Genetics: Are Jewish People Smarter?

[WoodwindWhistler]

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/1478/

This is interesting. 

It's always refreshing to see things like this re-iterated: "Lynn Jorde, professor of genetics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, gives but one example: For a while, it was assumed that a particular variant of monoamine oxidase caused antisocial behavior. Then several thousand children in New Zealand with this variant were followed for a period of more than twenty years. Researchers found that their subjects misbehaved only if they’d been abused as children—if they hadn’t, there was none. “We’ll probably find that there are genes that influence behavior,” says Jorde. “But I’m quite certain we won’t find genes that determine behavior.”"

Also, this next bit could be due to language requiring finer grains of pitch and cadence perception (some words in Chinese would sound indistinguishable from each other, to you whereas they are two completely separate words that sound very similar, but for a bit of inflection.)

"Until recently, a famous study seemed to suggest that Asian children were more likely than Europeans to have absolute pitch. Then along came another study, this time showing that absolute pitch is most likely to manifest itself only if children take music lessons before the age of 6. No one in the first study had bothered to ask whether their Asian subjects were exposed earlier to music than their European counterparts."

Specifically I wanted to comment on the sidenote of funneling money towards studying health disparities for minorities as a policy. It is well known, at least among sociologists, that those living in poverty have worse health outcomes due to factors like cheaper real estate = more pollution and poverty in general = more immune system destroying stress, so I wonder if they are controlling for those factors that disproportionately affect minorities.

But hey, why address socioeconomic ills that would benefit all first when you could throw money at the voracious pharmaceutical industry or insist that the minority individuals are just not paying out the nose for good enough/specialized healthcare? Sigh.