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Old February 11th, 2005 #1
Antiochus Epiphanes
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Default Stanford scientists agree race is real

Stanford scientists agree race is real. Here is proof.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea...c-rgm012705.php

Contact: Amy Adams
[email protected]
650-723-3900
Stanford University Medical Center

Racial groupings match genetic profiles, Stanford study finds
STANFORD, Calif. - Checking a box next to a racial/ethnic category gives several pieces of information about people - the continent where their ancestors were born, the possible color of their skin and perhaps something about their risk of different diseases. But a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine finds that the checked box also says something about a person's genetic background.
This work comes on the heels of several contradictory studies about the genetic basis of race. Some found that race is a social construct with no genetic basis while others suggested that clear genetic differences exist between people of different races.

What makes the current study, published in the February issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, more conclusive is its size. The study is by far the largest, consisting of 3,636 people who all identified themselves as either white, African-American, East Asian or Hispanic. Of these, only five individuals had DNA that matched an ethnic group different than the box they checked at the beginning of the study. That's an error rate of 0.14 percent.

According to Neil Risch, PhD, a UCSF professor who led the study while he was professor of genetics at Stanford, the findings are particularly surprising given that people in both African-American and Hispanic ethnic groups often have a mixed background. "We might expect these individuals to cross several different genetic clusters," Risch said. This is especially true for Hispanics who are often a mix of Native American, white and African-American ancestry. But that's not what the study found. Instead, each self-identified racial/ethnic group clumped into the same genetic cluster.

The people in this research were all part of a study on the genetics of hypertension, recruited at 15 locations within the United States and in Taiwan. This broad distribution is important because it means that the results are representative of racial/ethnic groups throughout the United States rather than a small region that might not reflect the population nationwide.

For each person in the study, the researchers examined 326 DNA regions that tend to vary between people. These regions are not necessarily within genes, but are simply genetic signposts on chromosomes that come in a variety of different forms at the same location.

Without knowing how the participants had identified themselves, Risch and his team ran the results through a computer program that grouped individuals according to patterns of the 326 signposts. This analysis could have resulted in any number of different clusters, but only four clear groups turned up. And in each case the individuals within those clusters all fell within the same self-identified racial group.

"This shows that people's self-identified race/ethnicity is a nearly perfect indicator of their genetic background," Risch said.

When the team further analyzed each of the four clusters, they found two distinct sub-groups within the East Asian genetic cluster. These two groups correlated with people who identified themselves as Chinese and Japanese. None of the other genetic groups could be broken down into smaller sub-sections. This suggests that there isn't enough genetic difference to distinguish between people who have ancestry from northern Europe versus southern Europe, for example. Risch admitted that few people in this study were of recent mixed ancestry, who might not fall into such neat genetic categories.

This work could influence how medical research is carried out. Often researchers ask study participants to identify their race and ethnicity at the beginning of a clinical trial. The researchers can then follow people of different racial/ethnic groups to see which group is more likely to get a particular disease or respond well to a new treatment. This information can help future doctors know which patients may need additional disease screening or should receive one treatment over another.

But recently some researchers have moved to examining genetic differences between participants rather than relying on race and ethnicity. Their reasoning is that genetic differences may be a more precise tool for tracking groups of patients. Risch points out that this genetic analysis is costly. If people fall into the same groups using self-identified race as using genetics, then that could bring down the expanding cost of medical research.


###
Other Stanford researchers who participated in this work include Hua Tang, a graduate student now at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Tom Quertermous, MD, the William G. Irwin Professor in Cardiovascular Medicine.

Stanford University Medical Center integrates research, medical education and patient care at its three institutions - Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford. For more information, please visit the Web site of the medical center's Office of Communication & Public Affairs at http://mednews.stanford.edu.

PRINT MEDIA CONTACT: Amy Adams at (650) 723-3900 ([email protected])
BROADCAST MEDIA CONTACT: M.A. Malone at (650) 723-6912 ([email protected])
 
Old March 4th, 2005 #2
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Its nice to see that science,has proven,the fact that there are differences,but haven't our own eyeballs been telling us that,for a long time?

Niggers look a lot closer to monkeys then humans.

All one has to do is just look at them,their behavior is much more like monkeys too.

Make eye contact with a monkey,or a nigger,they both see it as confrontational.

Lots of other similarities too,like the lips,and low foreheads,the incoherent babbling,etc.
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Old March 8th, 2005 #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Proud White Guy
Its nice to see that science,has proven,the fact that there are differences,but haven't our own eyeballs been telling us that,for a long time?

Niggers look a lot closer to monkeys then humans.

All one has to do is just look at them,their behavior is much more like monkeys too.

Make eye contact with a monkey,or a nigger,they both see it as confrontational.

Lots of other similarities too,like the lips,and low foreheads,the incoherent babbling,etc.
It's hard to convey that message when the masses of asses are thoughtless sheep who go along with a TV enduced party line.
 
Old June 18th, 2005 #4
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I say the differences are more profound then just apperances.I say look to IQ.In my opinioun IQ is genetic.And the three sub species of human all have different IQ ratings.These observations are only generaly speaking.But the careful observer can easily see theise differences.Example who gave us the airplane,a white guy.For bragging rites who first came up with the idea,hint it was a white guy.My point is this whtie & blacks are different,not just skin pigmentation but the way they act,talk,dress,everything about them and yes IQ.I also feel they are 3 laps down and heading to the pits to have a white guy fix their car."I can conceive of no greater calamiyy then the assimilations of the negro into our social and political life as our equal" Ade Lincoln
 
Old July 5th, 2005 #5
Antiochus Epiphanes
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Here is an interesting story which sheds light on the process by which biologists assign a taxonomic designation. It's about a little dolphin that was first thought of as a variety or subspecies, now reclassified as a separate species, upon closer genetic examination.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050705...e_050705172006

Quote:
The snubfin was initially thought to have been an Irrawady dolphin, usually found in Asia and Australia, but DNA tests proved that it was a different species, said Beasley of James Cook University in Townsville.
Isnt it then fair of us to ask, might not Negroes be assigned one day to a separate homonid species?

And, what is the difference, or divergence, in DNA that definitively marks a "separate species--" if anything?
 
Old July 5th, 2005 #6
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If even a 100% communist college like Stanford agrees with this,there could actually be a slight ray of hope.
 
Old July 9th, 2005 #7
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Default Corrected link

Quote:
Originally Posted by Antiochus Epiphanes
Stanford scientists agree race is real. Here is proof.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea...c-rgm012705.php

Contact: Amy Adams
[email protected]
650-723-3900
Stanford University Medical Center

Racial groupings match genetic profiles, Stanford study finds
STANFORD, Calif. - Checking a box next to a racial/ethnic category gives several pieces of information about people - the continent where their ancestors were born, the possible color of their skin and perhaps something about their risk of different diseases. But a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine finds that the checked box also says something about a person's genetic background....
For reasons that are unclear, the link you provide is truncated and does not point to the article anymore. Here is the same link, which will appear to VNNF members to be the same as your link, but it should actually point to the article in question: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-rgm012705.php

Here is a posting of mine from another thread on the same subject, the definitive proof of the existence of race as shown through DNA tests: http://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.p...418#post241418
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Last edited by lawrence dennis; July 9th, 2005 at 09:19 AM. Reason: added link to another post on same subject
 
Old July 9th, 2005 #8
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Default 'Gene hunters flock to Amish country'

Gene hunters flock to Amish country

Quote:
Wednesday, July 6, 2005

STRASBURG, Pa. — Smack dab in the middle of a central Pennsylvanian cornfield, in the heart of an Amish culture that typically shuns technology, sits a marvel of genetic medicine and science. The building itself, a tidy clapboard structure, was raised by hand, rope and horse in the Amish way 16 years ago. Upstairs, is the Clinic for Special Children. Downstairs houses the Amish Research Clinic.

The clinic has played a role in numerous significant discoveries by expert gene hunters, from diabetes breakthroughs to unlocking some of the mysteries behind sudden infant death syndrome.

The gene hunters, who come from far and wide, spend countless hours rooting through a rich genetic trove that only an insular genetic pool like the Amish can offer.

To the Amish, many of whom travel the few dozen miles or so from their homes by horse and buggy, the clinic has been heaven sent. It very often saves their children, who are disproportionately afflicted by rare and sometimes fatal genetic-based diseases because of 200 years of inbreeding.

"It's weird and it's wonderful," said Terry Sharrer, medical curator of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. "I have never seen anything like this."

The children's clinic is the creation and life's work of Dr. Holmes Morton and his wife Caroline. The Harvard-educated couple surprised colleagues and friends in 1987 when they announced they were giving up prestigious urban posts in Philadelphia, packing up the family and starting a new life among the Amish and Mennonite religious sects.

It's a place where the laundry of plain clothes flaps in the breeze and barefoot children in smocks and straw hats run around homes shared and passed down by multiple generations. Road signs warn drivers to share the road with the horses and buggies.

Morton hasn't regretted the move.

"We discover a new gene almost weekly," he said.

Isolated populations with homogenous genes such as the Amish in central Pennsylvania, the Ashkenazi Jews and Indian tribes offer genetic researchers unparalleled insight into disease and genetics.

These closed populations, whether by geography or religion, were created by just a few families — called the "founder effect" — and built on generations of inbreeding.

The Amish have higher rates of inherited disease caused by bad, recessive genes that are diluted in the general population but remain captive in closed societies. That increases the odds that distant relatives that are each carriers of a rare disorder will marry and produce afflicted children.

Since the human genome was mapped five years ago, the genetic discoveries are coming fast and furious in Strasburg.

The advent of the increasingly powerful gene chips, which enable researchers to experiment with thousands of genes simultaneously, have also advanced Morton's work.

Morton estimates that he's uncovered about 150 genes implicated in various diseases, most of them found in the last few years.

Last year he found a gene implicated in sudden infant death syndrome.

He's also uncovered a genetic cause for the malady maple syrup urine disease, so-called because the victim's urine is sweet smelling. It's a rare enzyme deficiency that if left untreated, as it was for many years in the Amish community, will lead to mental retardation. Through a severe diet that excludes meat, eggs and milk — and constant vigilance — Morton can keep the disease in check.

Much of Morton's funding is raised by community auctions that sell quilts, furniture and baked goods made and donated by the Amish.

Downstairs, Dr. Alan Shuldiner and his colleagues at the Amish Research Clinic are armed with $10-million (U.S.) in National Institutes of Health grants to conduct a dozen different large-scale studies of the Amish, including diabetes, heart and longevity studies.

Shuldiner, also a researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, says his lab has drawn the blood of 3,000 of the 30,000 Amish who live in the area.

Shuldiner opened his lab in 1995 after spending a year working out of his car. He initially befriended an Amish woman who had children with diabetes. She served as his liaison to a community skittish of outsiders. When he moved into the special children's building, he said his credibility among the Amish was cemented.

"This building is really a pillar of the Amish community," he said.

Mary Morrisey, a nurse in Shuldiner's lab, spends most days whipping around the back roads of Lancaster County in her minivan on a mission to enroll 1,000 Amish. The aim is to uncover genetic causes of heart disease. In two years, the lab has enrolled nearly 600 volunteers — a testament to how massive the undertaking is.

On Wednesday, Morrisey spent two hours at the kitchen table of one family's house, drawing blood and explaining the intricacies of the study to the pair, who are in their mid-60s who have nine children and 54 grandchildren.

The screen door was constantly slamming as barefoot kids frolicked about the house, the younger ones fretting about needles being stuck into their grandparents' arms. Grandma soothingly reassured them in the Pennsylvania Dutch they use with each other.

For a Luddite community that by and large quits school after the eighth grade, the Amish are well-informed about the technological breakthroughs their blood contains.

They view their participation with the "English" scientists as in keeping with the tenets of their branch of Christianity, which demands they help their fellow man.

"I wouldn't know why not," the woman responded when Morrisey asked her to join the study. "It could help our family — and help others." ...
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How is the faithful city become an harlot! It was full of judgment: righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers. Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water. Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards.

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Old September 5th, 2005 #9
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It is no surprise to me this is the standpoint of Stanford (or any other university for that matter). The notion of race, and the feelings of hate that stem from belief in it, benefit their investors; the big banking firms, the government, and corporations. Each of these holds to the same belief of race that benefits them. It seems natural the schools they invest in would echo.
 
Old October 22nd, 2005 #10
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Ever hear of outer space aliens taking Niggers to get there embryonic genes.
I think they had rather mutate live stock.
 
Old October 22nd, 2005 #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by forroms1
It is no surprise to me this is the standpoint of Stanford (or any other university for that matter). The notion of race, and the feelings of hate that stem from belief in it, benefit their investors; the big banking firms, the government, and corporations. Each of these holds to the same belief of race that benefits them. It seems natural the schools they invest in would echo.
Yes, and everyone in this forum knows where your money is invested Jew. Are you upset that your tentacles have not yet completely subdued every American University? Take your nay-saying elsewhere, the facts are apparent.
This is a typical paranoid Jewish reaction to the truth. Oy! Don't listen to the Phd's at Stanford, just turn on your television and we will tell you what conclusions to draw.
 
Old June 21st, 2006 #12
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Default Race Genes Location

Race, Genes, Location and years of living or history all apply to medical
and other human conditions.

Lactose intolerant, no not I.



Say cheese.

Give me my fat, over come the fear of fat via Atkins.

Ok it miight kill others.
 
Old October 15th, 2006 #13
Abzug Hoffman
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Wonder why they left out the famed clever Jewish race from their study?

Race science has to start, like other sciences, with the collection of facts, followed by classification of some kind and then laws and theories to follow. I don't know why white, black, yellow, red and brown and Jew is so complicated for some people.

From an old chemistry text book, probably written by a jew for the chemistry industry around 1940, but still making a good point, as text books used to do in those days before multicult...

Author: Unknown


"An Acid Test

In a world in which propaganda and deliberate intent to deceive seem more active than ever, a little training in science will put one on guard against the most brazen frauds. There is, moreover, a simple test by which any educated man or woman [must be a jew writing this] may
judge whether an assertion is worthy of belief. He simply asks himself how anyone would set out to prove it.

If it is an assertion with regard to diet, for example, he immediately thinks of controlled experiments with guinea pigs, and later with human beings. If it concerns national policy, monopolies, or "social justice," he asks to have the terms defined, with something of the precision known to science, then wonder whether anyone has undertaken the impartial collection of statistical data, to prove or disprove the assertion. If no experimental proof seems possible, or if the terms used have not been defined, nor statistical evidence collected and weighed, the idea may usually be swept aside as the offering of a demagogue or crank.

Yet only and educated man can apply this test. Plenty of statistical data have been collected in every field, unsuspected by the mere reader of newspapers; and the human mind has developed tools to work with that are unsuspected by the uneducated. Our acid test, after all,
is only for the few to apply - for the lucky few who were born with sufficient mental motive force to make broad contacts with the work of other minds, in this and former generations.

.... Science can only gradually mold public opinion through the pressure of established facts, in lands in which established facts are not too much hindered in becoming known...
 
Old February 4th, 2007 #14
Princzessin
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Proud White Guy View Post
Its nice to see that science,has proven,the fact that there are differences,but haven't our own eyeballs been telling us that,for a long time?

Niggers look a lot closer to monkeys then humans.

All one has to do is just look at them,their behavior is much more like monkeys too.

Make eye contact with a monkey,or a nigger,they both see it as confrontational.

Lots of other similarities too,like the lips,and low foreheads,the incoherent babbling,etc.

I've studied and compared the behavior of negroes and simians (apes). The similiarities in social behavior were a little overwhelming. The same goes for the undenyable appearance.
 
Old July 12th, 2007 #15
James Woroble Jr.
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Give these twerps another two decades and three million in grant$ and they'll additionally, and officially, conclude that sex is real.
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Old October 30th, 2007 #16
Mike Mazzone of Palatine
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http://www.davidduke.com/general/the...race_2985.html

The Two Galileos of the Modern Age Tell the Truth about Race - by Dr. David Duke

Until recently, Dr. James Watson, the co-winner of the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA and the man most responsible for the monumental Human Genome Project, was the most revered scientist in the entire world. No longer. His own world famous Cold Harbor Laboratory suspended him and forced him to retire, universities and museums have canceled his lectures, and a chorus of media and public voices now call him the most opprobrious term in modern times: “racist.”

What was his great crime? He simply uttered a few words about the undeniable scientific fact that there are IQ differences among races, as dangerous a thing to do today as saying the Earth is not the center of the universe in Galileo’s time.

Dr. Watson has echoed the other leading scientific giant of the modern age, Dr. William Shockley, in daring to speak truth about what amounts to the 21st Century equivalent to the Middle Age’s heresy: that important racial differences exist. Both of them did not in any way advocate discrimination or suppression of any race or people. Like modern day Galileos they simply wrote and spoke the simple truth and then paid a great price for their scientific honesty.

If one had to pick the greatest scientific achievements of the last 100 years, it would be easy to name the two at the very top: the development of the transistor (and its progeny the silicon chip and the resulting computer age) and the discovery of the structure of the building block of all life, the DNA Double Helix.

The transistor and its stepchild, the semi-conductor, laid the foundation of the electronic and computer ages. No invention has more transformed the world in which we now live. Not only have computers and modern electronics enhanced medicine and saved hundreds of millions of lives, but they have also advanced transportation, communication, business, and indeed every aspect of science, human productivity and creativity. Dr. William Shockley headed the team at AT&T labs that invented the transistor, and he later established Shockley Semi-conductor, the firm that launched the famed Silicon Valley and the modern computer industry. In 1956, Dr. Shockley and his team won the Nobel Prize for this monumental achievement that is the basis for the computer, electronic, and communication systems that enable you to read these lines at this very moment. It would be practically impossible to list the ways Dr. Shockley’s discoveries have affected every aspect of science and technology. Shockley’s invention has led to myriad more inventions in every aspect of human life.

The other preeminent scientific achievement of the last 100 years was the discovery of the DNA structure. History will certainly record this as having been as important as the invention of the computer, for it is the crucial scientific discovery for understanding the foundation structure of all life—and specifically our own human genes.

The discovery of the DNA structure led to the ability to cure and prevent mankind’s most deadly and debilitating diseases and ailments. Ultimately it has the potential to free mankind from every currently known disease and ailment. It enables us to produce healthier plant and animal life; it even helps us to develop pollution-eating bacteria and other innovative means of saving ourselves and our planet. Some scientists say that even super computers will one day be based on DNA molecules and will be millions of times faster than silicon-based computing.

Perhaps most importantly, knowledge of DNA has the promise to influence even our own personal health and inherent abilities; it may even be the key to improvement and advancement of mankind itself, our innate abilities and even our healthy lifespan. It ultimately means limitless possibilities for mankind. The spiral DNA Double Helix is truly a spiral stairway to the stars.

The scientists who unlocked the DNA structure were James Watson, Thomas Crick, and Maurice Wilkins. Dr. James Watson, like Shockley, was a physicist. He became an expert in the biological understanding of the cell, and like Shockley, he was the key scientist of his research group. Watson discovered the nucleotide base pairs that are the key to the structure and function of DNA. He and Dr. Crick won the Nobel Prize in 1962. Watson went on to spearhead the Human Genome Project which has now identified every sequence of mankind’s DNA, a tool of incredible power to better the lives of human beings. As the Sunday Times of London reported on October 14, 2007:

The names Watson and Crick, it has been said, have “joined Darwin and Copernicus among the immortals.” The pair’s discovery of the structure of DNA, in 1953, has been hailed by fellow Nobel laureates as the greatest single scientific achievement of the 20th century.

After winning the Nobel Prize, Dr. Watson did not rest on his reputation. He took over the Cold Spring Harbor Research facility and turned it into the premier genetics research institution in the world in the fight against cancer and other human ailments. His vision drove on the Human Genome Project, an endeavor which most scientists believe ranks as an achievement that far eclipses the moon landing. Watson also fought against the patenting of genes, saying that the knowledge and use of human genetics must be open to all scientists to lessen disease and improve the human condition.

Now, in one of the most disgraceful events in the history of mankind, Dr. Watson has been reviled, his lectures at universities and museums canceled, and he has been forced to resign from the research institution that he created.

What was his crime? He dared to simply utter a few lines scientific truth about genetics and race. Three decades earlier the same thing happened to that other giant of modern science, Dr. William Shockley. Shockley was called a “racist” and became a media-designated pariah for daring to question the new religion of biological racial equality. Egalitarianism is the incredibly silly idea that despite the wide variation of mankind’s races in physical structure and characteristics, that somehow all races must be identically equipped in mental qualities and traits. This theory was born out of religious kind of blind utopian egalitarian political thought and grafted on the biological world. Most of the scientists who have supported the race as a “social construct” mythology such as Gould, Lowentin, Kamin, Rose have in fact been open Marxist egalitarians in their political views. Unfortunately they have had strong allies in the Jewish-leftist dominated mass media, and the media bias still continues to this day.

The fact is that both Shockley and Watson are not racists in the popular definition of the term as they sought neither hatred nor supremacy over other races. In fact, they were concerned about the well-being of Black people as they were about Europeans and all mankind. But, they have felt that the truth is always a better way to address problems than self-delusion.

Many years earlier, Dr. Shockley talked about the dysgenic trends among Black populations and proposed policies to help them increase their IQ. This is how Wikipedia described it:

Shockley believed that the higher rate of reproduction among the less intelligent was having what he called a “dysgenic” effect, causing a lowering of worldwide human quality. Although Shockley was concerned about both Black and White dysgenic effects, he found the situation among Blacks more disastrous. While unskilled Whites had 3.7 children on average versus an average of 2.3 children for skilled Whites, Shockley found from the 1970 Census Bureau reports that unskilled Blacks had 5.4 children versus 1.9 for the skilled Blacks.[11] Shockley reasoned that because intelligence (like most traits) is at least partially inherited, the Black population would, over time become much less intelligent countering all the gains that had been made by the Civil Rights movement. The Left made much of his concern about Black intelligence so as to brand him a racist because (as he stated) this stance countered their claim that all people are identical.

Shockley was certainly concerned about genetic dangers facing people of European decent, but as the above shows, he also had genuine concern about the well-being of those of African descent and of all people. He wanted every race to be better with each generation.

Watson has voiced similar concerns. He even made great efforts to help the Black community in the United States, but that, of course, had no mitigating effect on the vile attacks he suffered for simply relating the plain facts of African IQ. Nor could anyone refute the facts of what he said; all they could do was say that what he wrote “wasn’t true”—as if that would make the facts go away.

Here are some excerpts of the Sunday Times article which quoted some unguarded comments Dr. Watson made in his conversation:

He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal,… He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”.

He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

… the geneticist explains that he has opened a DNA learning centre on the borders of Harlem in New York. He is also recruiting minorities at the lab and, he tells me, has just accepted a black girl “but,” he comments, “there’s no one to recruit.”

Everything Dr. Watson said was absolutely correct. The prospect of Africa is and has been “inherently gloomy” for centuries. Social policies have been formulated on the premise that Sub-Saharan African intelligence is the same as ours, but all the testing says, “not really.” There have been literally thousands of scientific studies of IQ differences between the races and all of them show deep differences. He went on to say one “should not discriminate on the basis of colour,” because there are “many people of colour who are very talented, but at the same don’t promote them if they haven’t succeeded at the lower level.”

Watson, and Shockley before him, ardently defends the civil rights of all people. He wants to hire, promote and advance people on their abilities fairly and equitably. This policy is exactly the opposite of his critics who seek “affirmative action” which amounts to blatant racial discrimination against the better qualified.

He goes on to say that there is “…No firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically.” Certainly that is a very logical and reasonable statement, for it is logical that populations evolving in radically different environments would not develop identical mental capabilities and qualities.

One should notice that Dr. Watson condemns racial discrimination, and pointed out that there are Blacks who are very talented. He simply stated the undeniable scientific fact that different population groups do have profound differences in intelligence. The media quoted a few egalitarians that voiced the lie that there is no scientific evidence or any “real scientists who believe that the IQ difference between races has been influenced by heredity as well as environment. In actual fact, an overwhelming numbers of scientists admit that there is a marked difference in IQ among the races of mankind, as do even most of the egalitarians.

There have been thousands of intelligence studies that tested differing racial groups, and many of them also factored in environmental variables and striven to remove cultural bias. Thousands of carefully structured studies of intelligence involving millions of individual intelligence tests have proven beyond any doubt that a significant difference in IQ exists between Europeans/East Asians and Africans. And thousands of IQ studies have shown that intelligence as measured by IQ is at least equally determined as much by genetics as by environment. For instance, it is shown by many studies that children adopted from birth are closer to the IQ’s of their birth parents than the IQ’s of the adopted parents who raise them.

The controlled media have been full of stories, supposedly backed up by good science, which suggest that markedly lower Black IQ scores are solely the result of environment—that no “real scientist” believes that the low African IQ scores are partially due to genetic differences. In fact, three times more leading psychologists and sociologists think that racial differences in IQ were due to both genetic and environmental variation rather than soley the result of environment.

In 1987, Rothman and Snyderman conducted a survey of 1,020 scholars in academic specialties that would give them reason to be knowledgeable about IQ.

The survey was given to members of the American Education Research Association, National Council on Measurement in Education, American Psychological Association, American Sociological Association, Behavior Genetics Association, and Cognitive Science Society. According to the report, regarding the question “The source of black-white difference in IQ”:

This is perhaps the central question in the IQ controversy. Respondents were asked to express their opinion of the role of genetic differences in the black-white IQ differential. 45 percent believe the difference to be a product of both genetic and environmental variation, compared to only 15 percent who feel the difference is entirely due to environmental variation. 24 percent of experts do not believe there are sufficient data to support any reasonable opinion, and 14% did not respond to the question. Eight experts (1%) indicate a belief in an entirely genetic determination.

Considering what has happened to Dr. Shockley and Dr. Watson, one is likely to assume that even more experts believe in genetic-influenced IQ differences in race. When the most respected scientist in the world cannot speak the truth without disgrace and vilification, many scientists would fear to answer the question candidly. The study also surveyed journalists and found the opposite view of the scientists, Most journalists surveyed believed the differences were “entirely environmental.”

So, Watson has been attacked by journalists who support a scientific minority opinion. Watson simply said outloud what experts believe at least in a 3 to 1 ratio — that lower intelligence scores for some racial groups are both genetically-influenced.

Even the egalitarians admit that a marked IQ difference exists between the races, but they claim other factors such as environment and cultural bias, rather than genes, cause differences in IQ. There are many scientific studies that disprove the idea that environmental and cultural bias accounts for the sharp IQ difference. But again it must be remembered that even those academics who argue environmental or cultural factors in IQ differences are tacitly admitting that the IQ differences do exist. When Watson said that Africans on average have lower IQs, he stated the accepted scientific fact that everyone knows but none dare say. It is a fact not changed by many explanations given. In Snyderman and Rothman’s surveys, no scientist refuted the fact that on average Blacks score lower on intelligence tests just as Watson said. The question is not whether Blacks are on average less intelligent, the question is why. Watson spoke the truth.

Watson has repeatedly clarified his position that a lower IQ does not blanketly make someone “inferior,” any more than a lower IQ White person is inferior to a high IQ White person. The fact that every one of the sixteen finalists in the hundred meter dash at the last Olympics were of African descent does not make Europeans inferior human beings; it just means Whites are, on average, slower at high speed running. Because Africans may have a lower IQ does not make them inferior human beings. It simply means that, on average, they are less intelligent, less adept at the skills of Western technology. It does not mean that every African is less intelligent, but there is much evidence that the intelligence of a group can obviously have a powerful impact on a society. In fact, Africans may be far more adapted to surviving in the climate, fauna and flora in Africa than a European. Would the fact that a European Survival Quotient (SQ) in the African jungle might lower than Africans be proof that Europeans are “inferior?”

It would be far better for the egalitarians to accept scientific reality instead of condemning truth tellers such as Watson and Shockley, the planet’s most important scientists in the last hundred years. They should be asking, “Is not the first task of science to determine without prejudice or personal bias what is true and real?” And, “If this is true, how can Black intelligence be enhanced?” Or, “How can we adapt the Western social systems used in Africa to the reality of human differences so as to make the system work better there?” For hundreds of years, Europeans have been trying to transplant our modern high-tech society to the African continent only to meet with repeated, abject failure on every level. This is in stark contrast to formerly economically primitive, but higher IQ populations in East Asia that have accomplished economic and societal miracles in just a very few decades.

I had the honor of calling Dr. Shockley a friend, even a mentor. I remember a conversation when he related how he was even shunned and reviled by academics who privately said the same things that he said publicly. He told me that more than once he was tempted to do as Galileo did and recant, but I still remember clearly his words that will remain burned into my memory all my life: he said, “How can I deny the most important fact of life on earth? I helped invent the transistor, but ultimately certain types of genes invented the transistor; it is not the transistor that has invented genes. If we lose the character of our DNA, we will lose all else in time.”

Dr. Watson clarified his position in an article in The Independent in the UK on October 19, 2007:

“We do not yet adequately understand the way in which the different environments in the world have selected over time the genes which determine our capacity to do different things,” he is quoted as saying. “The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity.”

“It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science. To question this is not to give in to racism. This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers.”

Yet, under an avalanche of condemnation and vile attacks, suspension from his own research facility, and even death threats, he issued an apology and a strange statement in which he said that he did not believe that Africa was genetically inferior and that science has no evidence to back up that assertion. He apologized for something he did not say. He simply said that lack of African social progress in the Western model could be caused by a lower average Western style intelligence. Such a statement does not imply blanket inferiority, unless one assumes that every human who has less than average intelligence is an inferior human being. Intelligence, of course, is only one trait that makes up the human experience. President Bush, for instance, has never shown acute mental abilities, but still many Americans voted for him and revere him. No one would say that his relatively low IQ makes him inferior. What they don’t like are his deceitful actions such as in the Iraq War.

In the end, Watson did exactly what Galileo Galilei had done 364 years earlier in the face of the Inquisition. Galileo was forced to say that there was no scientific basis for the idea that the Earth went around the sun, and that such was absurd. The wording of Galileo’s statement was, “The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; the proposition that the Earth moves is contrary to all laws because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.”

A keen observer noted that after Galileo spoke this formal recant he descended from the dock and muttered under his breath, “Yet, it still moves.”

The Holy Writ of today’s world are now egalitarianism and racial equality—not equality of opportunity or equality of rights and respect, but dogmatic unquestioning belief in a universally identical mental capability and character among markedly different peoples. Today, no one faces execution for doubting any of the tenets of the egalitarian religion–but if the most revered scientist in the world can be thrown out of his own laboratory and university and be reviled by the media, the politicians, and the “scientific establishment” for simply stating an easily confirmed truth, how many scientists will dare in the future to come down on the wrong side of that issue?

In the end, Watson, much like Galileo, recanted. But, in light of all of his prior comments on the issue and the vicious campaign launched against him it is obvious that his recantation was coerced. I believe that Watson, like Galileo and so many others, now mutters under his breath, “It still moves.”

Dr. Shockley, though, to his eternal honor, never recanted, watered down or apologized for, or his beliefs. To the last of his days, he told me that the fight for our genetic heritage was more important than the work he did inventing the transistor. And, indeed it is.

In Dr. Shockley’s name, we carry on this fight in the sciences, in history, in psychology, and in the rest of academe; we carry on this fight in our homes and with our families; we carry on this fight in everything we do, because as Dr. Shockley said, if we lose our genetic heritage, everything else will soon fall apart as well. There are many leading scientists with the opinions of Shockley and Watson, but few with pluck of Watson or the steely courage of Shockley. If our heritage is to survive and science will continue its march to the truth, we need many more like Dr. William Shockley.

The modern establishment is just as bigoted and dogmatic today as was the Inquisition in Galileo’s time. The label “Racist” is the 21st century version of the calling someone a witch in the middle ages, and scientific racial understanding is called “racism” today as it was called heresy then. The scientists of the 17th century were not witches or heretics, they were bearers of light. We are not “racists” or “haters” but bearers of truth that is vital to the progress of mankind. Those of us who know the truth can take heart in realizing that the two most important scientists of mankind in the last hundred years, Dr. William Shockley and Dr. James Watson, men who have incalculably improved life on earth, share our core beliefs. Millions of others people do as well, but they must find the courage to do far more than mutter under their breath, “Yet, it still moves!”
 
Old March 9th, 2014 #17
RickHolland
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Only force rules. Force is the first law - Adolf H. http://erectuswalksamongst.us/ http://tinyurl.com/cglnpdj Man has become great through struggle - Adolf H. http://tinyurl.com/mo92r4z Strength lies not in defense but in attack - Adolf H.
 
Old March 9th, 2014 #18
luftwaffensoldat
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Race isn't a social construct, society is a racial construct.

The 3rd world is the way it is because it is filled with 3rd world people. Import them into the west and they recreate their 3rd world societies.

Equality is destroying America and Europe.
 
Old June 21st, 2014 #19
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What Science Says About Race and Genetics

The New York Times' former science editor on research showing that evolution didn't stop when human history began.


Quote:
A longstanding orthodoxy among social scientists holds that human races are a social construct and have no biological basis. A related assumption is that human evolution halted in the distant past, so long ago that evolutionary explanations need never be considered by historians or economists.

New analyses of the human genome have established that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional.In the decade since the decoding of the human genome, a growing wealth of data has made clear that these two positions, never at all likely to begin with, are simply incorrect. There is indeed a biological basis for race. And it is now beyond doubt that human evolution is a continuous process that has proceeded vigorously within the last 30,000 years and almost certainly — though very recent evolution is hard to measure — throughout the historical period and up until the present day.

Biologists scanning the genome for evidence of natural selection have detected signals of many genes that have been favored by natural selection in the recent evolutionary past. No less than 14% of the human genome, according to one estimate, has changed under this recent evolutionary pressure.

Analysis of genomes from around the world establishes that there is a biological basis for race, despite the official statements to the contrary of leading social science organizations. An illustration of the point is the fact that with mixed race populations, such as African Americans, geneticists can now track along an individual’s genome, and assign each segment to an African or European ancestor, an exercise that would be impossible if race did not have some basis in biological reality.

Racism and discrimination are wrong as a matter of principle, not of science. That said, it is hard to see anything in the new understanding of race that gives ammunition to racists. The reverse is the case. Exploration of the genome has shown that all humans, whatever their race, share the same set of genes. Each gene exists in a variety of alternative forms known as alleles, so one might suppose that races have distinguishing alleles, but even this is not the case. A few alleles have highly skewed distributions but these do not suffice to explain the difference between races. The difference between races seems to rest on the subtle matter of relative allele frequencies. The overwhelming verdict of the genome is to declare the basic unity of humankind.

Genetics and Social Behavior


Human evolution has not only been recent and extensive, it has also been regional. The period of 30,000 to 5,000 years ago, from which signals of recent natural selection can be detected, occurred after the splitting of the three major races, so represents selection that has occurred largely independently within each race. The three principal races are Africans (those who live south of the Sahara), East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans), and Caucasians (Europeans and the peoples of the Near East and the Indian subcontinent). In each of these races, a different set of genes has been changed by natural selection. This is just what would be expected for populations that had to adapt to different challenges on each continent. The genes specially affected by natural selection control not only expected traits like skin color and nutritional metabolism, but also some aspects of brain function. Though the role of these selected brain genes is not yet understood, the obvious truth is that genes affecting the brain are just as much subject to natural selection as any other category of gene.

What might be the role of these brain genes favored by natural selection? Edward O. Wilson was pilloried for saying in his 1975 book Sociobiology that humans have many social instincts. But subsequent research has confirmed the idea that we are inherently sociable. From our earliest years we want to belong to a group, conform to its rules and punish those who violate them. Later, our instincts prompt us to make moral judgments and to defend our group, even at the sacrifice of one’s own life.

Anything that has a genetic basis, such as these social instincts, can be varied by natural selection. The power of modifying social instincts is most visible in the case of ants, the organisms that, along with humans, occupy the two pinnacles of social behavior. Sociality is rare in nature because to make a society work individuals must moderate their powerful selfish instincts and become at least partly altruistic. But once a social species has come into being, it can rapidly exploit and occupy new niches just by making minor adjustments in social behavior. Thus both ants and humans have conquered the world, though fortunately at different scales.

Conventionally, these social differences are attributed solely to culture. But if that’s so, why is it apparently so hard for tribal societies like Iraq or Afghanistan to change their culture and operate like modern states? The explanation could be that tribal behavior has a genetic basis. It’s already known that a genetic system, based on the hormone oxytocin, seems to modulate the degree of in-group trust, and this is one way that natural selection could ratchet the degree of tribal behavior up or down.

Human social structures change so slowly and with such difficulty as to suggest an evolutionary influence at work. Modern humans lived for 185,000 years as hunters and gatherers before settling down in fixed communities. Putting a roof over one’s head and being able to own more than one could carry might seem an obvious move. The fact that it took so long suggests that a genetic change in human social behavior was required and took many generations to evolve.

Tribalism seems to be the default mode of human political organization. It can be highly effective: The world’s largest land empire, that of the Mongols, was a tribal organization. But tribalism is hard to abandon, again suggesting that an evolutionary change may be required.

The various races have evolved along substantially parallel paths, but because they have done so independently, it’s not surprising that they have made these two pivotal transitions in social structure at somewhat different times. Caucasians were the first to establish settled communities, some 15,000 years ago, followed by East Asians and Africans. China, which developed the first modern state, shed tribalism two millennia ago, Europe did so only a thousand years ago, and populations in the Middle East and Africa are in the throes of the process.

Two case studies, one from the Industrial Revolution and the other from the cognitive achievements of Jews, provide further evidence of evolution’s hand in shaping human social behavior within the recent past.

The Behavioral Makeover Behind the Industrial Revolution

The essence of the Industrial Revolution was a quantum leap in society’s productivity. Until then, almost everyone but the nobility lived a notch or two above starvation. This subsistence-level existence was a characteristic of agrarian economies, probably from the time that agriculture was first invented.

The reason for the economic stagnation was not lack of inventiveness: England of 1700 possessed sailing ships, firearms, printing presses, and whole suites of technologies undreamed of by hunter gatherers. But these technologies did not translate into better living standards for the average person. The reason was a Catch-22 of agrarian economies, called the Malthusian trap, after the Rev. Thomas Malthus. In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus observed that each time productivity improved and food became more plentiful, more infants survived to maturity, and the extra mouths ate up the surplus. Within a generation, everyone was back to living just above starvation level.

Malthus, strangely enough, wrote his essay at the very moment when England, shortly followed by other European countries, was about to escape from the Malthusian trap. The escape consisted of such a substantial increase in production efficiency that extra workers enhanced incomes instead of constraining them.

This development, known as the Industrial Revolution, is the salient event in economic history, yet economic historians say they have reached no agreement on how to account for it. “Much of modern social science originated in efforts by late nineteenth and twentieth century Europeans to understand what made the economic development path of western Europe unique; yet these efforts have yielded no consensus,” writes the historian Kenneth Pomeranz. Some experts argue that demography was the real driver: Europeans escaped the Malthusian trap by restraining fertility through methods such as late marriage. Others cite institutional changes, such as the beginnings of modern English democracy, secure property rights, the development of competitive markets, or patents that stimulated invention. Yet others point to the growth of knowledge starting from the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th century or the easy availability of capital.

This plethora of explanations and the fact that none of them is satisfying to all experts point strongly to the need for an entirely new category of explanation. The economic historian Gregory Clark has provided one by daring to look at a plausible yet unexamined possibility: that productivity increased because the nature of the people had changed.

Clark’s proposal is a challenge to conventional thinking because economists tend to treat people everywhere as identical, interchangeable units. A few economists have recognized the implausibility of this position and have begun to ask if the nature of the humble human units that produce and consume all of an economy’s goods and services might possibly have some bearing on its performance. They have discussed human quality, but by this they usually mean just education and training. Others have suggested that culture might explain why some economies perform very differently from others, but without specifying what aspects of culture they have in mind. None has dared say that culture might include an evolutionary change in behavior — but neither do they explicitly exclude this possibility.

To appreciate the background of Clark’s idea, one has to return to Malthus. Malthus’s essay had a profound effect on Charles Darwin. It was from Malthus that Darwin derived the principle of natural selection, the central mechanism in his theory of evolution. If people were struggling on the edge of starvation, competing to survive, then the slightest advantage would be decisive, Darwin realized, and the owner would bequeath that advantage to his children. These children and their offspring would thrive while others perished.

“In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry,” Darwin wrote in his autobiography, “I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work.”

Given the correctness of Darwin’s theory, there is no reason to doubt that natural selection was working on the very English population that provided the evidence for it. The question is that of just what traits were being selected for.

The Four Key Traits

Clark has documented four behaviors that steadily changed in the English population between 1200 and 1800, as well as a highly plausible mechanism of change. The four behaviors are those of interpersonal violence, literacy, the propensity to save, and the propensity to work.

Homicide rates for males, for instance, declined from 0.3 per thousand in 1200 to 0.1 in 1600 and to about a tenth of this in 1800. Even from the beginning of this period, the level of personal violence was well below that of modern hunter-gatherer societies. Rates of 15 murders per thousand men have been recorded for the Aché people of Paraguay.

Work hours steadily increased throughout the period, and interest rates fell. When inflation and risk are subtracted, an interest rate reflects the compensation that a person will demand to postpone immediate gratification by postponing consumption of a good from now until a future date. Economists call this attitude time preference, and psychologists call it delayed gratification. Children, who are generally not so good at delaying gratification, are said to have a high time preference. In his celebrated marshmallow test, the psychologist Walter Mischel tested young children as to their preference for receiving one marshmallow now or two in fifteen minutes. This simple decision turned out to have far-reaching consequences: Those able to hold out for the larger reward had higher SAT scores and social competence in later life. Children have a very high time preference, which falls as they grow older and develop more self-control. American six-year-olds, for instance, have a time preference of about 3% per day, or 150% per month; this is the extra reward they must be offered to delay instant gratification. Time preferences are also high among hunter-gatherers.

Interest rates, which reflect a society’s time preferences, have been very high — about 10% — from the earliest historical times and for all societies before 1400 AD for which there is data. Interest rates then entered a period of steady decline, reaching about 3% by 1850. Because inflation and other pressures on interest rates were largely absent, Clark argues, the falling interest rates indicate that people were becoming less impulsive, more patient, and more willing to save.

These behavioral changes in the English population between 1200 and 1800 were of pivotal economic importance. They gradually transformed a violent and undisciplined peasant population into an efficient and productive workforce. Turning up punctually for work every day and enduring eight eight hours or more of repetitive labor is far from being a natural human behavior. Hunter-gatherers do not willingly embrace such occupations, but agrarian societies from their beginning demanded the discipline to labor in the fields and to plant and harvest at the correct times. Disciplined behaviors were probably evolving gradually within the agrarian English population for many centuries before 1200, the point at which they can be documented.

Clark has uncovered a genetic mechanism through which the Malthusian economy may have wrought these changes on the English population: The rich had more surviving children than did the poor. From a study of wills made between 1585 and 1638, he finds that will makers with £9 or less to leave their heirs had, on average, just under two children. The number of heirs rose steadily with assets, such that men with more than £1,000 in their gift, who formed the wealthiest asset class, left just over four children.

The English population was fairly stable in size from 1200 to 1760, meaning that if the rich were having more children than the poor, most children of the rich had to sink in the social scale, given that there were too many of them to remain in the upper class.

Their social descent had the far-reaching genetic consequence that they carried with them inheritance for the same behaviors that had made their parents rich. The values of the upper middle class — nonviolence, literacy, thrift, and patience — were thus infused into lower economic classes and throughout society. Generation after generation, they gradually became the values of the society as a whole. This explains the steady decrease in violence and increase in literacy that Clark has documented for the English population. Moreover, the behaviors emerged gradually over several centuries, a time course more typical of an evolutionary change than a cultural change.

In a broader sense, these changes in behavior were just some of many that occurred as the English population adapted to a market economy. Markets required prices and symbols and rewarded literacy, numeracy, and those who could think in symbolic ways. “The characteristics of the population were changing through Darwinian selection,” Clark writes. “England found itself in the vanguard because of its long, peaceful history stretching back to at least 1200 and probably long before. Middle-class culture spread throughout the society through biological mechanisms.”

Economic historians tend to see the Industrial Revolution as a relatively sudden event and their task as being to uncover the historical conditions that precipitated this immense transformation of economic life. But profound events are likely to have profound causes. The Industrial Revolution was caused not by events of the previous century but by changes in human economic behavior that had been slowly evolving in agrarian societies for the previous 10,000 years.

This of course explains why the practices of the Industrial Revolution were adopted so easily by other European countries, the United States, and East Asia, all of whose populations had been living in agrarian economies and evolving for thousands of years under the same harsh constraints of the Malthusian regime. No single resource or institutional change — the usual suspects in most theories of the Industrial Revolution — is likely to have become effective in all these countries around 1760, and indeed none did.

That leaves the questions of why the Industrial Revolution was perceived as sudden and why it emerged first in England instead of in any of the many other countries where conditions were ripe. Clark’s answer to both these questions lies in the sudden growth spurt in the English population, which tripled between 1770 and 1860. It was this alarming expansion that led Malthus to write his foreboding essay on population.

But contrary to Malthus’s gloomy prediction of a population crash induced by vice and famine, which would have been true at any earlier stage of history, incomes on this occasion rose, heralding the first escape of an economy from the Malthusian trap. English workmen contributed to this spurt, Clark dryly notes, as much by their labors in the bedroom as on the factory floor.

Clark’s data provide substantial evidence that the English population responded genetically to the harsh stresses of a Malthusian regime and that the shifts in its social behavior from 1200 to 1800 were shaped by natural selection. The burden of proof is surely shifted to those who might wish to assert that the English population was miraculously exempt from the very forces of natural selection whose existence it had suggested to Darwin.

Explaining Ashkenazi IQ

A second instance of very recent human evolution may well be in evidence in European Jews, particularly the Ashkenazim of northern and central Europe. In proportion to their population, Jews have made outsize contributions to Western civilization. A simple metric is that of Nobel prizes: Though Jews constitute only 0.2% of the world’s population, they won 14% of Nobel prizes in the first half of the 20th century, 29% in the second and so far 32% in the present century. There is something here that requires explanation. If Jewish success were purely cultural, such as hectoring mothers or a zeal for education, others should have been able to do as well by copying such cultural practices. It’s therefore reasonable to ask if genetic pressures in Jews’ special history may have enhanced their cognitive skills.

Just such a pressure is described by two economic historians, Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, in their book “The Chosen Few.” In 63 or 65 AD, the high priest Joshua ben Gamla decreed that every Jewish father should send his sons to school so that they could read and understand Jewish law. Jews at that time earned their living mostly by farming, as did everyone else, and education was both expensive and of little practical use. Many Jews abandoned Judaism for the new and less rigorous Jewish sect now known as Christianity.

Botticini and Eckstein say nothing about genetics but evidently, if generation after generation the Jews less able to acquire literacy became Christians, literacy and related abilities would on average be enhanced among those who remained Jews.

As commerce started to pick up in medieval Europe, Jews as a community turned out to be ideally suited for the role of becoming Europe’s traders and money-lenders. In a world where most people were illiterate, Jews could read contracts, keep accounts, appraise collateral, and do business arithmetic. They formed a natural trading network through their co-religionists in other cities, and they had rabbinical courts to settle disputes. Jews moved into money-lending not because they were forced to do so, as some accounts suggest, but because they chose the profession, Botticini and Eckstein say. It was risky but highly profitable. The more able Jews thrived and, just as in the rest of the pre-19th century world, the richer were able to support more surviving children.

As Jews adapted to a cognitively demanding niche, their abilities increased to the point that the average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is, at 110 to 115, the highest of any known ethnic group. The population geneticists Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran have calculated that, assuming a high heritability of intelligence, Ashkenazi IQ could have risen by 15 points in just 500 years. Ashkenazi Jews first appear in Europe around 900 AD, and Jewish cognitive skills may have been increasing well before then.

The emergence of high cognitive ability among the Ashkenazim, if genetically based, is of interest both in itself and as an instance of natural selection shaping a population within the very recent past.

The Adaptive Response to Different Societies

The hand of evolution seems visible in the major transitions in human social structure and in the two case studies described above. This is of course a hypothesis; proof awaits detection of the genes in question. If significant evolutionary changes can occur so recently in history, other major historical events may have evolutionary components. One candidate is the rise of the West, which was prompted by a remarkable expansion of European societies, both in knowledge and geographical sway, while the two other major powers of the medieval world, China and the house of Islam, ascendant until around 1500 AD, were rapidly overtaken.

In his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, the economic historian David Landes examines every possible factor for explaining the rise of the West and the stagnation of China and concludes, in essence, that the answer lies in the nature of the people. Landes attributes the decisive factor to culture, but describes culture in such a way as to imply race.

“If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference,” he writes. “Witness the enterprise of expatriate minorities — the Chinese in East and Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews and Calvinists throughout much of Europe, and on and on. Yet culture, in the sense of the inner values and attitudes that guide a population, frightens scholars. It has a sulfuric odor of race and inheritance, an air of immutability.”

Sulfuric odor or not, the culture of each race is what Landes suggests has made the difference in economic development. The data gathered by Clark on declining rates of violence and increasing rates of literacy from 1200 to 1800 provide some evidence for a genetic component to culture and social institutions.

Though equivalent data does not exist for the Chinese population, China’s society has been distinctive for at least 2,000 years and intense pressures on survival would have adapted the Chinese to their society just as Europeans became adapted to theirs.

Do Chinese carry genes for conformism and authoritarian rule? May Europeans have alleles that favor open societies and the rule of law? Obviously this is unlikely to be the case. But there is almost certainly a genetic component to the propensity for following society’s rules and punishing those who violate them. If Europeans were slightly less inclined to punish violators and Chinese slightly more so, that could explain why European societies are more tolerant of dissenters and innovators, and Chinese societies less so. Because the genes that govern rule following and punishment of violators have not yet been identified, it is not yet known if these do in fact vary in European and Chinese populations in the way suggested. Nature has many dials to twist in setting the intensities of the various human social behaviors and many different ways of arriving at the same solution.

For most of recorded history, Chinese civilization has been pre-eminent and it’s reasonable to assume that the excellence of Chinese institutions rests on a mix of culture and inherited social behavior.

The rise of the West, too, is unlikely to have been just some cultural accident. As European populations became adapted to the geographic and military conditions of their particular ecological habitat, they produced societies that have turned out to be more innovative and productive than others, at least under present circumstances.

That does not of course mean that Europeans are superior to others — a meaningless term in any case from the evolutionary perspective – any more than Chinese were superior to others during their heyday. China’s more authoritarian society may once again prove more successful, particularly in the wake of some severe environmental stress.

Civilizations may rise and fall but evolution never ceases, which is why genetics may play some role alongside the mighty force of culture in shaping the nature of human societies. History and evolution are not separate processes, with human evolution grinding to a halt some decent interval before history begins. The more that we are able to peer into the human genome, the more it seems that the two processes are delicately intertwined.

Nicholas Wade is a former science editor at The New York Times. This piece is adapted from the new book, A Troublesome Inheritance, published by the Penguin Press.
http://time.com/91081/what-science-s...-and-genetics/

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Old July 16th, 2017 #20
Alex Linder
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