PROPHETIC VOICE - Divine Involvement: the overlooked component!

... the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment ...

2 Peter 2:9

Here (the title link) is an excellent article on two fronts: first, as fine scientific research and, second, as a great example of how easy it is for the God-less worldview to miss the forest for the trees.

In a world without God, certain conclusions are clearly seen from the data presented; if, however, the existence of a divine designer/controller is added to the recipe, completely different conclusions might be drawn.

The more I read on the Intelligent Design-Darwinism debate the more I find intelligence is a monopoly for one side. For a really readable explanation of ID get Geisler & Turek's I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (my review is here).

I've clipped several pieces so, in all fairness, you might want to read whole article in context. (e-mail reg. req'd)

When my husband and I were in graduate school in mathematics at Northwestern University in the early 1960s, his dissertation adviser had a theory about why Jews were so prominent in mathematics departments.

I don't want to be unfair but notice the era and the University; some of what follows will not be that surprising in light of it.

Ashkenazi Jews - that is, the population among the Jewish diaspora that settled in Europe roughly north of the Alps - were subject to discrimination and worse for two millennia, Izzie Weinzweig proposed. The brightest boys, the ones who excelled at studying the Talmud, became rabbis, and for the daughters of the richest merchants the rabbi was the best catch, so their children had the best chance of surviving poverty and persecution.

For those of you sensitive to the vocabulary of Darwinism, you should be sensing a direction about now.

Hey I was a Presbyterian at the time but it sounded plausible to me. I've encountered versions of this theory since, but Gregory Cochran has brought it up to date with an explanation that marries anthropology with biology: Natural selection made the Ashkenazim smart.

Those who lived, that is. Unfortunately, it also ensured they carried a very high load of potentially lethal genetic mutations, of which Tay-Sachs is the best-known.

Perhaps I'm reading something into the article at this point but isn't the author saying the theory of "natural selection" is deselecting Ashkenazim at the same time it's making them more intelligent. Christ said something about a house divided against itself cannot stand ... right?

[Cochran has] teamed up with two anthropologists from the University of Utah ... , Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending. A draft of their paper, which is scheduled to appear in the Journal of Biosocial Science, is available [here] (in pdf).

The clues Cochran and his co-authors have put together:

There was almost no intermarriage between the Ashkenazim and their gentile neighbors.

For a long period - the paper suggests roughly 800 A.D. to 1600 A.D. - the Ashkenazim were restricted to occupations that the broader society despised, banking and finance, to put it nicely, otherwise known as money-lending and tax collection.

These occupations, even today, put a premium on high intelligence and disproportionately reward it.

Families that were more successful financially were also more successful at raising their children to adulthood.

And finally, there are several disease clusters, "groups of biochemically related mutations that could not plausibly have reached their present high frequencies by chance, that are not common in adjacent populations, and that have physiological effects that could increase intelligence."

However, introduce the "overlooked component" in their eisegetical worldview, namely God, and there could be another plausible causation.

.... This is a brutal bargain, but it was made, altogether unknowingly, in a brutal time. When two Tay-Sachs carriers married and had children, a quarter of them would die of the disease, but half of all children died anyway; their remaining children had a better chance of surviving to adulthood.

Mothers with a mutation that makes them smarter but also leads to breast cancer would die of it, but probably not before their children were born, so natural selection wouldn't care.

Now let me ask you something: doesn't that last clause trouble you, seeing that it is coming from an otherwise intelligent person? How in the world could we, from the data available, say whether "natural selection" would or "wouldn't care."

And on another point, isn't Seebach inadvertently suggesting 100% mortality rate? Unless I'm reading something into this, the author is implying a "they all die" scenario without any data to support the implication.

Many of you will recognize that the same dynamic has operated in areas where malaria is endemic; mutations that protect carriers against malaria cause a variety of anemias, especially sickle-cell anemia, in people who have two copies of the mutated gene.

Read my PROPHETIC VOICE post on "the horse named death" for another angle at this point.

You might wonder whether eight centuries is long enough to accomplish changes like this. On IQ tests, the Ashkenazim are nearly one standard deviation above the European norm, and the pattern of scores - high on verbal factors and the part of mathematics that doesn't depend on spatial visualization - is unlike that of any other group.

This is all good science, I have no criticism of it as science; but when they shut the door to divine influence it simply frustrates me beyond description.

But it's 40 generations or more; that's plenty of time. Also, Cochran said, there's no evidence in antiquity that anybody thought Jews were particularly smart. It was the kind of thing people noticed and commented on - the Ionian Greeks were widely thought to be clever. And whatever influenced the Ashkenazim apparently did not have similar effects on other Jewish populations, a fact of some social significance in Israel today.

Unless I'm mistaken the bible makes many references to exceptional Jews; for example, the book of Ecclesiastes. Of course the bible is not an acceptable historical reference work for the God-less worldview. And wasn't Flavius Josephus selected to write the secular history of Jews because he was considered an unusually intelligent scholar. And to this day the ethical arguments of the Apostle Paul are considered valuable grist in university literature and philosophy departments (here and here). All of my examples are Jewish ... right?

You shouldn't think of people getting married with the intention of having smart kids; that would be more like Lamarck than Darwin. Rather, imagine you could go back in time and administer culture-fair IQ tests to a suitably chosen sample of the population every generation or so. What you'd see is that bell curve for the Ashkenazim would shift slowly upward, a point or two every century, while the distribution for their neighbors didn't change.

I don't see this as natural selection at all, I see it as God being faithful to the word he gave Abraham and Jacob. Of course my worldview includes faith and and an infallible Scripture, which allows for that possibility.

The research done by Cochran and the others only confirms my belief in a compassionate, long-suffering, and faithful God ... perserving Israel, while at the same time carrying out His wrath on a sinful and disobedient people. I'm not offended by their conclusions or their hypotheses, just their utter resistance to any alternate explanation for the course of life.