Krauthammer Misses 7 Percent of Jewish Nobel Prize Winners
In a disturbing sign of our inability to hop on to blog trends (and then pretending that we were ahead of the curve the whole time), we failed to blog the Krauthammer "Everyone's Jewish" article yesterday. Which means that we didn't get to comment on this:
There are 13 million Jews in the world, one-fifth of 1 percent of the world's population. Yet 20 percent of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, a staggering hundredfold surplus of renown and genius. This is similarly true for a myriad of other "everyones" - the household names in music, literature, mathematics, physics, finance, industry, design, comedy, film and, as the doors opened, even politics.
Actually, it's closer to 27 percent of Nobel Prize winners. Also 25 percent of Turing Award winners, 50 percent of chess champions, and an IQ 12-15 points above the mean. But who's counting? The downside? Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's, Niemann-Pick, and cancer:
Dr Cochran, however, suspects that the intelligence and the diseases are intimately linked. His argument is that the unusual history of the Ashkenazim has subjected them to unique evolutionary pressures that have resulted in this paradoxical state of affairs. Ashkenazi history begins with the Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in the first century AD. When this was crushed, Jewish refugees fled in all directions. The descendants of those who fled to Europe became known as Ashkenazim... Most of the dozen or so disease genes that are common in them belong to one of two types: they are involved either in the storage in nerve cells of special fats called sphingolipids, which form part of the insulating outer sheaths that allow nerve cells to transmit electrical signals, or in DNA repair. The former genes cause neurological diseases, such as Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's and Niemann-Pick. The latter cause cancer.
So that's kind of a downer. Blogs that caught the article the first time around: Boker Tov, Boulder (neat picture included), IsraPundit, Israel Matsav (who will not be talking to us in... oh... about 30 hours), and IRIS.
UPDATE: The suggestion of a race-specific, genetic source for intelligence will not be the most controversial thing that we post this week. So that's kind of neat.
There are 13 million Jews in the world, one-fifth of 1 percent of the world's population. Yet 20 percent of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, a staggering hundredfold surplus of renown and genius. This is similarly true for a myriad of other "everyones" - the household names in music, literature, mathematics, physics, finance, industry, design, comedy, film and, as the doors opened, even politics.
Dr Cochran, however, suspects that the intelligence and the diseases are intimately linked. His argument is that the unusual history of the Ashkenazim has subjected them to unique evolutionary pressures that have resulted in this paradoxical state of affairs. Ashkenazi history begins with the Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in the first century AD. When this was crushed, Jewish refugees fled in all directions. The descendants of those who fled to Europe became known as Ashkenazim... Most of the dozen or so disease genes that are common in them belong to one of two types: they are involved either in the storage in nerve cells of special fats called sphingolipids, which form part of the insulating outer sheaths that allow nerve cells to transmit electrical signals, or in DNA repair. The former genes cause neurological diseases, such as Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's and Niemann-Pick. The latter cause cancer.
So that's kind of a downer. Blogs that caught the article the first time around: Boker Tov, Boulder (neat picture included), IsraPundit, Israel Matsav (who will not be talking to us in... oh... about 30 hours), and IRIS.
UPDATE: The suggestion of a race-specific, genetic source for intelligence will not be the most controversial thing that we post this week. So that's kind of neat.
