Ashkenazi Jews

Recently I read a book with a claim I did not consider before. Human evolution in historic times: Archaeogenetics. The book is: The 10,000 year explosion. According to the authors, Cochran, and Harpending, there has been human evolution even in time spans of one thousand years. To make the argument more palatable, they emphasize that the crucial element is intelligence, i.e., that an intelligent actor gets involved. Concretely they cite the Russian experiment to turn wild silver foxes into dogs. In fifty years, Dmitri Belyaev, accomplished this feat.

Now comes the controversy and two comments.

According to Cochran, et al., European social mores "bred" a new kind of human group, Ashkenazi Jews. The members of this group, from around 500 of the Common Era, to the present, have been bred in that part of the World, for "brains". The kind of intelligence IQ tests are good at. It was not a controlled experiment; actually there were no bad or good intentions about the outcome, it was simply that Jews were not allowed to govern Germany, Poland, or Russia; just to mention three countries where this human experiment happened.

Jews good at maths, prospered and had more children, dull ones in these activities, were not good producers of children, in other words; they were poor.

I know, and admire several members of this group from my country. Marcos Moshinski, Jerzy Plebanski, Jacob Bekenstein, José Wudka, Benjamín Grinstein, and Arturo Rosenblueth.

Maybe is the soup: Borscht. Maybe the Torah, who knows.

My point here is that we have great US economists, all over the political spectrum, advising American presidents. The only Jew that wanted to be president is Joe Lieberman. No luck here yet . The economists are Milton Friedman, Larry Summers, and two that give free advice on TV and newspapers. Paul Krugman, and Joe Stiglitz.

Please don't take this post the wrong way, my wife, and therefore my two children, belong to this group.

Here comes the comment:

My late father in law, used to say: There are always two temples in every Jewish community: the one you go to, and the one you don't go to.

Jewish people are as diverse as any other group of people I have come in contact with; and that is the comment:

I couldn't stop feeling the irony of today's interview by Amy Goodman in Democracy Now! with Joe Stiglitz; when she asked. What is your assessment of Larry Summers....

Just watch the show.

My last comment is; I love brains.