Dear editor:

No politically-correct person (and I’m not one) would dare ask the sticky questions of why Ashkenazi Jews, Jews of Eastern European origin, score 8 to 15 points higher on IQ tests than American Gentiles or why African American athletes are superior to whites in sports where speed is crucial. But the answers are simple almost to the point of being self-evident.

Throughout most of European history Jews were excluded from agriculture, crafts and most other “normal” occupations. To survive, they concentrated on vocations requiring verbal and mathematical skills such as banking, medicine, law and science. Judaism, unlike medieval Christianity, didn’t forbid charging interest on money, giving Jews an advantage there. The more enterprising, prosperous Jews produced larger families while the less-gifted reproduced at a lower rate and many drifted away from Judaism altogether. Jewish success today in business and the professions came about through the phenomenon of natural selection, survival of the fittest, if you will. On the other hand, Sephardic Jews of Iberian and Middle-Eastern origins test about like the rest of us for IQ.

The horrible, inhuman conditions aboard the African slave ships and the harsh conditions on many Southern plantations tended to eliminate physically weaker African involuntary immigrants from the gene pool; only the strongest survived. Earlier, on the plains of Africa, the lions and other big cats had a name for humans who were slow afoot —“dinner.”

If fundamentalists and other members of the Flat Earth Society need further evidence of evolution and natural selection, let them consider the alarming development of medicine-resistant bacteria in our hospitals and clinics. This comes from the irresponsible, indiscriminate, wholesale prescribing of antibiotics by the medical profession; the hardiest and probably the most lethal germs survive and reproduce, again, through natural selection.

Evolution is an observable fact, but until recently natural selection has been at least debatable. But British scientists Peter and Rosemary Grant, in detailed research over a period of 25 years, were able to observe and document the actual mechanism of natural selection in their studies in the Galapagos Islands. This is a phenomenon about which Darwin and his successors up until now could only speculate and surmise.

George B. Reed, Jr., Fort Oglethorpe