I hadn’t seen that essay, here is the paper, which goes into a lot more detail.
If you want to know more about the actual occupational profile of the Ashkenazi Jews over the Middle Ages, read the paper. Moneylending was near-universal for a couple of centuries, but was preceded and followed by other white-collar occupations.
We think that the Ashkenazi Jews are a dirt-simple example of trait selection in an a endogamous population exposed to a very unusual environment (a unique occupational mix). It's ag science, basic quantitative genetics, not that Gould knew anything about that, either. We bothered to do enough analysis to show that there was no tight genetic bottleneck in the Ashkenazi Jews (since confirmed) , and then did a few million simulation runs to show that there was no way of getting the observed high gene frequencies of recessive lethals in the absence of that tight bottleneck - except selection.
We also noted the concentration of the Ashkenazi genetic diseases into a few metabolic paths - most famously four different sphingolipid mutations. And we calculated the likelihood of such a concentration occurred by chance: less than 1 in 100,000. What do you want, egg in your beer? And what do those sphingolipids do at higher than usual levels: they increase dendrite and axonal growth and branching. They are the only mutations in humans known to do so.
I guess you would have no idea as to the explanation of a high frequency of a myostatin null mutations in a breed of beef cattle - a null mutation that greatly increases muscle growth. There are genetic veterinarians who had no idea why that happened. I bet they were still mystified when they found _another_ mutation in the same breed that increased muscle mass even further.
We have lots of gene variants today that didn't exist 50,000 years ago. All the alleles conferring light skin color look to be younger than that.
Some populations have thousands of functional variants that never existed in Africa - note that everyone outside of Africa seems to have about 2.5% Neanderthal ancestry, while people Australia/New Guinean have another ~5% of Denisovan ancestry.
As for mutations in the last 10,000 years that are important, do you drink milk? Do you know anyone with sickle-cell trait? Do you have blue eyes?
Do you know anyone with cystic fibrosis? Do you flush when you drink alcohol?
New insights into the concept of group harms in vulnerable populations such as minorities and workers in a workplace setting and the use of Community Consultation to prevent injury to special social structures…
Such harms may include stigmatization, loss of status, genetic determinism, and violation of cultural or group norms and values…
What follows are examples of studies that have had negative impacts on groups of people who were not necessarily study subjects:
- Publication of results of research conducted in Ashkenazi Jewish families contributed to the misperception that Jews are more prone to genetic defects and diseases…
Various studies purporting to study the intelligence of various racial groups…
Researchers must anticipate that their research may have to change or even stop in order to minimize potential harms.
This is interesting. I could not find it on the internet. Where is it available? If these kinds of restrictions on open intellectual inquiry are common in the academic world it explains why there has been so little effort there to substantiate the findings of The Bell Curve.
Quite honestly, I find this sort of think outrageous. Imagine what it would be like if there were restrictions on investigation of global warming on the grounds that those investigations might inhibit economic growth and private property rights.
If that is true it is only true because of restrictions into the study of the relationships between genes, IQ, success in live, crime, and race.
Don’t you know about ninjas?
Imagine what your president could do to you, if you, and your nerd scientists, prove he is “inferior”, just because his “hardware” doesn’t fit the rest of the presidential pictures :rolleyes:
Wake up. Human beings are all about the same in brains, simply because races has separated too late in evolution. It is easier to change the hardware than the brain wiring!
You do not seem to understand the difference between an average and a specific example. No one maintains that President Obama, whom I voted for, is inferior to all whites and Orientals because his father was an African Negro.
Nevertheless, I do not believe that restrictions on a scientific study into the relationships between genes, IQ, success in life, race, and crime are acceptable in any environment. If genes are responsible for high black crime rates and low average black ntelligence, this has political implications. Political policies based on assumptions that are not true usually have bad effects.
Is that supposed to be an intelligent contribution to a serious discussion? 
There is an obvious relationship between the amount of time a racial group has practiced agriculture and urban living and the average IQ and crime rate of that racial group. The relationship is not one to one.
Indeed, and it’s something that GIGO Blaster possibly wasn’t aware of. Of course aside from written regulations, you also have obvious unwritten restrictions in the form of social/professional disapproval from doing unpopular research.
Curses! Foiled again by human rights! 
Of course I was aware of ethical restrictions, but you guys were not mentioning it. It just fleshes out the point of Pinker when he tells the public that societal changes based on controversial research are going nowhere.
However, ethical restrictions have not stopped several champions of other crackpot theories before, so I guess the Pioneer Fund does not have much contributions nowadays.
The obvious implication, and in some cases the stated advocacy, of Charles Murray’s writings are that we should spend less public money on anti poverty programs and education, and more on the criminal justice system. With the exception of No Child Left Behind, that is the direction the United States as a country has been moving in since at least 1980.
No Child Left Behind is failing to achieve its goals. When that failure become obvious to the voters, I predict cut backs in educational spending. Charles Murray has argued that most Americans get more education than they are capable of assimilating. Most Americans have not heard of Charles Murray. Nevertheless, he provides scientific reasons for moving in the direction most Americans obviously want the United States to keep moving in.
In The 10,000 Year Explosion Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending explain the evolution of racial differences described in The Bell Curve, and in Race, Evolution , and Behavior, by Professor J. Philippe Rushton.
Meh, repeating again will not change things for your sorry side.
NCLB still has nothing to do with race. You have not even attempted to explain how they’re related. I think you believe you’ll win this argument by boring everyone else into abandoning the thread.
As I said, you weren’t discussing this in good faith. You have argued, against evidence and common sense, that these obstacles were made up.
What exactly do you mean by crackpot theories? The idea that traits might be distributed differently across groups that were in different environments over thousands of years? I’m not sure why you’d find that unusual, particularly given you claim not to be a creationist. You should read Peter Singer’s 'A Darwinian Left’ maybe.
No Child Left Behind is accumulating data that different racial groups have had differing amounts of success in achieving the goals.
I understand you very well :rolleyes:. Your ideas aren’t quite new, you know. They were very popular in the 30s and early 40s, for instance :eek:
Race doesn’t exist. At least, not in the sense people with little culture still believes. What exist are genetical distances between individuals, but good luck if that is related with intelligence.
Just go to the morgue one day, and ask the “clerk” that show you brains of people from different races. Try to guess what race belong each brain :smack:
Don’t be silly. IQ is heavily influence by education, and you can’t measure oppresed human groups, with low education and marginal conditions, and expect from them the IQ of Einstein. :smack:
So, they are Social Darwinists as well? I see.
By the way, 10.000 years is too short a time span for evolving.
And the genetic distance between individuals from the same race is less than it is between people from different races. Whether you call them races or populations, the reality is that they form clusters as a consequence of geographical isolation, inheritance and natural selection operating over the last 50k years since humans left Africa. Most alleles probably occurs in each ethnic group, but with varying frequency. So you are likely to see statistical group differences.
It was only during the civil rights movement that it became fashionable to lie about the innate nature of racial differences, and to force others to lie. Nevertheless, the scientific evidence that the differences exist and are innate keeps mounting. Soon the constraints of political correctness will collapse as abruptly as the Soviet Union. One can already hear the foundations crack under the weight of Truth.