Brahmin IQ

[VetLegion]

Well, what is it? I'm wondering whether Brahmins have same average intelligence as other Indians, or have they, as a group, been under some sort of selection for intelligence.

[Lonestar]

You know, a Brahmin is a cow in Texas. I had to give it s shock to collect semen in animal husbandry class at Texas A&M.

Glad I'm not a farmer.

[DRoseDARs]

Kinky. That's almost as bad as Mrs. Bush telling us about Mr. Bush jacking off a horse (yes, she really DID tell us about it).

[VetLegion]

You know, a Brahmin is a cow in Texas.

Those are certainly under selection. Maybe not for intelligence...

[VetLegion]

BTW., book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_...Nations_(book) gives average IQ for India to be 81.

[lord of the mark]

if brahmins have higher IQs without also having a set of nasty genetic diseases to go with it, I will have to say "unfair"!

[VetLegion]

Anyway, I think that they are a good natural experiment with regards to heritability of IQ, importance of upbringing and environment and so on. It would surprise me if nobody used Brahmins to examine those issues yet.

[Barnabas]

Can ashkenazi jews breed out their diseases by marrying mizrahi or sephardic jews?


I think many indians are not fed properly, with good nutrition the iq average should increase quite a lot, also, I know nothing about how the study was done.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Brachy-Pride
Can ashkenazi jews breed out their diseases by marrying mizrahi or sephardic jews?

Im not sure what you mean by "breed out" but since most are recessive you can improve your particular odds, and you can dilute the pool generally. Of course arguably youd be doing the same with IQ, unless of course you select for higher IQ sephardic-mizrahi Jews.


Note, there is at least on academic who thinks that the worst of the Ashkenazic genetic diseases, TaySachs, is directly related to the tendency to high IQ. Something in the neurology of Tay Sachs is posited to be related to changes in neurology leading to higher intelligence. Im not sure if IQ studies of Tay Sachs carriers has borne this out, however.

[VetLegion]

I think many indians are not fed properly, with good nutrition the iq average should increase quite a lot, also, I know nothing about how the study was done.

I agree. I think that comparisons of third and first world countries with regards to IQ are very suspicious for that very reason. Good nutrition and IQ jumps very much. Not to mention that there are other problems with the tests themselves.

But comparing groups within India could give us some interesting results.

[lord of the mark]

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]

Reviews of the controversial paper have been both positive and negative, with critics claiming the argument to be far-fetched and unsupported by direct evidence.[3] Many genetically-isolated human groups have faced multifarious adaptive pressures one could cherry pick to justify presently exhibited group traits.[5] Supporters of the paper, however, saw the critique as an example of scientifically-justified prejudice.

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Brachy-Pride
I know nothing about how the study was done.

They asked them about the origins of Hindu civilization.

[Kontiki]

Originally posted by VetLegion
BTW., book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_...Nations_(book) gives average IQ for India to be 81.

Before the Muslim invasion, it was 496.

[aneeshm]

Whatever IQ difference you find is the result of upbringing and culture, not innate. It would be interesting to conduct a statistical study of the IQ differences between children born to Brahmin parents (i.e., Brahmin by blood) and (non-Brahmin) children adopted (at an extremely young age - say, before the age of one) by Brahmin parents. I don't think any difference will be found.

It would also be interesting to compare IQ between different castes in the SAME socio-economic bracket. In such a case, IMO, differences may only be found in the lower economic scale, because that is where caste culture will play the maximum role.