Ethnic diversity causes lower life expectancy

European countries have longer average life expectancy than the United States, but comparing nearly all-white Europeans to the United States which has a substantial black minority, a race known for its lower life expectancy, then you are comparing apples to a mixture of apples and oranges. It's a meaningless comparision.

That's what yesterday's NY Times article hints at, mentioning the words "ethnic diversity" but is afraid to say more plainly.

* * *

A commenter linked to a blog post with a chart of U.S. life expectancy by sex and race. Relative life expectancy between races is very similar to relative IQ between races, with Asians having the longest life expectancy and blacks having the shortest life expectancy.

It's too bad that there's not a special entry for Ashkenazi Jews--does their higher IQ lead to higher life expectancy, or do they have the same life expectancy as other Europeans?

* * *

SURVIVOR BIAS

OK, the linked chart seems to say that "Latinos" have higher life expectancy than whites. How can that be? It's obviously a survivor bias (a problem which pollutes a lot of statistics). Because Latinos are disproportionately immigrants, deaths at a young age are not being recorded because they take place in a foreign country.

Immigrants need to be excluded from these statistics in order for them to be accurate.

Comments

[ironrailsironweights.wordpress.com]

You're reading too much into a passing reference to ethnic diversity. The article makes it clear that higher past smoking rates are the main reason for America's lower life expectancy.

Peter

[Pamela N Red]

I disagree. There have been many studies done showing that diversity improves genes due to watering down any family defects.

Go back a few generations and Europe was very unhealthy due to inbreeding a practice that was not only accepted but encouraged to keep the money in the family.

There are a lot of Europeans mixed with Asian and Indian people so to say they are purebred is bogus.

I think America's health issues have more to do with obesity than anything else. We have all the good food from every country and some don't know when to push away from the table.

[Tino]

Yes, but non-Hispanic whites also live shorter than Europeans. (Asians in the US live longer than even the Japanese, so I guess that is a counterargument against the medical system being worse). Blacks reduce white life expectancy through the high murder rate, but I have never seen any estimate of how much.

Life style, rather than medical system, seems to be driving the differences. Mormons live 7 year longer than non-Mormons in Utah, which dwarfs the 1-2 year difference between American whites and Europeans.

[Buckaroo]

I am glad to see that someone is taking a much needed whack at the "life expectancy at birth" as the end-all measure of health care quality. The article itself is a bit thin on the specifics, though, and not just because it only vaguely gestures at "ethnic diversity" (hey, I thought this was supposed to be our stength; it's so hard to keep up).

A few possible non-health-care-related reasons that immediately come to mind:
1) much higher murder rates in the US; these are obviously concentrated among the young so that's a bunch of small numbers going into the numerator
2) more miles-per-person driven thus increasing traffic deaths (even if per-person-mile deaths aren't especially high; I don't know the exact numbers)
3) different job mix that could have more industrial accident-prone positions in the US (again, this is just speculation)

Another area to look into are environmental factors like water quality and air pollution although I don't readily see why Europe should have an advantage there since it's so much denser. Well, the French do get most of their electricity from nuke plants so that cuts down on sulfurous compounds coming from coal so that's something.

[sabril]

Anyway, even liberals are aware of this issue when it suits their purposes. For example, if you are arguing with a liberal about gun control and you compare New Hampshire and New Jersey, they will be quick to tell you it's not a fair comparison because of the racial makeup of these areas.

[The Engineer]

Americans of Scandanavian descent live longer and are far richer than Scandanavians of Scandanavian descent. That tells you all you need to know about everything.

[Wade Nichols]

Along a similar line of reasoning, but unlike the NY Times, Steve Sailer spoke the unpleasant truth in his article on "Bowling For Columbine" in reference to gun control:

"For example, metropolitan Liberals support gun control for a hard-headed reason: to disarm the dangerous urban minorities who threaten them. But liberals hardly want to admit that, even to themselves, so they flocked to Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine,” a minstrel show about scary white rural gun nuts and the evil corporations that profit off them.

In “Columbine,” Moore did ask one interesting question: how come Canada has many guns but few murders? Moore stared into the abyss of political incorrectness at the obvious answer—Canada is only 3 percent black and Hispanic—and blinked. It’s so much safer blaming tacky K-Mart for selling bullets."

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2004/aug/02/00029/

Where's Robert Putnam when you need him? Maybe he could conduct a study of health care, and then squirm and self-flagellate himself for a couple months before releasing his results!

But we all know that such a study would simply trumpet the usual reasons for lower black life expectancy - poor diets due to racism, stress due to racism, poor health care due to racism, lack of fresh fruit and vegetables due to racism, overpriced grocery stores due to racism, unsafe neighborhoods due to racism, racist front desk staff at the health club, white people hogging the treadmills, etc. etc.

[HDI]

See

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/04/us-human-development-indices.html

for life expectancies by ethnic group.

As far as I understand white Americans are not behind Europeans; Americans only lag when you average everything together.

[ironrailsironweights.wordpress.com]

"It's too bad that there's not a special entry for Ashkenazi Jews--does their higher IQ lead to higher life expectancy, or do they have the same life expectancy as other Europeans?"

It's my understanding that they have particularly high rates for several genetic conditions. That might limit life expectancy.

Peter

[eh]

[It's a meaningless comparision.]

Perhaps it is similar for crime rates. Europeans often cite the US as especially violent, but I imagine that if you exclude Blacks -- e.g. black males are less than 10% of the US population but commit over 50% of all murders -- then the crime rate here would problably be comparable to most European countries.

[zuwr]

"It's too bad that there's not a special entry for Ashkenazi Jews--does their higher IQ lead to higher life expectancy, or do they have the same life expectancy as other Europeans?"

Isn't body size inversely correlated with life expectancy?

"Measurements of Jews have been taken sporadically in most European countries with the following results: The average height of Jews is 162.1 cm.; span of arms, 169.1 cm.; and girth around the chest, about 81 cm.: so that they are the shortest and narrowest of Europeans." from here:
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1573&letter=A

[sabril]

Warren Meyer had an interesting post on this issue.

It seems that if you take out deaths due to homicide and car crashes, the US has a higher life expectancy that any European country.

I will try to find a link if anyone is curious.

[Brandon Berg]

I see from the linked chart that Latinos in the US have a longer life expectancy than every European country except Andorra. Given that Latinos have the lowest rates of health insurance of any major ethnic group in the US, those who would attribute the US's low life expectancy to health care have some explaining to do.

Also of note is that Asian Americans live four years longer, on average, than the Japanese.

[JL]

"Relative life expectancy between races is very similar to relative IQ between races"

Except that Hispanics live longer than whites.

[HS: No, if you clicked through the link, you would see that whites live longer than "Latinos."]

[MaryJ]

1) much higher murder rates in the US;
------------------------------
The US life expectancy rates DO include homicide rates, while many other countries do not count homicides in their life expectancy figures. I would be interested in seeing what our life expectancy rates look like if homicides were stripped out.

The Centers for Disease Control announced only a couple of months ago that U.S. life expectancy rates have improved by a significant amount since 1997; if our healthcare system is so bad, why are we seeing improvement?

[HS: I would guess that nearly all of the increased life expectancy in recent years is from higher survival rates from cancer and heart disease. (In other words, same percentage of people getting these diseases, but less chance of dying from them.)

Does anyone know differently?]

[MaryJ]

Here's the press release from the CDC, dated August 19 of this year.

http://www.cdc.gov/media/pressrel/2009/r090819.htm

Life expectancy in the U.S. has improved by 1.4 years since 1997 -- this seems like rather a lot of improvement in only 12 years.

The press release also makes clear that the CDC counts both homicides and death from accidents in their life expectancy calculations. Do other nations count both homicides and accidents in their calculations? I know from studying this issue that many countries do not count homicides; I wonder if they exclude accidents as well?

Regardless, it's obvious that the comparative life expectancy figure is being manipulated to push the nationalized healthcare debate.

[dearieme]

The attmepts I've seen that purport to explain American life expectancy seem more like attempts to explain it away. It does seem remarkably pointless, since, except for the Japanese, the advanced nations are clustered pretty close together - close enough for minor discrepancies in definition and data-gathering to account for a fair part of the differences.

[MrLomez]

"Blacks reduce white life expectancy through the high murder rate."

B.S. Blacks don't kill whites. Blacks kill blacks.

Say what you will about violence in the black community, but remember that it takes place almost entirely within homogeneous black ghettos. The only whites who get killed by blacks are drug dealers/addicts. The VERY rare carjacking, notwithstanding.

[Tino]

"Americans of Scandanavian descent live longer"

Do you have any source for this? I know the 3 highest states are Hawaii (asians, no crime), Minnestoa and Utah. But I have never seem figures based on ancestory.

[amir]

I don't know about Ashkenazi Jews, but Israel has among the highest life expectancies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
But only average intelligence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations

[HS: Interesting chart. Israel, however, has three different demographic groups, in probabable declining order of life expectancy: Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Arabs.]

[Tino]

16% of whites are murdered by blacks, so it's not nothing (and white on white murders include hispanic on non-hispanic white).

[JL]

"HS: No, if you clicked through the link, you would see that whites live longer than "Latinos.""

Nope. From Steve Hsu's post:

White males: 75.7
White females: 80.7
Latino females: 85.0
Latino males: 79.1

[HS: Obviously a survivor bias, because Hispanics are immigratns.]

[Linda]

I started thinking about racial differences in life expectancy when Michael Jackson sadly died at the young age of 50. No matter how famous you are, at the end of the day we're all just another racial statistic.

[M Stein]

Testosterone could be a factor. This could also partly explain the gender life expectancy gap.

Asians have lower levels on average than whites, who have lower levels than blacks.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3455741

[Chi]

Intelligence may be linked to a general fitness factor.

Arden, R., Gottfredson, L. S., & Miller, G. (in press). Does a fitness factor contribute to the association between intelligence and health outcomes? Evidence from medical abnormality counts among 3,654 US veterans. Intelligence.

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009fitness.pdf

Pierce, A., Miller, G, Arden, R., & Gottfredson, L. S. (in press) Why is intelligence correlated with semen quality? Biochemical pathways common to sperm and neuron function, and their vulnerability to pleiotropic mutations, Communicative & Integrative Biology, 2(5). (Sept/Oct 2009)
http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/cib/article/8716

[Melykin]

"In “Columbine,” Moore did ask one interesting question: how come Canada has many guns but few murders? Moore stared into the abyss of political incorrectness at the obvious answer—Canada is only 3 percent black and Hispanic"

----------------------

3% black and hispanic, PLUS about 4% aboriginal. However, I don't think the aboriginals are much into shooting each other. They seem to go in more for stabbing each other with knives or broken bottles in drunken brawls. In any case, they certainly bring down the average life expectancy in Canada. They have a tragic inclination to drink.

I notice that a lot of the posts here are defensive of the American health care system. Well how do you think people in Canada feel when Americans hold up Canada's health care system as a pariah? The fact is Americans, Canadians and Europeans all get pretty good health care. Its just that people in Canada and Europe don't have to go bankrupt to get it.

[WBC]

Hispanics have a pretty high life expectancy in the U.S.

[Zeenon]

@HS I don't know what chart you're looking at but Latinos have longer life expectancies than Whites.

Latinos | Whites
Males: 79.1 | 75.7
Females: 85 | 80.7

[OneSTDV]

Your title is misleading, though your summary of the article is correct.

Ethnic diversity, having lots of different races together, doesn't cause lower life expectancy. For example, a group comprised of Europeans and Asians will not have a "lower" life expectancy due to their being together.

But the comparison between Erope and Ameirca is not apt due to HBD.

[Blanc]

-The only whites who get killed by blacks are drug dealers/addicts.-

Yeah, except for kids in Wichita, Knoxville, those cops in NYC, etc...

[D]

Are you sure the life expectancy difference/IQ correlation is still significant after controlling for SES? What do you think is a more likely determinant here? THe idea that a liberal always trumpets racism as the reason for everything is ridiculous. What's more likely, that "intelligence" somehow causes people to live longer? Or that having more money and as a result a better diet and access to health care does?

[Behrstrahlung]

B.S. Blacks don't kill whites. Blacks kill blacks.

B.S. to you, blacks mostly kill other blacks but they kill a healthy percentage of whites too, enough to drive the white death by homicide rate up

[RT]

It would appear that race, homicide and auto accidents account for a lot of the US-European disparity in life expectancy.

http://www.aei.org/docLib/20061017_OhsfeldtSchneiderPresentation.pdf

Also, Lomez, blacks DO kill a lot of non-blacks:

http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.pdf

Apparently, 45% of violent crimes by blacks have a white victim, 43% a black victim, and 10% an Hispanic victim.

[Jack]

Interestingly, although Blacks on average have shorter life expectancies that Whites, this differnce disappears at the very oldest ages, with Blacks being somewhat overrepresented among centenarians. (According to the 2000 census, in 2000 Blacks made up 8% of the U.S. 65+ population, 7% of the 80-84 age cohort, but 14% of 100+ population).

[Imposter John]

HS, how is it that you of all people do not have La Griffe Du Lion in your blogroll?

[HS: He doesn't have a regularly updated blog.]

[M Stein]

Mark Wetham posted a paper that theorized the higher than expected Hispanic life expectancy was due to the CHRM2 gene which is found in both East Asian and Hispanic populations at a higher rate than in Caucasian or African populations.

http://congenialtimes.blogspot.com/2009/04/study-on-chrm2-race-health-and-iq.htm

[Linda]

"Are you sure the life expectancy difference/IQ correlation is still significant after controlling for SES? What do you think is a more likely determinant here? THe idea that a liberal always trumpets racism as the reason for everything is ridiculous. What's more likely, that "intelligence" somehow causes people to live longer? Or that having more money and as a result a better diet and access to health care does?"

I think intelligence is a big factor in life span. It takes brains to stay alive for a long time. To go decade after decade without making a life-ending mistake takes good judgement, quick thinking & the ability to think longterm. Intelligence is the ability to problem solve & the most important problem we solve is how to stay alive. There's also been studies showing low IQ people are more likely to get into car accidents.

And if IQ is low, high SES can actually cause you to die younger because you spend the money on dangerous drugs delivered by money hungry doctors.

[HS: I believe that genetic factors could have a stronger influence on life expectancy than SES, within reason. (If someone's SES is so low they are living on the streets, that could lower life expectancy.)]

[Linda]

"[HS: I believe that genetic factors could have a stronger influence on life expectancy than SES, within reason. (If someone's SES is so low they are living on the streets, that could lower life expectancy.)]"

I agree. But I also think that there's more to the racial gap in life span just IQ or SES. According to Rushton, blacks are the oldest race on Earth & thus follow an ancient r reproductive strategy (high reproductive output, low parental care) while East Asians are recently evolved & follow the K reproductive strategy (low reproductive output, high parental care). According to Rushthon, Blacks learn to walker younger, reach puperty faster, have sex sooner & more frequently & die younger. East Asians by contrast learn to walk older, reach puberty later, have sex later & less, & die older. K strategits have a slower life cycle and live longer than r strategists. This is seen all over the animal kingdom, but Rushton was the first to so brilliantly apply this theory to humans & deserves a Nobel prize for this.

According to Rushton, virtually all of the racial differences (from intelligence to sexual anatomy to life span tp personality & social order) can be parsimoniously explained by the r/K dimenionsion which is rooted in the time period when each of the three major races branched off of the main trunk of the human evolutionary tree: Negroids nearly 200,000 years ago, Caucasoids nearly 100,000 years ago, and mongoloids, about 40,000 years ago.

[Linda]

"Interestingly, although Blacks on average have shorter life expectancies that Whites, this differnce disappears at the very oldest ages, with Blacks being somewhat overrepresented among centenarians. (According to the 2000 census, in 2000 Blacks made up 8% of the U.S. 65+ population, 7% of the 80-84 age cohort, but 14% of 100+ population)."

If you slice the data enough ways you're eventually going to find anomalies. It's called data mining. Has the oldest living person in the world ever been a black person?

[HDI]

IQ and longevity

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/11/iq-and-longevity.html

Note these results are within a Scottish population, so genetic differences between Europeans and Native Americans or Asians (e.g., CHRM) would not show up.

Nature: Ten years ago, on 16 October 1998, I presented findings that people from Aberdeen with higher childhood IQs — measured at age 11 in the Scottish Mental Survey of 1932 — were significantly more likely to survive to age 76. It was at a psychology seminar at Glasgow Caledonian University, UK. For one audience member, the finding did not go down well. "So, you're saying that the thick die quick?" It was not a point of clarification; it was an accusation. The temperature in the room rose as the questioner railed against a result he found insulting and wanted to invalidate. Hadn't intelligence tests been discredited?

... it has since been shown that childhood social class does not account for the association between childhood intelligence and later mortality [3].

Intelligence can predict mortality more strongly than body mass index, total cholesterol, blood pressure or blood glucose, and at a similar level to smoking [4].

[Galtonian]

The paper that attempts to link CHRM2 gene variation to ethnic and social class differences in mortality is called "Cognitive epidemiology of ethnic health and the CHRM2 vagal vigour hypothesis."

The pdf is Available from Nature Precedings at this link:

http://precedings.nature.com/documents/2862/version/1

Data presented in the Supplementary Figures within the pdf show how mortality due to particular diseases (ischemic heart disease, stroke, hypertension, COPD/emphysema, lung cancer etc.) is strongly correlated with IQ, especially in whites and blacks. The paper also shows data (see Supplementary figure 5) for external causes such as accidents, homicide, and suicide.

CHRM2 gene variation has been linked to IQ, vagal nerve signaling, and substance abuse. The vagus nerve is a natural mind-body health link because the vagus nerve has a potent anti-inflammatory effect on the body and inflammation has been linked to atherosclerosis and cancer.

[Jack]

"If you slice the data enough ways you're eventually going to find anomalies. It's called data mining. Has the oldest living person in the world ever been a black person?"

I do not know if the oldest living person in the word has ever been black, but the larger than expected number of black centenarians is not an anomaly. Blacks have shorter life expectancies than whites until about age 85, after which the trend reverses, with blacks comprising an increasing share of each age cohort after that point. In the U.S., this tendency holds up nationwide, and has done so at least since the 1980 census (I haven't read anything about the data before then). Thomas T. Perls, director of the New England Centenarian Study, has hypothesized that a larger percentage of blacks possess genes that lead to unusually long lives.

[Linda]

Actually Jack, I did a bit of research and the oldest known living person in the world, until just a couple weeks ago was indeed black. However when this person died on Sept 11, 2009, an East Asian (Japanese) took her place. And the oldest known man to ever live was also East Asian, though the oldest known person to ever live was a white woman. Rushton seems to confirm what you say about the black death rate decreasing at high ages though he focuses on the overall death rate across all ages. It sounds like black life span has a lower mean but a higher SD.

But there could also be a survivor bias confounding the data. For example how do we know if blacks are overrepresented among the super old unless we know how many black fetuses were concieved in the first place. It could be that the population of black fetuses was originally very large, but because of higher rates of miscarriages & infant deaths, the blacks that get counted in the census of a given country are only the survivors & thus are more durable (longevity genes) for this reason alone. Of course in every race, only those who survive long enough to be born (& leave the hospital) get counted in the census, but since races differ in miscarriage & infant mortality rates, this could bias the data.

[WBC]

Half Sigma, Mexico has a life expectancy of 76. This despite the much lower standard of living and much poorer healthcare system. It's not implausible to me that U.S. Hispanics could outlive whites.

A study in the International Journal of Epidemiology found that native born Hispanic men had a life expectancy of 75.2 and native born Hispanic women had a life expectancy of 82. Native born white men lived to 74.8 and native born white women lived to 79.9. This study was conducted in 1999-2001, so I expect life expectancies may have increased slightly since then.

[James B. Shearer]

"OK, the linked chart seems to say that "Latinos" have higher life expectancy than whites. How can that be? ..."

Better genes (in this respect). You know HBD. Or maybe it's cultural. But the "Hispanic Paradox" ( http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/news/2009/7/7/the_hispanic_paradox_us_hispanics_live.htm ) is well known.

[Brandon Berg]

Your "survivor bias" hypothesis doesn't work, because of the way life expectancy is calculated. The way they do it is calculate the death rates in the current year for each one-year age bracket, and then determine how long the median person would live given those death rates. So let's say the death rates for each age are as follows (obviously these numbers don't make sense for humans, but I'm not typing out a 100-row table):

0: 5%
1: 10%
2: 10%
3: 10%
4: 15%
5: 20%
6: 30%
7: 40%
8: 50%
9: 80%
10: 100%

So a hypothetical weasel (or whatever) has these odds of living to each age:
1: 95%
2: 86%
3: 77%
4: 69%
5: 59%
6: 47%
7: 33%
8: 20%
9: 10%
10: 2%

A weasel's life expectancy, then, would be a bit less than 6 years. The survivor bias you hypothesize doesn't come into play here because it doesn't affect the death rates for young people living in the US, which is all that really matters for purposes of calculating life expectancy.

However, there is another potential source of bias, which is that sickly people probably don't immigrate much, so the people who do immigrate are disproportionately healthy and have lower death rates. It's also been hypothesized that terminally ill Mexicans tend to go back to Mexico to die. I would expect that Mexican immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, tend to drive less (and are thus less likely to be killed in auto accidents).

[Linda]

Actually it makes sense that Lations live longer if you consider they are part Native American, and Native Americans are arguabley mongoloid, which Rushton ranks as the most advanced race with the slowest life cycle. The real mystery is not the long life span of a group that is arguabley part mongoloid; the real paradox is their low IQ scores. From the Rushtonian perspective, a mongoloid related population should have high IQ's.

[Muff]

Some comments about Latinos:

1) Puerto Rico, despite being substantially poorer than even the poorest state in the nation, has a higher life expectancy than the US average. This cannot being due to the survivors' effect. Furthermore, Puerto Rico has a large gender gap in life expectancy compared to the USA, which suggests lifestyle factors are at play.
2) Take a look at a list of countries ranked by per capita income, and then compare it to a list of countries ranked by life expectancy. You'll find that Latin American countries tend to over-perform in life expectancy -- namely, their life expectancies are higher than what you'd expect based on their per capita income. Just look at Mexico, as WBC noted. Costa Rica and Chile, both wealthy by Latin American standards but poor by American standards, have life expectancies on par with the USA. Hence, it's not entirely surprising that Latino Americans would have a life expectancy higher than the USA average.
3) Since Latinos are poorer and lack health insurance, one would expect their infant morality rate to be higher than the Anglo average (just like the black infant mortality rate is drastically higher). However, the Latino infant mortality rate is virtually the same as the Anglo white rate. This is yet another health measure in which Latinos over-perform, and I don't think this can be attributed to the survivor effect.

[Peter A]

I find it odd that HS seems to think "life expectancy" correlates with intelligence - there's no reason it should. Russian whites by and large strike me as smarter than American whites - but they certainly don't live as long. People from the Caucus mountains live very long life spans, and culturally have never really amounted to much. Why couldn't Latinos live longer than whites? Maybe they do, maybe they don't. There's really no moral or cultural superiority inherent in a longer lifespan so this strikes me as a fairly trivial issue.

[WBC]

Yes, Linda. Mongoloids are the "most advanced race". Which is why Mongolia is a first world country and has a high life expectancy.

Sri Lanka is an interesting case also. It's a poor third world country without much of a healthcare system, and decades long civil war between the ethnic Tamil minority and Sinhalese majority, and it enjoys an expectancy of 75.

[M Stein]

" Peter A wrote,
I find it odd that HS seems to think "life expectancy" correlates with intelligence - there's no reason it should."

See the papers above by Gottfredson, Miller & co. Also look up some of the work by Ian Deary. There is a lot research showing such a correlation.

[sabril]

"Maybe they do, maybe they don't. There's really no moral or cultural superiority inherent in a longer lifespan so this strikes me as a fairly trivial issue."

I agree. I think part of the problem is that HBDers want to fit everything into Rushton's paradigm where all measurable attributes fall on a continuum with Orientals on one end; blacks on the other end; and caucasians in the middle.

However, it would not suprise me to learn that this is an oversimplification. For example, it seems that caucasians come out on top in upper body strength.

[hellothere]

it seems that caucasians come out on top in upper body strength.

Seems to be Polynesians. And East Asian musculoskeletal build lends itself to fighting.

[Jim J Thorper]

She was probably talking about people with Down's syndrome not Asians. Google "corky" and "fight the power" to see what I'm talking about.

[PointMan724]

Correlation does not equal causation.