March 16, 2006--Jewish Genes

For many years I have been an amateur student of the nature of human nature. Anyone who lived through the last 50 years of the 20th century could easily be excused for being interested in this subject—especially when struggling to understand the human capacity to inflict what can only be called evil on other humans. There have been numerous holocausts, world-scale wars, and purges that have taken the lives of tens of millions. Other than helping to control the size of the world’s population, what evolutionary purpose has been thus served? It is almost enough to cause one to want to jettison both Darwin and Intelligent Design!

A recent article in the NY Times (linked below) on the gathering evidence that human evolution is ongoing might be helpful in this search for understanding, while also reopening the dangerous question about how many social and cultural traits noticed among different societies, races, and religions might be biologically determined.

Findings from the Human Genome Project are suggesting that regionally varying physiological capacities might be DNA based. East Asians, for example, show signs of recent evolution (“recent” here being during the last 6,600 years) that have enabled them to better digest rice; and Northern Europeans have apparently evolved in ways that make it easier for them to benefit from milk and milk derivatives.

None of this is either very surprising or controversial. Much more complicated are those studies that are finding evidence that character traits are also genetically transmitted. The Yanomamo, a warlike people from Brazil, may have evolved in ways that select for fiercer people: there are genetic data which suggest that men who have killed in battle have three times as many children as those who did not and that this has led to biological changes in the population.

Considerably more complicated are genome studies that see certain alleged characteristics of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews as genetically transmitted across the generations. These studies claim that because Jews were excluded from certain aspects of communal life they needed to make their livings in ways that required increased intelligence. Cognitively demanding professions such as money lending and tax farming were available only to Jews, and thus they needed to get smarter in order to survive. Hence when mutations occurred that made some Jews brighter than others, presumably they had more progeny (boys let us pray) who could carry on the family business while the others, including the gentiles, got left behind.

I suppose this explains the Rothschilds. However, it also takes us potentially back into Protocols of Zion territory. And to killing for that matter. But don’t just pick on the poor Yanomamo.