I've gone maroon in my new stuff in the
following. My old stuff is in blue.
Keith is in black.
Ed
I've often wondered if they might have blended into
migrant Jewish populations from the west.
Keith: I'm puzzled
about these people, too. I don't understand by what you mean in the last
sentence. As I understand it, there were only isolated pockets of Jews to the
west in those days -- though I might be mistaken.
Keith, what I'm referring to is the migration of Jews
eastward from Western Europe because of persecutions and expulsions (see:
http://members.eisa.com/~ec086636/christians&jews.htm ). These migrations would have begun in, probably, the
12th Century and would have continued to about the 15th Century. Jews from
Europe would have moved as far east as eastern Poland and the Ukraine. The
Khazars ceased to exist as a distinct people in about the 11th or 12th
Centuries, and one has to wonder what happened to them. They may have been
aware of the movement of Jews into eastern Europe, and might have tried, perhaps
succeeded, in making contact and merging with them. I have a
friend of Jewish ancestry whose father came from Saratov in the
Ukraine. While he doesn't think he has Khazar connections, he doesn't
dismiss the possiblity. That's where I'll have to leave the matter for the
moment.
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.
Keith: The numbers are pretty reliable --
they're the results of many tests. (Summarised in IQ and the Wealth of
Nations by Lynn and Vanhhanen. IQ scores don't have absolute value but
there's a high correlation between the main varieties of tests and results are
consistent when subjects are re-tested. All high IQ people don't necessarily
become successful in material or creative terms, but all highly accomplished
people in the arts or sciences (except perhaps a few idiots savants)
score highly on IQ tests.
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.
Keith: Yes, I sympathise with your point but
will the future of manking depends upon our skills in growing potatoes or at
other things? If it's other things, then IQ scores are probably the best method
yet of selecting people who perform them well.
I'm afraid I find this a little too
close to social Darwinism for comfort. My own family may be illustrative
of what I'm trying to say. As Central European peasants they were potato
growers generation upon generation all the way down. In Canada, in its
first generation, the family produced doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, teachers
and, alas, even economists. We have many friends from the Caribbean here in Ottawa, all bright
and competent people. Just a few generations ago their ancestors were
plantation slaves.
I must say too, that Lynn and
Vanhanan are, in my opinion, highly suspect researchers. In praising the
book, here's what one source says about them:
IQ and the Wealth of Nations is a
brilliantly-conceived, superbly-written, path-breaking book that does for the
global study of economic prosperity what The Bell Curve did for the USA.
Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen examine IQ scores and economic indicators in
185 countries. They document that national
differences in wealth are explained most importantly by the intelligence
levels of the populations. They calculate that mean national IQ correlates
powerfully—more than 0.7—with per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
National IQs predict both long-term and short term economic growth rates.
Second in importance is whether the countries have market or socialist
economies. Only third is the widely-credited factor of natural resources, like
oil.
High praise indeed, except that putting
anything in the same box as The Bell Curve immediately raises
suspicions. Adding to these, the praise is extended by one Phillipe
Rushton, a Canadian who achieved some noteriety a few years ago by publishing
material similar to that of Lynn and Vanhalen. One of his findings, if I
recall correctly, was an inverse relationship between IQ and the racially
determined length of the penis.
Other reviewers are not as kind to Lynn
and Vanhalen. Thomas Volken published the following abstract in the
European Sociological Review:
“Recently Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen have
presented evidence that differences in national IQ account for the substantial
variation in national per capita income and growth. This article challenges
these findings and claims that, on the one hand, they simply reflect
inappropriate use and interpretations of statistical instruments. On the other
hand, it is argued that the models presented by Lynn/Vanhanen are
under-complex and inadequately specified. More precisely the authors confuse
IQ with human capital. The paper concludes that once control variables are
introduced and the models are adequately specified, neither an impact of IQ on
income nor on growth can be substantiated.”
I simply don't accept the Lynn and Vanhalen
thesis. Applying a single standardized test to a large, economically and
culturally diverse, variety of peoples does not make much sense to me.
Ever so many factors enter into human productivity and development, especially,
as the foregoing points out, the development of human capital. At the most
basic level, however, if people are treated like dogs and forced to live like
dogs, they will behave like dogs. If they are treated like human beings,
they will behave fully human.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2003 2:19
PM
Subject: Thoughts on IQ scores (was Re:
[Futurework] Talmud vs. Science (or Censorship thereof)
Ed,
At 07:55 27/11/2003 -0500, you
wrote:
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. I'm puzzled about these people, too. I
don't understand by what you mean in the last sentence. As I understand it,
there were only isolated pockets of Jews to the west in those days -- though I
might be mistaken.
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. The numbers are pretty reliable -- they're the
results of many tests. (Summarised in IQ and the Wealth of Nations by
Lynn and Vanhhanen. IQ scores don't have absolute value but there's a high
correlation between the main varieties of tests and results are consistent
when subjects are re-tested. All high IQ people don't necessarily become
successful in material or creative terms, but all highly accomplished people
in the arts or sciences (except perhaps a few idiots savants) score
highly on IQ tests.
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. Yes, I
sympathise with your point but will the future of manking depends upon our
skills in growing potatoes or at other things? If it's other things, then IQ
scores are probably the best method yet of selecting people who perform them
well.
Keith
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Keith Hudson
- To: Christoph Reuss
- Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- 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>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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