> Ashkenazi Jews, who subsequent to the Roman Empire conquests ended up through the middle of Europe, up into Germany and then into the USA where they now provide much of the intellectual horsepower of fantastic developments.>
I think the Ashkenazi Jews peaked (or saturated?) in the 1970s. If they were the best of the gene pool from Europe (or maybe they were knowledge based workers for the most generations), the gene pool of Indians and Chinese (and Africans) is only 10-20 percent tapped for knowledge based activities. And already the dominant faculty of the top 100 universities has changed significantly from jewish to Indian and Chinese. Similar results are being seen in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Also on spelling bee and Intel Westinghouse science competition.
This one is actually coming from a jewish news source, and tallies well with my limited observation of trends since the 1980s.
forward.com
As for Jews, a massive genome study released last year found that because of historical migration patterns, Ashkenazi Jews — who account for nearly all the Jewish finalists — are genetically very similar to northern Italians. There are tens of millions of Americans of Italian origin. They came in the same historic immigration waves as the Jews. Yet they do not appear as finalists in disproportionate numbers.
In other words, immigration doesn’t explain the changing demographics of the Intel science contest. Ethnicity does. Put differently, the Intel contest is a story comprising, in roughly equal proportions, Chinese, Indians, Jews — each accounting for 1% to 2% of the American population — and everyone else. I can hear your blood boiling out there. If it’s not immigration, what is it — genetics? Am I trying to say that these three groups are genetically superior?
There is a big story here, though: The rise of Asian immigrants and their children. There were barely 10 among all the finalists through the first 30 years. In 1974, for the first time, there were three, then six the next year. Since then it’s been lurching upward. In 1984 there were 13 Jews and seven Asians; in 1986, six Jews and 11 Asians; in 2003, 12 of each.
(this is the list for this year's Intel Westinghouse top 40 finalists sciencenews.org
I’m citing “Asians” specifically rather than the more general “children of immigrants” because the increase consists almost entirely of youngsters of Chinese and Indian origin. Those two countries each account for between 4% and 5% of America’s total yearly immigration, but almost all of Intel’s vaunted immigrant surge. Mexico supplies five times as many immigrants as China or India, the Philippines and Vietnam about the same number, and Cuba, El Salvador, Canada and South Korea only slightly less, but those populations almost never figure in the Intel finals. |
