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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (380736)	4/26/2008 8:14:52 PM
From: SilentZ	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574267

I'll be honest with you, Dave -- my brain is short-circuiting trying to follow your logic here. But I'll do my best. >WTF are you talking about? China has grown its population by proselytization. I was talking about Christianity and Islam, not China. >I'm asking why, if you started the civilizations at about the same time, they haven't grown to roughly the same number of people. That should have happened. Maybe there should only be a billion Jews. Or even a half billion. But 15 Million? No, that shouldn't have happened. The Chinese are the descendants of all of the people that lived in a gigantic land atea over the last 100,000 years or so. The Jews are the descendants of a group of a few hundred thousand people from about 3,000 years ago, and many were converted away from being Jews over the last 2,500. >I raise this question because it was raised by Netanyahu at a meeting in which the foreign leaders of China and India were present. These leaders immediately reacted with shock--their mouths flying open -- when this disparity was pointed out to them, so the issue was not lost on these individuals. It's horrible, nonsensical logic. -Z

To: i-node who wrote (380736)	4/26/2008 10:36:53 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574267

"CJ? You're a smart guy with numbers. What do you think caused it?" Well, Z has a point. Once China started to grow, if your area got conquered, you became Chinese regardless of whatever identity you had before. And that is a form of proselytization. Look at their respective histories. China has been more or less stable for millenia. Most Jews haven't been so lucky. Not only was the original Israel in an area that still isn't stable, they got kicked out in two waves. The last one, by the Romans, scattered Jews across the empire, into the cities where they weren't exactly welcomed with open arms. They were usually segregated into ghettos. Remember that cities weren't great places to live until the past century or two. This is illustrated by the fact that the Ashkenazi Jews have several characteristic genetic disorders that exist in a large percentage of the population. By large percentage, often several percent of the population are carriers for one or more of these. They are all autosomal recessives, which means that if you only have the gene from one parent, you are ok, even more than ok. But, if you get one from each parent, you are screwed. In the homozygous state they kill or disable in many really nasty ways. But, the heterozygous carriers often have advantages that adapt them to medieval city life. Tay Sachs, for example, gives the carriers a high immunity to tuberculosis. If I recall correctly, there are at least two more which confer similar advantages to a population that had to live in crowded, unsanitary conditions. Given this and the high prevalence of the other autosomal recessives, I suspect that they all make their own little contribution. Bottom line, there were very strong selection pressures on them. The mortality rate had to've been extremely high to drive those kind of changes.