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On Nov 7, 2005, at 11:45 PM, shempmcgurk wrote:
An interesting idea, but recent scientific evidence would suggest otherwise. The prejudices against medieval Europe forced Jews into very specific job classifications while disallowing others. It's rather compelling work which shows that they underwent a kind of forced social selection . This has only occurred with Ashkenazi Jews. In one of the great ironies of modern time, the Ashkenazim, who were persecuted by the Nazis as genetically "inferior", were actually by a twist of fate, in a way genetically superior! Of course the downside is it also introduced a number of serious genetic diseases, several of which severely impact the nervous system. This may have serious implications for understanding the evolution of our own consciousness hardware, i.e. the nervous system and its advantages and limitations. from the Wikipedia: "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" See also Race and intelligence A controversial 2005 paper [8] to be published in Cambridge's Journal of Biosocial Science, [9] hypothesizes that European Jews' history of persecution created social selection for high intelligence, leaving a positive effect on the hereditary component of their IQ. The paper, by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending [10] of the University of Utah, notes that European Jews were forbidden to work in many of the common jobs of the middle-ages from AD800 to 1700, such as agriculture, and subsequently worked in high proportion in meritocratic, IQ-intensive jobs, such as finance and trade, some of which were forbidden to gentiles by the church. Those who performed better are known to have raised more children to adulthood, thus passing on their genes in greater proportion than those who performed less successfully. The Jews rarely married outside of their faith, creating a reproductively isolated population in which this selective pressure would, in Cochran et al's statistical models, be able to effectively influence gene frequency in the 35 generations over these 9 centuries. Cochran et. al. hypothesize that in this environment the social selection for intelligence was strong enough that mutations creating higher intelligence when inherited from one parent but creating disease when inherited from both parents would still be selected for, which may explain the unusual pattern of genetic diseases found in the Ashkenazi population, such as Tay-Sachs and other sphingolipid diseases. Some of these diseases have been shown to correlate with high IQ, and others are known to cause neurons to grow an increased number of connections to neighboring neurons. Cochran comments in a New York Times article that he was drawn to the question when he noted that patients with torsion dystonia, relatively common in Ashkenazi Jews, had an average IQ of 122.[11] Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker states that the results are bound to be controversial but are hard to ignore. Others, such as geneticist Andrew Clark and mathematician Montgomery Slatkin, comment that the study seems far-fetched and is unsupported by direct evidence. There have been other theories along similar lines. One theory notes that for Jews to be socially successful in their peer group, expertise at Torah study has traditionally been an advantage, and since the Enlightenment, those Jews lacking the intellectual skills for this endeavour may have been more prone to assimilate into general culture, thus leaving the reproductively-isolated Jewish population.(Murray 2003, Shafran 2005) To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!'
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