As with my reply to Ed, I'm going to extract drastically. It's end-of-the month admin time for me business-wise and I haven't much time right now.
At 16:03 27/11/2003 -0500, you wrote:
Keith said:
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.
If this is true it explains a lot physiologically that I have experienced over the years in my work. It also explains why it is so important for the Arts to be at the core of the curriculum since the Arts are the primary access point for the environment for the child from age zero to six. This is not Western music or any other type but the basic arts that develop the perception.
I agree with you totally on this point.
(KH)There appears to be a very strong two-way 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.
I think it probably has more to do with the Ashkenazic emphasis on the schule. The kind of argumentitive reasoning exercised in Talmudic studies is very stimulating.
Yes, this is the sort of environment which promoted rich development of the rear cortex and which then served as a "cultural carrier" in the post-puberty to 25 year age development of the frontal cortex.
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.
There is one problem here. As the Ashkenazim and other groups have experienced the regular world the second and third generations post Israel, and post defamation, have begun to join the rest of the world on their intelligence. I don't find this group any more intelligent or successful (other than they have the capital like the Wasps) to succeed in regular business.
The average IQ of modern Israelis is less than 100 at the present time mainly because of the original contribution of Middle East Jews. However, the major migration of Ashkenazi Jews from Russia some 10 years ago boosted average IQ at that time but the national average is still below that of Europe or America. I get the impression (highly subjective and spotty) that the really brilliant Israeli research in which they are among the world leaders (software, development of pilotless airplanes, missiles) are also due to strong linkages with Jewish firms in America. My guess is that the two-way split which I've written about before that's I believe is occurring in most western developed countries due to technological requirements will also apply to Israel, and perhaps to a slightly greater degree because of the traditional Jewish respect for scholarship.
But its not just Jewish. We can see the same in England today in the non-Jewish population. Where are the Lord Russells today? They are following the path of all of the economically successful groups "down the tube" and into the mediocrity of the affluent mass. What started in the argument of politics ends up in the mountains or in some foreign country defending their house. When I first came to NYCity forty years ago it was almost an intellectual and musical paradise. And it was all Jewish. Today the Horowitz's are neo-conservatives and their thought is as limited as the Post Emerson New Englanders. Look at all of that research from places like the Heritage Foundation. (It is embarrasing.) You can't tell the difference between them and all of the rest of the mediocrities. There are some lights. Some great thinkers and singers but the movement is towards the next group these days. The Blacks and the Hispanics who are struggling their way up and benefitting from the struggle on all levels. In Canada the next group will be the "First Nations" as they now have their own control of their destiny. (That is my hope anyway.) But it is all cycles. Peoples come and peoples go as do nations.
I think that nations have come and gone in the past almost exclusively for one reason -- the development of the next major innovative weapon of war. However, I think we're into a different world now. No single nation is going to be able to invent and develop a significant new weapon without another nation doing so too. No, I think that we're now settling into an almost pure Darwinian situation in which there will be selection of the fittest -- both between large population blocs and, within the developed countries, between different classes (as written below previously).
(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 agree.
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.
Interesting.
The more egalitarian the education system becomes, the more selective it becomes and the more stratified society becomes.
That is totally counter to the US. The less egalitarian the system becomes here, the more selctive it becomes and the more stratified economically with only the elite capitally succeeding because they have cornered the market. But in the long run they decline because ultimately they are at a dead end where their fear of poverty controls their entire imagination and ultimately ruins their discipline. I believe the same happens to the Aristocracy in England but you would have to confirm or deny that.
I am not saying that education has become egalitarian in the US, anymore than it has become in England. But that is what educationalists are striving for.
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.I agree but why just the "left wingers"?
I wasn't making a political point. It is just that left-wingers are much more concerned about education for all and a fairer society for all than right-wingers who tend to be fatalistic about these matters.
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
