Monday, January 30, 2017
Natural selection in East Asian populations has favored genetic mutations leading to bigger brains, according to a new study by Chinese researchers that did not find a similar preference in Europe or Africa
The study has shed new light on an issue that has puzzled scientists for decades: why is the average Asian brain bigger than the average European or African one? The world's largest survey of brain sizes, conducted by American scientists three decades ago using more than 20,000 modern human skulls from around the globe, found that the average cranial volume among East Asians was 1,415 cubic centimeters, compared with 1,362 for Europeans and 1,268 for Africans. Subsequent studies have confirmed those results. Among them was a magnetic resonance imaging survey which found that East Asians had a higher cranial vault, which allowed their skulls to house a bigger brain. Researchers proposed a range of hypotheses to explain the differences, with some suggesting that living in a cold climate could lead to a boost in brain size because in such conditions a bigger brain would be better at maintaining a constant temperature at its core, where most thinking took place. But the climate theory could not fully explain differences in the brain sizes of people living in the same latitudes, such as Chinese and Europeans. The Chinese researchers said that a gene called CASC5 – one of eight regulating human brain size – might provide more clues. Unlike most of the other genes, which also regulated the brain sizes of monkeys or early human species such as Denisovans and Neanderthals, genetic mutations of CASC5 in Homo sapiens are relatively young, only occurring after our species left Africa between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. The researchers, led by Professor Su Bing, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Kunming Institute of Zoology, compared CASC5 mutations in different populations for the first time. They found a "high frequency" of four mutations closely related to increased brain size among East Asian populations including Chinese, Japanese and Mongolians. But such mutations rarely occurred in Europe or Africa. "At the population level, our results suggest a selection of CASC5 in East Asian populations, which seems to favor a larger grey matter volume of the brain," the researchers said. "By contrast, no signal of selection was detected in Europeans and Africans."
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4 comments:
One wonders, then, why the Asians show few signs of higher intelligence than Whites. Whites invented practically every scientific advance, proved themselves light-years ahead of the Asians in literature, art, music, and so on, and exhibit the most enterprising, adventurous spirit of the Earth's races.
The Asians are definitely smart enough to imitate White inventions, and possibly expand on them, but they hardly seem to be innovators.
ha! ironsides, ignorance is bliss buddy. Most Chinese culture, agriculture, medicine, literature, astronomy, mathematics and science traces back almost 4,000 years. Guns. Papermaking. compass. printing. Mechanics. Hydraulics. Warfare. Metallurgy. Music theory. Alcohol. Cookware. Daggers. Ax. Rowing Oar. Money (paper notes). Cast iron. Belt Drive. toothbrush. Crossbow and the list goes on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions
I'm not Asian but I do read more than just White Supremacist literature. You should try it.
I guess we should thank the Chinese for letting us beat them to the moon. I know it was a close race.
I do read more than white supremacist literature, though you apparently read only Yellow Supremacist literature from today's white-hating cultural marxists. I read something called "history." It's interesting, you should try it sometime.
The gun was not invented by Asians; they had gunpowder, it's true, but they used it mostly for pyrotechnics until much later, when Europeans introduced firearms. The "fire lance" was a fireworks tube used for frightening enemy horses; interesting and useful, probably, but again, they never really did anything with it. Of course, those who hate Europeans try to build it up into something it wasn't.
Papermaking? Papyrus was made thousands of years ago in the Mediterranean also. Alcohol is more than 4,000 years old in European areas. Daggers and axes have existed in Europe for thousands of years; the ancient Middle Easterners, at least, had daggers and axes 5,500 years ago (see the White Supremacist literature known as the Stele of Vultures).
The Chinese are relative parvenus in a lot of areas, and even when they did invent something, they rarely developed it further or did anything useful with it. The Europeans led the world -- and still lead the world -- in practically all scientific endeavor. There is no Chinese equivalent to Mozart or Beethoven or Pachelbel or even the Medieval composers; their music tends to be simple, repetitive, and in some cases practically atonal. Basically all machinery, engines, computers, and all accurate scientific theories originated in Europe, but even before that, the Europeans had them beaten in many fields.
Claiming that the Chinese invented daggers, axes, oars, warfare, metallurgy, alcohol, astronomy, literature, medicine, or math ahead of everyone else is so ridiculous that it's laughable. Metallurgy is the product of Indo-European types in the Balkans, the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean; the ancient Egyptians had meteoric iron daggers in 3,000 BC, and the earliest known copper smelting was from 6th millenium BC Serbia, according to the "white supremacist" site Wikipedia, which I chose specifically because you can look it up to confirm it.
Even more absurd, you're claiming that they had guns 4,000 years ago? That's a good one.
Try reading "The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West" by J.P. Mallory. It gives an interesting overview of how linguistic evidence along with archaeology strongly suggest that the wheel, chariots, and even the much-vaunted Chinese medicine were introduced to China by Indo-Europeans. It's not a white supremacist book, it's actually just a fairly neutral history. Try "The Mummies of Urumchi" by Elizabeth Barber, too, and branch out from there if you're interested.
I don't doubt that the Chinese are fairly smart, certainly far more intelligent than the blacks or the American Indians. They have a tendency to invent stuff but then never do anything about it; and much more was invented and achieved in Europe and the ancient Middle East than the Chinese ever managed.
The Chinese are smart, but don't forget, their society was still at the mud and water buffalo and bound foot stage when the Europeans were inventing and using internal combustion engines, photography, machine guns, modern materials and optics, etc.
But, continue driving your White-invented car with its White-invented wheels on White-invented roads, running your White-invented computer on White-invented electricity, looking out the window through White-invented window glass, wearing clothing made with White-invented methods, and telling yourself that the Great and Wise Yellow People outdo Whites in everything and that we're just a bunch of dullards with bones through our noses like the kraal-dwellers.
What's the next movie going to be, "Hidden Rice Bowls?"
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