[lit-ideas] Re: On misunderstandings and dialogue
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 20 May 2014 19:03:21 +0200
Well, actually the Ashkenazis were prohibited from engaging in agriculture
in most medieval European states (with the exception of Poland, where they
remained generally rather poor), so how does fit the thesis of the superior
mental abilities of agriculturalists ?
O.K.
On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 6:22 PM, Lawrence Helm
<lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> Cochran and Harpending in the early part of their book argue rather
> convincingly that the adaptation of agriculture about 10,000 years ago
> affected mental abilities. The traditional view is that there has been no
> change in mental capabilities for the last 100,000 years or so. As a
> result of the discoveries being made in genetics in the past 10 or 15
> years, that assertion has been weakened. The Ashkenazi argument is to
> bolster the more substantial argument that mental capabilities are as
> subject to evolutionary effects as physical ones.
>
>
>
> Lawrence
>
>
>
> *From:* lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:
> lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *Donal McEvoy
> *Sent:* Monday, May 19, 2014 1:45 PM
>
> *To:* lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> *Subject:* [lit-ideas] Re: On misunderstandings and dialogue
>
>
>
>
> >As to the idea that the Ashkenazis genetic difference being resistance to
> a disease, the happy side-effect being increased intelligence, Cochran and
> Harpending write, “. . . we think that most of the characteristic
> Ashkenazi mutations are not defenses against infectious disease. One reason
> is that these mutations do not exist in neighboring populations—often
> literally people living across the street—that must have been exposed to
> very similar diseases. Instead, we think that the Ashkenazi mutations have
> something to do with Ashkenazi intelligence, and that they arose because of
> the unique natural-selection pressures the members of this group faced in
> their role as financiers in the European Middle Ages.”>
>
>
>
> This seems suspect on a number of levels, that no "synecdoche" can answer:
>
>
>
> 1) Conscious intelligence is a World 2 affair: it is not part of Darwinian
> theory that this World 2 can act causally downwards so as to cause
> "mutations" - on the contrary, this posits a kind of "Intelligent Design"
> argument writ small into human consciousness. To be clear: it is consistent
> with Darwinism that mental events may operate on the body via the brain but
> not that they may operate to direct physical "mutations".
>
>
>
>
>
> 2) That "mutations" do not occur in "neighbouring populations" is no
> argument that therefore the "mutations" are not a response to "very similar
> diseases" faced by "neighbouring populations": the question is whether the
> "neighbouring populations" interbreed - if they do not, there is no reason
> a "mutation" within one population might spread within only that one
> population, though its favourability is due to being a response to "very
> similar diseases" faced by a second population: it will not spread within
> that second population because the second population does not interbreed
> with the first.
>
>
>
> Or have I missed something?
>
>
>
> Dnl
>
> Simple-minded Darwinist
>
> Ldn
>
>
>
> On Monday, 12 May 2014, 19:53, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> You might not like Cochran and Harpending’s book. They base their
> arguments around recent studies in genetics; so their emphasis is not upon
> “tradition”
> other than to point out cases where genetic analyses do not support it.
> They probably don’t cover material in a form you would like. In places
> where you would like a one to one counter of traditional views, they
> probably just summarize their points making them susceptible to quibbles.
>
> “In the case of the Jews they write, “Admixture has not kept the
> Ashkenazim from becoming genetically distinct. Even if a population starts
> out as a mixture of two peoples, as in this case, becoming endogamous
> (ending intermarriage) and staying so for a long time ensures that the
> population will become homogeneous. If the population’s ancestry is 60
> percent Middle Eastern and 40 percent European, for example, a few dozen
> generations of endogamy will result in a population in which each
> individual’s ancestry is quite close to 60 percent Middle Eastern and 40
> percent European. In other words, you eventually get a population that has
> a flavor all its own—even more so if it experiences special selective
> pressures.
>
> “This means that if you look at the most informative parts of the genome,
> you can tell whether a certain individual is Ashkenazi (as opposed to, say,
> a non-Jewish Italian, Greek, or German) just about every time, particularly
> if all his or her recent ancestors are Jewish. In the plot, the circles
> represent Ashkenazi Jewish individuals, but the shaded circles represent
> individuals whose grandparents were all Ashkenazi Jews as well. That
> distinction matters, because Jews haven’t been nearly as endogamous over
> the past century as they were during the Middle Ages.
>
> “Could these same methods distinguish the Ashkenazi from other Jewish
> groups, such as Moroccan Jews or Yemeni Jews? The answer is almost
> certainly yes. Although that particular measurement has not yet been made,
> it should be easy to make that distinction because the genetic distance
> between Ashkenazi Jews and Yemeni Jews is considerably larger than that
> between Ashkenazi Jews and Western Europeans.
>
> “Further down Cochran and Harpending write, “It is noteworthy that
> non-Ashkenazi Jews do not have high average IQ scores. Nor are they
> overrepresented in cognitively demanding fields like medicine, law, and
> academics. In Israel, Ashkenazi Jews, on average, score 14 points higher
> than Oriental Jews, almost a full standard deviation, which is 15 or 16
> points on most IQ tests.37 That difference means that the average
> non-Ashkenazi Jew in Israel would have an IQ score that would be at the
> 20th percentile among the Ashkenazim. Academic accomplishment in the two
> groups seems to vary in the same way, even among those born and raised in
> Israel: Third-generation Ashkenazi Jews in Israel are 2.5 to 3 times more
> likely to have graduated from college than third-generation Mizrahi Jews,
> for example (the ancestors of the Mizrahim moved to Israel from Asia and
> North Africa).”
>
> As to the idea that the Ashkenazis genetic difference being resistance to
> a disease, the happy side-effect being increased intelligence, Cochran and
> Harpending write, “. . . we think that most of the characteristic
> Ashkenazi mutations are not defenses against infectious disease. One reason
> is that these mutations do not exist in neighboring populations—often
> literally people living across the street—that must have been exposed to
> very similar diseases. Instead, we think that the Ashkenazi mutations have
> something to do with Ashkenazi intelligence, and that they arose because of
> the unique natural-selection pressures the members of this group faced in
> their role as financiers in the European Middle Ages.”
>
> [Cochran, Gregory; Henry Harpending (2009-01-27). The 10,000 Year
> Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (p. 205-217).
> Basic Books. Kindle Edition.]
>
> Lawrence
>
> *From:* lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [
> mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>] *On
> Behalf Of* Omar Kusturica
> *Sent:* Monday, May 12, 2014 9:50 AM
> *To:* lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> *Subject:* [lit-ideas] Re: On misunderstandings and dialogue
>
> Well again, the 'traditional view' holds that the Jews in the Ottoman
> Empire, far from being permitted to do only manual work, played a key role
> in its foreign trade. A few links below.
>
>
> https://jewishhistory.research.wesleyan.edu/i-jewish-population/5-ottoman-empire/
>
> http://books.google.me/books?
>
> http://sephardichorizons.org/Volume1/Issue3/SecondGoldenAge.html
>
>
> id=ScsUAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA129&lpg=PA129&dq=jewish+merchants+in+ottoman+empire&source=bl&ots=yE9HYC1Kxc&sig=1iqZBsT5qF2hdN5TzM2IoVQkmgA&hl=en&sa=
>
> On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 7:13 AM, Lawrence Helm <
> lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Yes, but I didn’t quite know how to reply to this since you were
> presenting the traditional point of view while Cochran and Harpending are
> drawing conclusions based on recent studies based upon the human genome and
> arguing new points of view. Perhaps I put it poorly, but at some point
> Cortez put about 500 troops on the ground. Not everyone available came
> ashore. I didn’t mean to imply that 500 was all he had throughout his
> entire military career. Cochran and Harpending clearly don’t imply that.
> But had it not been that disease destroyed about 90% of the Amerindians
> during the period that Cortez was working, he (in the opinion of Cochran
> and Harpending) would not have succeeded. They mention one critical battle
> where the Amerindians opposing Cortez were largely sick, but there were
> probably others.
>
>
>
> The traditional view is to credit Cortez cleverness and not to think
> disease played a critical role. I believe Cochran and Harpending have
> argued that the traditional view does not adequately explain these events.
> Viruses and bacteria deserve more credit than they’ve received.
>
>
>
> I can see that my brief examples haven’t done justice to Cochran and
> Harpending’s arguments but I don’t feel up to going into much more detail
> than I already have – especially since their book seems one argument after
> another.
>
>
>
> In another case, I had written that it was easier for colonist to settle
> North America because disease had wiped out most of the Amerindians. North
> American was empty. I thought I wrote enough to mean “empty” as compared
> to “India” for example.
>
>
>
> In another case I wrote that the Ashkenazi Jews working as money lenders
> developed skills that gave rise to Einstein, but I intended “money lenders”
> as a synecdoche. Medieval states didn’t need that many money-lenders.
> Ashkenazis did other things as well. Cochran and Harpending refer to the
> Ashkenazis as being the “white collar workers of the medieval world.”
>
>
>
> Jews were treated better in Muslim dominated areas during the period the
> Ashkenazis were coming into their own, but those Jews were only permitted
> to do menial work. And today in Israel the difference in potential,
> between Ashkenazi Jews and Jews from Muslim countries is marked. The
> latter apparently are not competent to take on the more complicated work.
> They do menial work in Israel just as they did in Muslim lands. I’m sure
> there are exceptions.
>
>
>
> Lawrence
>
>
>
>
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