Christianity linked to stupidity, farming geneticists find
It’s official. The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.html?oref=login (registration required) and “The Economist”:https://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=S%27%28X%2C%2FP1%23%20%23%40%22%2C%0A (unfree content) have both picked up on Greg Cochrane’s recent paper in the Journal of Biosocial Science that suggests that stupidity and farming are linked to the way that natural selection has acted on Christians to make them mentally slow and sluggish, although it also gives them increased resistance to certain diseases. Cochrane, of course, paints this as a claim that Judaism is linked to banking and a weakness to certain rare diseases.
Rather than provide the Mandatory Rant, I’ll let you do it in the comments. I’d just like to point out that if you think farming doesn’t require intelligence, you’ve never grown a thing in your life.
Alex Golub is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He studies mining and petroleum development in Papua New Guinea, as well as American culture in to the online game World of Warcraft. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org
For what its worth, here is a permanent link to the NY Times article.
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It’s funny that the only people who don’t regularly claim that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than everyone else is… Ashkenazi Jews. And you’d think we’d know, being so smart and all!
For the record, though, there weren’t many Jews involved in jobs that required great deals of intelligence, wither — collecting tolls, brewing beer, making furniture, running shops, butchering meat, and the other non-agricultural jobs Jews might have been, at different times and in different places, allowed to perform don’t require particularly high or even above-average intelligence. Sure, there were a handful of Jewish bankers — no greater percentage of Jews that there were Christian bankers, I’m sure, and all that banking doesn’t seem to have done the Christians much good!
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“wither” = “either”
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I think the reason Ashkenaz Jews don’t think Jews are smarter than other people is that they’ve actually met enough to know. As someone with a Ph.D., I’m amazed when people claim that being a banker or a lawyer, or making loads of money in any way actually requires intelligence. But maybe that’s just sour grapes.
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Ashkanazi Jews are genetically predisposed to be anthropological bloggers.
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You can read a draft of the paper here.
http://harpend.dsl.xmission.com/Documents/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf
The authors are responding to comments here:
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/004045.html
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