(Photo: Melissa Goodman)

In an earlier cb review of a book on the role of culture and education on American intelligence (Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It:, I mentioned a hypothesis by physicist and iconoclast scholar Gregory Cochran suggesting a genetic basis for Ashkenazi intelligence scores (slightly less than one standard deviation above the American population’s average). Nisbett noted that this slight difference in average IQ translated into massive differences in the distribution of individuals at the very highest IQ levels (140+).

Cochran, and anthropologist Henry Harpending, have now written a fuller discussion of their Ashkenazi hypothesis within the context of a much wider contrarian, and occasionally irreverent, book on the new discoveries in human genetics affecting our understanding of the evolution of modern humans. The authors explicitly reject the convential wisdom that human evolution largely stalled with the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens as the sole hominid species on the planet.

With new techniques for examining the human genome, it’s possible to give approximate dates on the major recent changes to human physiology triggered by migrations into new environments or the adoption of new economic lifestyles (such as pastoralism or agriculture). Key physiological adaptations such as lactose tolerance, resistance to diabetes or obesity, Vitamin D absorption through skin, malarial protections (subject to recessive genetic disease such as sickle-cell anemia), high-altitude occupation, and the aforementioned Ashkenazis’ IQ, now have associated dates and timetables … and new research promises to nail down the timing and nature of similar genetic changes amongst the world’s populations. The impact of such genetic changes, and associated vulnerabilities, on the human occupation of Europe, North America, and Africa/Asia for the last 50,000 years are the focus of this book.

In contrast to most authors in the biological and social sciences, Cochran and Harpending believe that significant and influential human evolution has occurred in the recent past and that the pace of such evolution continues and even accelerates as selective pressures on modern populations intensify. The larger population pools in turn make it more likely that valuable mutations can spread widely and relatively quickly … often in ways that are completely independent of the X and Y sex chromosomes first used to map human genetic history. For example, Cochran and Harpending suggest that there may well have been an exchange of advantageous genetic mutations (through “introgression”) from Neanderthals to Cro-Magnon/H. sapiens sapiens without any associated impact on the paternal or maternal lines of genetic material associated with our species.

By looking back into post-Neanderthal human prehistory with new genetic data, scholars can track the movement of humans out of Africa and into Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas. They can also begin to hypothesize about the role that genetic change played in the relative reproductive success of Upper Paleolithic hunters, the first agricultural communities in Eurasia, and the Indo-Europeans who left their cultural and linguistic imprint on roughly 3 billion of the people in the world today.

Table of Contents
==============

1. Overview, Conventional Wisdom [1]
2. The Neanderthal Within [25]
3. Agriculture, The Big Change [65]
4. Consequences of Agriculture [85]
5. Gene Flow [129]
6. Expansions [155]
7. Medieval Evolution: How the Ashkenazi Jews Got Their Smarts [187]
Conclusion [225]
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

The 10,000 Year Explosion is a fast-paced book which covers a lot of terrain, often at the leading edge of genetic research. It’s written in straightforward language for the general reader but a familiarity with the basics of human genetics, disease, and prehistory would be helpful. As such, the specifics of any given argument made by the authors is liable to change relatively quickly as scholars engage the arguments and new data is discovered.

The overall argument proposed by the authors, that the pace of human evolution is actually picking up, is a very useful perspective for assessing such new information as it appears. The suite of ailments and genetic predispositions that face an industrialized and tightly-linked world is radically different that the hunter-gatherer environment of 10,000 years ago. Who lives, who dies, who successfully reproduces, and at what rate. That’s demography and genetics in constant interplay. As the authors describe, we aren’t exactly alike under the skin. One small fascinating case in point is the two physiologically distinct ways in which Tibetan and Andean peoples adapted physically to high-altitude living. The invisible history of these adaptations, at the physiological and genetic levels, is only now being understood.

Individual mutations have had a massive impact on the history of the planet (cf. the disease vulnerabilities of Native Americans, absent in Africa and Asia, or the significant economic advantage of lactose tolerance amongst pastoralists). The mix of genetic vulnerabilities or slight reproductive advantages that particular peoples maintain after decades, hundreds, or thousands of years of exposure to agriculture are also as unique as a fingerprint. Why, indeed, would the pace of that change be slowing if humans continue to move into new urban environments with brand-new combinations of environmental and genetic pressures?

With the acceleration of digital computation, storage, and transmission speeds, we can count on new surprises coming out of genomic research. As entire genomes (rather than just small chunks of human DNA) are compared (between individuals and between populations), “genetic archaeology” will enter a new phase of describing/dating population movement and subsequent admixture in far greater detail. This is bound to rewrite large chunks of history before the modern era, and dramatically change our understanding of prehistory, if only to highlight circumstances where favourable adaptations spread throughout world populations and led to some marginally greater rate of survival for particular peoples. Rather than a story of population replacement, often genetic prehistory was the story of genes or adaptations independently expanding through extant populations.

And rather than a conclusive statement about their hypothesis, the authors provide a solid opening salvo in an argument about the nature of humanity, past and present. Our society currently has a schizophrenic attitude to genetic variability in modern populations. On the one hand, an obsession with genetic testing for medical purposes but simultaneously a desire to deny the historical circumstances that led to such variation in the first place. In the next decade or two, as genotyping becomes more closely associated with both disease diagnosis and therapeutic prescription, the hidden history of humans in the last 10,000 years will get more air time.

Cochran and Harpending ensure that it will be difficult to put this genetic genie back in the bottle. Strongly recommended as a birthday or holiday gift for biology students (high school and above) and for those that follow theoretical arguments in medicine and biology. If you liked Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel you’ll also enjoy the briefer The 10,000 Year Explosion. The book is also recommended as a library check-out for anyone with an interest in human evolution, Neanderthal-CroMagnon interaction, the history of American and African colonization, the effects of agriculture on human prehistory, and the causes for the dramatic Indo-European expansion from the steppes.

Controversial, a bit flippant at times, but an enjoyable read, the 10,000 Year Explosion signals a new and exciting phase in science and history.

In New York this week, I asked a former Eastern European dissident who spent time in prison under the Communists: “If you were sitting in a cell in Cuba, Iran or Syria and saw this photo of a smiling American president shaking hands with a smiling Hugo Chávez, what would you think?”

He said: “I would think that I was losing ground.”

Monday’s WSJ carried a letter from an actual Cuban dissident, 29-year-old Luis Fernandez. Writing from Barcelona, Mr Fernandez (”I am a black Cuban and I love my land. I was expelled in 2002 from my medical studies because I was considered a dissident”) describes the sense of betrayal he feels as a result of Obama’s actions:

I confess, it is very sad to see the president of a champion of democracy like the U.S., standing shoulder to shoulder with leftist populists like Hugo Chávez and Daniel Ortega. It is frustrating to see the leader of a proven democratic nation smile and shake hands with people who have no idea about democracy and have no respect for other points of view.

It does not matter to the president that the Castros have inflicted suffering, anguish and pain on millions of people for decades. For Barack Obama, Cuban living conditions, values, and honor are meaningless.

Meryl Yourish points out that the Jewish community in Venezuela could use some encouragement and support these days…support which is certainly not provided by excessive friendliness with Mr Chavez.

(Venezuelan) Jews not only fear the petty criminal, but being subjected to abuse because they are Jewish and identify with Israel. Today, the Jewish community is a target of a vicious campaign instigated by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who compared Israel’s entry into Gaza to Nazi aggression.

In fact, on the cover of the most recent edition of PDVSA, the monthly magazine of the Venezuelan state oil company, there is a picture of a concentration camp with a watchtower and barbed wire. Flying over the camp is an Israeli flag. The caption emblazoned across the picture reads “NUEVA ADMINISTRACION” (”under new management”).

Meryl links Robert Avrech, who says:

When the President of the United States warmly greets and embraces a Jew-hating tyrant, there are consequences.

And of course, the lives of victims of totalitarian regimes—the unjustly imprisoned, the tortured, the murdered and the maimed—are devalued.

Of course, there are times when the leader of a democracy must work with the leaders of a repugnant regime. Even Winston Churchill, a fervent anti-communist, found it necessary to cooperate closely with Joseph Stalin. But this was done under the pressure of the most urgent necessity, and there is no remotely similar justification for excessive friendliness with Chavez and other similar dictators. Moreover, Obama’s whole positioning of the United States–that we have an almost infinite backlog of misdeeds for which he must endlessly apologize on our behalf–gives powerful encouragement to such people.

UPDATE: WSJ article today on the extent of anti-Semitism…specifically, government-instigated anti-Semitism…in Mr Chavez’s Venezuela.

The “rhinoceros” reference is, of course, to Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 play, which is summarized at the link. (The play has also been made into an excellent film, featuring Zero Mostel–this would be a very good time to order it from Netflix or pick it up at a local video store.)

See also my 2002 post on the rise of political violence and intimidation in America.

link via Meryl Yourish

This post (via a comment by Eric at Bookworm) indicates that many “official” reviewers did not like this movie very much, and cites an absolutely bizarre passage in a review published by CNN:

It’s a remarkable story, one that should have inspired a more exciting and original movie than this sluggish compendium of earnest debates and hackneyed battle scenes.

Zwick’s Hollywood liberal credentials are not in doubt, but his films have a surprisingly gung-ho undercurrent (they include such martial adventures as “The Last Samurai,” “Glory,” “The Siege,” “Legends of the Fall” and “Courage Under Fire”).

So, films are now supposed to be assessed based on the “Hollywood liberal credentials” of their directors? And the past heroism of Jews fighting their would-be murderers must only be portrayed and celebrated when Jews are not currently fighting other would be murderers?

Americans must no longer allow their opinions on movies, or on anything else, to be mediated by the court scribes of the old media. For movies as for books, reviews by “nonprofessionals” posted on blogs and on sites like Amazon are generally much more enlightening than those by the “professionals.”

Defiance will not go down as one of the great movies of all time, but it holds your interest and it tells a story that ought to be better known. Go and see it if you have a chance.

Because based on the images and stories below, it seems like it might be 1932 in Germany, as Nazi street thugs work to complete the destruction of the Weimar Republic.

Or it might be 1928 in one of those American cities where the Ku Klux Klan is running rampant.

Here are reports and videos from some of the anti-Israel (and often openly anti-Semitic) demonstrations that have been held around the world since Israel launched its Gaza incursion:

San Francisco…also this

Melbourne, Australia

Anaheim

Fort Lauderdale

Chicago

Dublin, Ireland

Holland

Paris

New York City

UPDATE: Read hating Israel in Trafalgar square

Ahmadinejad may choose his words carefully, but underneath all of the rhetoric is an agenda that threatens all who seek a safer and freer world. We gather here today to highlight the Iranian dictator’s intentions and to call for action to thwart him.

The world must awake to the threat this man poses to all of us. Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust ever took place. He dreams of being an agent in a “Final Solution” — the elimination of the Jewish people.

Note that I referred to a speech that Sarah Palin was going to give. She was not allowed to give it, because she was disinvited from the rally.

Why was she disinvited from the rally? It seems that after Hillary Cinton cancelled her own participation in the rally, certain Democratic operatives threatened the Jewish organizations that were putting together the rally with the possible loss of their tax-exempt status if they allowed Palin to speak at the rally. A ridiculous threat, and one the organizers of the rally should have resisted, rather than quickly caving in.

It would have been a very good thing for leading American politicians to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in support of Israel and against Ahmadinejad’s dangerous madness. If Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden declined to attend, for whatever reasons of political calculation or schedule conflict, there were plenty of other leading Democrats that could have spoken at the rally. Unfortunately, there were apparently some influential Democrats who were more interested in undercutting Palin than in standing firm against the threat represented by the Iranian regime.

Carolyn Glick, in The Jerusalem Post:

IF PALIN had been allowed to deliver this speech at Monday’s rally, she would done just what the organizers of the rally, and what the Jewish people in Israel, America and worldwide need to have done. She would have elevated the imperative of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and the implicit moral and strategic imperative of overthrowing the regime in Teheran to the top of America’s national security agenda. Given the massive media attention she garners at all of her public appearances, Palin’s participation in the rally would have done more to steel Americans – across the political spectrum – to the cause of opposing Iran than 10 UN Security Council sanctions resolutions could do.

It was a remarkable speech, prepared by a remarkable woman. But it was not heard. It was not heard because the Democratic Party and Jewish Democrats believe that their partisan interest in demonizing Palin and making Americans generally and American Jews in particular hate and fear her to secure their votes for Obama and his running-mate Sen. Joseph Biden in the November election is more important than allowing Palin to elevate the necessity of preventing a second Holocaust to the top of the US’s national security agenda.

To which I would add: A strong united front against the Iranian regime is important not only to Israelis and to the world’s Jews, but to all Americans and indeed to all civilized countries. Support for Israel is important today for the same reasons that support for European democracies was important in the late 1930s. The Democrats who pressed for Palin’s exclusion have in my view not only harmed Israel, they have harmed their own country and the entire civilized world.

In early 1940, the writer Andre Maurois spoke with Paul Reynaud, who had just become Prime Minster of France. One of the topics was Reynaud’s long-standing rivalry with Edouard Daladier:

Nevertheless,” (Maurois) said, “Daladier is certainly a man who loves his country.”

“Yes,” Reynaud said, “I believe he desires the victory of France, but he desires my defeat even more.”

This may have been a bit unfair to Daladier, who was far from the worst of the leading French politicians of the day. But it gives an accurate impression of the state of things in the late Third Republic. And we all know what happened a few months later.

In the United States today, the focus of the Democrats on defeating internal political enemies, together with wilful obliviousness to the threat from external enemies, is reaching France-1940-like levels.

UPDATE: See Seraphic Secret.

Called “Zwischen Bleiben und Gehen” (”Between Staying and Going”), the exhibition documented the lives of 10 Jewish men and women in the post-war Soviet occupied zone, later East Germany:

Nelhans’ fate was especially tragic. Having survived the war underground in Berlin, he helped found a Jewish community in East Berlin in late 1945, only to be arrested in 1948 by the NKVD, the Soviet secret service – allegedly for helping Jewish Red Army soldiers escape to Palestine.

Jailed for 25 years by a military court, he died in a Soviet labor camp in 1950, aged 51. Some 47 years later the Russian military authorities conceded Nelhans had been falsely convicted and ordered his posthumous rehabilitation.

…

The East-West propaganda battle began immediately after the war. The Communist Party loudly trumpeted its view that East Germany was innocent of the evil Nazi past.

…

Stalinist party purges in Eastern Europe, accompanied by anti-Semitic show trials in Prague and Budapest sparked fear among Jews in East Berlin.

…

Jews who were communist party members often found themselves accused of being “Zionist agents” or “Jewish nationalists” at a time when the communist Eastern bloc was supporting Arab states in their conflict with Israel.

The website of the Centrum Judaicum itself currently has no information on this exhibition, but here is some English language information on two other past exhibitions: Pioneers in Celluloid: Jews in Early Cinema and Relatively Jewish. Albert Einstein – Jew, Zionist, Nonconformist.

Some more pictures of the Neue Synagoge can be found here.

–Henryk Broder, in a speech to the German Bundestag.

*Yes, I know that the lamp on the right is not a proper Hannuka lamp. We were out of the proper candles, and the candles that we had fit only these two lamps.

UPDATE: Potato pancake recipe. Grate potatoes. Squeeze out as much liquid as possible. Chop onions and mix with grated potatoes. Add egg, salt and pepper. Form into thin patties and fry in 1/4″ of oil (traditional method) or in nonstick pan using a trace of oil, making sure to smash pancakes onto frying pan to make them as thin as possible. Drain, cool and serve with yogurt/sour cream and/or apple sauce or other fruit sauces/preserves.

UPDATE 2: I tried it again on the second night, this time using a mix:

]]> http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/5391.html/feed 30 http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/5188.html http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/5188.html#comments Fri, 07 Sep 2007 12:50:38 +0000 David Foster http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/5188.html …because it increasingly seems that the first 3 digits must be one, nine, and three.

Denis MacShane, a British member of Parliament, writes:

Hatred of Jews has reached new heights in Europe and many points south and east of the old continent. Last year I chaired a blue-ribbon committee of British parliamentarians, including former ministers and a party leader, that examined the problem of anti-Semitism in Britain…Our report showed a pattern of fear among a small number of British citizens — there are around 300,000 Jews in Britain, of whom about a third are observant — that is not acceptable in a modern democracy. Synagogues attacked. Jewish schoolboys jostled on public transportation. Rabbis punched and knifed. British Jews feeling compelled to raise millions to provide private security for their weddings and community events. On campuses, militant anti-Jewish students fueled by Islamist or far-left hate seeking to prevent Jewish students from expressing their opinions.

More worrisome was what we described as anti-Jewish discourse, a mood and tone whenever Jews are discussed, whether in the media, at universities, among the liberal media elite or at dinner parties of modish London. To express any support for Israel or any feeling for the right of a Jewish state to exist produces denunciation, even contempt.

Read the whole thing. This link comes via Neptunus Lex, who notes:

Once again, the children of Israel are the canaries in the coal mine of Western Civilization.

Traditional anti-Semitism was motivated in part by the feeling that Jews were “different” from their surrounding societies. But a lot of the modern hate of Israel–much of which has bled over into outright anti-Semitism–is motivated by the belief that that country is too similar to the societies in which its European and American opponents reside. Many leftists oppose Israel not in spite of the fact that it is an economically-successful, technologically-advanced, Enlightenment-based capitalist democracy, but because of these factors. These are the same things they dislike about their own societies.

Note also this statement in the MacShane document:

…the bulk of the West’s university intelligentsia remains hostile to the Jewish state.

Western democracies, and particularly the U.S., have invested heavily in universities in part because of a belief that higher education tended to reduce prejudice and to encourage more universalist attitues. It is not at all clear that things have in practice worked out that way.

Previous What Year is This? post here.

British film-maker Richard Littlejohn has released a documentary titled The War Against Britain’s Jews. Read this article, in which he talks about some of the things he has learned in his research.

I believe this program ran on Britain’s Channel 4 on Monday—don’t know if any reruns are planned.

Via Judith at History News Network.

I can’t tell if the Hodges piece is parody. If not, he reminds me of a leftist anti-Semitic high-school history teacher I had. He too used that “people of the book” line, to knock Christendom for being more hostile to Jews than Islam is and to explain away Muslim mistreatment of Jews.

In fact the Muslim record, particularly the recent Arab-Muslim record, only looks good in isolated cases or by comparison with the worst abuses of old Christendom. The modern Christian world is astonishingly tolerant by historical standards. Christian institutions have shrunk away from national government while radical Islam seeks to perpetuate Islam’s historical political totalism.

The history of Jews under Islam, particularly in the post-Ottoman Arab world, has typically been one of second-class citizenship at best, punctuated by pogroms (Hebron 1929, Iraq 1941, Aden, etc.). The old southern-white American attitude toward blacks seems like a close parallel to the typical Arab-Muslim attitude toward Jews: they were tolerated as long as they didn’t become politically assertive, but if they became politically assertive they were suppressed viciously. (Do the ignoramuses of the Left who claim to hate Zionism but not Jews realize whose attitudes they are mimicking?)

There have been relatively tolerant Muslim societies, but the Wahabbists and Shiite fascists currently in the vanguard of resurgent Islamic imperialism are anything but. It’s delusional to imagine that Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists or other non-Muslims would be tolerated under a modern European Sharia regime, except to the extent that they were socially and politically unassertive and submitted to systematic humiliations of the kind that non-Muslims are accustomed to in Saudi Arabia. Groups like the Bahais, whom the Islamists consider to be apostates, could expect to be suppressed ruthlessly.

The sad and terrible thing about the Hodges essay is that there are probably quite a few westerners who are ignorant enough to accept his argument.

Julie Burchill (RTWT) (Via Samizdata)

(via DFME)

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