X-Men: First Class
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
Starring…
James McAvoy (Prof. Charles Xavier)
Michael Fassbender (Magneto)
Kevin Bacon (Sebastian Shaw)
January Jones (Emma Frost)
Rose Byrne (Moira MacTaggert)
Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique)
[Spoilers ahead, you have been warned]
Another weekend, another superhero movie. No magic hammers or wishing rings in this one. Instead, there are mutants, Soviets, and Kevin Bacon. The story is a jumble of three loosely related plots: the origin story of Prof. Xavier and the X-Men, the efforts by Xavier and company to foil Sebastian Shaw’s genocidal plans, and (by far the best storyline) Magneto’s quest for vengeance against Shaw (a Nazi collaborator). All that, plus a sexist homage to the Forgetfulness Kiss from Superman 2.
I’ll note that X-Men: First Class (XMFC) was better than Thor, though that’s setting the bar fairly low. And it was better than X-men Last Stand, though that’s setting the bar so low one has to be careful not to trip over it. Thor had a tedious moral about humility, but at the end of the day the movie was about nothing more complicated than Chris Hemsworth’s abs. XMFC is a movie that wants to express an opinion on important topics, including vengeance, intolerance, and minority rights. Like the comic it was based on, XMFC explores these topics through metaphor, but the results leave much to be desired.
Since it’s introduction, the X-Men comic has relied upon metaphor to imbue the concept of mutants with social relevance. In the early 60’s, the X-Men were a metaphor for the civil rights movement. Mutants were “hated and feared” by the rest of the world, but the X-Men fought to protect humanity and demonstrate that mutants could be loyal, tax-paying citizens. Mutants were black people … except that all the mutants were white. The comic celebrated tolerance, equality, and the loftier goals of the civil rights movement, but without ever acknowledging the movement’s existence. I’ll revisit this problem below.
Over the course of the 80’s and 90’s, the mutant metaphor shifted from race to queerness (this change was most evident in the Legacy Virus storyline, an HIV-like disease that only targeted mutants). The change may have been driven in part by a genuine commitment to LGBT rights, even at a time when public hostility to queerness was overt and widespread. But the shift was also necessitated by the success of the civil rights movement. In popular media, black characters were no longer relegated to the role of servant or comic relief. Even in the backwoods that is superhero comics, black heroes were becoming more numerous and prominent. The most prominent of all was the X-Men’s Storm, who led the team for nearly a decade. In a world with black heroes, addressing race issues primarily through metaphor is difficult to justify.*
The X-Men have always been a metaphor for teen alienation. While all teenagers occasionally feel hated or oppressed, most comic readers are nerds (also, geeks, dweebs, and dorks) who feel especially awkward and unappreciated. So what better escapist fantasy than a world where all the misfits have superpowers that they use to save the world? Plus, they get to hang out with their fellow (improbably attractive) misfits at a posh school called Hogwarts Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. The makers of XMFC clearly understood the teen alienation metaphor, which was why all the mutants bitched and moaned about being freaks and outcasts. Then they went to the School for Gifted Youngsters, and they suddenly realized that they’re young, beautiful, and have awesome superpowers.
Yet for a film that’s set in the 60’s, there were surprisingly few references to the civil rights movement. Perhaps acknowledging the African American struggle for equal rights would raise too many questions, such as how would the emergence of a superhuman race affect relations between normal blacks and whites? Would race relations improve when faced with a common evolutionary threat? Or would ancient prejudices persist even within the mutant community? These are interesting questions to explore, but that would require a very different kind of movie (one where fewer things blow up).**
While it largely ignores race, XMFC takes full advantage of the queerness metaphor. Because mutants are hated and feared, they must find ways to blend in with the “norms,” though they do so only by denying who they truly are. Mystique’s character arc is largely an “out and proud” storyline. As a shapeshifter, she can easily blend in, but only by constantly hiding her natural, blue form. By the end of the film, she’s embraced her gorgeous blue self. There’s also a moment where Prof. Xavier accidentally “outs” another mutant who works for the CIA, which leads to a humorous dig at “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” And there’s an obvious overlap of the queerness metaphor with the teen metaphor. After all, what subset of teens feels more hated and misunderstood than those struggling with their sexual identity?
But metaphor only goes so far. As I mentioned above, the X-Men comic largely abandoned the civil rights metaphor as broader cultural attitudes changed and black characters entered the mainstream. Similarly, attitudes regarding the LGBT community have changed enormously over the past few decades. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” will (probably, eventually, hopefully?) be repealed, and a majority of Americans now support gay marriage. So instead of veiled references to queerness, why not include an actual queer character in the ensemble cast? Hell, the film could have gone the safe route by including a lipstick lesbian. Not exactly freaking out the norms, but it’s better than nothing. I’ll also point out that filmmakers can’t fall back on the excuse that the source material gives them nothing to work with. There are at least a handful of queer X-Men that I can name off the top of my head. Why not use Northstar? He’s gay … and Canadian! Who doesn’t like Canadians? But just as blacks were nonexistent in the early X-Men comics, so queers are nonexistent in XMFC. In all likelihood queer characters were excluded because of the fear that a sizable minority of consumers would refuse to see a movie that promoted “alternative lifestyles.” So the (presumably liberal) filmmakers expressed their support for LGBT rights, but only in a way that wouldn’t hurt profits. Using the mutant-as-queer metaphor seems less a subversive or daring act than a cowardly one.
X-Men: First Class reveals the limits of political expression in the current crop of big, summer blockbusters. Movies can toy with political views, but even the least controversial opinions must be expressed in a vague or indirect manner. It’s far safer, and more profitable, to pretend that you have no opinion at all.
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* There are thoughtful ways to use the mutant-as-minority race metaphor in the 21st century, and Grant Morrison did so during his X-Men run. But it requires an intelligent writer with an appreciation for how racial identity and race relations have evolved since the 60s.
** Even if the metaphor was present, it’s hard to overlook that, of the two mutants of color, one gets killed and the other goes evil. Celebrating racial equality in the abstract doesn’t mean much when characters of color are still thrown under the bus.
Nice post, I hadn’t thought about the evolution of X-Men’s topicality or how this movie approached that. The civil-rights vs. queer dichotomy is an interesting one.
Just on a basic cinematic level, I thought the imagery felt very stale and recycled. The opening at the Concentration camp is basically lifted directly out of the last movie and seems like a cut-n-paste of the standard tragic-separation movie imagery, way to open the movie with some of the most dead and hackneyed images possible! The “period” setting adds very little new or fresh. Still more entertaining than the original (60’s) comics which were some of the most boring that I’ve read from that period.
I wondered why the X-Men box office take was flatter than expectations over the opening weekend until I went and saw it Monday night.
One can wax philosophically all day long about how the film’s metaphors are spot-on and contemporary, blah, blah blah, but that’s exactly why the film is not meeting expectations: It beats you over the head with its messages until you fall to your knees, and then it beats you over the head some more.
X-Men was preachier than any sermon I’ve ever attended, and unlike a sermon, which generally last only an hour, X-Men made you sit there twice as long.
Look carefully at the box office numbers for opening weekend. For most good films, Saturday’s take is stronger than Friday’s, and Sunday’s usually drops a bit, but generally only back down to about the Friday numbers.
By contrast, X-Men’s numbers were $21 million, $19 million and $13 million respectively for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. This probably indicates that word-of-mouth for X-Men was not good.
The bottom line: Nobody likes a long-winded preacher.
ave – I agree about the 60s comic. It truly is remarkably boring. It’s hard to believe it turned into a sales juggernaut (albeit, with a lot of re-jiggering).
Maheras – I really don’t think the film is at all preachy. It’s still mostly explosions and superpowers and teen angst. There’s a lot of talk about the morality of vengeance, I suppose. But it didn’t seem as preachy or as pretentious as Dark Knight, and that made a gazillion dollars.
Maybe it just didn’t click with people. Maybe it needed more Wolverine. He is the big star of the X-Men franchise, after all.
Great review. I guess the only possibly devil’s advocate argument I can toss out is that Mystique is bisexual in the comics (I don’t know if it’s ever been explicitly stated, but it’s pretty obvious regarding her long relationship with Destiny). But a viewer’d only know that if they’d read the comics (and the comics from the 80s, natch), so yeah, basically what I’m saying is that I think you’re right.
The only thing I’d add is that they not only completely avoided the Civil Rights Movement in the movie — they also sidelined their black characters rather quickly, and wound up with an all white team of X-Men by the end of the film. Pretty disappointing.
When did the civil rights stuff take hold? My memory is that it doesn’t really appear in the original Kirby comics…did it come from Roy Thomas, or was it not until Chris Claremont?
I have to disagree with you, Jones. The civil rights metaphor has been around since the very beginning. It just has never been explored thoroughly or consistently. Roy Thomas wasn’t interested in metaphors, and Claremont was always jumping from one crazy plot thread to another. It’s always there in the background, ready to crop up when a writer needs it.
And it’s there in the early Kirby/Lee comics (especially in the first storyline featuring the Sentinels). A racial minority that’s hated and feared by the majority, but they still strive for equality and justice? That sounds like an idealized vision of the black civil rights movement to me.
Fair enough; I was only thinking of the first 10 or so that are fully drawn, not just laid out, by Kirby. The Sentinels are a bit later than that although, since he did lay-outs, I assume Kirby probably did plot and character design for them too.
IIRC, in those first issues mutants are feared only to the extent that all the other super-heroes like Spiderman, the Thing or–especially–the Hulk are: i.e. because they’re really f-ing dangerous. By and large the general public don’t seem to freak out about mutants in those first issues more than they do about other superpowered types in other Marvel comics of the same vintage. Magneto comes off as just another ranting megalomaniac in the vein of Red Skull/Dr Doom/et al. And ProfX has a close and friendly relationship with the US govt and military, who seem happy to cooperate with the X-Men.
My impression of those first issues is that the initial concept was basically super-hero high, complete with school uniforms.
“There are thoughtful ways to use the mutant-as-minority race metaphor in the 21st century, and Grant Morrison did so during his X-Men run.”
Did he? I remember Morrison saying that mutants were a metaphor for the type of people who read X-men comics. I don’t remember a particularly strong racial element to his X-men book. Morrison likes to mix his metaphors, so I certainly wouldn’t say there was absolutely no racial element to New X-men, but I think it’s basically a misreading to summarize his take on mutants as being a metaphor for race. Morrison’s mutants are basically people engaged in an experimental utopian/ progressive society.
Jones – I think the superhero high is certainly the main focus of the stories. I still think the mutant-as-race metaphor is there. I’ll concede it wasn’t a very deep metaphor, and it wasn’t explored in any detail by Kirby, Lee, et al.
pallas – I think you’re right that the mutants represent a progressive society (or as Morrison would put it, an evolution of human society). I was writing off the cuff, which is why I put that thought it footnotes, but I should have elaborated further.
I think Morrison’s race metaphor is very obvious in the relations between Xavier, Magneto, and the new generation of mutants. Xavier represents assimilation into the (white) mainstream, Magneto is a separatist/terrorist. But the younger mutants say no thank you to both, they want equal rights and all that, but they also want to be a distinct sub-culture in America. This strikes me as the story of racial identity and acceptance in the United States … and that idea is not unrelated to a pregressive/utopian society. The idea that people can embrace a specific identity (black, gay, Latino, etc.) while still being an American is central to the progressive vision of America.
“I think Morrison’s race metaphor is very obvious in the relations between Xavier, Magneto, and the new generation of mutants. Xavier represents assimilation into the (white) mainstream, Magneto is a separatist/terrorist”
I don’t disagree with this, though I personally tend to look at it more in light of a general generational theme, the young punk saying “I don’t give a crap about what my granddaddy and your granddaddy fought over fifty years ago”
Morrison’s Magneto is basically a caricature and parody of the history of the character, so I never saw it as a particularly serious racial theme. He’s basically senile, and given Austin Powers- esque supervillian gag lines.
When he says lines like “The name is MAGNETO! Eric is the name our oppressors gave me!” that strikes me as a line intended to be very camp and funny. I mean, I know a number of comic fans take some of this absurd shit very seriously, but in between Magneto ranting about reversing the Earth’s polarity when he gets around to it, and his crazy drug addiction induced antics, I took racial references like this as largely intended to be funny gags.
Back a couple of decades, I showed a few copies of the Roy-Thomas-written, Neal-Adams-drawn ’70s X-Men to a casual comics reader. He pretty much floored me when he said it struck him as Nazi propaganda.
But it makes sense. In the comic, they give Mutants the cod nomenclature of ‘Homo Superior’. One Thomas caption compares the encounter of a Mutant with a Human as that between a Cro-Magnon and a Neanderthal.
Until late in the ’80s, under Chris Claremont, the X-Men were a fantasy of racial superiority; Claremont very imperfectly and clumsily patched that over by making Magneto a Jew. (Which is fodder for anti-Semites looking for conspiracy myths, and myths of Jews’ supposed feelings of superiority.)
Nothing new here, of course. It goes back to A.E. Van Voft’s Slans; or even to Bulwer-Lytonn’s ‘Vril: The Power of the Coming Race’ in the 19th century. (That novel also gave your British readers ‘Bovril’.)
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Richard Cook says:
…And it was better than X-men Last Stand, though that’s setting the bar so low one has to be careful not to trip over it.
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I never fail to be amazed at the movies which are “demonized”: Waterworld, Daredevil. You’d think these were utterly atrocious abominations, instead of skillfully done genre fare. (Catwoman, on the other hand… [At least it’s in the “so bad it’s good” zone.])
As for X-Men Last Stand being so widely dissed, was it ’cause the Brian Singer X-movies were such towering, positively Shakespearean works of genius in comparison? Sorry; they were pretty excellent, but not so vastly above Brett Ratner’s turn at bat.
The Significant Other and I had a great time at X-Men: First Class; a fun, entertaining, exciting “popcorn movie.”
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…of the two mutants of color, one gets killed and the other goes evil. Celebrating racial equality in the abstract doesn’t mean much when characters of color are still thrown under the bus.
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Though it’s worth pointing out that the one who got killed died heroically; while his white fellow students were (understandably) shitting their pants in fear of the villain and his murderous assistant, who’d just slaughtered all their guards, he was the only one who tried attacking them, and paid with his life for his courage.
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…I really don’t think the film is at all preachy. It’s still mostly explosions and superpowers and teen angst. There’s a lot of talk about the morality of vengeance, I suppose. But it didn’t seem as preachy or as pretentious as Dark Knight, and that made a gazillion dollars.
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Yup!
Re the, in effect, “it’s not preachy enough” (about gay rights, race, etc.) criticism: wouldn’t making its characters’ “metaphorness” more explicitly stand in for one or the other thus narrow and weaken the metaphor?
By not doing so, the creators enable as many people as possible who feel they don’t “fit in” (they’re more creative or intelligent than the average; see religion or patriotism as hogwash; don’t give a shit about getting rich or sports, etc.) to feel some kinship to the mutants…
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Norb says:
…Claremont very imperfectly and clumsily patched that over by making Magneto a Jew. (Which is fodder for anti-Semites looking for conspiracy myths, and myths of Jews’ supposed feelings of superiority.)
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Why shouldn’t they feel that way? Jews are superior! (At least intellectually.)
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Are Jews Smarter?
Did Jewish intelligence evolve in tandem with Jewish diseases as a result of discrimination in the ghettos of medieval Europe? That’s the premise of a controversial new study that has some preening and others plotzing…
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http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/1478/
Now watch Noah protest: “No, no, we’re a bunch of idiots like everybody else…”
“Jewish Diseases”!??!?
W…T…F…?????????????
Mike, Jews are not smarter than everyone else. Saying they are is a pretty standard part of anti-semitic rhetoric. And one controversial scientific study doesn’t make the claim any less idiotic.
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Norb says:
“Jewish Diseases”!??!?
W…T…F…?????????????
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Um, ever heard how sickle-cell anemia disproportionately targets blacks (10% of them!)? Or…
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Tay–Sachs disease is caused by a genetic mutation on the HEXA gene on chromosome 15. A large number of HEXA mutations have been discovered, and new ones are still being reported. These mutations reach significant frequencies in several populations. French Canadians of southeastern Quebec have a carrier frequency similar to Ashkenazi Jews, but they carry a different mutation. Many Cajuns of southern Louisiana carry the same mutation that is most common in Ashkenazi Jews. Most HEXA mutations are rare, and do not occur in genetically isolated populations. The disease can potentially occur from the inheritance of two unrelated mutations in the HEXA gene.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease
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Because populations differ somewhat in their genetic backgrounds, it is possible that genetic differences could be partly responsible for differences in disease prevalence. For many disorders caused by genetic changes in single genes, these differences are readily apparent. Cystic fibrosis, for example, is seen in about one in 2,500 Europeans but only in one in 90,000 Asians. Sickle-cell disease is much more common in individuals of African and Mediterranean descent than in others, although it is found in lower frequency in many other populations because of migration and intermarriage…
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http://www.nchpeg.org/nutrition/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=463&tmpl=component
To the Japanese, Americans smell bad. As it turns out, it isn’t just racism at work:
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Body odor is largely influenced by major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules. These are genetically determined and play an important role in immunity of the organism…
One study suggests that body odor is genetically determined by a gene that also codes the type of earwax one has. East Asians (those of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese descent) have the type of sweat glands that even after hitting puberty still don’t produce the chemicals found in the perspiration of other ancestral groups. East Asians evidently have a greater chance of having the ‘dry’ earwax type and reduced axial sweating and odor. This may be due to adaptation to colder climates….
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_odor
And let’s not be “breedist” by saying that German Shepherds are more prey to hip dysplasia; dismiss all to be found at “Breed Predisposition to Disease and Congenital Conditions”: http://www.petdoc.ws/BreedPre.htm .
In limited genetic groups — like European royalty — you can also end up end up with harmless peculiarities like the “Hapsburg lip” becoming more prevalent. On the positive side, look at those groups which live on mountainous areas, where it’s cold and the air is thin: barrel-chested for greater lung capacity, short limbs and digits to conserve body heat. Or…
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Ever wonder how Tibetans can thrive on the roof of the world while the rest of us suffer from altitude sickness just looking at Pike’s Peak?
Scientists think they have the answer. A team of researchers from China, England, Ireland and the United States identified a particular spot within the human genome that is linked to low hemoglobin levels, a variant specific to Tibetans.
The variant is called EPAS1, and it explains why Tibetans can live two miles above sea level without getting sick…
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http://news.discovery.com/human/tibetans-carry-unique-gene-to-combat-mountain-sickness.html
But I guess we must deny that any ethnic group might be genetically predisposed to be particularly vulnerable to some diseases, or to better able to process certain foods, or taller or shorter, because it’d be “racist” to admit it; because right-wing groups might then distort and misapply that info to push their agendas.
“But I guess we must deny that any ethnic group might be genetically predisposed to be particularly vulnerable to some diseases,”
I think you can say this without referring to some diseases as “Jewish diseases.” They don’t actually only affect Jews, so the nomenclature is inaccurate in any case, yes?
Also…there’s a rather large difference between linking genetics to well-defined genetic diseases, and linking it to intelligence, which is pretty ill-defined even as a sociological concept, much less a scientific one.
norb- I remember one of the Thomas/Adams X-Men had a scene where Cyclops calls an Arab a “camel jockey.” He was more than a little racist.
I agree that there has always been an undercurrent of racial superiority in the X-Men (it’s there in spades in the Morrison run too, and it’s the most unpleasant part of his story). Some of this is peculiar to the X-Men, though I think a lot of it comes with the territory in superhero comics, which are, after all, obsessed with power and dominance.
Your point about Magneto’s Jewishness is interesting, but it is worth pointing out that while Clarmont made Magneto a Jew, he also devoted much of X-Men and New Mutants to Magneto’s redemption. I haven’t counted the issues, but I think he spent most of the 1980s as a good guy and a caretaker for the New Mutants. Then he got reset as the villain in the late 80s, then got reset as sort of a good guy, then reset as a villain, ad nauseum.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Mike, Jews are not smarter than everyone else. Saying they are is a pretty standard part of anti-semitic rhetoric. And one controversial scientific study doesn’t make the claim any less idiotic.
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http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/cultureclash.jpg
But personally, I don’t think that Jews are necessarily inherently smarter; I side with those mentioned in the article…
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Most social scientists—and biological scientists, for that matter—would argue that a complex combination of culture, history, and religious tradition has been responsible for the steady, metronomic production of average Jewish geniuses.
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…and give the kudos for creating disproportionately intelligent kids to a culture which disproportionately values learning, and expects high achievement.
Then there are factors affecting intelligence such as nutrition. For centuries, in England it was argued that the “lower classes” were inherently less intelligent, and thus deserved their place. But, once those Lefties pushed for social programs that ensured less-well-off pregnant women and kids would get adequate food, the “intelligence gap” went away! Naturally, then Margaret Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan (the latter arguing for counting ketchup as a vegetable in school lunch programs for poor kids, the better to cut down on the food given them) tried to roll that back…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
[Mike H.] “But I guess we must deny that any ethnic group might be genetically predisposed to be particularly vulnerable to some diseases,”
I think you can say this without referring to some diseases as “Jewish diseases.” They don’t actually only affect Jews, so the nomenclature is inaccurate in any case, yes?
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It’s overly simplistic. Though more handy to use than “diseases which disproportionately affect Jews,” I’d err on the side of clunky, verbose precision. Look at the way AIDS has been referred to as “the gay plague,” thus not only playing into the hands of those who argue that it was a “divine judgment” targeting that group, but making it appear if you weren’t gay, you didn’t have to worry about catching or spreading it.
(The drawback — isn’t there always at least one? — is that instead of focusing medical help/educational efforts on the group(s) mainly afflicted by a disease, the assistance gets widely and less-efficiently diffused.)
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Also…there’s a rather large difference between linking genetics to well-defined genetic diseases, and linking it to intelligence, which is pretty ill-defined even as a sociological concept, much less a scientific one.
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Yes, intelligence is a messy, flexible thing. Tim Kreider’s April 2001 cartoon on the subject: http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/intelligence.jpg .
Still, certain kinds of intelligence and other genetic factors consistently show correlations:
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Scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore say that children who possess extremely high levels of mathematical or verbal ability tend, far more often than children of normal ability, to be left-handed, nearsighted and suffering from asthma or other allergies.
“We’ve identified some biological correlates of intelligence,” says study director Camilla Benbow, who stresses that these factors have not been shown to cause higher intelligence. “We view our [mathematically and verbally] precocious kids as unpredictable products of [genes] and environments.”
From a national sample of over 100,000 children between 12 and 13 years of age, Benbow and colleague Julian Stanley identified and studied 292 youngsters who scored at least 700 out of 800 on the mathematical reasoning section of the Scholastic aptitude Test (SAT) and 165 individuals wno scored at least 630 out of 800 on the verbal section on the SAT (there was some overlap between the two groups). The tests are designed to be taken by high school seniors.
Over 20 percent of the children with the top scores are left-handed or ambidextrous, reported Benbow at a conference on the “Neurobiology of intellectual Giftedness” in New York City last week. This is twice the rate of left-handedness found among the general population of 12- to 13-year-olds. Youngster with the highest SAT scores also are twice as likely to have allergies and four times as likely to be myopic, adds Benbow. Eighty percent of the “precocious” children have at least one of these three characteristics.
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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_v127/ai_3743623/
Don’t ask, don’t tell has been repealed. It made all the papers, as they say. Google the site’s news section using the phrases marines gays, and you’ll see recent stories about DIs getting sensativity training.
I was in Reno this past weekend for the Blackbird Reunion (a gathering of former members of the SR-71 community, and the current/former members of the U-2 community), and we all had a good laugh at how the “modified” SR-71 in the X-Men film had a passenger compartment in the fuselage, complete with rows of passenger windows on each side similar to those found on commercial aircraft. I found myself explaining how the SR-71 has been part of the X-Men continity for decades, citing some examples I’m aware of. The one where I described how Wolverine changed out a damaged SR-71 engine practically all by himself in just a few hours got a good laugh.
Those “milk-digesting mutants”!
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Stone Age Europeans could survive extreme cold, wild animals and disease — but not milk.
Tests on skeletons from Europeans who lived around 5000 BC show they all shared the genetic trait we call “lactose intolerance,” which meant that adults who drank milk would suffer bloating and diarrhea.
But suddenly, that all changed. With the arrival of dairy herds, the gene that lets some adults digest milk became the single greatest key to survival all across Europe, a new study says.
Milk and cheese brought crucial energy and protein that prevented starvation because they remained available even during crop failures, droughts and floods…
“Although the benefits of milk tolerance are not fully understood yet, they probably include: the continuous supply of milk compared to the boom and bust of seasonal crops; its nourishing qualities; and the fact that it’s uncontaminated by parasites, unlike stream water, making it a safer drink,” said biologist Mark Thomas of University College London.
“All in all, the ability to drink milk gave some early Europeans a big survival advantage.
“Our study confirms that the variant of the lactase gene appeared very recently in evolutionary terms and that it became common because it gave its carriers a massive survival advantage.”
The clues to the sudden shift lie in genetics.
Today, more than 90 per cent of northern Europeans can digest milk as adults. That’s a complete rewriting of the genetic blueprint carried by Neolithic peoples of 5000 BC.
The gene that produces lactase (the enzyme that breaks down lactose in milk) was probably a minor little mutation that popped up occasionally in small numbers all along, says genetics expert Earl Brown of the University of Ottawa.
“It would be like the one extra blade on your Swiss Army knife that you never use. It’s just hanging on your belt,” he said. “Then suddenly you need it. And anyone who has that blade has a big evolutionary advantage.” …
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http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=ea1f9046-bf83-41f2-b303-c26a0741fce8&k=46229
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