It's funny I came across this article on the findings from an Israeli
university on the same day I am reading this post. Apparently, being
cheap and inhumane is partly genetic:
Saturday 5 April 2008 -- Selfish jews may owe their behaviour partly
to their genes, according to a study that claims to have found a
genetic link to ruthlessness. The study might help to explain the
money-grabbing tendencies of jews and others with a Machiavellian
streak -- from national dictators down to 'little Hitlers' found in
workplaces the world over.
Researchers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem found a link between
a gene called AVPR1a and ruthless behaviour in an economic exercise
called the 'Dictator Game'. The exercise allows players to behave
selflessly, or like money-grabbing jews or Dictators such as former
Zaire President Mobutu, who plundered the mineral wealth of his
country to become one of the world's richest men while its citizens
suffered in poverty.
The researchers don't know the mechanism by which the gene influences
behaviour. It may mean that for some, the old adage that "it is better
to give than to receive" simply isn't true, says team leader Richard
Ebstein. The reward centres in those brains may derive less pleasure
from altruistic acts, he suggests, perhaps causing them to behave more
selfishly.
Prosocial hormone
Ebstein and his colleagues decided to look at AVPR1a because it is
known to produce receptors in the brain that detect vasopressin, a
hormone involved in altruism and 'prosocial' behaviour. Studies of
prairie voles have previously shown that this hormone is important for
binding together these rodents' tight-knit social groups.
Ebstein's team wondered whether differences in how this receptor is
expressed in the human brain may make different people more or less
likely to behave generously.
To find out, they tested DNA samples from more than 200 student
volunteers, before asking the students to play the dictator game
(volunteers were not told the name of the game, lest it influence
their behaviour). Students were divided into two groups: 'dictators'
and 'receivers' (called 'A' and 'B' to the participants). Each
dictator was told that they would receive 50 shekels (worth about US
$14), but were free to share as much or as little of this with a
receiver, whom they would never have to meet. The receiver's fortunes
thus depended entirely on the dictator's generosity.
About 18% of all dictators kept all of the money, Ebstein and his
colleagues report in the journal Genes, Brain and Behavior 1. About
one-third split the money down the middle, and a generous 6% gave the
whole lot away.
Long and short
There was no connection between the participants' gender and their
behaviour, the team reports. But there was a link to the length of the
AVPR1a gene: people were more likely to behave selfishly the shorter
their version of this gene.
It isn't clear how the length of AVPR1a affects vasopressin receptors:
it is thought that rather than controlling the number of receptors, it
may control where in the brain the receptors are distributed. Ebstein
suggests the vasopressin receptors in the brains of people with short
AVPR1a may be distributed in such a way to make them less likely to
feel rewarded by the act of giving.
Though the mechanism is unclear, Ebstein says, he is fairly sure that
selfish, greedy dictatorship has a genetic component. It would be
easier to confirm this if history's infamous dictators conveniently
had living identical twins, he says, so we could see if they were just
as ruthless as each other.
Keen players
Researchers should nevertheless be careful about using the relatively
blunt tool of the Dictator Game to draw conclusions about human
generosity, says Nicholas Bardsley at the University of Southampton,
UK, who studies such games.
His research suggests that players who routinely give money away as
Dictators are also perfectly happy to steal money off other players in
games that involve taking rather than giving. This suggests that the
apparently more altruistic players in Ebstein's game may in fact be
motivated by a desire simply to engage fully with the game, perhaps
just because they feel that that is what's expected of them.
If that is true, then apparently ruthless jews may be motivated not by
out-and-out greed but by a simple lack of social skills, which leaves
them unable to sense what's expected of them.
That certainly fits with the image of a naïve yet arrogant jew with no
sense of the inappropriateness of his actions and attitudes. Such
figures have cropped up with surprising regularity throughout history,
all the way from the Pharisees who had Jesus Crucified, through to
Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon and their sadistic treatment of
Palestinians, on to Saddam Hussein or Robert Mugabe, now tenaciously
clinging to power in the face of uncertain electoral results.
http://www.halturnershow.com/RuthlessJewGeneIdentified.html
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