[ExI] Ashkenazi Longevity was Re: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals)

[The Avantguardian]

----- Original Message -----
> From: PJ Manney <pjmanney at gmail.com>
> To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> Cc: 
> Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2011 9:41 PM
> Subject: Re: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals)
> 
> 2011/12/12 John Grigg <possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com>:
>> I think that the ban on Christians charging interest for loans, may have
>> caused change in the Jewish gene pool, in terms of the selection for
>> the type of intelligence that excels at finance.  But then the Jews had a
>> strong merchant class dating back to the Babylonians and the Romans.  I
>> think if any people have been molded for success by powerful selective
>> pressures from within and without, it is the Jews.  I find it painfully
>> ironic that Hitler and the Nazi's considered themselves a "master 
> race," and
>> persecuted the Jews, when the Jews are a prime example of several millennia
>> of intense cultural eugenics at work, with the end result being a people 
> who
>> have achieved so much for humanity.
> 
> As a resident Ashkenazi (which simply means "German" in Medieval
> Hebrew), please allow me to weigh in.  Jews will tell you the
> following might have exerted pressures on their culture and gene pool
> for increased intelligence:
> 
> 1) Your above mentioned ban on usury.
> 
> 2) Your above mentioned experiences in trade.  Jews traveled all over
> Europe and Asia as soon as trade routes were established.  They
> settled in Europe in the early middle ages.  It's how the Ashkenazim
> (a branch of Judaism) as a genetic pool even exist.  A few traveling
> traders/bankers married gentile/pagan women.  Supposedly, it's how
> many Ashkenazim got red/blonde hair, green/blue eyes, etc.  Someone
> should study haplogroups to see if it's true and not just parallel
> mutation.
> 
> 3) Beyond that early intermarriage, we're really inbred!
> 
> 4) The smartest men in the community had the highest and most
> prestigious job: Rabbi.  The first cut was dynastic (the
> Cohen/Kohein/Kohanim and Levi families), but they chose the best
> scholars from those families to become rabbis.  Scholars were a
> prestigious job, too.  They married sought-after women in their
> communities and were under biblical orders to be fruitful and
> multiply...  ;-)  Otherwise, wealth, jobs and social class were
> dynastic.  The top women (and intelligence was valued in women, too --
> see #5) married the wealthiest men and had the most children who
> survived.
> 
> 5) I don't know if you've spent much time with Jewish women, but they
> were raised to be more than competent -- they had to be dominant.
> While the men in the old days were studying and arguing their Torah,
> the women secretly ran the businesses, raised the families and kept
> the home fires burning, while the men took the credit for a profitable
> business, smart kids and well-run homes.  Girls needed intellectual
> skills to pull this trick off, so they were taught mathematics,
> languages, etc.  And if you had no sons to push into scholarship, you
> raised your daughters secretly with advanced schooling.  My
> great-grandmother was the youngest of six daughters to a
> merchant-banker in Warsaw.  Like her sisters, she spoke 6 languages
> fluently, was taught mathematics, economics, science and philosophy.
> When her father tried to marry her off to a local aristocrat, she ran
> away to the New World, married a poor, but adorable and loving tailor
> and used her knowledge to create a real estate business and raise very
> smart kids.  And this was not unusual!  So intelligence was valued in
> women, not just men.
> 
> 6) Judaism as a culture reveres learning and analysis in general.
> Even regarding their religious writings, there is not a written word
> in the culture that has not been argued, debated, analyzed,
> reinterpreted, etc. continually for the last 2000 years.
> 
> 7) Being a persecuted underdog for 2 millennia does wonders for
> survival skills, which are linked to intelligence.  I firmly believe:
> increased pattern recognition > intelligence > paranoia > survival.
> Woody Allen was right: it's not whether you're paranoid.  It's 
> whether
> you're paranoid enough.
> 
> 8) As the perpetual outsider, Jews have had to assimilate local
> traditions while preserving their own cultural heritage.  It's this
> cultural mishmash and the related practice of synthesizing large
> amounts of divergent information that often brings fresh intellectual
> and creative insights.  I really think this is a significant reason
> why 0.2% of the world is Jewish, but 20% of the Nobel winners are
> Jewish.
> 
> 9) The IQ increase is predominantly found in Ashkenazim, which is
> between 50% and 80% of the world's Jews, depending on the source.
> 
> There's still enormous debate whether there is or isn't a genetic
> component to all of the above and the arguments both pro and con are
> sadly rife with political correctness, bigotry, bias, etc.  Pity...

I didn't know you were Ashkenazi. Lucky you. One thing that *is* an Ashkenazi genetic trait is long life expectancies. The Ashkenazi weigh in with one of the highest rates of survival into the centenarian age category. I once met a researcher who claims that one of the reasons for this is that the lipid-micelles i.e. HDL and LDL cholelesterol particles in the blood of Ashkenazi patients are of larger diameter on average than in the overall population, and therefore more resistant to oxidation by free-radicals. He has found a genetic linkage to the I405V allele variant of the cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) gene. Here is a link to what I think is his work:
 
http://www.cenegenicsfoundation.org/library/library_files/Unique_lipoprotein_phenotype_and_genotype_associated_with_exceptional_longevity.pdf
 
 
Almost makes up for Tay-Sachs disease in the gene pool no? But more relevant to your previous discussion is the question can you think of any historical selective pressures for this trait to have evolved? For example do Ashkenazi women typically wait longer before having their first child relative to other ethnic groups?  
 
Stuart LaForge

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -Clay Shirky