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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (219731)	9/14/2007 7:31:29 PM
From: D. Long	Respond to of 793897

Those who survived those conditions were certainly luckier than most, but odds are they were smarter than most too Let's not start selecting for luck in our species... (see Larry Niven's Ringworld - we don't need Teelas springing up messing with the laws of probability) <ggg>

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (219731)	9/14/2007 7:58:41 PM
From: skinowski	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793897

There is enough reason to believe that Jews were smart way before the Crusades and Chmelnicki, who did not distinguish much between the smart and the stupid. I think the article by Murray which I just linked offers some far more plausible hypotheses. Here is one of them - the "Babylon selection": The biblical account clearly states that only a select group of Jews were taken to Babylon. We read that Nebuchadnezzar “carried into exile all Jerusalem: all the officers and fighting men, and all the craftsmen and artisans. . . . Only the poorest people of the land were left” (2 Kings 24:10). In effect, the Babylonians took away the Jewish elites, selected in part for high intelligence, and left behind the poor and unskilled, selected in part for low intelligence. By the time the exiles returned, more than a century later, many of those remaining behind in Judah had been absorbed into other religions.