{"id":7446,"date":"2009-04-20T13:37:24","date_gmt":"2009-04-20T20:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=7446"},"modified":"2009-04-20T13:37:24","modified_gmt":"2009-04-20T20:57:12","slug":"jews-get-diseases-because-were-smarter-than-you-its-a-chosen-people-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=7446","title":{"rendered":"Jews get diseases because we're smarter than you! It's a Chosen People thing."},"content":{"rendered":"

My (non-Jewish) father told me about this story<\/a> over the weekend. I wasn’t surprised to see PZ critiquing it.<\/p>\n

Here’s the argument, as quoted by PZ<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases?<\/p>\n

Tay-Sachs disease. Canavan disease. More than a dozen more.<\/p>\n

It offended Cochran’s sense of logic. Natural selection, the self-taught genetics buff knew, should flush dangerous DNA from the gene pool. Perhaps the mutations causing these diseases had some other, beneficial purpose. But what?<\/p>\n

At 3:17 one morning, after a long night searching a database of scientific journals from his disheveled home office in Albuquerque, Cochran fired off an e-mail to his collaborator Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n

“I’ve figured it out, I think,” Cochran typed. “Pardon my crazed excitement.”<\/p>\n

The “faulty” genes, Cochran concluded, make Jews smarter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I had basically the same reaction to my father’s summary of the article that PZ did, though of course PZ probably said it better than I did off the cuff in the car:<\/p>\n

My first answer would be to consider that they are a sub-group isolated by a history of bigotry from the outside, and strong cultural mores from the inside that promote inbreeding. These are variations amplified by chance and history…<\/p>\n

Mr Cochran’s flaw is in his premise. There is no reason to assume that the frequency of every allele in a population must be the product of a selective advantage. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ashkenazic Jews may simply be susceptible to many genetic diseases because those diseases didn’t sufficiently interfere with our breeding that they were erased. They don’t have to have given us a benefit. That’s not how evolution works.<\/p>\n

My other question about the article revolves around the idea of “smarter.” There are certainly a lot of cultural ideas floating around that Ashkenazic Jews are somehow smarter than people of ethnicities — and these are old enough that when Goddard tried to push his flawed IQ tests as proof that Aryans were smarter than other peoples, he specifically mentioned what he felt were myths of Jewish intelligence.<\/p>\n

But what is this coming from? Do we really have data to prove it? Remembering, of course, that minor fluctuations in IQ tests are easily explicable because of the ways in which upbringing informs interaction with standardized tests, I’m unwilling to take the 7 point difference they find between Ashkenazic Jews and other ethnicities too seriously. However, if — if — Ashkenazic Jews are performing meaningfully higher than average on IQ tests (in a way that suggests they actually have a higher narrow-and-problematic-thing-that-IQ-measures rather than just a better facility with standardized tests), have we ever done anything to try to confound environmental factors? Why does it have to be genetic?<\/p>\n

When I first went to college, I attended a school with something like a 40% Jewish student body. I hadn’t been around so many Jews before. Many of my childhood friends were Jewish, and of course I’m ethnically Jewish, but I hadn’t had the experience of being in social groups that were predominantly Jewish.<\/p>\n

I remember commenting to a friend of mine who had attended a Jewish private school in Chicago that my experience was that Jews were smarter. The Jewish friends I’d had in high school, I said, were all intelligent and academically capable. Therefore, I concluded, Jews were smarter than average.<\/p>\n

My friend lowered a skeptical gaze at me, and said, “Believe me. Jews are just as dumb as everyone else.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My (non-Jewish) father told me about this story over the weekend. I wasn’t surprised to see PZ critiquing it. Here’s the argument, as quoted by PZ: Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whatever"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}