In a timely follow-up to our previous post, here’s an article from Science Daily:
Cultural Differences Are Evident Deep in the Brain of Caucasian and Asian People
The lead paragraph:
People in different cultures make different assumptions about the people around them, according to an upcoming study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers studied the brain waves of people with Caucasian and Asian backgrounds and found that cultural differences in how we think about other people are embedded deep in our minds. Cultural differences are evident very deep in the brain, challenging a commonsense notion that culture is skin deep.
The assumption made by the researchers here is that the biology of the human brain, and therefore important aspects of the way it functions, are altered and conditioned by culture — as summed up in the closing paragraph:
“We often feel that culture is like clothes; you strip them off, and we are all humans,” [researcher Shinobu] Kitayama says. “There’s some truth to that, but studies like this begin to demonstrate that culture can go much deeper. What appears to be a natural being, or a human mind, may be culturally shaped or formed.”
Note the presumptive directionality here: culture determines biology. But where do cultural differences come from in the first place? They aren’t drawn from a deck of cards, and they don’t fall from the sky.
Far more likely, in my opinion: the same selection pressures that account for the radiations of biologically varying human groups are at the root of variations in culture. But it’s a two-way street: the memetic environment of culture itself can have a profound effect on differential reproduction, which means that once the ball gets rolling, culture and biology start feeding back into each other (for example, it seems likely to me that the selection pressure on Ashkenazi Jews for various cognitive skills, due to cultural restrictions over many centuries, is what resulted in that population’s having the highest average IQ of any human group).
So: chicken or egg? It’s more like chicken egg foo yung.
9 Comments
I assume biology plays exactly the part you describe here, but I’d like to make two points about your method, because both are little bug-a-boos of mine.
Your observation that Ashkenazi Jews have high IQ’s because of selection pressures really amounts to guess work – not the “high IQ” part, but the “selection pressure” part. You can prove anything this way. I’ve even heard it said that the good sprint times of certain Africans (is it Kenyans?) is due to women mating with men who could run faster, and capture more food, in the jungle. So why do the British have better long distance times?
And then there is the whole issue of brain wave research. Do we really know what it means? I think the rise of Computer Science has led people to assume that looking at the neural activity of the brain tells us something about how we are “wired” to think, but really we don’t even know what is meant by thinking. To say Asians and Caucasians have different brain waves just means they have different physical characteristics … like skin color.
Where does this leave us half-and-halfs?
Dom, the idea that it was cultural selection that led to the high IQ of Ashkenazi Jews — both the exclusion of Jews from land ownership, etc., forcing them into jobs that required high cognitive skills (which in turn would have created a selection pressure within the group to prefer those who excel at such tasks, and therefore would be good providers), and their extreme reproductive isolation over the same period — just seems by far the soundest explanation to me.
Who says the British have better long-distance times? Marathons are dominated by East Africans these days.
As for brainwaves – yes and no. Yes, we are still a very long way off from exhaustively mapping brain activity to thought, but much has been done, and brain activity in various regions has been reliably associated in many studies with various types of cognitive and emotional activity.
Kevin, I guess it depends both on what particular genetic hand you were dealt, and of course how you were brought up.
Full Disclosure: I am an Ashkenazi Jew, so I hope no one is offended by the following ethnic joke:
So, this Jewish-American family is enjoying dinner at a family-owned Chinese restaurant in New York, and they are speculating whether or not there are any Jews living in China. They ask their young waiter, “Are there Chinese Jews?” The waiter replies, “I am not sure. I’ll ask my Dad; he’s in the kitchen”. A couple of minutes pass, and a middle-aged Chinese-American approaches their table and asks, “You have question?” The Jewish father repeats his question, and the Chinese chef replies, “Don’t know. Ask father”. A while later, a little old Chinese man approaches the table and asks, “You got question?” And after the same question is repeated, he says, “No, is no Chinese juice. Is apple juice; is orange juice; is prune juice. Is no Chinese juice”.
Do you mean that the Chinese (at least the Han) aren’t part of the lost tribes of Israel? Next thing you know, somebody will tell me that Native Americans aren’t really Jews, either. Sheesh!
Everybody in the world is from some lost tribe of Israel.
Except the Jews, of course. But they’re really Khazars . . . or, rather, the lost tribe of the Khazars. And the Khazars were a lost tribe of Israel.
So, everybody’s lost . . . like sleep gone awry.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
BTW, so far as just so stories are concerned..
While I’m familiar with the account of selection pressures on Ashkenazi populations outlined by Malcolm, and find it a plausible story, there’s also some plausibility to the idea that the tradition of Torah study undergirds Jewish intellectualism. Of course, there’s no reason why internal and external dynamics couldn’t act in concert.
If you are interested in the four-thousand years “History of the Jews”, I highly recommend Paul Johnson’s book.
Johnson is a British historian, who happens to be a believing Christian himself. Nevertheless, his account of my people’s history is authoritative, moving, and very readable.