Ashkenazi Jews

O

Orleander

OH JOY!!!!
Valued Senior Member
I was taking a breast cancer risk test and one of the questions asked if I was of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. I thought that was odd.
Then I read this:
Among Ashkenazi Jews, a higher incidence of specific hereditary diseases has been reported:
* Bloom syndrome
* Breast cancer and ovarian cancer (due to higher distribution of BRCA1 and BRCA2).
* Canavan disease
* Colorectal cancer due to hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer (HNPCC).
* Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (non-classical form)
* Crohn's disease (the NOD2/CARD15 locus appears to be implicated)
* Cystic fibrosis
* Familial dysautonomia (Riley-Day Syndrome)
* Fanconi anemia
* Gaucher's disease
* Hemophilia C
* Mucolipidosis IV
* Niemann-Pick disease
* Pemphigus vulgaris
* Tay-Sachs disease
* Torsion dystonia
* Von Gierke disease

WTHell! Does god hate them or what?! Most of these I haven't even heard of, but they have them!
 
Heh, they're like a race of nerds. Everyone picked on them, then they ended up becoming really wealthy.
 
Maybe, maybe not; they just happen to be the most extensively studied
 
Wikipedia

Expert Findings

Psychometrics research has found that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest mean score of any ethnic group on standardized tests of general intelligence, at roughly one half to one standard deviation higher than the mean of the general white population.[5] These studies also indicate that this advantage is primarily in verbal and mathematical performance; spatial performance is about 90, if whites are taken as the mean. Estimates vary from 107 to 117. [6][7][8][9]

Achievement

Ashkenazi Jews have made disproportionately Large contributions to presumably intellectual pursuits.
Though they are about a ¼ of 1% of the world's population, they comprise 28% of Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, and Economics, and have accounted for More than Half of world Chess Champions.[10]

In the United States, Ashkenazi Jews represent less than 2% of the population, but have won 40% of the Nobel Prizes in science awarded to U.S. citizens, and 25% of all Turing Awards.

A significant decline in the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to Europeans and a corresponding increase in the number of prizes awarded to U.S. citizens occurred at the same time as Nazi persecutions of Jews drove them from Europe during the 1930s and the Holocaust reduced their number in Europe during the 1940s.[11]

Whether these differences may be attributed entirely to environmental factors or partially to genetic factors is not quite settled, reflecting the larger academic debate on group differences in intelligence.

Cochran et al.

The 2005 study Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence [1] by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending at the University of Utah noted that European Jews were forbidden to work in many of the common jobs of the middle-ages from C.E. 800 to 1700, such as agriculture, and subsequently worked in high proportion in meritocratic jobs requiring higher intelligence, such as finance and trade, some of which were forbidden to gentiles by the church. Those who performed better are known to have raised more children to adulthood, according to Cochran et al., passing on their genes in greater proportion than those who performed less successfully.[2]

Cochran et. al. hypothesized that the eugenic pressure was strong enough that mutations creating higher intelligence when inherited from one parent but creating disease when inherited from both parents would still be selected for, which could explain the unusual pattern of genetic diseases found in the Ashkenazi population, such as Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's disease, Niemann-Pick disease, Mucolipidosis type IV, and other lipid storage disorders and sphingolipid diseases.[3] Some of these diseases (especially torsion dystonia) have been shown to correlate with high intelligence, and others are known to cause neurons to grow an increased number of connections to neighboring neurons.[4]..."

More at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alansohn/Ashkenazi_intelligence
 
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Orleander said:
but aren't most of those things fatal??
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Yes they are; but since Ashkenazi Jews are now no longer endogamous to the same extent, it will be mitigated in a few generations. In the US, its already hard to see the same level of "Jewishness" as I saw in India. And India Jews are pretty assimilated. I'm not sure how many Jews in the States are really religious though, so I could not say. Most Jews IMO, are ideally placed to be free thinkers in a safe society, so I would assume that capitalism and opportunity would make them more secular (in terms of assimilation) and hence more likely to intermarry other groups.

Since you're Jewish (?), I would like your opinion on this.
 
Traditionally Jews were not allowed to own agricultural land and were forbidden from the military in Europe.

They were assigned into small isolated urban ghettos where a high intelligence was favoured, but physical attributes like strength and good health were not.

Ashkenazis have the higest average IQ in the world, even higher than the Japanese, and were responsible for 30% of all Nobel laureates in Germany from 1901 to 1939...in spite of making up only one percent of the population.
 
Orleander said:
I don't know whether to be sad or angry.
She died in 1958 of bronchopneumonia, secondary carcinomatosis, and carcinoma of the ovary; :( her death certificate read (quote) "A Research Scientist, Spinster, :mad: Daughter of Ellis Arthur Franklin, a Banker."

thanks for the link, though. VERY interesting.
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Kind of my own sentiments. And considering that the Nobel prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA should arguably have been awarded to Franklin, rather ironic that it was her Ashkenazi dna that most likely killed her.

Completely off topic, but the most blatant example of a female scientist being cheated of the recognition she deserved:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner

A pet peave of mine is someone not getting rightfull credit for their accomplishments for whatever reason.

>>edit. There were a couple of good shows on PBS that went into the contributions of these two women in considerable detail. I think they were both Nova episodes. Iirc, the one on dna was "The Double Helix". Unfortunately, I don't recall the title of the one I saw covering fission.
 
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Disease causing genes are not always harmful (see heterozygote advantage). Although two copies of the gene for sickle cell anaemia is often fatal, one copy is not and provides protection against Malaria. That's why the gene persists in parts of Africa. European Jews were often forced to live in crowded, dirty ghettos which increased exposure to diseases.

In their heterozygous forms, Cystic Fibrosis protects against Cholera, Typhoid, Diarrhoea and possibly Tuberculosis (TB), Tay-Sachs may protect against TB and affects intelligence, and Canavan and Torsion Dystonia both affect intelligence. I wouldn't be surprised if most other diseases have effects that haven't been found yet - maybe genetic research will uncover these in time.

Exposure to TB also favours the survival of those with over-active immune systems, which has links to auto-immune disorders like Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA).

http://media.www.michigandaily.com/...ndaily.com&MIIHost=media.collegepublisher.com

A certain Native American population had peak death rates from TB nearly seven times higher than those in England and North America over the last two hundred years. Generations later, this same population had rates of RA nearly seven times higher than the rest of the world. In Africa, where TB had been relatively nonexistent, RA was now also absent.

Because the matching trends were more than 100 years apart, Mobley surmised that the connection had something to do with genetics and natural selection.

Other diseases also possess this relationship with one another. The genetic mutation that causes sickle cell anemia, if only present on one chromosome, affords protection from malaria. Similarly, only one mutation of the gene that causes cystic fibrosis gives protection for cholera-induced diarrhea. Mobley also noted two diseases with a direct relationship — a mutation that provided resistance to the bubonic plague now seems to make those survivors’ descendants HIV-resistant.

The common thread is epidemics. Epidemics can induce genetic change, in essence causing evolution on a small scale. Survivors of epidemics can pass their resistance on to future generations, but those without resistance take their weak genes to the grave. “This is Darwinian selective pressure at its best,” Mobley said.

“Genetic mutations that allowed people to survive tuberculosis epidemics two hundred years ago are combining and coming together in the descendants of those individuals, making their immune systems very much stronger and unfortunately, inducing these autoimmune-type diseases,” he said.
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Zephyr said:
Disease causing genes are not always harmful (see heterozygote advantage). Although two copies of the gene for sickle cell anaemia is often fatal, one copy is not and provides protection against Malaria. That's why the gene persists in parts of Africa. European Jews were often forced to live in crowded, dirty ghettos which increased exposure to diseases.

In their heterozygous forms, Cystic Fibrosis protects against Cholera, Typhoid, Diarrhoea and possibly Tuberculosis (TB), Tay-Sachs may protect against TB and affects intelligence, and Canavan and Torsion Dystonia both affect intelligence. I wouldn't be surprised if most other diseases have effects that haven't been found yet - maybe genetic research will uncover these in time.

Exposure to TB also favours the survival of those with over-active immune systems, which has links to auto-immune disorders like Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA).

http://media.www.michigandaily.com/...ndaily.com&MIIHost=media.collegepublisher.com
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Thats interesting, I just read this article the other day while googling Askenazi genetic diseases



A longstanding debate about the origin of hereditary diseases that are relatively common in Ashkenazi Jews may have been laid to rest. At least some of the diseases exist as a matter of chance, and not because their causative mutations confer a protective effect, according to a new analysis by Dr. Neil Risch of Stanford University and others.

A well-known instance, found in Africans, is the mutation in the hemoglobin gene that makes the red blood cells crinkle up and become stuck in the fine veins, causing sickle cell anemia. People who inherit a copy of the mutated gene from both parents have a serious disease. But the much larger number who inherit just a single copy are protected against malaria.

A rival theory to explain common mutations is that they just happened to be present in a founding population and grew more frequent by chance. In the genetic change that occurs between generations, some gene variants wax in frequency and others wane in a random process called genetic drift. Drift and natural selection are the two driving forces of evolution.

No fewer than four diseases that are quite common among Ashkenazim are of the same kind. All affect the lysosomes, recycling bodies in the cell, and prevent the lysosome from properly degrading a certain kind of fat. The four lysosomal storage diseases are Tay-Sachs, Gaucher disease, Niemann-Pick disease and mucolipidosis Type IV.

For a single population to have four such diseases seemed so odd that several geneticists have suggested that there has to be a hidden benefit. The geneticists suggested that the diseases must have become relatively common through natural selection, which favored people who carried a single copy of the mutated genes in question.

Dr. Risch set out to test that idea by comparing the frequency, dates of origin and geographical distribution of the four diseases with those of a group of other disease-causing mutations that are less rare among Ashkenazim. His subjects were mostly Orthodox high school students undergoing genetic testing at Dor Yeshorim offices in Brooklyn and Jerusalem. Dor Yeshorim, founded by Rabbi Josef Ekstein, aims to prevent genetic disease by advising carriers of the same mutations not to marry each other.

Dr. Risch and his colleagues plotted the original distribution of the four diseases by asking the students which countries their grandparents had come from. Comparing the lysosomal storage disease mutations with the others, which included Bloom syndrome, Fanconi anemia Type C and Canavan disease, they found no difference in frequencies, geographical patterns or dates of origin. This implies that the lysosomal mutations were not under selective pressure; if they were, they would be expected to be more common than the other diseases. The diseases became more common through the random effects of genetic drift, aided by the fact that Ashkenazim married within their own community.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9400E7DC163FF937A35750C0A9659C8B63
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so a fatal long term disease protects against a fatal short term disease? When it comes to suffering, I think I'd like short term.
 
S.A.M. said:
Thats interesting, I just read this article the other day while googling Askenazi genetic diseases
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Interesting, but it only covers a few of them. I suspect an actual understanding of the genes involved will give a more complete picture. There is bound to be a founder effect (most Europeans supposedly descend from seven women, let alone just the European Jews) but I would be surprised if there were no benefits to the most fatal mutations - otherwise, why wouldn't they vanish?

Orleander said:
so a fatal long term disease protects against a fatal short term disease? When it comes to suffering, I think I'd like short term.
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Dead is dead. How is short term death different from long term death?

In the long term, genetic engineering will cure all these ailments, but only those whose parents survived to have them will benefit from it.
 
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