Pretty funny comments, quickly illustrating the taboo nature of the subject, or maybe we're seeing the usual Internet response bias: the sorts of people inclined to post are the sorts inclined to troll. To answer the original post, yes, The 10,000 Year Explosion (why didn't they hyphenate that compound adjective?) made a good case for the provocative final chapter, which was the subject of their research. My BS detector never twitched, unlike when I read the posts in this thread. So, "serious scientists consider, [human evolution] stoped around 40.000 years ago"? They made a pretty good case for the *acceleration* of evolution, because a group's innovation rate is a function of not only individual innovation rates, but also the number of individuals and the diffusion rate. BTW, that concept applies to cultural evolution as well. For me this was an eye-opener, and I am convinced. Until this book I was a paleo purist (diet-wise), but now I have to acknowledge that maybe indeed evolution has had time to adapt humans to their new diets (probably not yet perfectly to American breakfast cereals). Genetic innovation, like cultural innovation, can occur anywhere, and genes, like ideas, belong to whoever adopts them. So a positive (probably) IQ innovation first appeared among Ashkenazis, great. If that makes you cry, take consolation, even if in Schadenfreude: the new alleles for increased IQ arose under huge pressure, and inflict a cost (there is a nice morality play for you--everything comes at a cost), and they will eventually sweep the human population to the degree that they are advantageous. The unique pressures and isolations of the Jewish population have ended, and they outbreed so much now that they won't be able to monopolize their couple of improved genes. Amusingly, to buy into the fallacy that a higher group average makes all the individuals in the group superior is to agree with the Nazi's racial philosophy, just not with their specific criteria. So is a black with a genius-level IQ (e.g. me) now supposed to feel inferior to a Ashenkazi with a lower IQ (e.g. most of my Jewish friends)? Uncle Al's gloating posts suggest that this is so, but it is the individuals that matter. We're not ants. But does a higher IQ make even an individual "superior"? There are a whole lotta criteria for assessing the fitness of a human being--I suspect some people with high IQs would trade a couple points for my cavity-free teeth; I would trade them back to be free of my migraines. Emotional Intelligence is often labeled a fad, but I'm sure we all know some high-IQ individuals who fail for the lack of it. Obviously IQ isn't everything. As T10KYE's authors points out, and Uncle Al repeats, a huge percentage of Nobel Prize winners are Ashkenazis. What they forgot to mention was that nearly all are Ashkenazi men, not women. Are the intelligence genes in the Y chromosome, or are other factors required to achieve success? Given all the emotion clouding this issue, we're still a long way from reaching an understanding.
