June 9, 2005

Galton's Theory of Dysgenic Catholic Celibacy:

The publication of the Cochran-Harpending Theory of Ashkenazi Intelligence has stimulated a revival of the popularity of alternative theories tracing back to Sir Francis Galton. Darwin's half-cousin, who coined the term "eugenics," pointed out that since the Catholic Church was the main "career open to talents" in the medieval world, the celibacy rule for priests, monks, and nuns might have lowered the intelligence and morality level of Christian Europe. I have also heard it asserted that Galton pointed out that the Jews practiced the flip side of this by encouraging rabbis to have a large family, but I haven't found proof of that. That particular theory was advanced at least as far back as cyberneticist Norbert Wiener's autobiography.

But is Galton's theory of Christian celibacy, which was only mandatory for priests from 1000 onward, quantitatively plausible? I've never seen an in-depth study. A reader raises doubts bout how how important the effect might have been:

As far as the 'smart boys went to the monastery' theory, birth order is the determining factor in vocations, even into the 20th century. Generally the first son was to inherit the feudal obligations of the father (to work land, fight, etc.). First daughters were to marry others of the same class. It usually was only the third child of either sex that COULD go to the church, so much work was needed and so many children died before adulthood. The Benedictines had no IQ tests to filter their recruits, and even local priests were often illiterate. (Also, they were often fathering children surreptitiously...)


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Remind me again: why do we want the USA to become more like Latin American?

The Washington Post reports:

Hispanic Population in United States Soars

In July 2004, Hispanics numbered 41.3 million out of a national population of nearly 293.7 million. They have the fastest growth rate among the nation's major racial and ethnic groups. In the 1990s, they accounted for 40 percent of the country's population increase. From 2000 to 2004, that figure grew to 49 percent...

The future of those young people has become the topic of a debate among advocates and scholars, with some noting that Hispanics already have lower average education levels than other Americans and that their children could face a future at the bottom...

Experts have predicted the rise of the Hispanic voting bloc for years, but it has not happened. The Census Bureau recently reported that 47 percent of Hispanic citizens voted in last year's presidential election, compared with 60 percent of blacks and 67 percent of non-Hispanic whites. Part of the reason might be that Hispanics are younger and poorer than other voters, factors that are linked to lower turnout. Hispanic voting power also is lessened because millions of them are illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, the AP reports on a new study of millionaires around the world. In most regions, the average millionaire has a little over three million dollars in assets, but in Latin America the average millionaire has over twelve million dollars, almost four times as much.


Millions of Millionaires Trillions in Assets Average in Millions
Asia-Pacific 2.3 $ 7.2 $ 3.1
Mid East 0.3 $ 1.0 $ 3.3
Europe 2.6 $ 8.9 $ 3.4
North America 2.7 $ 9.3 $ 3.4
Africa 0.1 $ 0.7 $ 7.0
Latin America 0.3 $ 3.7 $ 12.3


In other words, while Latin America isn't very rich, the rich in Latin America have more money than God. Why do we want to reproduce Latin American social patterns here?

It used to be that liberals could criticize Latin America for its staggering inequality, but that is largely not allowed anymore because it might reflect on immigration.

You can read about the link between illegal immigration and increased inequality in the US here:

http://www.isteve.com/Inequality-Immigration.htm

where I compare the relatively high levels of inequality in Arizona and New Mexico to the lower levels in the two states directly north of them Utah and Colorado.

And here's a recent column on why California has gotten more unequal as it has gotten more Democratic and more multicultural.

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/041121_ca.htm

Finally, here's a column of pure crimethink on why, after almost 500 years of interethnic marriage in Mexico, is the Mexican elite still so white looking:

http://www.isteve.com/ImportingMexicanInequality.htm
and

http://www.isteve.com/HowLatinoIntermarriageBreedsInequality.htm

I've gotten numerous emails from Mexicans saying that's the first time they've ever seen the basic fact of the their country's social history explained.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 8, 2005

Jewish Telegraph Agency on Ashkenazi Intelligence by Cochran and Harpending

Good article from Jewish Telegraph Agency: The JTA is the venerable Jewish news wire service.

What we've seen so far in the first six days since the Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence genes story broke in The Economist and the New York Times is extremely gingerly handling in the mainstream press combined with more positive response in the explicitly Jewish press. Judging from the Google News search engine, even though Nicholas Wade's NYT report was the most emailed article in the nation's leading newspaper all weekend, only a single other newspaper picked it up. The AP hasn't dared touch it yet, nor have the newsweeklies.

In contrast, the Jewish Telegraph Agency's report is quite balanced:

Study on Ashkenazi genes sparks intrigue, debate - and reflection


By Chanan Tigay

NEW YORK, June 7 (JTA) - A reported link between Ashkenazi intelligence genes and susceptibility to genetic disorders is clearly mixed news for the descendants of Eastern European Jews. It may come as little surprise, then, that reactions to a new study linking the two are a mixed bag as well.

After all, if what the University of Utah researchers say is true, some Jewish mothers may just have had their dreams for brilliant children turned to nightmares.

Beyond that, it may also mean that Ashkenazim have, albeit unwillingly, "been part of an accidental experiment in eugenics," as The Economist magazine put it in a recent article.

"It has brought them some advantages. But, like the deliberate eugenics experiments of the 20th century, it also has exacted a terrible price."

The mere mention of eugenics - which refers to a movement to improve humankind by controlling genetic factors through mating - is enough to ring bells that many Jews would rather not hear 60 years after the Allied defeat of the Nazis.

To be precise, the main Cochran-Harpending theory does not propose a eugenic mechanism for raising the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews, if "eugenic" is understood to mean a breeding system. They simply show that in medieval northern Europe, wealthy Jews tended to have more surviving children than poor Jews, probably because the wealthy could afford more food, fuel, and living area. In contrast, among Christians, rural folk tended to have more surviving children than urbanites (due to the epidemics that ravaged medieval towns), even though the urbanites may have been self-selected for higher intelligence and greater wealth. Virtually all Jews lived in towns and cities, so this negative correlation between urbanism and health didn't apply to them as much because they were all urban, more or less. Conceptually, that's not Galtonian eugenics, that's just Darwinian selection.

Cochran and Harpending are skeptical about the alternative eugenic explanation for the evolution of Ashkenazi intelligence that goes back at least a half century to the autobiography of Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, who attributed his brilliance to being descended from a long line of well-bred rabbis. It's often been claimed since that Jewish communities arranged marriages between the smartest young student and a daughter of the richest merchant and encouraged them to have lots of children. Also, having famous scholars in your family tree has been said to have given people more points in the marriage market. If this were true, that would be more deserving of the term "eugenic.' I don't find this idea implausible, but Cochran has challenged supporters of the idea to document it and quantify the magnitude of eugenic breeding for scholarship among early medieval Jews. I would say that the ball is now in their court to come up with hard evidence supporting the notion that this kind of eugenic breeding for scholarship was important enough to drive selection for intelligence to a significant degree.

I will admit that the distinction between Darwinism and Galtonism is not perfectly sharp: Darwin partly got the idea for natural selection from the artificial selection being practiced for millennia by animal breeders, and his half-cousin Galton (they were grandsons of the near-genius Erasmus Darwin) just turned it around and proposed encouraging marriages among people with traits believed to benefit society. Most societies in human history have engaged in something like that so there was nothing terribly radical about Galton's suggestion. (But G.K. Chesterton's objection to Galton's "positive eugenics" seems irrefutable: if arranged marriages succeeded in breeding better men and women, the first thing these healthier, smarter, more robust individuals would do would be to tell society to butt out of arranging their marriages and they'd go back to choosing their own mates!)

Galton, a kindly man of liberal views, was shocked at a 1904 conference to hear how far the new generation of socialist eugenicists, led by H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, were prepared to go to take eugenics in a negative direction by advocating sterilization, or worse, of the "unfit." Eugenics was most popular among WASPy progressives, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Teddy Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, and Winston Churchill (during his Liberal phase). It tended to appeal to outdoorsy intellectuals who spent a lot of time around country people who bred horses and dogs.

Quite a few Jews were supporters of eugenics before WWII, as this article from Ha'aretz shows, but with so many not-so-hot Big Ideas to choose from back then, Jewish intellectuals tended to obsess more over their own homegrown Big Ideas like Marxism and Freudianism rather than enthuse over the horsey set's obsession with breeding.

Today, of course, some Jewish organizations strongly back a voluntary eugenics testing program called Dor Yeshorim that has successfully reduced the incidence of the Jewish hereditary disease Tay-Sachs by discouraging marriages between individuals who are heterozygous for the disease.

According to the study, slated to appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Biosocial Science, Ashkenazim do better than average on IQ tests, scoring some 12-15 points above the test's mean value. But they also are more likely than any other ethnic groups to suffer from diseases such as Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's disease and Niemann-Pick - related conditions that can be debilitating and deadly.

The new study hypothesizes that the genetic disorders could be the unfortunate side effects of genes that facilitate intelligence.

But for some people, ascribing collective traits to entire ethnic groups - especially to European Jews - reminds them that the Nazis heaped a pile of supposed genetic characteristics on that continent's Jews and used the characteristics as a basis to exterminate them.

It's worth noting that the Nazis banned IQ tests because Jews averaged higher scores on them than did gentiles.

Indeed, the researchers say they had difficulty finding a journal that would publish their findings.

For other people, criticizing such research on this basis reeks of political correctness. This is real science, they say, with real potential to help save Jewish - and other - lives.

"When you study genetics in order to cure diseases, that's great," said James Young, a Jewish studies professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the author of "Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation."

"But when genetics are studied as a way to characterize or essentialize a whole ethnic group or nation of people, then I think it's very problematic." Still, he said, "I was kind of intrigued by this connection, and the dark irony of what it means to have your intelligence gene linked to a so-called genetic disease gene. It's kind of striking."

For Dr. Guinter Kahn, a Miami physician who lectures internationally on German doctors during the Holocaust, studies like this have real scientific merit. "This stuff is being done with genes, and they're actually finding true results," he said. "The stuff they did in World War II was pure baloney motivated by the greatest geneticists of that time in Germany - but they all fell into the Hitler trap."

Although no one is questioning the researchers' motivations, some observers worry that their findings may be misused. "Will bigots use this? Bigots will use anything," said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation league. However, he said, their abuses should not block research that could benefit the Jewish community.

Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt agrees. When it became clear that fewer Jews were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau than had originally been thought, some Jews worried that this information would be manipulated by Holocaust deniers to back their claims, said Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University. "I had people say to me, 'We shouldn't talk about these things,' " Lipstadt recalls, "I said, 'No, no, no. It's always good to talk about the truth.' We should never be afraid of the truth."

As to concerns about what it means to say that one group of people is genetically smarter than others, Henry Harpending, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah and one of the study's three authors, told JTA that such complaints boil down to political correctness.

"It's no secret," he said of the Ashkenazi IQ numbers. "Your grandmother told you this."

Indeed, the study notes that although Ashkenazi Jews made up just 3 percent of the U.S. population during the last century, they won 27 percent of the country's Nobel Prizes in science and account for more than half of the world's chess champions.

However, Harpending added, this is "the kind of thing that you're not supposed to say these days." "We regard this as an interesting hypothesis and are a little surprised at the attention. On the other hand, geneticists kind of know that variation between populations is almost certainly in the DNA and they kind of don't talk about that" for fear of losing federal funding for their research, Harpending said. "What we've done is started out with an idea and followed it, so what we have is a pretty interesting and pretty good-looking hypothesis - and it ought to be tested."

But could this research actually end up helping anybody? Gregory Cochran, one of the study's authors, hopes so. "I don't have the cure to any disease in my pocket. I wish I did," he said. But "if this all pans out, you learn something about how the brain works. Who knows? Maybe you can do something to help some people one day."

Cochran's switch from physics to the evolutionary biology of disease after the Cold War was motivated in sizable measure by a number of close friends who died or barely survived major diseases. He came to realize that the medical profession could benefit from a rigorous application of Darwinian logic, and the medical establishment is starting to agree.

The study says that because European Jews in medieval times were restricted to jobs in finance, money lending and long-distance trade - occupations that required greater mental gymnastics than fields such as farming, dominated by non-Jews - their genetic codes over the course of some generations selected genes for enhanced intellectual ability.

This process allowed these Jews to thrive in the limited scope of professions they were allowed to pursue. Further, in contrast to today, those who attained financial success in that period often tended to have more children than those who were less financially stable, and those children tended to live longer.

It is for this reason, the researchers said, that many Ashkenazi Jews today have high IQs - and it may also be the reason they suffer from the slew of genetic diseases. According to the researchers, many individuals carrying the gene for one of these diseases also receive an "IQ boost."

Rabbi Moses Tendler, who holds a doctorate in biology and teaches biology at Yeshiva University, said there is "no doubt that genetic makeup determines intelligence and, indeed, predisposes as well as offers resistance to genetic diseases."

But he took issue with the study's findings. The fact that Jews did not intermarry until relatively recently, Tendler said, led to a concentration of various genes among their numbers, some good and some bad. "Wherever they were, Jews lived on an island," he said. In scientific terms, arguments similar to Tendler's are known as a founder's effect.

Rabbi Arthur Green, dean of the Rabbinical School at Boston's Hebrew College, wondered whether the findings took into account all relevant factors in the development of Jewish intelligence. He noted that during the period in which the researchers believe the Jewish intelligence gene began to be selected, the majority Christian world was, in a sense, selecting against such a gene. "In that same period of 1,600 to 1,800 years, Christian Europe was systematically destroying its best genetic stock through celibacy" of priests and monks, he said.

"The Christian devotion to celibacy, particularly for the most learned and highest intellectual achievers, diminished the quality of genetic output and created a greater contrast with the Jewish minority," he said.

This argument, of course, is lifted bodily from that arch-demon Sir Francis Galton, founder of eugenics. It's interesting that a Jewish publication has no problem with repeating Galton's contention that Christians were subject to dysgenic selection pressure that would lower their IQs.

Once again, Galton's theory about celibacy is not completely implausible but its supporters should try to assemble quantitative evidence to show it would have had a noticeable effect.

The Jewish devotion to study and learning, meanwhile, also probably worked in tandem with economic factors in the development of intelligence, Green surmised.

This sounds like a vague version of the Norbert Weiner-Kevin MacDonald theory of eugenic Jewish breeding.

In some of the Ashkenazi disorders, individuals experience extra growth and branching of connectors linking their nerve cells. Too much of this growth may lead to disease; increased but limited growth, though, could breed heightened intelligence.

In an effort to determine the effect of Gaucher's on IQ, for example, the researchers contacted the Gaucher's Clinic at Shaare Zedek Hospital in Jerusalem. Although the center did not have specific IQ numbers on patients at the clinic, the jobs they held were high-IQ professions: physicists, engineers, lawyers, physicians and scientists.

"It's obviously a population with enriched IQs - big time," Harpending said.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

John F. Kerry's plastic surgery

That awful Herman Munster college picture of Kerry that the Boston Globe maliciously used yesterday reminded one reader:


It has never been well reported but Kerry had a jaw reduction operation sometime in the late 70's or early 80's just before his run for U.S. Senate. I have been in his presence before, and after the surgery, it is quite a noticeable difference, and improvement...


I'm not a big fan of plastic surgery, but it's perfectly reasonable for people with odd facial features that cause other people to make fun of them to get them fixed.


I wonder if Kerry suffered from a mild case of the pituitary problem called acromegaly that causes bones to keep growing. Famous acromegalics include Gheorghe Muresan, the tallest player in NBA history, and Primo Carnera, the largest heavyweight boxing champ.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Now we know why Garance Franke-Ruta smeared me last year: so she could steal my ideas without attribution!

When David Brooks cited a statistic from my "Baby Gap" article last December about how Bush had carried 25 of the top 26 states in white total fertility, Franke-Ruta of The American Prospect wrote a classic anti-Sailerist diatribe trying to anathematize me as unfit to ever be read by anyone. I responded to her in my next article, where I also revealed the even more stunning "Marriage Gap" -- Bush carried the top 25 states in average years married among white women ages 18-44.

I sensed that Franke-Ruta was not attempting to silence me solely out of simple-minded political correctness. No, she had displayed some heretical streaks herself, such as attacking Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" for the same reason I did. As she wrote: "black Americans were six times more likely to be murdered than whites in 1999, and seven times more likely to commit homicides." It's a classic operation of the marginally politically incorrect when they feel the hot breath of the wolfpack of the politically correct on their necks to try to gain credit by hurling someone more honest than themselves from the sleigh.

But I wasn't devious enough to figure out that she was trying to keep people from reading me so she could steal my ideas! Her new, long posting on TAPPED begins:

THE PARENT GAP. Another big gap in voting patterns is the so-called "parent gap," which is actually a marriage and parenthood gap, as single moms tend to be strongly Democratic. [More]


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 7, 2005

"Becoming the Sickness, the Head Becomes Good?"

Automatic translation of the headline on a Japanese article about the Cochran-Hardy-Harpending theory of "The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Russell Crowe Arrested

The star of "Cinderella Man" got himself arrested this week for throwing a telephone at a hotel employee who displeased him. This was not a first offense for the guy who is probably the greatest leading man of the era ("Gladiator," "A Beautiful Mind," and "Master and Commander"). Remember back on New Year's Eve 1999 when everybody was too worried about Y2K glitches and terrorism to party hearty? Well, not old Russell. He gave the last millennium a properly Australian send-off by getting involved in three separate drunk and disorderly incidents with the police.


I've been writing a bit about Crowe lately. From my June 20th cover story in The American Conservative on Hollywood's politics, I noted:

In contrast to Hollywood's leftist politics, which have been in stasis for decades, its increasingly moderate values reflect more recent trends, such as the clean-living fad that emerged in reaction to the Great Hollywood Snowstorm of roughly 1975-1985. As cocaine laid waste to a brilliant generation of filmmakers, the Boy Scout of the bunch, Steven Spielberg (who as a lad had earned more than twice the number of merit badges required to make Eagle Scout), went on to stupendous success. Similarly, the top stars of recent years, such as Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Harrison Ford, are highly disciplined professionals who can be counted on to establish a harmonious atmosphere on the set and market the product relentlessly in the media. A jerk can make it to the highest rank only if he is as talented as Russell Crowe.

And from my upcoming review of "Cinderella Man" in the July 4th edition of The American Conservative (subscribe here):

That Crowe, a hard-drinking hothead who broke up Meg Ryan's marriage to Dennis Quaid, isn't anything like the saintly boxer James J. Braddock only adds to the power of his impersonation. We admire the high-testosterone man who could play the cad but instead chooses to be the dad more than the low testosterone fellow without that option.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Name Game:

The Washington Post published the following letter from a couple of little goody-two-shoes:

Wrong Term for the Kalahari's People

Craig Timberg's June 3 front-page article, "A Culture Vanishes in Kalahari Dust; Bushmen Elders Resist Relocation in Botswana," was informative and thought-provoking, but unfortunately he used the term "Bushmen" throughout.

We are writing on behalf of our classmates in an international baccalaureate social/cultural anthropology class at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington; we have been studying the peoples of the Kalahari.

According to anthropologists Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and Richard Lee, the term "Bushmen" is pejorative and no longer accepted in the anthropological community. In his 1979 ethnography "The Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society," Mr. Lee wrote that "the term Bushmen has both racist and sexist connotations."

In addition, the Kalahari is inhabited by many different peoples, and they should be called by whatever name they give themselves. For example, this year we studied the specific Kalahari group living on the border of Botswana and Namibia who call themselves the Ju/'hoansi, or "the real people."

Back in 2002, I wrote in "The Name Game:"

Ironically, the movement to change ethnic names to those used by the groups themselves frequently restores these kind of self-glorifying terms. For example, Comanche Indians are now supposed to called the "Numunuu," which means "the people."

The fashion of renaming the Bushmen of Southwestern Africa as the "San" exemplifies many of the problems with the name game. University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending [coauthor of "The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence"] who has lived with the famous tongue-clicking hunter-gatherers said, "In the 1970s the name 'San' spread in Europe and America because it seemed to be politically correct, while 'Bushmen' sounded derogatory and sexist."

Unfortunately, the hunter-gatherers never actually had a collective name for themselves in any of their own languages. "San" was actually the insulting word that the herding Khoi people called the Bushmen. ("Khoi" is the term used by those who were labeled "Hottentots" by the Dutch. As you can probably guess by now, "Khoi" means "the real people.")

Harpending noted, "The problem was that in the Kalahari, 'San' has all the baggage that the 'N-word' has in America. Bushmen kids are graduating from school, reading the academic literature, and are outraged that we call them 'San.'"

"I knew very well," he said, "That one did not call someone a San to his face. I continued to use Bushman, and I was publicly corrected several times by the righteous. It quickly became a badge among Western academics: If you say 'San' and I say 'San,' then we signal each other that we are on the fashionable side, politically. It had nothing to do with respect. I think most politically correct talk follows these dynamics."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More on the "Acting White" study

In response to my posting below about Fryer and Torelli's study showing that Hispanics lose more same-race friends the higher their GPA than do blacks, a college professor writes:



Your post on educational attitudes among Hispanics and blacks is consistent with my impressions in in the classroom. Apathy towards learning seems widespread among Hispanics. Curious whites are much more common (though not common enough), and among whites and even blacks you have the type of person who is not particularly smart, but who is motivated to play the intellectual. But rarely do I see Hispanics who like to get into a discussion about things--to explore ideas for curiosity's sake, or to project the image of a smart person. As a group, they are a pretty inert bunch. When I see this among black students, it seems like they are simply not getting it; when I see it among Hispanics, they just don't care. I haven't seen them say that someone is trying to be better than them if they act smart, but I have heard this is what you will be told if you excel in school.

The gap between whites and Hispanics in average IQ is only about 65% as large as the gap between whites and blacks, as is the gap between whites and American-born Hispanics on the NAEP achievement test, but Hispanics do worse than blacks on certain measures of quantity of schooling, when their higher average IQs suggest they should be getting more schooling.

Come to think of it, Asians don't seem particularly curious--just very driven and competitive. Similarly, women are also less curious than men. They are better students but are less interested.

That's the same thing you see when looking at who wins the science Nobel Prizes: white guys ask the big, hard questions. Too bad we're the "cancer of history," as Ms. Sontag so felicitously put it.

A reader writes:

The major surprises from the paper were a) that the social cost for blacks in "acting white" [i.e., getting good grades] is much larger in integrated schools, and b) that the social cost for high grades is greatest for... guess who? Private school students of any race.

As for the private schools, a reader urges caution in interpreting the data:

According to the figure on page 47 of the report, the popularity curve for Hispanics and blacks at private schools is pretty flat. Popularity peaks for whites at about a 1.75 GPA and declines significantly to a 4.0 GPA. The curves are very wiggly so I don't think they have a lot of data for private school students.

Another reader responds:

Isn't one obvious reason why blacks and Hispanics with better grades have fewer friends of the same race (or "race" for Hispanics) simply the fact that the ones with better grades are likely to have more white classmates and white friends? Likewise, perhaps low-achieving whites have more black and Hispanic friends. I assume that having more friends of one kind means fewer of another!

Another reader writes:

It would have been interesting to see, for black and Hispanic high achievers, how many white friends each had. In other words, how much all this is basically about students making friends in their academic-achievement class, rather than in their race-ethnic class. I suspect black high achievers have more white friends now than do Hispanic ones, but perhaps I am wrong. And that might not fit all the other ancient axes the Post has to grind.

One also suspects that, in the old days of either pure segregation in the South or ability-tracking in the North, that high-achieving blacks were much more popular and admired by their fellow blacks than they perhaps are today. Blacks could then feel pride in and identify a bit with the most talented of their fellow blacks, while still feeling they shared many of the same experiences. Now, I think the same exceptional levels of achievement among poor-performing minorities are taken as a signal of separation from the main group, which is probably what is happening.


I now see that Fryer and Torelli mention in passing in their confusingly written paper that: "substitution towards other race friendships does not fully explain the stark difference in the popularity – achievement gradient."

In other words, in an integrated school, a smart black kid in the A.P. classes would acquire more white friends, but not as many as he'd lose black friends. This doesn't necessarily mean that black students intentionally penalize black high achievers. They just have less contact with them and less in common with them. So, once again we come back to the brute fact that on average whites are smarter than blacks, and that most other effects hypothesized about the white-black education gap are marginalia.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

My article on John F. Kerry's IQ Validated

"Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush? I'm sure the candidates' SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead."

Howell Raines
- Former Executive Editor of the New York Times
"The 'Dumb' Factor"
Washington Post, August 27, 2004


Last October, in my VDARE.com article "This Just In: Kerry's IQ Likely Lower than Bush's!" I showed that Kerry's score on the Officer Qualification Test he took when he joined the Navy was no better and probably slightly worse than the score George W. Bush made when he took the Air Force's equivalent test.

I estimated that on the IQ test-like sections of the military aptitude tests that Bush scored somewhere around the equivalent of a 125 IQ (which is in line with his 1206 SAT score [under the harder pre-1995 scoring system]) while Kerry scored around the equivalent of a 120 IQ. Both IQs are adequate to be President, but not hugely impressive. (For more on Presidential performance and intelligence, see my article "Does IQ Matter in a President?")

When NBC's Tom Brokaw asked Kerry about my study showing him scoring lower than Bush, which John Tierney wrote about in the NYT, Kerry told him, "I must have been drinking the night before I took that military aptitude test.” Today, Michael Kranish reports in the Boston Globe:


During last year's presidential campaign, John F. Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W. Bush was the populist who mangled his sentences.

But newly released records show that Bush and Kerry had a virtually identical grade average at Yale University four decades ago.

In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.

Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D's in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.

The grade transcript, which Kerry has always declined to release, was included in his Navy record. During the campaign the Globe sought Kerry's naval records, but he refused to waive privacy restrictions for the full file. Late last month, Kerry gave the Navy permission to send the documents to the Globe.

Kerry appeared to be responding to critics who suspected that there might be damaging information in the file about his activities in Vietnam. The military and medical records, however, appear identical to what Kerry has already released. This marks the first time Kerry's grades have been publicly reported.


The Globe article comes with an amazing college picture of Kerry, which makes him look like the 1933 heavyweight champ Primo Carnera, a simple-minded acromegalic giant with a pituitary gland problem. (In "Cinderella Man," Carnera is the giant that Max Baer thrashes to win the heavyweight title. I wonder if Kerry had acromegaly, too -- his chin is awfully big.) The Globe must really not want Kerry to run again in 2008.


Real Clear Politics asks:


KERRY'S BIG SECRET?: That wasn't so hard, now was it? The mind simply reels at the possibility that Kerry refused for two years to fully release his Navy records because he didn't want people to know he got slightly lower grades at Yale than Bush. Could the ego on a man really be that big and that fragile?


Considering how disturbed Kerry was by my report on his IQ versus Bush's -- on the air with Brokaw, he laughed it off adeptly, but after the camera was off, he was so bothered by it that he returned to the topic to make the excuse that he must have been out drinking (as Brokaw told Don Imus a few days later) -- the answer may well be: yes, Kerry's ego was wrapped up in being smarter than Bush.


As Chris Suellentrop of Slate wrote in "Kerry vs. His Script: Why can't the man read a simple speech? Declaring war on declarative sentences," the candidate repeatedly insisted on padding out the well-written speeches his staff gave him with meaningless improvisations:


The campaign gives reporters the text of each of Kerry's speeches "as prepared for delivery," apparently to show how much Kerry diverges from them...

Kerry proves incapable of reading simple declarative sentences. He inserts dependent clauses and prepositional phrases until every sentence is a watery mess. Kerry couldn't read a Dick and Jane book to schoolchildren without transforming its sentences into complex run-ons worthy of David Foster Wallace. Kerry's speechwriters routinely insert the line "We can bring back that mighty dream," near the conclusion of his speeches, presumably as an echo of Ted Kennedy's Shrum-penned "the dream will never die" speech from the 1980 Democratic convention. Kerry saps the line of its power. Here's his version from Monday's speech in Tampa: "We can bring back the mighty dream of this country, that's what's at stake in these next two weeks."...

Kerry flubs his punch lines, sprinkles in irrelevant anecdotes, and talks himself into holes that he has trouble improvising his way out of. He steps on his applause lines by uttering them prematurely, and then when they roll up on his TelePrompTer later, he's forced to pirouette and throat-clear until he figures out how not to repeat himself. He piles adjective upon adjective until it's like listening to a speech delivered by Roget.

Kerry's health-care speech Monday in Tampa was a classic of the form. The written text contained a little more than 2,500 words. By the time he was finished, Kerry had spoken nearly 5,300 words—not including his introductory remarks and thank-yous to local politicians—more than doubling the verbiage.


In contrast, Bush seldom let his ego get in the way of competent campaigning. If he didn't think his speeches were good enough the way they were written, he'd get new speechwriters, not try to fix them on the fly himself. (Of course, Bush's standards for Cabinet Secretaries, foreign policy advisers, and other trivial officials are laxer than for the important jobs involved in winning elections.)


Before the last election, I wrote:


In the President's lone losing race, his 1978 run for Congress from West Texas, the victor stressed Bush's two Ivy League degrees. Bush resolved never to allow himself to be outdumbed again. And the Democrats haven't outsmarted him since.


The Kerry IQ-grades fiasco was reminiscent of the terrible knots that liberals tie themselves into over IQ:

Liberals tend to believe two things about IQ:

bulletFirst, that IQ is a meaningless, utterly discredited concept.

bulletSecond, that liberals are better than conservatives because they have much higher IQs.

Thus back in May of 2004, hundreds of liberal websites, and even the prestigious Economist magazine, fell for a hoax claiming to show that states that voted for Al Gore in 2000 have higher average IQs—by as much as an incredible 28 points—than states that voted for George W. Bush.

(In reality, no such data exist. But, for what it's worth, Bush and Gore voters were identical in educational level, and the states they won were almost dead even in 8th grade achievement test scores.)

The hoax was revived after the election last November, with sites carrying the bogus table of IQs by state getting tens of millions of visits from Democrats looking for proof of their intellectual superiority. My demolition of the hoax can be found at:

http://www.isteve.com/IQhoax.htm

A reader writes:

The only time during last years' campaign when Kerry looked smart was during that first debate. Three years of high school debating [and college debate] and then, 40 years later, practice Presidential debates with a two-minute egg timer made the guy look like a razor-sharp thinker.

Apparently, contrary to initial rumor and obvious impression, Bush's problem in the first debate was not sloth, but overpreparation. He had simply crammed so much into his brain that his untrained speaking style was overloaded. Reagan used to do badly for the same reason, too much preparation for his style.

Among certain educational subcultures in the early 1960s, debating was almost as socially obligatory as playing football. It was probably the most productive thing John Kerry did in his life. It almost won him the Presidency.


How in hell does a country of 300,000,000 come up with two mediocrities like Kerry and Bush as the only choices for President?



My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Aversion to "Acting White" Worse Problem for Hispanics than Blacks

The Washington Post reports:

Among white teens, Fryer and Torelli found that better grades equaled greater popularity, with straight-A students having far more same-race friends than those who were B students, who in turn had more friends than C or D students. But among blacks and especially Hispanics who attend public schools with a mix of racial and ethnic groups, that pattern was reversed: The best and brightest academically were significantly less popular than classmates of their race or ethnic group with lower grade point averages.

"For blacks, higher achievement is associated with modestly higher popularity until a grade point average of 3.5 [a B+ average], then the slope turns negative," Fryer and Torelli wrote in a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. A black student who's gotten all A's has, on average, 1.5 fewer same-race friends than a straight-A white student. Among Hispanics, there is little change in popularity until a student's average rises above a C+, at which point it plummets. A Hispanic student with all A's is the least popular of all Hispanic students, and has three fewer friends than a typical white student with a 4.0 grade point average.

Fryer and Torelli based their conclusions on a federally funded survey of 90,118 junior high and high school students in 175 schools in 80 communities nationwide during the 1994-95 school year. The resulting data set contained a wealth of information on each student, including the number of friends they had and who those friends were. To prevent an inflated tally, the researchers counted students as friends only if each listed the other as a friend.

This supports what I've been saying for some time: that Hispanics have a worse attitudinal problem toward education than do blacks. Contrary to the claims of John McWhorter, African-American culture isn't particularly anti-intellectual or anti-education ... at least relative to the average black IQ of 85. Considering that only about 1 out of 6 African-Americans has a three digit IQ, blacks spend quite a few years in school and a surprising fraction at least attempt college.

In general, blacks may suffer from inflated expectations about education: the Yale or jail syndrome. How many times have you seen interviews with poor ghetto children who announce they are going to be a doctor or a lawyer? When it eventually dawns on them that no way no how are they ever going to be doctors or lawyers, too many decide that then they might as well deal drugs.

The average Hispanic IQ is somewhere around 91, but Hispanics don't average more schooling than blacks. In some ways, this is healthy: Hispanics with two digit IQs are more likely to go get a job than waste time at a community college. Still, it reflect an anti-educational bias in Hispanic culture that keeps down many Hispanics who do have the brains to make use of education.

Looking at the actual report by Fryer and Torelli, the peer pressure effect doesn't seem terribly huge:

Put differently, evaluated at the sample mean, a one standard deviation increase in grades is associated with roughly a .103 standard deviation decrease in social status for Blacks and a .171 standard deviation decrease for Hispanics. For students with a 3.5 grade point average or better, the effect triples.

So, for blacks, if their grades go up by a standard deviation, their social status falls by one tenth as much. Is that the cause of their low grades? Perhaps to some extent. It might well be an explanation for why blacks get even worse grades on average than their standardized test scores would predict. But how big is the impact of peer pressure against "acting white" relative to the brute factor of lower average IQ? And would blacks consider getting good grades to be "acting white" if blacks had the same average IQ as whites? Occam's Razor keeps bringing us back to recognizing IQ as the 800 pound gorilla of the racial education gap.

As you might expect, Fryer and Torelli don't mention IQ. Nor do they mention Asians.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What are the odds that Gregory Cochran will win a MacArthur Genius Award?

Slim or none?

Every year the liberal MacArthur Foundation gives out a half million dollars each to a couple of dozen "geniuses." You might think that Cochran would epitomize the kind of genius that some wealthy foundation would like to support: the ornery independent-minded thinker with a long track record of original insights, but you'd be wrong. The philanthropic establishment likes to reward people who are well-connected, not people who come up with new and important ideas.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More white murderers on "Law & Orders" than in real NYC?

I've never seen it confirmed, but it strikes me as pretty obvious that the TV franchise "Law & Order," which debuted in 1990, was heavily influenced by Tom Wolfe's 1987 bestselling novel Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe's novel is about NYC detectives and prosecutors, bored and depressed by arresting and convicting countless poor minorities, hunting down for fun and political profit The Great White Defendant, rich white guy Sherman McCoy. "Law & Order" is the irony-free version of Bonfire, with the first half hour consisting of detectives arresting a rich white person and the second half hour consisting of the prosecutors torturing the law to come up with some absurd justification for charging the defendant with homicide. This formula has made L&O perhaps the biggest franchise in television history.

A reader writes

It might be an interesting factoid for an article that there are more white murderers plotted on Law & Order (all editions) than there are actual white murderers in New York City.

There were 572 murders in New York City last year. We know that only 10% of violent crimes in NYC were committed by non-Hispanic whites, so if the same is true for homicides in particular, that's 57 white murders. There are three "Law and Orders," I think, with about 25 episodes per season with, say, 80% being white. That's 60 white New York murderers on one set of shows compared to about 57 in all of the real world New York.

Anyway, I bet it's close.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 6, 2005

Nicholas Wade in New York Times on the Cochran-Hardy-Harpending Theory of Ashkenazi IQ

Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes

By NICHOLAS WADE

A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability.

The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility, the researchers say in a paper that has been accepted by the Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press in England. ["The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence"]

The hypothesis advanced by the Utah researchers has drawn a mixed reaction among scientists, some of whom dismissed it as extremely implausible, while others said they had made an interesting case, although one liable to raise many hackles.

"It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is," said Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, noting that it argues for an inherited difference in intelligence between groups. Still, he said, "it's certainly a thorough and well-argued paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright."

"Absolutely anything in human biology that is interesting is going to be controversial," said one of the report's authors, Dr. Henry Harpending, an anthropologist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He and two colleagues at the University of Utah, Gregory Cochran and Jason Hardy, see the pattern of genetic disease among the Ashkenazi Jewish population as reminiscent of blood disorders like sickle cell anemia that occur in populations exposed to malaria, a disease that is only 5,000 years old.

In both cases, the Utah researchers argue, evolution has had to counter a sudden threat by favoring any mutation that protected against it, whatever the side effects. Ashkenazic diseases like Tay-Sachs, they say, are a side effect of genes that promote intelligence.

The explanation that the Ashkenazic disease genes must have some hidden value has long been accepted by other researchers, but no one could find a convincing infectious disease or other threat to which the Ashkenazic genetic ailments might confer protection.

A second suggestion, wrote Dr. Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a 1994 article, "is selection in Jews for the intelligence putatively required to survive recurrent persecution, and also to make a living by commerce, because Jews were barred from the agricultural jobs available to the non-Jewish population."

The Utah researchers have built on this idea, arguing that for some 900 years Jews in Europe were restricted to managerial occupations, which were intellectually demanding, that those who were more successful also left more offspring, and that there was time in this period for the intelligence of the Ashkenazi population as a whole to become appreciably enhanced.

But the Utah researchers' analysis comes at a time when some geneticists have suggested natural selection is not the reason for the Ashkenazic diseases after all. Two years ago, Dr. Neil Risch, a geneticist now at the University of California, San Francisco, proposed a different genetic mechanism known as a founder effect, which occurs when a population is reduced for a time.

He found that all the Ashkenazic diseases had similar properties, including having arisen within the last 1,100 years. Therefore they had all arisen through the same cause, he argued, which must be founder effects, because it was unlikely that all could be due to natural selection. Last year, Dr. Montgomery Slatkin of the University of California, Berkeley, came to much the same conclusion for different reasons.

The Utah team agrees with Dr. Risch that the diseases all arose in historical times from the same cause but say natural selection is more likely because none of the non-disease Ashkenazic genes they tested showed any sign of a founder effect. They say the clustering of four of the diseases in the same biochemical pathway could only have arisen under the influence of natural selection, and calculate that the odds of a founder effect producing such a cluster are vanishingly low.

The four diseases, all of which are caused by mutations that affect the cell's management of chemicals known as sphingolipids, are Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher, and mucolipidosis type IV. A second cluster of diseases affects repair of DNA.

Turning to the possibility that some infection was the cause of the selective effect, the Utah researchers noted that Ashkenazim and Europeans lived together in the same cities and were exposed to the same microbes. If disease were the agent of selection, the Utah team argues, the European population would have developed a similar genetic response.

Ashkenazi Jews occupied a different social niche from their European hosts, and that is where any selective effect must have operated, the Utah researchers say. From A.D. 800, when the Ashkenazi presence in Europe is first recorded, to about 1700, Ashkenazi Jews held a restricted range of occupations, which required considerable intellectual acumen. In France, most were moneylenders by A.D. 1100. Expelled from France in 1394, and from parts of Germany in the 15th century, they moved eastward and were employed by Polish rulers first as moneylenders and then as agents who paid a large tax to a noble and then tried to collect the amount, at a profit, from the peasantry. After 1700, the occupational restrictions on Jews were eased.

As to how the disease mutations might affect intelligence, the Utah researchers cite evidence that the sphingolipid disorders promote the growth and interconnection of brain cells. Mutations in the DNA repair genes, involved in second cluster of Ashkenazic diseases, may also unleash growth of neurons.

In describing what they see as the result of the Ashkenazic mutations, the researchers cite the fact that Ashkenazi Jews make up 3 percent of the American population but won 27 percent of its Nobel prizes, and account for more than half of world chess champions. They say that the reason for this unusual record may be that differences in Ashkenazic and northern European I.Q. are not large at the average, where most people fall, but become more noticeable at the extremes; for people with an I.Q. over 140, the proportion is 4 per 1,000 among northern Europeans but 23 per 1,000 with Ashkenazim.

The Utah researchers describe their proposal as a hypothesis. Unlike many speculations, it makes a testable prediction: that people who carry one of the sphingolipid or other Ashkenazic disease mutations should do better than average on I.Q. tests.

The researchers have identified two reasonably well accepted issues, the puzzling pattern of diseases inherited by the Ashkenazi population and the population's general intellectual achievement. But in trying to draw a link between them they have crossed some fiercely disputed academic territories, including whether I.Q. scores are a true measure of intelligence and the extent to which intelligence can be inherited.

The authors "make pretty much all of the classic mistakes in interpreting heritability," said Dr. Andrew Clark, a population geneticist at Cornell University, and the argument that the sphingolipid gene variants are associated with intelligence, he said, is "far-fetched."

In addition, the genetic issue of natural selection versus founder effects is far from settled. Dr. Risch, whose research supports founder effects, said he was not persuaded by the Utah team's arguments. Dr. David Goldstein, a geneticist at Duke University who was not connected with either Dr. Risch's or the Utah study, was more open on the issue, saying Dr. Risch had made "quite a strong case" that founder effects could be the cause, but had not ruled out the possibility of selection.

Dr. Slatkin, though favoring a founder effect over all, said he agreed with the Utah team that this would not account for the cluster of sphingolipid diseases.

As for the Utah researchers' interpretation of Jewish medieval history, Paul Rose, professor of Jewish studies at Pennsylvania State University, said, "I think that some of their conclusions may be right though they still need a lot of work to be persuasive to historians and others."

Dr. Gregory Cochran, the first author on the Utah team's paper and a physicist who took up biology, said he became interested in the subject upon learning that patients with a particular Ashkenazic disease known as torsion dystonia were told by their physicians that "the positive thing is that this makes you smart."

"When you're in a hurry and have strong selection, you have a lot of genes with bad side effects," he said. The Ashkenazi Jewish population seemed to fit this pattern, he said, since they married only inside the community, making selection possible, and they had an urgent need for greater intelligence. Evolution had therefore selected every possible mutation that worked in this direction, despite their harmful side effects when inherited from both parents. "In a sense, I consider this a very boring paper since it raises no new principles of genetics," Dr. Cochran said.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Madame Bovary's Ovaries"

John Derbyshire on Madame Bovary's Ovaries:

It is 41 years now since zoologist William D. Hamilton worked out the evolutionary mathematics of kin altruism, demonstrating that even behavior that seems to belong to the moral and educational superstructure of human nature can be explained by natural selection. Sociobiology was on the march.

That march did not, of course, go unopposed. The political Left was outraged at the suggestion that our nature might have something to do with our biology, and therefore might not be infinitely malleable. Could there, then, be no “New Soviet Man”? No withering away of all behavioral sex differences? No elimination of all preference for one’s own kin or ethny over those more distantly related? Perish the thought! The Left rallied under charismatic generals like the late Stephen Jay Gould, and battle was joined.

The current state of the conflict is a sort of wary stalemate. The Left has conceded that the fundamental science behind sociobiology is indisputable, so that unyielding all-points opposition in the style of Gould is no longer tenable. Accredited human-science professionals John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have worked up “evolutionary psychology,” a low-tar version of sociobiology omitting all those elements that are obnoxious to the egalitarian Left, so even the most politically correct human scientist can now utter phrases like “assortative mating” and “parental investment” without blushing. In any case, the Left still firmly controls the Humanities, and thereby the commanding heights of Academia. This, they feel, gives them police power over how much may be said aloud about the biological roots of human behavior. It also gives them the right to punish those who say too much — people like the hapless Larry Summers.

This carefully policed armistice is the context in which Madame Bovary’s Ovaries should be read. David Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle; Nanelle Barash is his daughter, an undergraduate studying literature and biology at Swarthmore. In this collaborative effort, father and daughter take us through some well-known works of world literature to point out the basic facts of biology that underlie their stories. The general drift of the book is illustrated by the opening sentences of a paragraph in Chapter 5 (“The Biology of Adultery”): “It isn’t just Emma Bovary who is especially likely to be unfaithful when her mate has suffered a decline in status. A recent study of black-capped chickadees, for instance, found that . . .”

... It’s fun, in a mild way, but somewhat wearying to read at book length...

The authors’ real problem here is that they are trespassing very close to the boundaries of what may be written about for the general public. Of injunctions like the Golden Rule, they say: “They are especially important since . . . when those others are truly ‘other’ — that is, unrelated — there is a powerful yet subtle pressure to behave more selfishly.” But perhaps our awareness of kinship does not end with our actual known kin, but extends to . . . people who . . . look . . . like ourselves? Eeeek! Here you see the difficulties of explaining a theory when parts of it have been fenced off as unsuitable for public display. [More]


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Cochran-Harpending article #1 most emailed on NYT:

Most E-Mailed

1.

Over at GNXP, Cochran and Harpending are explaining their theory in more depth in the Comments section of this post.

Henry Harpending comments:

"[As for] the implications of our model for eugenics, yes, big time, eugenics is IMHO a route to disaster. Well understood engineered gene introductions could be fine but eugenics would be almost certain to bring all kinds of nightmares."

He's referring to the tendency seen among domesticated animals for breeding for any particular positive trait to accidentally introduce negative traits as well. Temple Grandin's recent book lists lots of problems that have crept in by too much artificial selection for single traits. For instance, recent efforts to make chickens more meaty turned a fraction of roosters into sex murderers. Some of the roosters forgot how to do the little dance that gets hens into the mood, so they just use force and end up killing hens a noticeable fraction of the time. The distorted genes for that spread slowly enough that farmers seldom noticed that anything was going wrong. By the time Grandin (whose specialties are cows and pigs) heard about it, farmers would say, "Oh, it's just natural for roosters to kill hens. All just part of Nature's rich tapestry." Of course, it's not. Natural selection would have gotten rid of genes for that a long time ago. It's artificial selection that allows disastrous genes to survive.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Fiddler on the Roof School of Jewish Historiography:

Jonah Goldberg writes on NRO's Corner:

I just got around to reading this fascinating New York Times article about a possible link between some genetic diseases among Ashkenazic Jews and higher intelligence... Here's my quibble, and I'm sure people who know more have an answer. But, the percentage of Jews in medieval moneylending alone has to be a very small number out of the total demographic pie. I mean most medieval Jews were in agriculture (or at least I'm pretty sure they were). Most of the Ashkenazi Jews I know are descended from the Shtetl not from long lines of bankers. It seems farfetched to me to imagine that this small stratum of financiers could be responsible for the widespread genetic effects described in the article.


Like Tevye!


An awful lot of Americans' knowledge of Eastern European Jews comes from that musical about an early 20th century milkman. It's one of my favorite movies, but it doesn't pretend to be a reliable guide to the status of medieval Jews.


No, less than 5% of Ashkenazis were in agriculture. Back in medieval times, most Ashkenazis were in relatively high-end jobs in finance, tax-farming, estate management, and the like. Then, there was a huge Jewish population boom in the last few centuries, so in the 18th and 19th centuries, lots of Jews dropped down to the skilled crafts and many became poor (cue "If I Were a Rich Man"), but very few became farmers.


This is different from most other middle man minorities. For example, Armenians have filled a lot of the same occupational slots (in Hollywood, there are quite a few Armenian agents and producers), but even in America, many Armenians are farmers (typically, fruit and nut growers in California's Central Valley).


The larger point is that post-Biblical Jewish history remains terra incognita for most people, including most Jews (in case you are wondering, I believe Jonah's father is Jewish and his mother, Lucianne Goldberg, is Irish), since writing about it in any fashion other than the most sentimental is apt to get you denounced as trafficking in stereotypes.


Update: Randall Parker has much additional information on the Cochran-Harpending theory at FuturePundit.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence"

New VDARE column: "Genes. Disease, and IQ" --



Ashkenazi levels of real world accomplishment are also impressive and thus support the IQ studies. Jewish Americans make up no more than three percent of the U.S. adult population. But in the 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene, the prominent social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University, pointed out:


"During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series." [pp. 26-27]



Interestingly, the Ashkenazi cognitive advantage seems to be mostly in verbal and numeric, rather than visual, skills. For example, in Hollywood, fewer top cinematographers are Jewish than are leading screenwriters or agents.

Ashkenazi intelligence is one of those facts that are obvious, important, and interesting, yet, is largely unmentionable in polite society… at least until this week.

The Cochran-Harpending theory may turn out to justify the audacity of The Economist and the NYT in breaking this taboo. If validated, it would prove a landmark in the fields of medicine, population genetics, IQ research, and even history...

The Cochran-Harpending-Hardy paper offers a fairly new but crucial perspective on the old nature and nurture question. The researchers have demonstrated that it's quite possible for nurture to change nature. Culture can drive heredity. Economics and social customs alter gene frequencies...

I can attest that, although a physicist by education and the leading theorist of evolutionary medicine by avocation, Cochran also has memorized almost the entire political and military history of the human race. (Here's an amusing piece by him in The American Conservative showing the similarities between Bush's Iraq adventure and Napoleon's invasion of Spain.)

When I'm reviewing a historical film such as Master and Commander or Hero and I need to pretend to actually know something about the Age of Nelson or China's Warring States era, a call to Cochran will not only fill me in on what happened, but, more importantly, why it happened.

All the evidence isn't in yet. But it could be that Cochran and Harpending have opened the door to explaining why some of history's most important developments happened—and that, finally, the political culture is beginning to listen. [More]

***


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer