Heidegger

Jud:
I have been saying for years that the Jews are more intelligent than the
goyim. The following appears to confirm it.

This is the reason why thinking thug Heidegger and his gang of German Nazi
louts wanted rid of them - they obviously outclassed the brain-dead *folkish*
mangel-munchers in sheer intelligence.

The Curious Case of the Ashkenazi Jews
By Steve Sailer _http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050605_iq.htm_
 http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050605_iq.ht…)

The slow liberation of the Mainstream Media from the deathgrip of political
correctness accelerated last week with startlingly courageous coverage in The
Economist and the New York Times of the potentially epochal scientific paper
by Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending, and Jason Hardy entitled The Natural
History of Ashkenazi Intelligence [PDF file].

The Economist headlined its anonymous article:

“Natural Genius? The evolution of intelligence: The high intelligence of
Ashkenazi Jews may be a result of their persecuted past.” (June 2, 2005).

And in “Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in
Ashkenazic Genes,”[ June 2, 2005] the NYT’s redoubtable genetics reporter Nicholas
Wade reported

“‘It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is,’
said Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, noting that it argues for
an inherited difference in intelligence between groups. Still, he said, ‘it’s
certainly a thorough and well-argued paper, not one that can easily be
dismissed outright.’”

The high average intelligence of the Ashkenazi Jews (essentially, Jews from
Northern Europe whose ancestors spoke Yiddish, ancestors of the great majority
of Jewish Americans) has had an enormous impact on the modern world.

(Jews from the Muslim world score somewhat lower than Ashkenazis, which
leads to a sizable social gap within Israel.)

The Economist reported:

“Ashkenazim generally do well in IQ tests, scoring 12-15 points above the
mean value of 100…”

Which is not an enormous gap. Assuming a 12 point difference between
Ashkenazis and white gentiles, it suggests that the median Ashkenazi scores
somewhere around the 80th percentile among all whites. Many gentiles have higher IQs
than many Jews.

But this difference in median intelligence does lead to large differences at
the far right edge of the bell curve.

For example, some back-of-an-envelope math suggests that Ashkenazi Jews are
roughly an order of magnitude more likely than white gentiles to have IQs
above 145. Roughly one in 70 Ashkenazi Jews score above 145 compared to one in
700 white gentiles. There are about 30 times as many white gentile adults as
Ashkenazi Jews in the U. S. So that implies one-fourth of white Americans with
IQs above 145 are Ashkenazi Jews.

Ashkenazi levels of real world accomplishment are impressive and thus
support the IQ studies. Jewish Americans make up no more than three percent of the
U. S. adult population. But in the 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene,
the prominent social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of
the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the
Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University, pointed out

“During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred
intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and
economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of
high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in
New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the
major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and
producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from
1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or
more primetime television series.” [pp 26-27]

Interestingly, the Ashkenazi cognitive advantage seems to be mostly in
verbal and numeric, rather than visual, skills. For example, in Hollywood, fewer
top cinematographers are Jewish compared to screenwriters or agents.

Ashkenazi intelligence is one of those facts that are obvious, important,
and interesting, yet, is largely unmentionable in polite society… at least until
this week.

The Cochran-Harpending theory may turn out to justify the audacity of The
Economist and the NYT in breaking this taboo. If validated, it would prove a
landmark in the fields of medicine, population genetics, IQ research, and even
history.

Wade reported in the NYT:

“A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the
unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European
origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced
intellectual ability. The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in
medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility…
Ashkenazic diseases like Tay-Sachs, they say, are a side effect of genes that
promote intelligence.”

Wade goes on to note that this theory was anticipated by Jared Diamond, the
celebrated author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (here’s
my review). Diamond pointed out in 1994 that one possible explanation for
these Ashkenazi hereditary diseases is:

“selection in Jews for the intelligence putatively required to survive
recurrent persecution, and also to make a living by commerce, because Jews were
barred from the agricultural jobs available to the non-Jewish population.”

In their brilliant cross-disciplinary essay, which will appear soon in the
Journal of Biosocial Science, the three University of Utah researchers show
that from about 800 to
1700 A. D., Yiddish-speaking Jews were almost completely confined to
cognitively-demanding occupations such as finance, fields in which intelligence pays
off more than in peasant farming.

They cite records showing that wealthy Jews had more children survive to
adulthood than poor Jews. Moreover, medieval Jews were sufficiently endogamous
(marrying within the ethnic group) to prevent gene flow from the gentile
population, which might have diluted the effects of this selection mechanism.

Contrary to the layman’s assumption that Darwinian selection can only putter
along at geological speeds, the authors mathematically demonstrate that the
35 generations during these nine centuries offered enough time for mutations
conferring greater business acumen to spread widely among the Ashkenazi.

Sadly, however, there haven’t been enough generations for natural selection
to refine away the downsides to some of these intelligence-boosting mutations.

Cochran, Harpending, and Hardy cite evidence that the victims of three
hereditary diseases that primarily afflict Ashkenazis tending to be smarter than
even other Ashkenazis. For example, a study of patients with torsion dystonia,
which until recently put 10 percent of its victims in wheelchairs, found
their average IQ was 121.

Tay-Sachs and several other Ashkenazi sphingolipid neurological diseases
could be analogous to sickle cell anemia, which is the snag in nature’s initial
attempt to provide genetic protection against the horrendous tropical killer,
falciparum malaria.

That mosquito-borne disease appears to have only become a devastating threat
a few thousand years ago, when agriculture began in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Enough generations have since gone by for the sickle cell mutation to emerge and
spread in tropical Africa and other warm places ravaged by this most deadly of
malarias. If you inherit a copy of the sickle cell gene from one of your
parents, you are more likely to survive falciparum malaria. But, unfortunately,
if you inherit copies from both of your parents, you will die in infancy—
unless you get modern medical care.

The sickle cell gene increases until the benefit it provides in surviving
malaria is equaled by the toll it takes in sickle cell anemia.

The Ashkenazi sphingolipid disorders could be similar. In the great
tradition of Einstein’s paper on the General Theory of Relativity, the Utah authors
have proposed a straight-forward test of one part of their theory: people with
one copy of the genes that cause the Ashkenazi sphingolipid diseases should
have higher IQs than their siblings who have no copies.

If validated, the implications of this discovery would be extraordinarily
broad.

With luck, it could lead to better treatments of victims of these diseases.

It could also aid understanding of the genetics of intelligence, which in
turn might lead to “smart pills” or genetic engineering to boost IQ.

Whether or not that would be a good thing for the human race is difficult to
say at present. But allowing the honest study of the social impact of
existing genetic differences would help us make better informed decisions about
whether we want to permit bioengineers to create new genetic disparities in the
lab.

The savage persecutions suffered by Jews suggest that high intelligence can
generate resentment among the masses. No doubt there will be some who will
suggest that the Cochran-Harpending paper should have been suppressed to prevent
awareness of the secret of Ashkenazi intelligence from seeping out.

But you have to be a true-blue intellectual to assume that the only way
anybody would ever notice anything as obvious as Jewish brainpower is if it gets
mentioned in the New York Times. Political correctness doesn’t keep facts from
being talked about—just from being written about in an intelligent,
constructive manner.

On the other hand, the happier experience of another ethnic minority that
may also have evolved stronger intellectual capacities under similar urban
conditions—the prosperous Parsis of Bombay—may offer clues to mitigating envy.

In any case, the Cochran-Harpending paper offers a fairly new but crucial
perspective on the old nature and nurture question. The researchers have
demonstrated that it’s quite possible for nurture to change nature. Culture can
drive heredity. Economics and social customs alter gene frequencies.

Of course, we already knew that from examples such as lactose intolerance.
Once, virtually no adult could easily digest milk. But after some tribes
started herding and milking dairy livestock, one or more mutations providing
lactose tolerance popped up and spread among them. Thus today, only two percent of
Danes are lactose intolerant, compared to 90 percent of Asian Americans.

There may be many more examples of the environment molding genes. For
instance, I recently described how the economics of tropical agriculture, in which
mothers could frequently raise enough food to feed their children without
much help from the fathers, tend to differ from the economics of temperate
agriculture, where the labor of fathers often made the difference between their
kids’ survival or starvation. This leads to different family structures and
different behavioral tendencies between tropical and Eurasian men — what
Harpending calls the “Cad vs. Dad” pattern of low vs. high paternal investment.

Are those disparities, which appear to manifest themselves in the large
racial inequality in illegitimacy rates seen in modern America, cultural or
innate?

Certainly they started out being cultural. But it’s possible that selection
made them partially inborn over time.

Finally, it’s not surprising that Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran came
up with such a stunning paper.

Harpending, who is with the University of Utah’s outstanding anthropology
department, is one of the leading population geneticists. Unusually for such a
mathematically- oriented scientist, he has also lived for 42 months in the
field with African tribes. Indeed, his love of Africa is so great that he almost
left academia at one point to become a safari guide.

I stay in touch with some quite smart people, but even among them, Gregory
Cochran is legendary for the ferocity of his scientific originality.

The Economist describes Gregory Cochran as:

“… a noted scientific iconoclast… He is that rare bird, a scientist who
works independently of any institution. He helped popularize the idea that some
diseases not previously thought to have a bacterial cause were actually
infections, which ruffled many scientific feathers when it was first suggested.
And more controversially still, he has suggested that homosexuality is caused
by an infection.”

The Atlantic Monthly’s February 1999 cover story by Judith Hooper, “A New
Germ Theory,” was about Cochran and another of his research partners, Paul
Ewald, and their Darwinian theory for why more diseases will turn out to be
caused by infections that doctors then expected. This year, the American Academy
of Microbiology endorsed liberalizing Koch’s Postulates, which have been the
basis for determining if a disease is infectious since the 19th Century, along
the lines Cochran and Ewald proposed.

The Atlantic noted:

“Cochran is a solo player, with an encyclopedic mind (he is a former College
Bowl contestant) and a manner that verges on edginess.”

I can attest that, although a physicist by education and the leading
theorist of evolutionary medicine by avocation, Cochran also has memorized almost
the entire political and military history of the human race. (Here’s an amusing
piece by him in The American Conservative showing the similarities between
Bush’s Iraq adventure and Napoleon’s invasion of Spain.)

When I’m reviewing a historical film such as Master and Commander or Hero
and I need to pretend to actually know something about the Age of Nelson or
China’s Warring States era, a call to Cochran will not only fill me in on what
happened, but, more importantly, why it happened.

All the evidence isn’t in yet. But it could be that Cochran and Harpending
have opened the door to explaining why some of history’s most important
developments happened—and that, finally, the political culture is beginning to
listen.

[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www. iSteve.
blogspot. com features his daily blog.]

Posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 6:03 am
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