Before these guys from Utah...

... published their studies of genetic diseases among Ashkenazic Jews you already knew that they were smarter than the rest of us, just like you knew that orientals worked harder, and blacks could run faster and jump higher - in short that we aren't really underachievers and it's not our fault that we got the short end of the genetic stick. Of course if you happen to be Ashkenazic, oriental, or black, you're out of luck - any failure to achieve is strictly your own fault.

The conclusion the University of Utah scientists came up with is that the cluster of genetic diseases restricted to Ashkenazis has some countervailing genetic advantage.

"Absolutely anything in human biology that is interesting is going to be controversial," said one of the report's authors, Dr. Henry Harpending, an anthropologist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He and two colleagues at the University of Utah, Gregory Cochran and Jason Hardy, see the pattern of genetic disease among the Ashkenazi Jewish population as reminiscent of blood disorders like sickle cell anemia that occur in populations exposed to malaria, a disease that is only 5,000 years old.

In both cases, the Utah researchers argue, evolution has had to counter a sudden threat by favoring any mutation that protected against it, whatever the side effects. Ashkenazic diseases like Tay-Sachs, they say, are a side effect of genes that promote intelligence.

Amazingly enough, not everybody is enthusiastic about this idea.

"It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is," said Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, noting that it argues for an inherited difference in intelligence between groups.

The basic idea is that because Jews in Europe were restricted to commercial and financial occupations in Europe, there was strong selective pressure to develop higher intelligence.

The Utah researchers have built on this idea, arguing that for some 900 years Jews in Europe were restricted to managerial occupations, which were intellectually demanding, that those who were more successful also left more offspring, and that there was time in this period for the intelligence of the Ashkenazi population as a whole to become appreciably enhanced.

The genetic diseases, which apparently all involve genes involved in neural development, were supposedly an unfortunate side effect of that evolution, much as sickle cell anemia is a side effect of resistance to malaria.

In describing what they see as the result of the Ashkenazic mutations, the researchers cite the fact that Ashkenazi Jews make up 3 percent of the American population but won 27 percent of its Nobel prizes, and account for more than half of world chess champions. They say that the reason for this unusual record may be that differences in Ashkenazic and northern European I.Q. are not large at the average, where most people fall, but become more noticeable at the extremes; for people with an I.Q. over 140, the proportion is 4 per 1,000 among northern Europeans but 23 per 1,000 with Ashkenazim.

I'm dubious personally, but I guess I should recheck those family rumors of Jewish heritage.

By the way, does anybody know what the Intelligent Design theorists think of the Designer's solution to malaria? If he was really intelligent, wouldn't you think he could come up with a solution that didn't involve approximately 1/4 of the population dying early of a miserable disease?