Human Evolution Seems to Be Accelerating (Jews evolved from "financing!")

AP via Fox News ^ | 12-11-07

[squireofgothos]

above-average intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews — those of northern European heritage — resulted from natural selection in medieval Europe, where they were pressured into jobs as financiers, traders, managers and tax collectors.

Those who were smarter succeeded, grew wealthy and had bigger families to pass on their genes, they suggested. That evolution also is linked to genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher in Jews.

The new study was funded by the Department of Energy, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Aging, the Unz Foundation, the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin.

[squireofgothos]

Oh this is too good. These guys are starting to sound like Jimmy the greek. DO NOT give an interview after drinking, or you end up with "science" like this: "you see now, (taking drink), your wily, covetous jew got into financing millions of years ago, and took all the white women, and (another drink) and that's why your black man has the big thighs for the sports..."

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

Hey! Ya forgot the diamond cutters!

[Greg F]

Yet in Sweden and Denmark, the gene that makes the milk-digesting enzyme lactase remains active, so almost everyone can drink fresh milk, explaining why dairy farming is more common in Europe than in the Mediterranean and Africa, Harpending says.

Life without milkshakes! Eat your wheat curds, my African FRiends. I will suck down another chocolate shake and my aryan tummy will digest it all! Lactase power!

[From many - one.]

I think what they were trying to say, in a particularly garbled way, is not that Jews in Europe got smarter, but that less smart Jews died off, raising the average and shortening the range.
Instead of 50-150 it would now be 75 to 150 because from 50 to 74’s died off disproportionately.

[dblshot]

“that Jews in Europe got smarter”

Lot of good that did them in 1939-43.

[wideawake]

above-average intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews — those of northern European heritage — resulted from natural selection in medieval Europe, where they were pressured into jobs as financiers, traders, managers and tax collectors

ZC this covers most of your baselines.

Fascinating theory! It wasn't 3 millenia of painstaking study of the Torah that drove "the evolution of Jewish intelligence": i.e. generations and generations of daughters of accomplished scholars marrying accomplished scholars - it was making change that did it.

And of course, they have IQ tests showing how much stupider the Prophets and Sages were back before the King of France ordered the Jews to take up tax-farming and smartened them up.

Mastering 15th century accounting is so much more difficult that mastering Gemara.

[jeddavis]

REAL/MACRO evolution means new kinds of organs and new kinds of capabilities. You got some sort of evidence of Jews with wings or anything like that?

[Sherman Logan]

Those who were smarter succeeded, grew wealthy and had bigger families to pass on their genes, they suggested.

In that case, we're obviously undergoing reverse evolution now. The more successful people are in today's world, the fewer children they have.

[philsfan24]

with 75% of them voting democratic every year, i wouldnt say they are all that smart.

[Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus]

I don't see what the big issue is here. Jews got smarter because of natural selection. Through 15 centuries of oppression, the Jews who were smarter could get the positions necessary to ensure (more or less) that they were protected, and had the financial resources to have larger families better provided for, more children surviving to adulthood, better prospects for other high-IQ mates, and so forth, so they would have higher IQ children, hence the average Ashkenazi IQ moved up over time. What's so controversial or hard to understand about that?

Question for the people who think that any talk about IQ and heredity automatically equals eugenics and Naziism - If you accept the principle of natural selection, which even most creationists as well as all evolutionists accept, then why can you not see the same principle at work here? On a scientific level, do you think human genetics operates any differently from that of the animals, which we routinely breed for the purposes of expressing specific traits?

[Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus]

with 75% of them voting democratic every year, i wouldnt say they are all that smart.

Well, intelligence and common sense are not necessarily contiguous traits.

[squireofgothos]

I think it’s primarily the financing that makes it funny. Next, the Pakistani’s are going to evolve a spatula arm to flip the hot dogs at the 7-11’s

[From many - one.]

So-called macro-evolution is an invention of some Creationists who want to draw an (invisible) line that blocks evolutionary changes from reaching the level of a new species (a population that can’t breed with the original).

No one has ever proposed a way for the organism to know it has reached that bordered and promptly stop accumulating mutations.

[From many - one.]

bordered = border

[wideawake]

I don't see what the big issue is here. Jews got smarter because of natural selection.

Except for the inconvenient fact that the vast majority of the Jews who worked in finance and the professions were murdered during the Second World War, and the bulk of modern Jewry are descendants of the dirt poor shtetl Jews of Poland and the Ukraine and the similarly circumstanced Mizrachim of Northern Africa.

It is obvious that from the days of at least the Babylonian Captivity the Jews had a reputation as a highly learned and competent population.

[wideawake]

No one has ever proposed a way for the organism to know it has reached that bordered and promptly stop accumulating mutations

The border, obviously, is the point where members of what was formerly one species are no longer able to successfully interbreed due to mutation. Mulism.

This is hardly an invention of creationists, but an internal assumption of evolutionism.

[squireofgothos]

exactly. It isn’t brain surgery- apparently this particular family/tribe of Jews, which has proven itself to be freakishly bright, obviously was sired by a very bright fellow, and he attracted intelligent women, and so on and so forth through the generations. Not being able to marry outside the faith obviously kept the high iq genes at home.

[nina0113]

You got some sort of evidence of Jews with wings or anything like that?

Those were the ones who built the Pyramids.

[montag813]

where they were pressured into jobs as financiers, traders, managers and tax collectors.

They say Einstein couldn't balance his own checkbook and was a disaster with money. It didn't matter much. Silly article.

[mommya]

I’ve just been learning about Ashkenazi Jews vs. other (original) Jews. I guess there is a controversy there. What do Freepers think? Are the Ashkenazi Jews the same as the original Jews or did a group of white Europeans choose to become Jews for religious and political reasons? Do these Jews feel superior to the others? Anyone care to touch this with a ten foot pole?