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Re: Fossian identities
Harriet Lyons (hlyons@WATARTS.UWATERLOO.CA)
Fri, 18 Nov 1994 14:54:19 -0500
Aw Shucks. And I thought MY neighbourhood in the Bronx was the world's
largest exporter of dentists (and social scientists). As Lieber's
references to the Rabbis karping about intermarriage would suggest, the
only sin worse than not going to college in my neighbourhood was to date
a shikse or a shaygetz (no I'm not going to translate for WASPS - read
Portnoy's Complaint, if you don't know). SURPRISE - The people who did
one were the likeliest suspects to do the other - I've long since lost
sight of the old neighbourhood, but I bet that quite a lot of the people
who committed these sins a) didn't do as well on the SATs as us more
easily dominated types and b) ceased to be identifiable as Jewish except
by people guessing from last names, and that wouldn't even pick up the
married women. Multiply the opportunity to definitively escape from
Jewishness over countless neigbourhoods and twenty centuries, and the
whole idea of a Jewish gene pool is meaningless, higher frequencies of a
few single effect genes like Tay Sachs not withstanding. If you have a
community that discriminates against those that don't do well on
educational tests (or other measures of literacy) and an opportunity to
leave that community offered to those who aren't happy there, guess who
you're going to find available for counting when you want to measure that
community's IQ - it doesn't prove a thing about the heritability of IQ.
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