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June 05, 2005
Mirror Mirror on the wall...
Who's the smartest of them all?
"The idea that some ethnic groups may, on average, be more intelligent than others is one of those hypotheses that dare not speak its name. But Gregory Cochran, a noted scientific iconoclast, is prepared to say it anyway. He is that rare bird, a scientist who works independently of any institution....
Together with Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending, of the University of Utah, he is publishing, in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Biosocial Science, a paper which not only suggests that one group of humanity is more intelligent than the others, but explains the process that has brought this about.
The group in question are Ashkenazi Jews."
Read about it here, its rather interesting.
Yannow, I don't think about my Tay-Sachs gene much, does it make me smarter? Heh, I'd like to claim yes, but I can't.
I am more interested in the fact that one copy of the Sickle-Cell Anaemia gene won't make you sick but will cause an immunity to malaria... a very good thing for the West Africans, who are the only people susceptible to Sickle-Cell, and who also live in malaria country.
So. Does the Tay-Sachs gene cause a not yet identified immunity to certain other diseases? SARS maybe?
This question has been raised to me before, by people much smarter than I...
Posted by LindaSoG at June 5, 2005 09:57 AM