Godless stated he wouldn’t post about Jews, but I’m not him, so I feel no restraint. Someone referenced Greg Cochran’s new essay How The Ashkenazi Got Their Smarts, so I feel obligated to link to it on Jerry Pournelle’s site. Enjoy & discuss….
Update from Godless:
Well, if it’s “Jeurasian” week at GNXP, I did have a few things to chip in. First is that the Cochran title is a reference to How the Leopard got his Spots…which is a self-referentially wry dig at sociobiological just-so stories. Nice wordplay there, GC. [1]
Second, just thought I’d link to this decent summary of Jewish genetics research up to 2002:
‘The authors are correct in saying the historical origins of most Jewish communities are unknown,’ Dr. [Shaye] Cohen [of Harvard University] said. ‘Not only the little ones like in India, but even the mainstream Ashkenazic culture from which most American Jews descend.’…. If the founding mothers of most Jewish communities were local, that could explain why Jews in each country tend to resemble their host community physically while the origins of their Jewish founding fathers may explain the aspects the communities have in common, Dr. Cohen said…. The Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA’s in today’s Jewish communities reflect the ancestry of their male and female founders but say little about the rest of the genome… Noting that the Y chromosome points to a Middle Eastern origin of Jewish communities and the mitochondrial DNA to a possibly local origin, Dr. Goldstein said that the composition of ordinary chromosomes, which carry most of the genes, was impossible to assess. ‘My guess,’ Dr. Goldstein said, ‘is that the rest of the genome will be a mixture of both.'”
So the upshot is: Y chromosomal lineage from the Middle East, mtDNA from local mothers, and autosomes are yet to be determined. A founder population of males from the Middle East came in, married local females, and practiced endogamy once the community got large enough. Another large contributor to phenotypic resemblance is natural selection effects…in irony of ironies, the Nazis exerted strong selection pressure for blond haired, blue eyed Jews.
Clearly at least some autosomes will have characteristically Ashkenazi signatures, because some of the diseases common to the Ashkenazi are located on autosomes (that is, non-sex chromosomes).
Diseases seen more frequently in the Ashkenazi Jewish populationBloom syndrome
Canavan disease
Cystic Fibrosis
Deafness
Familial Dysautonomia
Fanconi anemia
Gaucher disease
Niemann-Pick disease
Tay-Sachs disease
[From Cochran]
BRCA1
BRCA2 (breast cancer risk genes)
torsion dystonia
Factor XI deficiency (clotting disorder)
non-classic CAH
familial Mediterranean fever
familial hyperinsulinism
familial hypercholesterolemi
glycogen storage disease VII
pentosuria
maple syrup urine disease
mucolipidosis type IV.
This stuff is also useful for fact-checking Cochran’s essay, of course…though I’m too lazy to look up those pathways 😉
Now, a special treat for our GNXP readers:
Intellectual property bending uploads of two papers on the possibility of selection in Ashkenazim. My professional opinion? I think Risch is wrong, though he shouldn’t be derided as PC. He did write this good piece last year on the reality of race.
[1] Why, thank you, GC…says GC 😉
Update:
I don’t know buy the “lower visuospatial IQ” for Jews. Supposedly it comes from Daniel Seligman’s book “A Question of Intelligence”, but in my opinion it’s unlikely that Jews would have anything like their incredible math dominance (see here) without high visuospatial skills, unless “visuospatial” means something different than “ability to rotate/visualize three dimensional objects”.
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