Looking for the Math gene

Imagine if being shortsighted, a bit shy and socially awkward, not much handsome or strong, would still end up being a great boost to your chances of making babies and passing on your genes?

That’s what arguing for a genetic ability for ‘mathiness’ may entail, as the qualities above are pretty common among ‘mathy’ people (I know, I live among them). I can get why at least ‘mathy’ people would very much like to believe that :-)

As I see it, if anything, genes for “mathiness” would be more of an evolutionary burden than a gift. At least up to the last three decades, when being a ‘nerd’ shifted to being acceptable or even a positive trait – though in social circles where they also have lower than replacement reproductive rates, not helping much with the evolutionary part.

Yet, as Bret may be arguing, it is undeniable the influence of Jewish heritage, particularly of the Ashkenazi sort, in the mathematical sciences of the last 2 centuries. The disproportinate presence of Jews in modern Academia has been a source of envy with fateful consequences, such as Nazi Germany banning a sizable part of their own academic elite - handing their enemies a most valuable resource, as those same minds led America to the ultimate weapon (and the best proof that “karma is a b****” you may ever find).

Is it possible that Ashkenazi “mathiness” is a genetic trait, as Bret poses? We know intelligence is heritable, and there is even a (reasonable?) case on Ashkenazi IQ being above average. Yet geneticists have been looking – very unsuccesfully – for “gay genes” for half a century now. I wonder, if a nearly primal thing as love for humans can’t easily be represented by a set of genes, what to say about love for numbers?

But if we are to invoke history, we must go all the way through. After all, notwithstanding the cultural hallmarks of Israel, it is not there that you’ll find the great pyramids, Giza (c. 2500 BC) being built way before Abraham or the Kingdom of Judah (c. 900 BC) were around.

The mathematical acumen of the Egyptians was probably acquired by the Babylonians before 1600 BC. Though also a semitic people, they enslaved their Hebrew cousins a thousand years later, and we can conjecture the captives must have learned some math too – the Torah/Old Testament does present the number ‘pi’ as 3 (though Babylonians knew it with a few more decimal places). By the time Judeans were getting back their land (c. 540 BC), the torch of ancient Math was being passed on to another people of no semitic kinship: the Greek.

By then Thales of Miletus had already invented the fundamental stone of proper Mathematics, the Axiomatic method. He used it to prove the first theorems in geometry we know of – though he probably got them from the Egyptians who ‘knew’ it without formal proof. A generation later Pythagoras (or whatever group of people under that name) would initiate that famed school of thought, after traveling around Egypt and Persia, drinking from those mathematical sources too.

In the next 300 years the Greek would advance Math beyond anything seen previously, reaching their highest point with Euclid’s Elements (in Alexandria) and, a generation later, the greatest mathematician of the ancient world: Archimedes (288-212 BC) of Syracuse, though he did study in Alexandria too. This man will be responsible, nearly 17 centuries later, for the resurrection of the Heliocentric system (Copernicus got the idea from an Archimedes’ book, though Archimedes himself built on another Greek, Aristharcus of Samos); and the birth of integro-differential calculus by Fermat-Newton-Leibniz, both hallmarks of the modern scientific revolution.

At this point, maybe a keen observer back then would be justified at wondering about a Hellenistic gene for mathematics, except they had no idea about genes and so far Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians and Greek had not too many genetic connections. They did have cultural bridges built along history though. ‘Nature 0’ X ‘Nurture 1’ so far.

Archimedes will die by the hands of the new up and coming Empire - the Romans - in the second punic war, because his king (and cousin) made the mistake to betray the Romans for Carthago, a city of Phoenician background (so another cousin of the Judeans) trying their hand in the great geopolitical game. The relevant mathematicians of the next few centuries will mostly be around the Library of Alexandria (in Egypt, at some point Roman possession too). For all their mastering of engineering techniques, the Romans themselves won’t contribute much else to fundamental mathematics. We also know that Hellenistic cities of this ancient period had more literacy rates than Israeli ones, for example. So apparently, having a good Library was of much greater value than any genetic consideration back then. ‘Nature 0’ X ‘Nurture 2’.

A bit over 600 years later, the (western) Romans will fall to “barbarians” with no mathematical knowledge whatsoever, taking down also anything resembling an “education system”, with libraries (and whole cities) burnt, no more tutoring paths to Roman citizens, no more engineering corps and orderly societies under Roman pax and law. Western Europe will forget most of the Greek-Roman former ‘high culture’, Greek mathematics very much included. They will take more than 700 years to rediscover it, by translating it from Arab back to Latin after expelling the Muslims from Toledo (Spain) and taking the great Library the Arabs built therein – igniting a process that will lead to the European Renascence a couple of centuries later. There again, ‘Nature 0’ X ‘Nurture 3’.

By the time the Romans fell, they had expelled the Jews out of Judea for nearly 400 years. Though literacy rate of Jews before diaspora was probably below 3%, post-diaspora Jews were mainly influenced by their more nerdy faction, the Pharisees, who placed great emphasis on teaching male Jews from a young age to read their sacred texts. Yet, after six hundred years of diaspora the worldwide Jew population fell from 5 to merely 1 million, if much. A good deal of those lost Jews were not dead, but probably gave up on being Jews, for it was too taxing to keep the strict Pharisaic laws.

It is possible that this ‘selective pressure’ among Jews themselves drove the “strongest/smartest” to stay? Is it possible that continued formal education throughout centuries of father-to-son (or Rabbi-to-students) led to (be it ‘evolutive’ and/or ‘Lamarck-like’ – mind you, epigenetics is in fashion again) a sort of smarter people?

I don’t know, but in what refers strictly to Mathematics that was hardly the case: the new hot point was the Arab world, who greatly developed our computational capability by the introduction of a more intelligent notation (algarisms) and upon incorporating a grossly underestimated invention from the Indians: the zero. They also had libraries full of that old Greek wonderful math.

You will first hear of Jewish mathematicians along history in Spain circa 1100, back in the intersection among Muslims, Jews and Christians, where the last two are trying to cacht up with the first one.

Even allowing that capacity for language may lead to mathematical skills (since math is a kind of language too), there is still the point that literacy here isn’t a very well defined concept. A sizable proportion of male Jews were exposed to reading from an early age, but how efficient was that? Up to the 1600s (previous to Gutemberg), the best case scenarios would be the most devot (or connected to Rabbinic service) would read much of a very limited literature (few books around); the most common scenario is the one of a majority that would scarcely read any literature in their everyday life. Many probably even forgot what they’ve learned when kids. To drive home this point, even in relatively modern Tsarist empire of 1897, one third of Jewish male population was illiterate. I doubt pre-1600s was even half as good as that.

But let us suppose that a good number (say, at least 50% of males) of Ashkenazi in post-1600 Europe were not only literate, but actually used letters in their everyday life in meaningful ways. They certainly had a head start compared to the rest of the European population. Let us also say that at least 20% of these (hence 10% of total male population) used mathematics – four operations basic stuff at least– in their everyday life in meaningful ways. It remains the question: would 2 or 3 hundred years (give or take a few more if you wish) be enough for selection pressure to act on this group?

Just for comparison, lactose tolerance was developed among European populations in a timeframe considered real quick: a few (3 to 5, give or take) thousand years. And that’s for a genetic variation that depends on far, far less genes than a trait like ‘intelligence’.

I don’t know about you, but I am willing to bet that whatever points “nature” scores on this matter, “nurture” will be far off in the scoreboard.