain
cells which are not used in the immediate environment and the subsequent
networks that are left). This is something that schools can't really
influence. Some recent studies in England suggest that young middle-class
children of low-to-moderate ability at 4/5 years age are already starting to
pull away in performance from 'working'-class children of moderate-to-high
ability. By the age of 10/11 the difference is considerable. There appears to
be a very strong two-away effect going on between the 'basic brain kit' that
the genes contribute to the new born child and the 'basic kit' (of the fairly
fully-developed rear cortex) that the child is left with at puberty -- as the
individual starts his long march to fairly full brain maturation (by the
subsequent full development of the frontal lobes in which brain cells continue
to be formed) at 25 or so. The "scholastic" or "informational" shaping effect
of Ashkenazi Jews in their very earliest years of life therefore seems to more
fully potentiate the original genetic inheritance -- and was then shaped even
further by the tradition of arranged marriages, preferentially directed by
parents towards males of obvious intellectual ability. The effect of this
between about 1400 and 1870 (when large-scale emigration of Ashkenazi Jews to
western Europe and America started occurring -- thus exposing their relative
high ability to a wider world) has obviously been considerable and is further
supportive evidence of the realisation of evolutionary biologists from more
general studies that mutational and selection effects can occur much more
rapidly that was realised until fairly recently. (Fifty years ago most
biologists would even state that the human species was so different from all
others that evolution had stopped!) I think that the same effect of what can
roughly be called "scholastic inbreeding" occurred also among the diaspora
Chinese who typically have IQ scores of about 106 (many of them now returning
to mainland China and already having a significant effects there in, it seems
to me, just the same way that Ashkenazi Jews have had in many areas of
American life during the last century). I am becoming increasingly convinced
that the same sort of effect is occurring more generally in all the developed
countries -- an increasing cultural separation between professional
middle-classes and the rest, of which that part of ability which is measured
by IQ scores is a significant feature. There is a substantial IQ-score divide
between north and south England, for example. The more egalitarian the
education system becomes, the more selective it becomes and the more
stratified society becomes. All the evidence is pointing to the fact
that the more that left-wingers want to achieve a "fairer" society (and I
don't quarrel with that) by means of education, then they will have to start
thinking about intervention in the earliest weeks, months and years of a
child's life. My assessment is that this sort of 1984 scenario can't be
achieved politically in any significant way at all, so I'm increasingly
thinking that society in developed countries is already beginning to separate
into two groups of different ability and that this can't be stopped. This is
not a time for ideological shibboleths. If there is any possibility of this
trend being reversed, we need to accelerate research into brain studies.
Keith Hudson
At 00:19 26/11/2003 +0100, Christoph Reuss
wrote:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/genes/article/0,2763,605806,00.html
Journal
axes gene research on Jews and Palestinians
Robin McKie,
science editor Sunday November 25, 2001 The
Observer
A keynote research paper showing that Middle Eastern Jews
and Palestinians are genetically almost identical has been pulled from a
leading journal.
Academics who have already received copies of Human
Immunology have been urged to rip out the offending pages and throw them
away.
Such a drastic act of self-censorship is unprecedented in
research publishing and has created widespread disquiet, generating fears
that it may involve the suppression of scientific work that questions
Biblical dogma.
'I have authored several hundred scientific
papers, some for Nature and Science, and this has never happened to me
before,' said the article's lead author, Spanish geneticist Professor
Antonio Arnaiz-Villena, of Complutense University in Madrid. 'I am
stunned.'
British geneticist Sir Walter Bodmer added: 'If the journal
didn't like the paper, they shouldn't have published it in the first
place. Why wait until it has appeared before acting like
this?'
The journal's editor, Nicole Sucio-Foca, of Columbia
University, New York, claims the article provoked such a welter of
complaints over its extreme political writing that she was forced to
repudiate it. The article has been removed from Human Immunology's
website, while letters have been written to libraries and universities
throughout the world asking them to ignore or 'preferably to physically
remove the relevant pages'. Arnaiz-Villena has been sacked from the
journal's editorial board.
Dolly Tyan, president of the American
Society of Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics, which runs the journal,
told subscribers that the society is 'offended and
embarrassed'.
The paper, 'The Origin of Palestinians and their
Genetic Relatedness with other Mediterranean Populations', involved
studying genetic variations in immune system genes among people in the
Middle East.
In common with earlier studies, the team found no data
to support the idea that Jewish people were genetically distinct from
other people in the region. In doing so, the team's research challenges
claims that Jews are a special, chosen people and that Judaism can only
be inherited.
Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East share a very
similar gene pool and must be considered closely related and not
genetically separate, the authors state. Rivalry between the two races is
therefore based 'in cultural and religious, but not in genetic
differences', they conclude.
But the journal, having accepted the
paper earlier this year, now claims the article was politically biased
and was written using 'inappropriate' remarks about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its editor told the journal Nature last
week that she was threatened by mass resignations from members if she did
not retract the article.
Arnaiz-Villena says he has not seen a single
one of the accusations made against him, despite being promised the
opportunity to look at the letters sent to the journal.
He accepts
he used terms in the article that laid him open to criticism. There is
one reference to Jewish 'colonists' living in the Gaza strip, and another
that refers to Palestinian people living in 'concentration'
camps.
'Perhaps I should have used the words settlers instead of
colonists, but really, what is the difference?' he said.
'And
clearly, I should have said refugee, not concentration, camps, but given
that I was referring to settlements outside of Israel - in Syria
and Lebanon - that scarcely makes me anti-Jewish. References to the
history of the region, the ones that are supposed to be politically
offensive, were taken from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and other text
books.'
In the wake of the journal's actions, and claims of mass
protests about the article, several scientists have now written to the
society to support Arnaiz-Villena and to protest about their
heavy-handedness.
One of them said: 'If Arnaiz-Villena had found
evidence that Jewish people were genetically very special, instead of
ordinary, you can be sure no one would have objected to the phrases he
used in his article. This is a very sad
business.' Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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