Yes and you’ve probably gone to schools dominated by guilt-ridden PC liberals who’ve been suppressing THE TRUTH!!!
How many courses have you taken from the courageous race realists who go to malls and demand of people there “How large is your penis when fully erect?” “How far can you ejaculate?” “How many female sexual partners have you had in the past three years?”!
Um, that’s not the point of Wade’s book. Obviously, people have different skin colors, and skin color is, in part, genetic. If Wade had limited himself to pointing that out, then he’d have a book that is one page long.
Did you even read the rebuttals to Wade’s book? Do you even know how to science?
I am horribly ignorant of the history of Jewish people, and have never before heard the term “Askenazi”. Does that not sound like an unfortunate term?
(Poor attempt at humor: It sounds like the name of an evil 1930’s advice column.)
You betray your years of education with such a statement, if indeed you are on year 6 of receiving a PhD in biology. It’s rather like a physicist saying a book and a rock both fall at an equal rate and are therefore the same thing.
You know genetics run the gamut and the cluster that determines height potential is not equal between all people. If you meant to say something more nuanced it was not portrayed.
It’s certainly inevitable (and not unfortunate at all) when, as Wade has, someone makes baseless and evidence-free assertions about the inherent genetic characteristics of personality and intelligence for various “races”.
They are certainly well represented among Nobel winners. The rest of it is simple assertion without evidence.
Michelin star restaurants are predominantly located in France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. Somehow, I doubt this would be taken as a sign of a Japanese cooking gene. Sure, we could come up with some kind of story about scarce resources on an island nation leading to the dying out of people without appropriate culinary sense. But your BS meter should be pinging pretty loudly at that (just as it should be pinging pretty loudly at the story of Ashkenazi non-banker/lawyer/academics “dying out”).
It’s possible to come up with a story that ties genetics to an existing conclusion. It’s entirely a different matter to prove such a story.
I misremembered (or maybe Wade gave the wrong number in his book, but I’d bet the error is mine). It’s not quite so lopsided.
According to Jinfo - 26% of physics Nobel prizes have gone to people with one or two Jewish parents (measuring by heredity, not by faith). I know Wade talked about Ashkenazis in particular (I think to make the point this is really about environmental stressors and not ‘innate’ Jewish DNA being superior). But also, clearly, Germany and northern Europe generally were the hotbed of physics in the first half of the 20th century, and the US is now well represented and has a higher proportion of northern European Jews than the planet as a whole.
Still, certainly fewer than 26% of Germans, or Americans, or any nationality but *maybe *Israelis are Jews of northern European descent, and it’s an interesting question why the number is as high as it is.
Exactly- a “white” Sicilian may have more in common genetically with an “Arab” N. African than he would with a “white” German or Pole.
I think the fallacy is to take the Ashkenazi example and extrapolate it any further than the fact that the environmental stressors selected for intelligence. The high Jewish representation in Nobel Prize winners may just as easily be explained through some kind of cultural natural selection.
If having and excelling in intellectual professions is the way to survive and thrive, it’s more likely over the historical time frame that the culture changed, not the genetics. It’s pretty clear that Jewish culture has much more reverence toward professional and intellectual careers and achievement than say… standard White culture, and I think that pushes smart Jews into science and math in higher proportional numbers.
I suspect for the same reasons, we’ll start seeing a lot of Asian-American Nobel Prize winners in the next 4-5 decades as well, not because they’re inherently smarter than anyone else.
Intelligence is partially heritable (as are all behavioural traits).
If you have some reproductive advantage associated with that cultural niche, you’ll get an increase in the prevalence of that trait.
That is pretty much the argument for the high average level of intelligence for Ashkenazi jewish groups - pegged at about 110? That means on a normal distribution of intelligence, you’ll get a far higher proportion of people with high IQ’s who enter cognitively demanding professions.
@ miss elizabeth,
Whether groups have differ on average due to genetic variation is simply a hypothesis like whether North and South Europeans differ on average height.
In fact, as Steve Hsu has pointed out, that difference in itself appears to be due to differences in the allele frequencies linked to height.
Intelligence has similar heritability and involves a number of genes of small effect. Once you identify the genetic architecture of intelligence (or whatever trait you like) you could simply look at the prevalence across groups (that’s what Weinberg was concerned about above). As Hsu, noted the 2nd half of Wade’s book is speculative (which Wade acknowledges), nonetheless, the ideas are testable:
Wade has made specific claims. Orcenio has posted rebuttals to those claims in the other thread. How about any of you Wade defenders go through one of those rebuttals, pick a specific rebuttal and actually respond to it?
Well, I’m glad you admit that everyone is just speculating. We can dispense with the idea that you are actually doing science then.
But, Wade made specific scientific claims which were rebutted by the articles in the other thread. So, let’s get the counter-rebuttals from the Wade defenders.