Thread: Intelligence Gene Discovered

Originally Posted by jamescollister

The PC answer about environment, education, will not change a persons eye color, nor their intelligence level. Using the PC argument, pigs, which have similar genes to humans, brought up and educated in a good environment, would become smart.

I think I read somewhere that you were formerly a prison screw?

You didn't become one though, you were born to be one. Prison is about de-humanisation and reducing people to numbers and anecdotes and you we born gifted at that it seems as well as a knack for posting complete bullshit and whinging about political correctness. Luckily for the rest of humanity more people care about correct correctness than political correctness.




BTW, have you invented any wheels or are you just riding on the coattails of someone who did?

Never really been interested in studying physical racial differences close up, got too many other interests and things going. But from what I know those who try to make it only about skin colour and culture are just totally ignorant, selective and/or simply don't want to know.

It's such a hot potato for science that I'd imagine few are willing to handle it objectively and openly.

A cursory search brings this up. No idea whether it can be taken seriously or not, further investigation would be required.

Enjoy.


Professor J. Philippe Rushton

University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada


2nd Special Abridged Edition
J. Philippe Rushton
Race, Evolution, and Behavior
2nd Special Abridged Edition
Copyright @ 2000 by J. Philippe Rushton
All rights reserved.
Published by the Charles Darwin Research Institute
Port Huron, MI



Acclaim for J. Philippe Rushton's
Race, Evolution, and Behavior

"(An) incendiary thesis....that separate races of human beings evolved different reproductive strategies to cope with different environments and that these strategies led to physical differences in brain size and hence in intelligence. Human beings who evolved in the warm but highly unpredictable environment of Africa adopted a strategy of high reproduction, while human beings who migrated to the hostile cold of Europe and northern Asia took to producing fewer children but nurturing them more carefully."
---Malcolm W. Browne, New York Times Book Review

"Rushton is a serious scholar who has assembled serious data. Consider just one example: brain size. The empirical reality, verified by numerous modern studies, including several based on magnetic resonance imaging, is that a significant and substantial relationship does exist between brain size and measured intelligence after body size is taken into account and that the races do have different distributions of brain size."
---Charles Murray, Afterword to The Bell Curve.

"Describes hundreds of studies worldwide that show a consistent pattern of human racial differences in such characteristics as intelligence, brain size, genital size, strength of sex drive, reproductive potency, industriousness, sociability, and rule following. On each of these variables, the groups are aligned in the order: Orientals, Caucasians, Blacks."
---Mark Snyderman, National Review

"Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior ...is an attempt to understand [race] differences in terms of life-history evolution....Perhaps there ultimately will be some serious contribution from the traditional smoke-and-mirrors social science treatment of IQ, but for now Rushton's framework is essentially the only game in town."
---Henry Harpending, Evolutionary Anthropology.

"This brilliant book is the most impressive theory-based study...of the psychological and behavioral differences between the major racial groups that I have encountered in the world literature on this subject."
---Arthur R. Jensen, University of California, Berkeley.

"The only acceptable explanation of race differences in behavior allowed in public discourse is an entirely environmental one...Professor Rushton deserves our gratitude for having the courage to declare that `this emperor has no clothes,' and that a more satisfactory explanation must be sought."
---Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., University of Minnesota.

"The remarkable resistance to racial science in our times has led to comparisons with the inquisition of Rome, active during the Renaissance.... Astronomy and the physical sciences had their Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo a few centuries ago; society and the welfare of humanity is the better for it today. In a directly analogous fashion, psychology and the social sciences today have their Darwin, Galton, and Rushton."
---Glayde Whitney, Contemporary Psychology

"The data are startling to the uninitiated.... Race, Evolution, and Behavior confronts us as few books have with the dilemmas wrought in a democratic society by individual and group differences in key human traits."
---Linda Gottfredson, Politics and the Life Sciences

"Professor Rushton is widely known and respected for the unusual combination of rigour and originality in his work....Few concerned with understanding the problems associated with race can afford to disregard this storehouse of well-integrated information which gives rise to a remarkable synthesis."
---Hans J. Eysenck, University of London.

"Should, if there is any justice, receive a Nobel Prize."
---Richard Lynn, Spectator.


Race, Evolution, and Behavior:

Our Neanderthal genes have affected us, mostly positive.

Your Neanderthal DNA may help you fight disease, and give you allergies


This world map shows the sites and frequencies of Neanderthal-like DNA found in a set of human immunity genes. The orange represents findings of DNA from Neanderthals, and the blue indicates DNA unique to modern humans. The green represents DNA from a sister group to Neanderthals called Denisovians. (American Journal of Human Genetics 2016)

Deborah Netburn
Reporter

If you sneeze when flowers bloom in the spring and tear up in the presence of a cat, your Neanderthal DNA may be to blame.

About 2% of the DNA in most people alive today came from trysts between ancient humans and their Neanderthal neighbors tens of thousands of years ago, recent studies have shown. Now, scientists are trying to determine what, if any, impact that Neanderthal genetic legacy has on our contemporary lives.

In a pair of papers published this week in the American Journal of Human Genetics, two research teams report that in many people, a group of genes that govern the first line of defense against pathogens was probably inherited from Neanderthals.

These same genes appear to play a role in some people’s allergic reaction to things like pollen and pet fur as well, the scientists said.

“It's a bit speculative, but perhaps this is some kind of trade-off,” said Janet Kelso, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and senior author of one of the new studies. “Increased resistance to bacterial infection was advantageous, but may have resulted in some increased sensitivity to non-pathogenic allergens.”

Early man from Romania had close Neanderthal relatives, DNA shows

About 50,000 years ago, the modern humans who left Africa encountered Neanderthal settlements somewhere in the Middle East, scientists believe. On some occasions, these meetings led to couplings whose legacy is apparent in the genomes of people with ancestors from Europe and Asia.

Not everyone with Neanderthal DNA inherited the same genes. But the immunity genes appear to be more popular than others.

Among some Asian and European populations, the researchers found that these particular Neanderthal genes can be found in 50% of people.

“That's huge,” said Lluis Quintana-Murci, an evolutionary geneticist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and senior author of the other study. “It came as a big surprise to us.”

The findings imply that these Neanderthal genes must have served our ancestors well if they are still hanging out in our genome today, and especially at such high frequency, said Peter Parham, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford School of Medicine. If the DNA weren’t valuable, it would have been flushed out of the human gene pool.

“It suggests there was a benefit for the migrating modern human and the archaic human to get together,” said Parham, who wasn’t involved in the research. “What has survived is a hybridization of those populations.”

Manot Cave skull suggests link between Neanderthals and modern humans

Both of the research groups report on a cluster of three genes — known collectively as TLR6-TLR1-TLR10 — that make up part of the body's innate immune response to invading bacteria and viruses.

The innate immune response is different from the acquired immune response that we get through exposure to pathogens, either through vaccines or simply getting sick. Innate immunity kicks in first, and if it’s successful, it can destroy a pathogen in a few hours, before we even know we are sick.

Because this innate immune response is so useful, it has been a strong site of positive selection over time, Quintana-Murci said.

Though both groups of researchers came to the same conclusion that Neanderthal DNA plays an important role in immunity, the teams were asking different questions at the outset of their studies.

Quintana-Murci's group is trying to understand how microscopic pathogens have influenced the human genome as our species has evolved.

Because infectious diseases have killed so many people throughout human history, it makes sense that genes involved in immunity would spread through natural selection.

Neanderthal DNA lives on in modern humans, research shows

For their new study, Quintana-Murci and his colleagues examined 1,500 innate immunity genes in people and matched them up with a previously published map of the Neanderthal DNA in the human genome.

The team calculated the percentage of Neanderthal DNA in innate immunity genes as well as in other genes. When they compared them, they saw that innate immunity genes had much higher proportions of Neanderthal sequences.

Kelso's group, on the other hand, is interested in ancient genomes like those of Neanderthals. In particular, her team aims to uncover the functional consequences of long-ago interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals.

The Max Planck Institute scientists analyzed the genomes of thousands of present-day people from all over the world, looking for evidence of extended regions with high similarity to the DNA of Neanderthals. Then they checked how often they saw those Neanderthal-like DNA sequences in humans alive today.

“What emerged was this region containing three genes involved in the innate immune system,” she said.

Both research groups said there is still much work to be done to determine exactly how this Neanderthal DNA helped humans survive.

However, they are already certain that interbreeding with Neanderthals aided early humans as they faced new dangers after leaving Africa.

“The things we have inherited from Neanderthals are largely things that have allowed us to adapt to our environment,” Kelso said. “This is perhaps not completely surprising.”

Because Neanderthals had lived in Europe and western Asia for about 200,000 years before modern humans got there, they were probably already well adapted to the local climate, foods and pathogens.

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“By interbreeding with these archaic people, modern humans could then acquire some of these adaptations,” Kelso said.

Parham of Stanford said the results are convincing, especially since they were made by two independent groups that essentially confirmed each other.

The results add to a growing body of work that highlights our debt to our Neanderthal relatives.

“We're right in the beginning,” Parham said. “This type of work has really lit a fire beneath archaeologists to try to find more and more samples of Neanderthals so geneticists can do more population studies.”

Your Neanderthal DNA may help you fight disease, and give you allergies - LA Times