September 09, 2005
Jews vs Neanderathals?
From a discussion on Slashdot about the coexistence of modern Humans and Neanderathals followed by the laters extinction:
One theory is that when neanderthals mated with modern humans the offspring would survive if the father was a modern human and mother was a neanderthal because the neanderthal woman's birth canal was wider. However, if a neanderthal man mated with a modern human the mother and child could die in labor due to the fact that the birth canal was too narrow for the hybrid child. There has been speculation on differing gestation periods as well.The reason this results in extinction of one of the races is due to the fact that when there is consistent gender bias in inter-racial mating, if there is any degree of polygyny or serial monogamy (de facto polygyny) then the gene flow tends to be from the race whose males are successfully mating to the population whose males are not as successfully mating. If there is any substantial inter-racial mating under such circumstances it could easily be that a millenium or so is all it would take to destroy the existence of the race whose males are experiencing lower fertility.
In other words, coexisting homo-sapiens crowded out neanderathal males from mating possibilities. Judaism operates through matrilineal decent, but somehow survives... What are Jews doing differently? Extracting the best of the non-Jewish genes and making them Jewish?
Posted by Alex at 04:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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Seems, simply, that Judaism is memetically and not genetically defined. After all, previous attempts to physiologically define the Jewish "race" have been less than successful.
Posted by: eric at September 13, 2005 01:16 PM
Actually, there was nothing involved in this scheme other than to be able to identify who was a Jew in a world where rape by foreign armies was common. The Rabbis, in defining a Jew as someone born of a Jewish mother, did away with the problem of having to reject a child because the father was not Jewish. It was done out of compassion.
Posted by: Robert Graziani at September 14, 2005 09:50 PM
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