From: Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: sci.med,talk.politics.medicine
Subject: Re: RACE
Date: 18 Jun 2005 21:44:12 -0700
Message-ID: <1119156252.549401.317370@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>

>>Henry Harpending is about to titillate the world's conspiracy theorists
with one of the most politically incorrect academic papers of the new
millennium.

Why, he and his colleagues at the University of Utah asked, have Jews
of European descent won 27 per cent of the Nobel Prizes given to
Americans in the past century, while making up only 3 per cent of the
population? Why do they produce more than half the world's chess
champions? And why do they have an average IQ higher than any other
ethnic group for which there's reliable data, and nearly six times as
many people scoring above 140 compared with Europeans?

Prof. Harpending suggests that the reason is in their bloodline -
it's genetic. <<


COMMENT:

Well, it's NOT the most politically incorrect thing you can think of,
just the most politically incorrect which has to be seriously answered
in the media. You can't accuse the man of anti-semitism, which has
become THE most politically incorrect sin of modern times.  This is
actually flattering to Jews, though naturally it makes them very
uncomfortable. Not least because they half believe it already, and so
does everybody else.

The idea that all races of humans are exactly on equal footing when it
comes to intelligence and culture, was pioneered by that darling of
cultural relativism and the Left, Franz Boas, an anthropologist who was
of course a Jew. Since then, it's become academic scripture. Anything
that doesn't argue that humans are tabual rasa, and soley the products
of their cultural environments, is held these days to be wrong.
Including the idea that Askenazi Jews or Chinese might naturally and
genetically be better at math, music, and language.  Float that idea in
academia these days, and you'll just get a sort of sorrowful shrugging
(from Jewish professors and their Chinese grad students). Sure, you
might not be a regular skinhead with views like that, but obviously
you've blown a fuse somewhere, because anytime one group of people is
smarter, that means some other group of people has got to be dumber,
and we all know where that leads. Straight to Auschwitz, of course!

If was really good a few years ago when the human genome was all
sequenced and there didn't seem to be room enough in it to put in all
those racial difference that we seem to see by eye, and in
pharmacology. So maybe they're all in our imaginations?  But this year,
we found out that a lot of the difference in dog breeds are cause by
short tandem repeats in DNA, of the kind that don't show up as big
changes in sequencing, but which have drastic effects on gene function.
So gee, maybe the difference between the chihuahua and the St Bernard
IS in their genes after all!  Maybe beagles ARE really stupider than
Border Collies. And it's not just their owners....

And what will we find when we start looking at the human genome that
way?

SBH

From: Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: sci.med,talk.politics.medicine
Subject: Re: RACE
Date: 25 Jun 2005 12:20:29 -0700
Message-ID: <1119727229.295068.238460@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>

>>Jews are a very poor candidate for a human "race" or "breed".  It's
long been established that genetically they are closely similar to the
ethnicities they live among, and for obvious reasons.  There's some
effect due to migrations in the past thousand years, as Jews were
expelled from most western European countries in late medieval times
and moved east and south.  But even visually, eastern European Jews
look like eastern Europeans, North African Jews look like North
Africans and Chinese Jews look like Chinese.  Blood group data
demonstrate this very clearly. <<

COMMENT

It might if we're comparing Ashkenazi to Saphardics, say, rather than
comparing Ashkenazi to Europeans. But the hypothesis of "Jewish
intellegence" has really only been advanced ONLY for the Ashkenazi
Jews, and in that case of course there's a lot of evidence for
inbreeding. How can you possibly have a population where one in 30
people carries an allele like Tay-Sachs which hardly anybody else has,
without a lot of inbreeding (or a founder effect from a very small
group of individuals, followed by pretty stringent conservation).
Basically, you can't keep a 1 in 30 incidence of an allele which nobody
else has at even 1% of that, EXCEPT by inbreeding.  And there are at
least half a dozen of these genetic diseases, all arrising from
different recessive alleles, which ONLY show up in more than extreme
rarity, Eastern Europe included, except in Ashkanzi Jews. That's ALSO
just impossible without a lot of inbreeding.

By the the way, I don't think Ashkenazi Jews look just like Eastern
Europeans. Moreover, this group was in France in the time of
Charlemagne and later Germany, and only later moved East, and they
don't look typically French or German, either, at least to my eye.

I agree that the hypothesis that Ashekenazi intellegence is associated
with heterzygosity for Askenazic genetic diseases, is handwaving before
we collect the SAT stats and stuff like you sugggest. And it seems
rather unlikely that genes that screw up DNA repair (on cluster of
Askenzazic diseases) have anything to do with intelligence.

But here's the funny thing which promped the suggestion. Askenzaic Jews
don't have just have a big incidence of ONE recessive gene which alters
cell managment of sphingolipids, which would be expected to have a
disporportionate impact on brain development. They have FOUR of such
diseases for this SAME pathway: Tay-Sachs, Gaucher, Niemann-Pick, and
mucolipidosis type IV.  As far as I can tell, all involve completely
separate genes. This is a tremendously fishy fact, and NOBODY has a
good explanation for it. The nearest thing *I* can think of to compare
it to, is the fact that the gene that codes for the amino acid change
that causes sickle cell anemia (and trait) is known to have arisen
separately at least twice in the population subject to heavy pressure
to develop hemoglobin genetic variations to cope with the pressure of
malaria. If Ashkenzi, who were certainly inbred, and who were certainly
under heavy selective pressure as Europe's moneylenders for a
millennium, managed to develop four separate mutations in their brain
sphingolipid metabolism, and conserve all four, then YOU tell ME what's
going on. I think the brain/intelligence hypothesis is a lot better
story than the TB one. On that, at least, we agree.

SBH

From: Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: sci.med,talk.politics.medicine
Subject: Re: RACE
Date: 29 Jun 2005 15:18:26 -0700
Message-ID: <1120083506.811276.152130@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>

>>Btw, what's the current word on the persistence of cystic fibrosis at a
rate of 1 carrier in 40 in people of northern European origin?  Last I
heard they had dropped the stock anti-TB hypothesis and had some data
to support the notion that sperm cells carrying the trait had a
selective advantage in fertilizing eggs.  <<

COMMENT:

Was there ever a TB hypothesis for cystic fibrosis?  One that makes far
more sense is a defect in chloride-ion transport is protective against
toxin induced diarrheal diseases, which kill infants by stimulating the
very same chloride pump. Lots writen on this.

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/f02/web1/emyers.html

SBH