Askenazim and genetics

From JERUSALEM POST
(June 19, 2005)
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid
=1119147743663

Pride, prejudice and predispostition
By CHANAN TIGAY (JTA)


A reported link between Ashkenazi intelligence genes and susceptibility to
genetic disorders is clearly mixed news for the descendants of Eastern
European Jews.

It may come as little surprise, then, that reactions to a new study linking
the two are a mixed bag as well.

After all, if what the University of Utah researchers say is true, some
Jewish mothers may just have had their dreams for brilliant children turned
to nightmares.

Beyond that, it may also mean that Ashkenazim have, albeit unwillingly,
"been part of an accidental experiment in eugenics," as The Economist
magazine put it in a recent article. "It has brought them some advantages.
But, like the deliberate eugenics experiments of the 20th century, it also
has exacted a terrible price."

The mere mention of eugenics - which refers to a movement to improve
humankind by controlling genetic factors through mating - is enough to ring
bells that many Jews would rather not hear 60 years after the Allied defeat
of the Nazis.

According to the study, slated to appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal
of Biosocial Science, Ashkenazim do better than average on IQ tests, scoring
some 12-15 points above the test's mean value. But they also are more likely
than any other ethnic groups to suffer from diseases such as Tay-Sachs,
Gaucher's disease and Niemann-Pick - related conditions that can be
debilitating and deadly.

The new study hypothesizes that the genetic disorders could be the
unfortunate side effects of genes that facilitate intelligence.

But for some people, ascribing collective traits to entire ethnic groups -
especially to European Jews - reminds them that the Nazis heaped a pile of
supposed genetic characteristics on that continent's Jews and used the
characteristics as a basis to exterminate them.

Indeed, the researchers say they had difficulty finding a journal that would
publish their findings.

For other people, criticizing such research on this basis reeks of political
correctness. This is real science, they say, with real potential to help
save Jewish - and other - lives.

"When you study genetics in order to cure diseases, that's great," said
James Young, a Jewish studies professor at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst and the author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative
and the Consequences of Interpretation. "But when genetics are studied as a
way to characterize or essentialize a whole ethnic group or nation of
people, then I think it's very problematic."

Still, he said, "I was kind of intrigued by this connection, and the dark
irony of what it means to have your intelligence gene linked to a so-called
genetic disease gene. It's kind of striking."

For Dr. Guinter Kahn, a Miami physician who lectures internationally on
German doctors during the Holocaust, studies like this have real scientific
merit.

"This stuff is being done with genes, and they're actually finding true
results," he said. "The stuff they did in World War II was pure baloney
motivated by the greatest geneticists of that time in Germany - but they all
fell into the Hitler trap."

ALTHOUGH NO one is questioning the researchers' motivations, some observers
worry that their findings may be misused.

"Will bigots use this? Bigots will use anything," said Abraham Foxman,
national director of the Anti-Defamation league.

However, he said, their abuses should not block research that could benefit
the Jewish community.

Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt agrees.

When it became clear that fewer Jews were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau than
had originally been thought, some Jews worried that this information would
be manipulated by Holocaust deniers to back their claims, said Lipstadt, a
professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University.

I had people say to me, 'We shouldn't talk about these things,' " Lipstadt
recalls, "I said, 'No, no, no. It's always good to talk about the truth.' We
should never be afraid of the truth."

As to concerns about what it means to say that one group of people is
genetically smarter than others, Henry Harpending, a professor of
anthropology at the University of Utah and one of the study's three authors,
said that such complaints boil down to political correctness.

"It's no secret," he said of the Ashkenazi IQ numbers. "Your grandmother
told you this."

Indeed, the study notes that although Ashkenazi Jews made up just 3 percent
of the US population during the last century, they won 27% of the country's
Nobel Prizes in science and account for more than half of the world's chess
champions.

However, Harpending added, this is "the kind of thing that you're not
supposed to say these days."

He went on: "We regard this as an interesting hypothesis and are a little
surprised at the attention. On the other hand, geneticists kind of know that
variation between populations is almost certainly in the DNA and they kind
of don't talk about that" for fear of losing federal funding for their
research.

"What we've done is started out with an idea and followed it, so what we
have is a pretty interesting and pretty good-looking hypothesis - and it
ought to be tested."

But could this research actually end up helping anybody? Gregory Cochran,
one of the study's authors, hopes so.

"I don't have the cure to any disease in my pocket. I wish I did," he said.
But "if this all pans out, you learn something about how the brain works.
Who knows? Maybe you can do something to help some people one day."

The study says that because European Jews in medieval times were restricted
to jobs in finance, money-lending and long-distance trade - occupations that
required greater mental gymnastics than fields such as farming, dominated by
non-Jews - their genetic codes over the course of some generations selected
genes for enhanced intellectual ability.

This process allowed these Jews to thrive in the limited scope of
professions they were allowed to pursue. Further, in contrast to today,
those who attained financial success in that period often tended to have
more children than those who were less financially stable, and those
children tended to live longer.

It is for this reason, the researchers said, that many Ashkenazi Jews today
have high IQs - and it may also be the reason they suffer from the slew of
genetic diseases.

According to the researchers, many individuals carrying the gene for one of
these diseases also receive an "IQ boost."

Rabbi Moses Tendler, who holds a doctorate in biology and teaches biology at
Yeshiva University, said there is "no doubt that genetic makeup determines
intelligence and, indeed, predisposes as well as offers resistance to
genetic diseases."

But he took issue with the study's findings. The fact that Jews did not
intermarry until relatively recently, Tendler said, led to a concentration
of various genes among their numbers, some good and some bad. "Wherever they
were, Jews lived on an island," he said.

In scientific terms, arguments similar to Tendler's are known as a founder's
effect. Rabbi Arthur Green, dean of the Rabbinical School at Boston's Hebrew
College, wondered whether the findings took into account all relevant
factors in the development of Jewish intelligence.

He noted that during the period in which the researchers believe the Jewish
intelligence gene began to be selected, the majority Christian world was, in
a sense, selecting against such a gene.

In that same period of 1,600 to 1,800 years, Christian Europe was
systematically destroying its best genetic stock through celibacy" of
priests and monks, he said.

"The Christian devotion to celibacy, particularly for the most learned and
highest intellectual achievers, diminished the quality of genetic output and
created a greater contrast with the Jewish minority," he said.

The Jewish devotion to study and learning, meanwhile, also probably worked
in tandem with economic factors in the development of intelligence, Green
surmised.

In some of the Ashkenazi disorders, individuals experience extra growth and
branching of connectors linking their nerve cells. Too much of this growth
may lead to disease; increased but limited growth, though, could breed
heightened intelligence.

In an effort to determine the effect of Gaucher's on IQ, for example, the
researchers contacted the Gaucher's Clinic at Shaare Zedek Hospital in
Jerusalem. Although the center did not have specific IQ numbers on patients
at the clinic, the jobs they held were high-IQ professions:
physicists, engineers, lawyers, physicians and scientists.

"It's obviously a population with enriched IQs - big time," Harpending said.