Together at Last

I'm always curious what the pseudoscientific phrenologists like Murray and Sailer would make of the Ethiopian Jews. They're Jewish, so they're geniuses! They're black, so they're idiots!

(I kinda assume they'd try to explain it away by asserting that they aren't really Jewish...)

Not very interested in Murray's inane ramblings...more interesting are the stories about the different ways that Sephardic Jews from different places adapted to life in Israel. The immigrants from Arab countries all faced discrimination from the founding Ashkenazim, and it especially rankled the people who had come from places like Baghdad, where well-educated and cultured Jews had been among the economic elite forever. They were suddenly stuck with jobs that they hadn't had to do for many generations. But for Jews coming from Yemen, which was dirt poor, they didn't give a shit what anyone thought of them in Israel (according to my mom, who grew up in a town with lots of Yemenites), and they went about making their living in a new country without caring about anyone who turned their noses up to them.

It's a shame Larry Summers is no longer in a position to offer Murray a job at Harvard.

Ok, its easy to laugh at phrenology.

But, what about the arguments at hand?

First, does the overrepresentation of Jews in academia, etc, have a partly genetic explanation?

If the answer is yes, then what is the cause of this divergent evolution? There is an article in The Journal of Biosocial Science that hypotheses one explanation. Now, Murray is arguing for a different one.

I've read reviews of that article in the past, and thought the explanation was fascinating. The idea that IQ in a subgroup could change so quickly due to the genetic consequences of cultural phenomena. I have no idea how respected this hypothesis is among experts. But, its a scientific question, not something we can decide on based on ideology.

I also thought this article was fascinating, particularly the last section.

Clarification: in my comments, I'm referring to the peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Biosocial Science, not the one by Murray. I also would take what he writes with several grains of salt.

Huzzah! Up with Jewish quasi-racial supremacy!

It must be the extra brain stored in our giant noses.

But wait...now, the world has discovered Indians...a people with an even greater propensity to be doctors, professors, engineers, and makers of popcorn movies...and with even bigger noses! What will we Jews do now that we've been pushed out of our niche? At least we'll always control the bagel trade...

Matt's wrong about the sephardim. Murray speculates that their cognitive abilities previously were elevated, but that they declined over the last millenium.

Well, look on the positive side. Over the last couple of decades, the editorial position of Commentary and its close ideological allies has been to strongly denounce Darwinian evolution. So given the venue, Murray's article is actually shocking in its liberal/scientific focus.

What about Indian Jews?

Do they have an even greater yet propensity to be "doctors, professors, engineers or makers of popcorn movies"? The mind boggles at the thought of the possible discovery of the ultimate ubermenschen ... fortunately for me, I'm lucky enough to have some in my own family!

Unfortunately for me, I guess the reason why I don't have that special Jewish intelligence is that I have a merely average sized nose ...

I sense another Woody Allen movie here -- when will Woody Allen make a movie involving characters based on Murray, et al.? It'd be comedy gold! Anybody? The Editors? Anybody?

Obviously you think he's wrong; I'm just curious whether you think he's contingently wrong, (In some alternate universe he might be right.) or wrong in some more absolute sense. That is, do you think it's possible that a somewhat inbred line correlated with a particular religion could be on average smarter, the way they can be more inclined to suffer from hypertension, or other genetic illnesses.

Do you think there's something about intelligence that precludes genetic differences in it? Or just that precludes taking them seriously...

This claim was also made some 38 years ago by Nobel Prize winner William Shockley (who, like Murray was not Jewish). Unfortunately, Prof. Shockleys' calculations were based on an underestimate of the number of Jews in North America by a factor of 3!

First, does the overrepresentation of Jews in academia, etc, have a partly genetic explanation?

No.

This has been another episode of simple answers to stupid questions.

As a gentile who has spent a significant amount of time in mostly Jewish circles, I've definitely heard these types of arguments dozens of times before. Personally, they make me nauseous, and it does surprise me somewhat that otherwise well mannered people will hold forth on the genetic superiority of their ethnicity over mine in front of me. I am impressed that someone had the guts to publish a piece on it. Better than simply holding forth in private and off the record, I guess.

Brett Bellmore asks a good question. I don't understand why ideas of the type Murray is advancing are met with such derision. I mean, I haven't read The Bell Curve, but I've read about it a great deal, and gather that it was bad science, and published in a sensationalistic way.

Therefore, I understand why people are skeptical, a priori, of anything Murray has to say.

But, the deeper question posed by the data and the "Cochran-Hardy-Harpending theory" seem legitimate to me, and interesting from the point of view of learning about how quickly and in what ways evolution can bring about changes in average intelligence.

If people think that there cannot be any bioligical explanation of these data, they should state why they think that.

"Unfortunately, Prof. Shockleys' calculations were based on an underestimate of the number of Jews in North America by a factor of 3!"

Really? And were Murray's?

Seriously, I'm curious about this; The vehemence this meets with seems motivated by more than a factual disagreement. Is intelligence a result in part of genetics, which could theoretically differ between groups, just like height, or isn't it?

The answer to the question will likely become clearer within the next 12 months. There are undoubtedly studies underway to try to prove or disprove the Cochran/Harpending/Hardy hypothesis. While disproving their hypothesis would not eliminate the possibility of a genetic component to ashkenazi IQs, proving it would pretty much end the debate.

Amongst Indians, South Indian Brahmins (I happen to be one...through no skill of my own of course) are considered the super-brainiacs. My wife, who is an Ashkenazi Jew, is expecting our first child, who will obviously be the true Ubermensch that prophesy has foretold. He/she will unite the force, destroy the one ring, or at the very least, kick ass on the SATs.

"I haven't read The Bell Curve, but I've read about it a great deal, and gather that it was bad science, and published in a sensationalistic way."

Without reading it, you've gathered this? You can get a used copy for under $4 from Amazon, you know. Won't even put money in Murray's pocket...

"As a gentile who has spent a significant amount of time in mostly Jewish circles, I've definitely heard these types of arguments dozens of times before. Personally, they make me nauseous...".

I have to say, I don't understand the logic here. The hypothesis that one ethnic group has higher IQ than another one is nothing to take personally. I'm not Jewish, but it wouldn't bother me in the least if I learned with 100% certainty that the average Jewish IQ is 1 Std. dev. higher than the average non-Jewish IQ. So what? Does that suddenly change what my IQ is? Where is the logic to this?

Maybe of you smart Jews out there can explain it to me.

" My wife, who is an Ashkenazi Jew, is expecting our first child, who will obviously be the true Ubermensch that prophesy has foretold."

Or, based on some of the genetics of IQ research I've followed, at a high risk of several mental illnesses. If high IQs had no downside, evolution would have made us all brainiacs.

Jim, it's a nature vs nurture thing. If the mind is not entirely a product of nurture, utopia can't be created by social engineering. (Though genetic engineering might have a shot.)

Also, if there are actual, honest to goodness differences between the races, then disparate impact doesn't prove discrimination, which would be really inconvenient.

"No.

This has been another episode of simple answers to stupid questions."

Um, how do you know? It's funny how liberals will malign creationist/intelligent designers for their ignorance of the virtues of science (as would I), but feel completely comfortable answering an interesting scientific query with a simple, politically correct "No."

Again I ask, how in God's name could you possibly claim that you know the answer to that question?

" "I haven't read The Bell Curve, but I've read about it a great deal, and gather that it was bad science, and published in a sensationalistic way." "

"Without reading it, you've gathered this? You can get a used copy for under $4 from Amazon, you know. Won't even put money in Murray's pocket..."

I've read several reviews that pointed out various methodological errors. I don't have time to read everything out there, so sometimes I just make a provisional judgement based on book reviews (hence the use of the phrase "I gather").

I could accept that on some level, 'intelligence' is genetically determined 'just like height.' What I could never accept is that success in academia, IQ test results, financial outcomes or anything on down the line is 'just like height.'

Neither Jews generally nor the Ashkenazim in particular constitute a race as that term has typically been used. It's probably more precise to look at this issue in terms of population subgroups than in terms of races.

After reading a couple of Steven Pinker's books, I thought he was exagerating the hostility that exists these days to biological explanations of innate capabilities, such as IQ.

Now, I'm not so sure.

First you would have to prove that success -- or not even success, but mere presence -- in academia has some correlation not even to genetics, but simply to intelligence in any objectively measurable way. And it's not.

People whose parents went to university are greatly more likely to go to university themselves. This is not because of genetics.

Height is not purely heritable. Environment, primarily childhood nutrition, has a significant impact on height. Of course, height also correlates to some extent with certain measures of success such as income.

neil,

Have they shown that adopted children of academics are as likely to go to university as biological children? I doubt it.

People whose parents went to university are greatly more likely to go to university themselves. This is not because of genetics.

That's certainly debatable. The children of academics would share the genetic make-up of their parents, and presumably would have inherited many of the genetic characteristics (not necessarily "IQ" intelligence) that led their parents to become academics. Having known a number of people who were adopted, who grew up to be nothing like their adoptive parents, yet very similar to their genetic parents, I'm inclined to lean heavily toward the nature side of the argument.

I guess what's interesting about the article is the suggestion that culture or other factors that operate on groups can have an impact on average IQ.

Sort of goes beyond the argument that Neal Stephenson puts into one of his character's mouths:

"While people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be... some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgement, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed."

Cognitive ability is clearly heritable to some extent. While there is a debate about exactly how heritable, the really controversial question is about the extent to which the variance in observed mean IQ scores among population subgroups is genetic.

The children of academics would share the genetic make-up of their parents, and presumably would have inherited many of the genetic characteristics (not necessarily "IQ" intelligence) that led their parents to become academics.

And what genetic characteristics are these, exactly? Without any more data, this is a tautology. Me, I'm disinclined to believe in unnamed, undetailed "genetic characteristics" which somehow drive our social decisions to the exclusion of measurable, testable social characteristics. You're working backwards from your proposition, much like creationists do. This necessarily leads to some leaps of faith.

If high IQs had no downside, evolution would have made us all brainiacs.

Really? Why don't we all have Superman's powers -- is it the weakness to Kryptonite that prevents natural selection from providing us with this endowment?

What are the compelling arguments against the bell curve? Seriously. I know of no compelling ones. It certainly explains a lot. No one's even alluded to a counter-argument here, except for "sensationalistic" and "methodological problems" and sneering.

Stephen Jay Gould argued that IQ is worse than useless. Let's assume he's right. Look at Nobel prizes, or the MIT math department. Next you might argue, "It's not that Jews are more intelligent, it's that they have a cultural heritage of prizing education." Well, what does that heritage look like over a few generations from an evolutionary point of view?

Please don't be snarky if you reply. I honestly don't relish the bell curve idea. I sincerely don't know of any compelling alternatives.

(Disclaimer: tiny tim is a non-Jewish caucasian).

Uh, we are all brainiacs. When was the last time you heard a monkey talk? I mean in real life. Cartoons don't count.

Other points to consider are that, first, large brains are metabolically very expensive, and second, that human-level IQ has only just arrived on the evolutionary time scale.

We don't all have Superman's powers because,

1. For the most part they're not physically realizable.

2. Evolution is a hill climbing algorithim, it finds local maxima, not global.

#2 is a more important point than most people realize.

"(Disclaimer: tiny tim is a non-Jewish caucasian)."

Yeah, yeah. I bet he's also a cute little crippled boy, waiting for Ebenezer Scrooge to save him.

Mr. Noah wins...hilarious, as you people so often are!

Don't anyone forget that when IQ was invented in the early 20th century, it was, among other things, used to scientifically confirm that Jews were genetically burdened with inferior intelligence...for them to now find themselves on top of the heap, this miracle of evolution has been rapid indeed!

Musings about whether intelligence (or even IQ) might be as genetically influenced as height are telling: as I understand it, the genetic component of height determination is widely overestimated compared to factors like diet and lifestyle. This is how you can look at 150-year-old American furniture and be like, "this looks made for little people!" -- it's not because of all the evolvin' we've been doing since then.

We have in the lay populace adopted a kind of "genetics of the gaps" mentality, where genes are the default explanation for all kinds of differences between people that have not been otherwise explained. In the vast majority of cases over the history of genetics, these assumptions have been shown to be overblown if not wholly mistaken. At some point we ought to give up the comfortable myth that we understand things we do not, and reserve the benefit of the doubt for non-genetic explanations in the absence of real evidence.

I wouldn't say that the article is complete trash. Murray is basically arguing that Jews today are possibly smarter today because the Romans and their allies "culled" the dumb Jews, or at least created an environent where dumb Jews found it difficult to continue practicing Judaism (I assume they mostly converted to Christianity). This could lead to some interesting historical investigations - i.e. was the rapid growth in Christianity in the late Roman Empire then actually a direct result of Roman oppression driving Jews into a less rigorous faith (which in its early days remember, was seen as a Jewish sect)? In that case Joshu ben Gamla is ironically probably the true father of Christianity.

tiny tim, barring outright breeding programs (as in dogs or cattle where prize animals become studs; arranged marriage is not even close), "a few generations" is not enough time for any evolutionary processes to take place. Let the Jewish cultural preference for intellectualism stick around for a couple tens of thousands of years and you might have some data to talk about.

Am I the only one disgusted by the idea that dumb Jews were culled by pogroms, leading to an intellectual super race? Just as with slavery theories of African-American athletic superiority, this is politically reprehensible, and scientifically hogwash; evolution doesn't occur on anything approaching this sort of time-scale, and isn't it handy that this pseudo-science just confirms stereotypes of the groups in question? Difference within groups remains greater than difference between. . .

And while this may seem like an innocuous "gentile praising jews" sort of thing, its only a matter of time until we're back to images of shadowy cabals using those mental superpowers for evil.

"We have in the lay populace adopted a kind of "genetics of the gaps" mentality, where genes are the default explanation for all kinds of differences between people that have not been otherwise explained. In the vast majority of cases over the history of genetics, these assumptions have been shown to be overblown if not wholly mistaken."

You mean explanations like, how scizophrenia is due to a cold parenting style?

There has probably been much more overreliance on nurture historically. I mean, look at the ridiculous ideas you see in Freudianism on one hand, and radical behaviorism on the other.

"At some point we ought to give up the comfortable myth that we understand things we do not, and reserve the benefit of the doubt for non-genetic explanations in the absence of real evidence."

This statement would be just as logical if the term "non-genetic" was replaced with "genetic".

RE Stephen Jay Gould

Gould wrote an entire book debunking the Murray-Hearnstein book. The title is, "The Mismeasure of Man."

Matt’s “together at last” elides a long history of convergence, which reaches back to the sub rosa rehabilitation of racists like Nathaniel Weyl. If Murray’s current article surprises, you haven’t been paying attention. The strange death of racial liberalism was the concerted work of several generations, undertaken under the noses of complacent, willfully ignorant bien pensant liberals.

Stories such as proferred by Murray may make for a decent chat over a couple beers, but that's about it.

Increases in mean IQ at the level under examination are relatively small. In an environment with the right selection pressure, they could probably be achieved in a relatively short amount of time. Cochran et. al. suggest somewhere around 20 generations would not be implausible.

from the perspective of an academic it's a shame that mindless 70's and 80's "blank slateism" still holds sway among many...at least if you are part of the reality based community.

There is no dispute today that genes are the largest single factor in determining a person's intelligence. the debate is over how large that factor is: estimates range from .4 to .8. the remaining factors are fetal nutrition and early childhood environment (especially nutrition)...about up and til ages 2 or 3. that's it.

so, yes, intelligence (and its effects -- academic success...income, health, marital success, etc.) are like height. how do we know this? primarily through exhaustive studies of identical twins separated at birth and raised by non-genetic parents.

to a large extent..your general life pattern is determined before you are born.

and, btw, IQ was not created early in the 20th century to prove that Ashkenazim were stupid.

We don't know what the time scale is.

The genetic code is analogous to a computer program. Small changes can have big effects. For example, changing certain genes is analogous to altering parameters in a computer program. Genes like homeobox genes are involved in large scale allocation, x amount of material to the brain, y amount to the body, etc.

Just look at how fast animals that were very similar to modern-day chimps evolved into us. Imaging if you had a person standing in Washington DC, holding hands with her mother, who in turn is holding hands with her mother, etc. By the time the chain reached NYC, you'd be looking at chimps holding hands.

ah, the Mismeasure of Man fallacy:

Gould was not a geneticist, nor a statistician (the discussion of regression analysis in MoM is all wrong), nor a cognitive psychologist. he was a paleontologist (known primarily in scientific circles for his tireless advocacy of punctuated equilibrium...a theory that was actually propounded first by Eldridge...and which pretty much has no adherents left today; he was primarily known in non-scientific circles for a variety of popular level books of varying quality....like Sagan). neither did he write that book as a critique of the Bell Curve (which was a methodologically flawed work). in fact, he didn't write it all. it was collection of research notes by his grad students on various racists and eugenicists of the late 19th and early 20th century.

so, let's put that canard to rest. there are many valid methodological critiques that have been made of Murray...none of them were by Gould.

It's hard to see how "Mismeasure of Man" could be a whole book devoted to refuting the Bell Curve, since MoM was published in 1981 and the Bell Curve in 1994.

Gould added an essay on the Bell Curve to a later edition.

as for the length of the evolutionary time frame...its all relevant to the pressures and phenotypes under discussion.

heck, natural blondes have virtually disappeared from the planet in less than a 100 years...and will be extinct even in Nordic populations in about another 100. human height can show dramatic shifts based solely upon self-selection.

tps12 - "Let the Jewish cultural preference for intellectualism stick around for a couple tens of thousands of years and you might have some data to talk about."

I don't think that's true. Breeders change animals dramatically to a purpose in a few generations. Also you're not explaining the mysteries of the Nobel Prize or the MIT math department, if you were trying to do so.

I grant that nature prizes intelligence in all humans, so it is difficult to stand out in this way. What difference you would expect to see are at one extreme, subsistence farmers, and the other peoples who live by their wits in a cosmopolitan setting.

You can determine the natural size of primate groups by the brain size of that type of primate. This indicates that the more social primates are more intelligent. This in turn indicates that in general there is a stronger demand for intelligence in humans who interact in an urban setting than in a rural one.

Re Nathan

1. I find it amazing that Mr. Nathan could dismiss Gould because he wasn't a statistician. Neither were Herrnstein or Murray. Murray isn't even a scientist of any kind.

2. Mr. Nathan is seriously in error relative to punctuated equilibrium. It is far from being rejected by the evolutionary biology community.

3. The regression analysis in the Bell
Curve makes the curious assumption that R^2 values of .16 are something to get excited about. Most statisticians consider regression analysis to be a highly dubious analytic tool to start with and would ROFL over a claim that an R^2 of .16 has some significance.

People whose parents went to university are greatly more likely to go to university themselves. This is not because of genetics.

The term you are looking for when talking about traits which children are more likely to have given their parents' situation/traits is "heritable." Certain traits can be heritable but not genetic. English speaking parents are far more likely to have children who speak English than non-English-speaking parents (on average). This is not because they have brains that are genetically pre-wired to speak English, but rather because language is inherited from parents.

Nathan, yes, the time frames required depend on how selection pressures are being applied. This is how such great variation in dog and cattle breeds are possible in such short periods of time. But we are not talking about unknowns here, we're talking about a vague respect for intellectualism within cultural Judaism compared to other groups. Where is the plausible mechanism by which such a hazy statement of values produces such rapid results? It's not there.

And no, you're correct, IQ was not invented to prove anything about Jews. It was invented for diagnosing mentally handicapped people and immediately applied to the race and class science that has such a rich intellectual heritage in the West.

No one is arguing for "blank slatism" in this thread, and your attempt to burn that straw man rather than engage people who actually question the orthodoxy of genetic essentialism is as fallacious as Steven Pinker's when he first came up with it. Essentialism has always been a fundamental component of the Western beliefs about individual differences and it remains so today. The most superficial review of our history reveals a direct line from notions like the divine right of kings to "noble blood" to the existence of decadent races, and so on through today's faith in an absolute and objective IQ. At no point has the West been broadly Freudian or assumed any other non-essentialist basis for the general societal worldview: just-so stories about genetics are only the latest iteration of an outlook that has always been with us.

And who knows? My height, intelligence, how I take my coffee may all be programmed in my DNA. But anyone with even a passing familiarity with the historical context of these kinds of ideas has no choice but to be highly skeptical of worldviews that by all appearances reinforce the same old ideas in the service of the same old power structures as since-dismissed ideas like phrenology and blood nobility.

Gosh, I can't imagine why liberals would be skeptical of non-falsifiable, non-peer-reviewed, untested hypotheses published by racial provocateurs in ethnocentric journals. They must hate science!

I think it's beyond dispute that high cognitive ability can cluster within certain families. And it seems to be the case that the Ashkenazim have more than their share of this trait, to the point where the median Jew of Eastern European background is more intelligent than the median member of most other ethnic groups, although the explanations offered by Murray are more flattery than science. It's far more likely that any given ethnically-linked trait is due to random genetic variation being reinforced by in-group marriage, than a result of the smart ones surviving persecution. Pogroms had this unpleasant tendency to be random mob violence.

But the simple fact is that intelligence is not linked to the color of your skin or the shape of your nose. It's not controlled by a single genetic locus. Variation within groups is far greater than variation between groups.

More importantly, since the advent of civilization, evolutionary selection pressures have a trivial effect on modern humans compared to cultural selection pressures. The Persians, Egyptians, Indians, and Chinese had advanced civilizations back when the Hebrews were a small, insignificant tribe and the Anglo-Saxons were living in tents. Claiming some sort of innate superiority for Hebrews and/or Anglo-Saxons requires complete and utter ignorance of history.

Jewish culture, with its talmudic tradition, fosters intellectualism. The British political and economic system drove its imperial success. Ideas and institutions matter. Attributing more importance to bloodline than culture is not merely a creepy, royalist attitude, it's thoroughly misguided.

SLC missed the part where I noted that the Bell Curve had its own statistical flaws (indeed the regression analysis in the BC was flawed...it just wasn't flawed for the reasons that Gould gave in the MoM0. I stand by my comment re: PE.

I noticed that SLC had no substantive critique to make.

(for the record, I have no interest in defending..or attacking the Bell Curve......I already noted it had quite a few flaws....I don't doubt that there heritable IQ differences across population subgroups...but they don't interest me as such....and discussion of such differences tends to a. give ammunition to racists on one-hand...and b. cause a general ostrich-in-the-sand denial of modern genetics and psychometrics by some on both the left and right...as evinced in this thread.

fwiw, I completely agree with everything LaFollette Progressive wrote above. everything.

indeed, I'd give an (unproveable) guess that assortive mating is primarily responsible for most heritable (genetic and otherwise) human traits.

tiny tim, not just "live by their wits," but "survive and reproduce by their wits." However much intelligence has been valued in Jewish culture(s) over the last couple thousand years, it's not at all clear that said valuation has prevented non-intelligent Jews from marrying and reproducing at the same rates as everyone else. Nor has there been a breeding program anything like what was required to shape breeds of domesticated animal, in any culture.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the feedback loops between genetic and cultural evolution are poorly understood. They're understood worse than that. Which means, among other things, that a great deal of effort is likely to go into understanding them better. Twenty years from now we may know a great deal more than we know today. Then again, maybe we won't. But in any case, investigations will proceed. To the extent that people on the right or left are discomfitted by this process, there's not much that can be done.

I can live with LaFollette Progressive's stated positions as well. For some reason I still feel Nathan's talking crazy.

I can disprove the myth of Jewish superior intelligence with three words:

Government of Israel

The Bell Curve makes rather stupid errors, such as reporting the wrong percentage of adult Americans at the time who went to college. Instead of just looking at the existing studies or census data, they just gave a number and didn't cite where it was from.

From a Slate article on this:

"Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that Herrnstein and Murray had buried key data in remote appendices. Upon closer inspection, that data appeared to demolish one of their core claims, that low IQ correlates highly with anti-social behaviors, more highly even than low socioeconomic status."

"In his essay, Nisbett reviews all the studies that might weaken Murray and Herrnstein's beloved thesis that blacks, taken as a group, are less intelligent than whites, taken as a group. He reviewed studies of skin color, blood group indicators, reported white ancestry, mixed-race children, adoption studies, and, most intriguingly, a study of the children of American soldiers and German mothers in post-war Germany. (The cohort of the children of black soldiers had the same IQ as the cohort of the children of white soldiers, indicating that the relatively depressed IQs of American-born blacks are an artifact of an environmental factor—the intractability of white American racism, maybe?) Like any prudent scientist, Nisbett admits when his evidence is vague, incomplete, or contradictory. But on one score he was unequivocal: "By conventional academic standards, Herrnstein and Murray's review of the evidence on the heritability of the IQ difference between blacks and whites is shockingly incomplete and biased.""

Here is the Nazi intellectual connection:

"Murray is happy to speculate about the motives of those who reject his work—apparently it's a vast left-wing conspiracy—he refuses to seriously discuss the fact that J. Phillippe Rushton, along with Arthur Jensen and 14 other researchers whose work is cited prominently by The Bell Curve, are recipients of grant monies from the Pioneer Fund. What is the Pioneer Fund? The Pioneer Fund was founded in 1937 by Harry Laughlin and Wickliffe Draper. Laughlin is described innocuously in The Bell Curve as "a biologist who was especially concerned about keeping up the American level of intelligence by suitable immigration policies." This may have passed as an acceptable gloss in 1994, but since the publication of The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism by Stefan Kuhl and The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and The Pioneer Fund by William H. Tucker, and extensive archival work by a University of Virginia medical ethicist named Paul Lombardo, it has become—how to put it?—a tad incomplete.

Defenders of the Pioneer Fund like to portray Laughlin as a man of his era, a garden-variety eugenicist at a time when eugenic theories were common, even respectable, intellectual coin. But Laughlin was a good deal more than that. As superintendent of something called the Eugenics Record Office, Laughlin's testimony before Congress helped pass the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. ("The Jew is doubtless here to stay," Laughlin confided to his associate Madison Grant, "and the Nordic's job is to prevent more of them from coming.") Meanwhile, as editor of the Eugenical News, Laughlin was an avid admirer of the German racial and sterilization policies being pioneered under Adolf Hitler. After Hitler signed the Law for the Prevention of Defective Progeny, Laughlin wrote an editorial praising Germany as one of the "great nations of the world" for its recognition of the "biological foundations of national character." When Laughlin was offered an honorary degree by the University of Heidelberg—then a fully Nazi institution purged of all Jewish remnant—he replied with "deep gratitude" at the honor "because it will come from a nation which for many centuries nurtured the human seed-stock which later founded my own country." Laughlin was unable to attend. But when his official diploma finally arrived stateside, he threw himself a luncheon on his own behalf. Two years later, he founded the Pioneer Fund."

"Draper, his partner, wrote its blank check. Heir to a vast textile fortune, Draper obsessed over the "dysgenic" degeneration of America's Nordic stock. In late August 1935, Draper traveled to Berlin to attend the International Congress for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems. Presiding over the conference was Wilhelm Frick, the reichminister of the interior who had administered the Nuremburg Laws. (Frick was hanged in 1946 for his crimes against humanity.) There Draper's travel companion and Laughlin's colleague and official conference surrogate Clarence Campbell delivered an oration that concluded with the words: "The difference between the Jew and the Aryan is as unsurmountable [sic] as that between black and white. … Germany has set a pattern which other nations must follow. … To that great leader, Adolf Hitler!" Three years later, when Draper paid to print and disseminate a book titled White America, a personal copy was delivered to Reichminister Frick."

http://www.slate.com/id/2128199/

Here is another Slate article:

http://www.slate.com/id/2416/

For years Europeans use such pseudo-science to paint East Asians, South Asian and Jews as inferior to white Europeans. Once it became obvious that all of these people were able to create some measure of success - in part because of liberals who forced racists to face their own bigotry, especially in the wake of imperialism and the Holocaust - East Asians, South Asians and Jews became the "good" non WASP groups while Arabs and black Africans stayed the "bad group."

tps12:

Murray's hypotheses appears to me to be attenuated and unlikely. However, on this thread there have been numerous statements in denial of legitimate peer-reviewed science...which Murray essentially gives accurately in the first part of his article. it's the leaps after that that...

When was the last time you heard a monkey talk? I mean in real life. - Jim W

Didn't G.W. Bush give a speech this morning?

Come-on ... I thought we were a bunch of liberals in the grips of an irrational Bush hatred -- and yet nobody has yet made that response? Perhaps could the right be wrong about our "irrational Bush hatred"? Maybe they are wrong about other things?

I have to say, I also find the idea (of Cochran-Hardy-Harpending) that cultural variables could produce a significant change in mean IQ for one subgroup in such a short time, kind of far fetched. Yet, its still plausible. That's why its so interesting. I'll be pretty surprised if it turns out to be true.

I can disprove the myth of Jewish superior intelligence with three words:

Government of Israel

Wow! For once I agree with Fred (or is this a different Fred?). Actually, though, this points to one of the problems of the myth of Jewish superior intelligence -- too many Jews start to believe it. And once someone's convinced he's too clever by a half, he'll act too stupid by 2/3.

Israel is always doing something that they think is sooooo strategically clever ... and it always backfires. And part of the reason why Israelis are convinced that they're being so clever is that they figure "we're Jewish -- of course we're smarter than those Arabs".

The myth of Jewish intellectual superiority is not a harmless one.

However much intelligence has been valued in Jewish culture(s) over the last couple thousand years, it's not at all clear that said valuation has prevented non-intelligent Jews from marrying and reproducing at the same rates as everyone else. Nor has there been a breeding program anything like what was required to shape breeds of domesticated animal, in any culture.

My own pet theory is that the Jews benefited -if one can use that word in light of the very real persecution they experienced- from the exclusionary character of the Christian societies they inhabited. These Christian societies which were feudal/agricultural forbade jews from having land and in doing so they forced them on the pursuits that formed the basis of modern capitalism: banking, commerce, the arts etc.

This in turn created the cultural legacies that gave emphasis to education and intellectual achievement, legacies that still survive with diaspora jews today. It also explains why the state of Israel isn't exactly a center of world culture or of world economy; on the contrary, Israeli economy isn't that dynamic while the state is in debt and inflicted by the sort of corruption and patronage networks you would expect to find in other Mediterranean and Arab countries.

As for discussion over IQ, it's really outside my realm of expertise, but I have the impression that certain right wing jewish circles have developed their own little brands of nationalism which are also very banal in their ordinariness.

I could be widely off base though.

Disclaimer: I am not jewish either.

Having known a number of people who were adopted, who grew up to be nothing like their adoptive parents, yet very similar to their genetic parents, I'm inclined to lean heavily toward the nature side of the argument. - vanya

I can come up with examples that go both ways. My younger brother is personality-wise exactly like several relatives of ours that he barely knew during his formative years ... and very much unlike my parents. Chalk that up to genetics (he has the same mix of genes that these relatives have) as the environment or influence of immediate family had little to do with it.

OTOH, my gf's adopted daughter seems to be turning out as a carbon copy of me. There is no genetic connection (to my knowledge) -- yet somehow she's picked up many of my character traits at a very young age. Chalk it up to me being around and being "someone whom mommy likes so I should imitate him"?

*

As to the issue of Jews in academia -- the number of Jews entering academica is really going downhill as Jews assimilate more into mainstream (less intellectualized) American culture: so I'm not sure how genetic "going into academics" really is. I suspect it's mainly cultural/family-influenced. I know many intelligent people whose families would kill them if they didn't use their intelligence to enter into a lucrative profession -- "you're smart ... why don't you become a doctor/lawyer" ... OTOH, some of us grow up in families where the idea is that if you are really smart, you get your Ph.D.

A certain slice of Jewish culture (traditional enough so as to place an emphasis on being a scholar ... not so traditional as to restrict such scholarship to the four cubits of halacha ... and not so reactionary as to be infected with the machismo that so affects many quarters of so-called traditional Judaism today, which machismo would view academia as not a physical or lucritive enough job to be a good job) might push toward academia -- but that slice of Jewish culture was a temporary phenomenon as we Jews were emancipated and our traditional emphasis on being a Talmid Chachem was translated into the secular sphere of emphasis on being an academic. But as Jews assimilate further, we don't have so much emphasis anymore on being a Talmid Chachem or it's secular equivalent of being an academic. And those Jews who would be "traditionally religious" (note the use of quotation marks -- they're religion isn't as traditional as they'd claim) enough to prioritize being a Talmid Chachem have so absorbed the cult of machismo (for reasons too complicated to get into here) that the traditional figure of the shy/deferential Talmid Chachem (and hence it's modern, secular equivalent of the absent-minded professor) is too un-worldly, not manly or productive enough to be something encouraged by that community.

So my guess is that Murray, et al., mistake a rather fleeting phenomenon for "the way things always were, will be and ought to be" -- a rather common thing for today's "things were always as they were on 1950s TeeVee shows and ought to remain that way" conservatives to do.

"it's not at all clear that said valuation has prevented non-intelligent Jews from marrying and reproducing at the same rates as everyone else."

You deny natural selection. The unintelligent are less likely to secure a fit mate. They are more likely to die in accidents. They are more likely to be incarcerated. They are less likely to be materially successful and thus to give their children advantage. These shortcomings are hardly noticeable in one or two generations, but for instance a 2% advantage or disadvantage is unmistakable over ten generations.

"Nor has there been a breeding program anything like what was required to shape breeds of domesticated animal, in any culture."

You are saying that it takes nature tens of thousands of years to mutate a species as much as a breeder can in a few generations. I think you underestimate evolution.

Liberals fight for gay rights because homosexuality is at least partly genetically determined.

Why can't they stomach the idea that intelligence might also have genetic origins?

On the other hand, many Conservatives dismiss the genetic origins of homosexuality but seem to gravitate towards Bell Curve-like arguements.

What gives?

The level of factual knowledge, logical reasoning, and appreciation of reality displayed in this thread would be below the average even on a Creationist website denouncing Darwin.

This may violate some rules, but it is Altercation's 3-parter knock-out of Murray from 2005 and is not available as linky goodness anymore since move from MSNBC to media matters:
------------
"Anyway, today’s entry concerns Murray’s first work, “Losing Ground.”

Perhaps the most successful publishing foray into the world of ideas by a combination of right wing funders and their compatriot intellectuals is the amazing public relations achievement undertaken on behalf of the work of the formerly obscure Charles Murray. How many 800 plus page nonfiction books featuring over a hundred pages of graphs and source materials have managed to sell upwards of 300,000 copies in hardcover in recent years? How many have inspired Vanity Fair-type celebrity coverage in virtually all major news magazines, as well as a special issue of the New Republic, which featured no fewer than seventeen responses? How many authors of such books have been featured in major Hollywood films, carried by characters wishing to demonstrate intellectual toughness? [1] The answer to all of the above is precisely one: Murray’s The Bell Curve. [2] Back in 1982, however, Charles Murray, was still a “nobody” in the words of William Hammett, president of the Manhattan Institute, and about to be Murray’s chief patron. Murray’s ascendancy would never have been possible without the patient, far-sighted investments in his work by a conservative network of funders and foundations, including the reclusive billionaire, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Olin Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and perhaps most significantly, Milwaukee’s Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. They not only supported Murray when he needed time to research and write his books, they funded elaborate publicity campaigns to ensure that Murray’s argument would dominate media discourse.

The story of Charles Murray’s rise in just one decade from being a public nobody to being America’s best known and perhaps most influential public intellectual is an odd but instructive tale with regard to just how easily conservatives can manipulate the SCLM, and legitimate views once considered unspeakable in polite society. As a writer, Murray displayed an uncanny ability to offer what appeared to be a reasonable and scholarly-sounding voice to opinions and arguments that had hitherto been considered beyond the pale of respectability. Indeed he has been quite self-conscious regarding this purpose as evidenced by the fact that in his book proposal for “Losing Ground,” he explained to potential publishers that his work would be welcomed by people who secretly believed themselves to be racists. "Why can a publisher sell it?" he asked. "Because a huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It's going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say." [3]

Trained as a Ph.D. in political science but without any formal credentials in economics or psychometrics --the two fields in which his work managed to incite national debates--Murray’s work has met with little but vituperation and disgust among those experts competent to judge its scientific merits. Yet owing to a series of brilliant and extremely well funded marketing strategies, and an unarguable genius for locating the g-spot of the political/intellectual marketplace, Murray somehow managed to transform public debate on issues where he lacked what most in the field would consider basic professional competence.

Back when Murray was still in Iowa, he became friends with a well-connected Reagan Administration official named Michael Horowitz. Horowitz secured an invitation for Murray to speak at a lunch sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, convincing William Hammett that he had discovered a star. Meanwhile, Murray sent a copy of an article he wrote for the Olin Foundation-funded neoconservative journal “Public Interest,” co-founded and edited by Irving Kristol. Kristol called Michael Joyce, whom he had helped hire to run the Olin Foundation, and explained that Murray wanted to turn his article into a book but needed money to do so, as no commercial publisher would pay a living wage for a wonky right-wing study of welfare policy by a nobody from Iowa. A series of quick phone calls resulted in a $125,000 grant from three conservative foundations.[4]

Viewing Murray’s work as a potential antidote to Michael Harrington’s The Other America, which helped inspire the War on Poverty, Hammett wrote, “Every generation produces a handful of books whose impact is lasting; books that change basic assumptions about the way the world works,” in a private memo at the time. “Charles Murray’s Losing Ground could become such a book. And if it does it will alter the terms of debate over what is perhaps the most compelling political issue of our time: the modern welfare state.” [5] Right again.

According to Murray’s formulation, welfare did not ameliorate or attenuate the ravages of poverty; it perpetuated and entrenched them. Instead of empowering poor people, it created a dangerous dependency on federal handouts that sapped their energy and destroyed their initiative, thereby preventing them from acquiring the productive skills they need to achieve success in America’s market economy. “We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead,” Murray lamented. It was time to scrap the entire system and let the poor fend for themselves.

Unfortunately, Murray’s assertions were based on a series of internal contradictions, specious arguments and outright phony claims unsupported by his data. For instance, his assertion that that the hope for welfare payments was the main source of illegitimacy among black teenagers posited no evidence for this claim, and failed to explain why the rate of illegitimacy rose for everyone—and not just welfare recipients--after 1972, while the constant-dollar value of those welfare benefits declined by twenty percent. While continually insisting on the impotence of the Great Society programs of the Johnson administration, Murray never once explained the development of the Black middle class during this period. Moreover, why blame the welfare policies of the late sixties and early seventies on for the decline in participation of Black males in the labor market when the decline actually dates back to the late fifties? It turned out that Murray’s calculations relied on the highly disputed figures of an obscure economist named Timothy Smedding. Using more traditional and widely-accepted measurements, Christopher Jencks calculated that contrary to Murray’s central claims, the percentage of the population defined as poor in 1980 was only half the size it was in 1965, and one third the size it was in 1950.

Much of Murray’s argument was taken up by a “thought-experiment” based on a fictional couple he named Harold and Phyllis who lived in Pennsylvania, who made what Murray argued was an entirely rational economic decision for the woman to remain unmarried after having a child in order to collect welfare benefits. But Murray screwed up his math. While Pennsylvania was indeed atypically generous to welfare recipients in 1980, the couple’s income would still have been over thirty percent higher if Harold had worked at a minimum wage job rather than Phyllis collecting welfare as the sole means of support for the family. [6]

Despite these weaknesses, Hammett’s prediction proved prophetic. Nothing so trivial as fundamental flaws in both reasoning and calculations managed to interfere with the Manhattan Institute’s plans to turn Murray’s blame-the-victim argument into the nation’s new conventional wisdom on welfare. The publicity campaign for “Losing Ground” was planned and executed with impressive discipline and imagination. Surely it had no precedent in the world of welfare wonkdom. Before it began, Hammett informed his colleagues “any discretionary funds at our disposal for the next few months will go toward financing Murray's outreach activities.” He then mailed out a massive number of copies—over 700-- to academics, journalists, and public officials, sent Murray on a national speaking tour (funded by $15,000 grant from the Liberty Fund) and he raised another $10,000 to “gather twenty of the nation’s leading scholars from both the conservative and liberal camps, along with some of the best writers on the subject, for a two-day discussion,” according to an internal memorandum. Hammett explained in an internal memo. Well-known columnists and other members of the media were paid between $500 and $1,500 a piece to participate, something that was unheard of at the time, and remains extremely rare. Taking advantage of the economic illiteracy of the punditocracy, Murray was able to sell his idea to these opinion-makers without having to respond to difficult queries that might have been posed by a competent economist. (No one, for instance, suggested submitting any part of “Losing Ground” to a peer-review professional journal.) The pundits who liked it did so because it reinforced their own worldviews—along with the arguments necessary to support Reagan Administration’s assault on the welfare state. Reagan liked to tell stories about “welfare queens” buying vodka with their food stamps. Most people understood these to be apocryphal, but conservatives repeated them in the belief that they contained within them a “larger truth.” Now here was Charles Murray with a book full of graphs and economic data that appeared to “prove” the larger story that Reagan’s imagined anecdotes hoped to impart. For conservatives seeking to weaken the welfare state, and for liberals and moderates seeking to make themselves appear more “relevant” in a period of conservative ascendancy, there was no sense in looking this gift horse too closely in the mouth.

In spite of the book’s errors, or because his readers were oblivious to them, Losing Ground quickly became a cause celebre for pundits and politicians alike. "This year's budget-cutters' bible seems to be ‘Losing Ground,’" noted a New York Times editorial early in 1985. “Among movers and shakers in the federal executive branch, the newspaper reported, “’Losing Ground’ had quickly become holy writ: "In agency after agency, officials cite the Murray book as a philosophical base" for proposals to slash social expenditure.” [7] The book was the subject of dozens of major editorials, columns, and reviews in publications such as the New York Times, Newsweek, the Dallas Morning News, and The New Republic. “As Charles Lane observed in The New Republic, its success could be viewed as “a case study in how conservative intellectuals have come to dominate the policy debates of recent years." [8] Even once the book’s obvious weaknesses had been identified, as experts began to weigh in from professional journals, they barely made a dent in its effectiveness as a weapon in the ideological wars. A decade or more later, conservatives were still wielding Losing Ground like a sword against the scourge of more money for the poor. When Murray was invited to be a guest on ABC's “This Week” during this same period, host David Brinkley lavishly praised him as "the author of a much-admired, much-discussed book called “Losing Ground,” which is a study of our social problems." Minutes later, Murray was explaining his solution: "I want to get rid of the whole welfare system, period, lock, stock and barrel -- if you don't have any more welfare, you enlist a lot more people in the community to help take care of the children that are born. And the final thing that you can do, if all else fails, is orphanages." [9] More than a dozen years after publication, the Philadelphia Inquirer accurately recalled that Losing Ground "provided much of the intellectual groundwork for welfare reform,” and just as the new House Speaker Newt Gingrich was suggesting that children in poverty be put in orphanages. [10]

[1] This was 1994’s "With Honors" starring Joe Pesci, about a homeless man at Harvard, released by Warner Brothers.

[2] The book was co-authored with the late Richard Hernstein, who died shortly before its publication. Its full title is The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).

[3] Jason DeParle, "Daring Research or Social Science Pornography?" The New York Times Magazine, October 9, 1994,, 51.

[4] Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power (New York: Times Books, 1986), 293

[5] Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power (New York: Times Books, 1986), 293

[6] Regarding the various flaws of Losing Ground, see Michael Harrington, “Crunched Numbers,” New Republic, January 28, 1985, pp.7-10, Robert Greenstein, “Losing Faith in ‘Losing Ground,’” New Republic, March 25, 1985, Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the war on Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989) pp.153-155, Michael Lind, Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America (New York: The Free Press, 1996) pp. 180-183 and Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power (New York: Times Books, 1986) pp. 292-295.

[7] The New York Times editorial page, February 3, 1985.

[8] The New Republic, 3/25/85.

[9] ABC News’s “This Week,” November 28, 1993.

[10] Philadelphia Inquirer editorial page, October 13, 1997.

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

The Bell Curveball, Part II.

Despite the success and continuing influence of Losing Ground, Murray soon shifted gears. Race is largely absent from “Losing Ground.” But Murray had a chance meeting with Harvard professor Richard Hernstein, who had been arguing in various places—including the ‘liberal’ Atlantic Monthly, that, “In times to come, the tendency to be unemployed may run in the genes of a family about as certainly as bad teeth do now.” [1] Murray was clearly excited by arguments like these, and decided to redirect his own research toward it. In 1990, the Manhattan Institute decided that it did not want to associate itself with this kind of research and informed Murray to find another home for his work on what he termed “the genetic inferiority stuff.” [2]

Fortunately for Murray, Michael Joyce, who had been so instrumental in supporting him at the Olin Foundation, had now taken over the Bradley Foundation. Murray’s $100,000 grant was moved from the Manhattan Institute to the American Enterprise Institute, after a brief—and failed--attempt to place him in the more centrist and establishment-oriented, Brookings Institute. Murray was, once again, extremely fortunate in his choice of sponsors. By the time he completed his second book, he had received more than $750,000 since the Bradley foundation had begun its support, with more than $500,000 coming during the four years he worked on The Bell Curve. [3]

The publicity campaign for “The Bell Curve” mimicked that of “Losing Ground.” It is safe to say that most scholarly books containing hundreds of pages of regression analyses and primary source-based historical, economic and sociological claims would first be published, at least in part, in academic quarterlies that vet submissions by scholarly peer review on the part of an editorial board. But Simon & Schuster did not even send The Bell Curve to reviewers in galleys and neither did its authors. A Wall Street Journal news story reported that the book had been "swept forward by a strategy that provided book galleys to likely supporters while withholding them from likely critics." The Journal suggested that AEI "tried to fix the fight when it released review copies selectively, contrary to usual publishing protocol." Murray and AEI also hand-picked a group of pundits to be flown to Washington at the think tank’s expense for a weekend of briefings by Murray and discussion of the book’s arguments.[4] This strategy would pay off when the book was released and the publicity machine put into action, long before the scientific establishment could garner a look and form any coherent judgments.

Couched between an endless array of tables, charts and ten-dollar words, the Murray/Hernstein thesis, at its core, was nevertheless disarmingly simple. The book’s first sentence is: “This book is about differences in intellectual capacity among people, and groups, and what these differences mean for America’s future.” The authors blame many of the nation’s social problems, including the persistence of an “underclass” characterized by high-levels of crime, welfare, and illegitimacy, on the fact that black people are just not as smart as white people. After all, they argue, all racial barriers to advancement have been removed from American society; hence, we have arrived at a near perfect consequential relationship between IQ and socioeconomic achievement. And because, the authors believe IQ to be largely the product of one’s genetic inheritance, it is futile for society to try to boost those doomed to failure beyond their natural stations in life. In addition, high-IQ women are now entering the workforce at record rates and refusing to reproduce a comparable rate to that of poor and stupid women, who rarely work and collect lots of welfare money. These trends are "exerting downward pressure on the distribution of cognitive ability in the United States," with its resultant increases in crime, welfare dependency and illegitimacy. Because those under siege will not simply sit tight and let their society slip inexorably into anarchy, the authors predict a future semi-fascist “custodial state” for America, not unlike “a high-tech and more lavish version of an Indian reservation.” Unfortunately, the dumb ones among us will lose such cherished rights as “individualism, equal rights before the law, free people running their own lives,” according to the authors, but such measures will become unavoidable lest we taken to address the coming crisis of a national dysgenic downturn.

Interestingly, while The Bell Curve sets out to achieve the same aims as “Losing Ground”— the reduction and eventual elimination of all transfer payments to the poor and indigent--it does so by directly contradicting Losing Ground’s central argument. In “Losing Ground,” Murray placed the lion’s share of responsibility for the creation of the American underclass at the feet of government anti-poverty programs, primarily welfare. "Focusing on blacks cripples progress," he declared in a 1986 op-ed piece (titled "Not a Matter of Race"), as Mickey Kaus later noted, traditional explanations of the special problems facing blacks nearly all begin with the assumption that blacks are different from everyone else, whether because of racism or because of their inherent qualities. [5] But in “The Bell Curve,” Murray attributed the existence of an underclass to the “true” difference between blacks and whites—the intellectual deficiency of blacks (among others), whose IQ scores averaged fifteen points below those of whites. Moreover, in The Bell Curve, Murray argues that entry to the welfare rolls almost qualifies as prima facie evidence of a low IQ, while in Losing Ground,” he purported—albeit using cooked statistics—to demonstrate that in many instances, it was a perfectly rational choice over certain job choices and even sometimes marriage.

Though he contradicted his earlier argument, Murray marketed his book by relying on the same psychological insight he made in his proposal for the first one: namely that many people worried that, privately, they were racists who yearned for expert reassurance that the rest of the nation shared their prejudice. “The private dialogue about race in America is far different from the public one,”[6] he wrote in The New Republic. The Bell Curve aimed to replace the public dialogue—the one in which all peoples were deemed created equal, their genetic makeup considered to be only a portion of their destiny—and replace it with the private one in which blacks and Latinos were understood to be inferior to whites and Asians.

Aided by another brilliant marketing campaign, The Bell Curve inspired a media firestorm. The book entered the public discourse as one writer commented, “like a noseful of cocaine.” It spent fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, outselling “Losing Ground” by a factor of ten to one, and even this was only a tiny measure of its spectacular success. Magazines published special issues; talk shows offered up two-part editions, and four separate collections of essays were published, devoted entirely to arguments about the book. As Chester Finn asked in January 1995, “Is there anyone left with access to a microphone, television camera, or printing press who has not unburdened himself of an opinion of The Bell Curve?” [7]

Much as Blanche DuBois depended of the kindness of strangers, Charles Murray depended on the ignorance of pundits. The initial debate on the Bell Curve was conducted almost entirely by people who had no professional capacity to assess its science. "I am not a scientist. I know nothing about psychometrics," wrote Leon Wieseltier, one of the most learned and least retiring members of the elite media, in The New Republic.[8] Even The New York Times Book Review, unchallenged as the most influential book review on earth, assigned the book to a science reporter, rather than a practicing scientist, much less a biogeneticist. As a result, the early reactions to the book proved to be a kind of Rorschach test for pundits on what innocent reviewers assumed to be the scientifically proven conclusions relating to the genetic intellectual inferiority of blacks and what might be done about it, rather than the more fundamental question of whether Murray and Hernstein had, in fact, proven anything. For instance Time called the book "845 pages of provocation with footnotes," while Newsweek defended its sourcing as “overwhelmingly mainstream."[9]

Not surprisingly, Murray’s oddest claims about The Bell Curve and the controversy it provoked, related to race. Over and over he insisted that the claims he made about Black genetic inferiority were both unimportant to the book’s central thesis and generally uninteresting and unimportant. He wrote in his 10,000 word essay in The New Republic:

Here is what we hope will be our contribution to the discussion. We put it in italics; if we could, we would put it in neon lights: The answer doesn't much matter. Whether the black-white difference in test scores is produced by genes or the environment has no bearing on any of the reasons why the black- white difference is worth worrying about. If tomorrow we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what role, if any, were played by genes, the news would be neither good if ethnic differences were predominantly environmental, nor awful if they were predominantly genetic.” [10]

Yet Murray could hardly claim to be unaware of the explosive potential of his work and likelihood that it would anger many people of good will. After all, he had been asked to leave his professional home at the Manhattan Institute over its subject matter. Murray noted in The New Republic that the subject upon which he was writing tended to leave people “scared stiff about the answer.” He admitted to a reporter that his investigation for The Bell Curve “was a case of stumbling onto a subject that had all the allure of the forbidden. Some of the things we read to do this work, we literally hide when we're on planes and trains. We're furtively peering at this stuff." [11] One wonders if this is one place where Murray took Glickes’ advice, as David Brock described it, to call black “white” and “deny a political agenda” as "the price of media credibility.” [12]

Whatever Murray’s reasoning, it worked. The New York Times Magazine made him its cover story. In a deeply sympathetic review in Forbes, Peter Brimlow, who had attended AEI’s pre-publication conference, hailed the book’s “Jeffersonian vision.” (Brimlow was apparently innocent of Jefferson’s views of the allegedly physiological basis of what he deemed to be Black intellectual inferiority in his famous 1787 essay, “Notes on the State of Virginia.”) [13] Ben Wattenberg gave Murray an extremely generous hearing on a special two-part version of “Think Tank.” The American Spectator assigned the book to the extremely conservative African-American sociologist Thomas Sowell, who also proved notably sympathetic with the authors’ goals as well as their motives. The review published in Commentary was authored by Olin-funded and Manhattan Institute-housed writer, Chester Finn, who also proved quite sympathetic, though disappointed that the authors did not go even further in their conservative prescriptions to solve the dysgenic crisis they diagnosed. And the magazine also offered Murray the opportunity to speak directly to his critics in a lengthy riposte to the reviews elsewhere.[14]

Undoubtedly the biggest political boost “The Bell Curve” received was from The New Republic. The editors of this once liberal magazine’s decision to carry Murray’s arguments at such length was symbolic to say the least. At more 10,000 words, it proved to be one of the longest articles ever published in the magazine’s nine decade life. When added to the seventeen responses published with it, it’s safe to say that no topic had ever galvanized the editors of what was once America’s liberal flagship quite to this degree, save perhaps the Arab peoples from time immemorial. Then editor, Andrew Sullivan argued in his unsigned editorial, “the notion that there might be resilient ethnic differences in intelligence is not, we believe, an inherently racist belief. It’s an empirical hypothesis, which can be examined.” This defense of Murray and Hernstein’s speech right to free speech rather than the validity of their argument, sounds plausible until one remembers that Holocaust denial is also an empirical hypothesis that can be examined. Clearly the magazine’s editor and owner sought to give Murray’s arguments the magazine’s imprimatur. )Today Sullivan says he believes the book to be “one of the bravest, smartest books of the decade.” [15])

Aside from Sullivan’s editorial, the only essay resembling an outright endorsement of Murray’s arguments came from Peretz himself. He devoted his essay to the alleged injustices perpetrated in the name of group-admissions to universities and (somehow) compared the United States unfavorably to Israel’s ‘ingathering of the exiles” on this point. A few New Republic editors have been known to play a game with one another in private whereby they try to insert favorable references to Israel in places where they clearly do not belong. Here Peretz seemed to be playing too.

It would be difficult to think of another prediction which sounds so innocuous but would prove to be quite so wrong-headed…

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

[1] Irene Sege, “’The Bell Curve’: The Other Author,” The Boston Globe, November 10, 1994, p. 91.

[2] Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado, No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and foundations Changes America’s Social Agenda (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 58

[3] Jason DeParle, Times Magazine, 32.

[4] Slate.com, Posted Friday, Jan. 17, 1997, at 4:30, m. PT

[5] Mickey Kaus, The New Republic, 1994

[6] Charles Murray and Richard Hernstien, “Race. Genes, and IQ – An Apologia,” The New Republic, October 31, 1994

[7] Chester Finn, “For Whom it tolls,” Commentary Review, January 1995

[8] Leon Wieseltier, , “The Lowerers,” The New Republic, Oct, 31, 1994, p. 20

[9] Geoffrey Cowley, “Testing the Science of Intelligence,” Newsweek, October 24, 1994, p. 56, (Ryan BCD, 29?), Richard Lacayo, “For Whom the Bell Curves,” Time, October 24, 1994 and Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined, Joel L. Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg and Aaron D. Gresson III (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996)

[10] Charles Murray and Richard Hernstien, “Race. Genes, and IQ – An Apologia,” The New Republic, October 31, 1994

[11] Jason DeParle, "Daring Research or Social Science Pornography?" The New York Times Magazine, October 9, 1994, 51.

[12] David Brock, Blinded, 107.

[13] Among other beliefs, Jefferson held that blacks “secrete less by the kidnies and more by the glands of the kin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat and less so of cold, than the whites. … They seem to require less sleep… They are at least as brave, and more adventurous. But this may proceed from a want of forethought which prevents danger their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female; but love seems with them to be more an eager desire than a delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. … In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia” (1787) in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, (New York: Library of America, 1984), 265

[14] Brimlow in Forbes, Finn in Commentary, Wattenberg,

[15] Email to the author, 2/21/01

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The Bell Curveball, III.

The criticisms came in two waves. The first, largely from journalists and published in mass-market publications, focusing largely on the book’s political implications; all they could do, really, was invite readers to accept their worldview as superior to that of Murray and Hernstein’s. But because the authors were presumed by most to be far more expert in their chosen field than their journalistic critics, these criticisms enjoyed precious little authority to dent The Bell Curve’s argument’s impact and almost none in damaging the book’s popularity. But the second wave of reviews, which did not arrive until much later, was comprised of expert opinion in the relevant field and provided a belated substitute for the peer-review process to which Murray and Hernstein were originally unwilling to submit.

Once experts in the fields of psychometrics, dysgenics, and genetics began to weigh in on the book, not much of it was left. Scholarly examination repeatedly demonstrated that the statements that form the very core of The Bell Curve’s arguments were either highly questionable or demonstrably false. For instance, Hernstein and Murray insisted, "it is beyond significant technical dispute that cognitive ability is substantially heritable". But as a group of British geneticists and psychometricans pointed in response, “Research in this field is still evolving, studies cited by Herrnstein and Murray face significant methodological difficulties, and the validity of results quoted are disputed. “ [1]

The mistakes grow even graver. They actually seek to quantify the degree to which such intelligence is heritable. “Half a century of work, now amounting to hundreds of empirical and theoretical studies,” they write, “permits a broad conclusion that the genetic component of IQ is unlikely to be smaller than 40 per cent or higher than 80 per cent. ... For purposes of this discussion, we will adopt a middling estimate of 60 per cent heritability." They appear to the unsuspecting reader to be the soul of caution in this regard. Alas, as Nicholas Lemann reported in Slate, another study by three scientists at Carnegie Mellon University employing exactly the same data base, suggested “a narrow-sense heritability of 34 per cent and a broad-sense heritability of 46 per cent,” a far cry from the figures employed by Murray and Hernstein.

In perhaps the key test of the honesty of the underlying science of the book, trained experts in the field found they could not reproduce its results. For instance, one chart in The Bell Curve purports to show that people with IQs above 120 have become "rapidly more concentrated" in high-IQ occupations since 1940. But Robert Hauser and his colleague Min-Hsiung Huang retested the data and came up with estimates that fell “well below those of Herrnstein and Murray." They add that the data, properly used, "do not tell us anything except that selected, highly educated occupation groups have grown rapidly since 1940." In another example of same, also unearthed by Lemann, Herrnstein and Murray attempted to measure socioeconomic status by averaging four factors of equal weight: mother's education, father's education, father's occupation, and family income. Since the last two were missing from their data sample, however, they simply substituted an average for the entire sample. But six scientists at the California at Berkeley recalculated the effect of socioeconomic status, using the same variables but weighting them differently. They found the book’s estimates of the ability of IQ to predict poverty suddenly appear profoundly exaggerated--by 61 percent for whites and 74 percent for blacks.[2] Robert Hauser notes, "To begin with, several of the numbers in [The Bell Curve] are simply wrong. There are no fewer than five copying or multiplication errors in age- and test-specific entries in the body of” a single table. These mistakes, he noted, led the authors to “understate both the initial black-white differences and the changes in test scores across time." Rerunning the data with a more accurate standard deviation, Hauser came up with a significantly higher black-white IQ convergence.[3]

In fact, the entire study is built on a faulty edifice. In this final summary statement of his TNR essay, Murray wrote, “In study after study of the leading tests, the idea that the black-white difference is caused by questions with cultural content [i.e, that the tests are “biased” against the culturally deprived,] [has been contradicted by the facts.”[4] If this statement is false, then virtually everything else in the book must also be false. But Jared Diamond, the celebrated professor of physiology at the UCLA School of medicine and extremely-highly regarded expert in evolutionary biology and biogeography is one of many experts who insists that this statement—at least in its descriptive sense regarding “study after study” cannot be justified. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Guns, Germs and Steel,” Diamond explains:

Even our cognitive abilities as adults are heavily influenced by the social environment that we experienced during childhood, making it hard to discern any influence of preexisting genetic differences. Second, tests of cognitive ability (like IQ tests) tend to measure cultural learning and not pure innate intelligence, whatever that is. Because of those undoubted effects of childhood environment and learned knowledge on IQ test results, the psychologists’ efforts to date have not succeeded in convincingly establishing the postulated genetic deficiency in IQs of nonwhite peoples.[5]

Diamond’s observation seems particularly relevant given the apparent carelessness to which Murray and Hernstein applied their false assumptions to the scientific studies they professed to assess. For instance, to take just one small example, Murray and Herrnstein note that South African "coloureds" have about the same IQ as American blacks. This helps to prove their case, they argue, because, "the African black population has not been subjected to the historical legacy of American black slavery and discrimination and might therefore have higher scores."[6]

But their claim of extremely low IQs for Black African--”very dull” in the authors’ words--derives from tests conducted in South Africa before the end of apartheid, a circumstance that could hardly be more relevant. And yet this qualification is nowhere to be found in The Bell Curve.[7] Nor do the authors find space to mention the racist assumptions of the scientist who conducted the research. And to top it all off, they misread the data upon which they were relying, and thereby screw up their own calculations.[8] Other scientists found countless other incidents of the authors either ignoring data that conflicted with that which they cited or unaccountably failing to include or address important studies that would throw a monkey wrench into their reasoning.[9]

As a result of the above, more than a few members of the expert community denounced the book as a kind of scholarly swindle; Writing in a special issue of The American Behavioral Scientist[--exactly the kind of journal that would have offered a peer review-reading of the Bell Curve had the authors been willing to submit to one—Michael Nunley, a professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma charged:

I believe this book is a fraud, that its authors must have known it was a fraud when they were writing it, and that Charles Murray must still know it's a fraud as he goes around defending it. By "fraud," I mean a deliberate, self-conscious misrepresentation of the evidence. After careful reading, I cannot believe its authors were not acutely aware of what they were including and what they were leaving out, and of how they were distorting the material they did include.[10]

“The Bell Curve “would not be accepted by an academic journal. It’s that bad,” added Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.[11] They was joined by many scholars, perhaps most notable among them, Leon J. Kamin, a noted professor of psychology at Northeastern University and author of The Science and Politics of IQ, who had been pointedly excluded from the AEI press-release gathering, lest his expertise get in the way of the book’s publicity campaign. Kamin warned, “To pretend, as Hernstein and Murray do, that the 1,000-odd items in their bibliography provide a ‘scientific’ basis for their reactionary politics may be a clever political tactic, but it is a disservice to and abuse of science.”[12]

But Murray and Hernstein’s research raised even more troubling questions about the authors’ agenda than mere incompetence or even ideological fervor. Charles Lane discovered that seventeen researchers cited in the book’s bibliography were contributors to the racist journal, Mankind Quarterly. Murray and Hernstein also relied on at least thirteen scholars who had received grants from the Pioneer Fund, established and run by men who were Nazi sympathizers, eugenicists, and advocates of white racial superiority.[13]

The racial problems with The Bell Curve’s sources went way beyond mere guilt by association. Many of its most important assertions rested on the work of the Pioneer Fund/Mankind Quarterly group of “scholars.” J. Philippe Rushton of Canada's University of Western Ontario, for instance, is cited eleven times in the book’s bibliography, and receives a two-page mention in its appendix (pp. 642-643). Rushton professes to believe in the existence of a hierarchy of "races" in which "Mongoloid" and "Caucasoid" are at the top, and "Negroid" at the bottom. "Negroids,” he argues, are younger when they first have intercourse, have larger penises and vaginas, increased sex hormonal activity, and larger breasts and buttocks. He judges that these factors, combined with the fact that black women produce more eggs and black men more sperm, lead to increased fertility, poorer parenting and sexually-transmitted diseases, including the AIDS virus. Rushton once summarized his views on black/white difference as follows: "It's a trade off, more brains or more penis. You can't have everything."[14]

Also the acknowledgements in “The Bell Curve,” include an authors note indicating that they have "benefited especially" from the "advice" of one Richard Lynn, whom they identify as "a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences." A professor of psychology at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, Lynn is also associate editor of Mankind Quarterly, and has received $325,000 from the Pioneer Fund. He has expressed the scholarly view that "the poor and the ill" are "weak specimens whose proliferation needs to be discouraged in the interests of the improvement of the genetic quality of the group, and ultimately of group survival." Leon J. Kamin describes Lynn’s work as riddled with “distortions and misrepresentations of the data which constitute a truly venomous racism, combined with scandalous disregard for scientific objectivity.”[15]

While some innocence on the part of critics, a category that would include the vast majority of the reading public is excusable in the book’s early reception, this caveat begins to evaporate with time as more and more of the book’s flaws became evident. At that point, support for the work begins to look much more like ideological solidarity than intellectual rigor For instance The New Republic editors’ decision to champion the book cannot be justified by the book’s scholarly value. It must therefore have appealed to its editors own beliefs about race and intelligence—beliefs, as Murray suggested previously, that they had hitherto felt uncomfortable admitting in public forums. Why else lend the magazine’s credibility as the voice of the center-left to a project riddled with racist sources and reactionary recommendations?

If The Bell Curve were actually a respectable scholarly contribution to the debate over the place of race and genetics in our society, then closing one’s eyes to its conclusions would have been a cowardly and ultimately self-defeating response. But as Mickey Kaus pointed out, the question isn't whether it is possible that some ethnic groups have, on average, higher mental abilities than others, it's whether Murray is a reliable guide when it comes to exploring this possibility.”[16] The question of whether Murray and his late co-author Richard Hernstein are themselves racists is a pointless and ultimately insoluble debate. What is unarguable, however, is the fact that they were willing employ sources infected with racist underpinnings in pursuit of arguments custom designed to appeal to racist inclinations on the part of their readers and reviewers.

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[1] This statement was developed by the [British] National Institutes of Health - Department of Energy (NIH-DOE) Joint Working Group on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Human Genome Research (ELSI Working Group) and was by the National Society of Genetic Counselors. It was written by Lori B. Andrews and Dorothy Nelkin and purblished as a letter to the editor of Science, January 5, 1995.

[2] Nicholas Lemann, “The Bell Curve Flattened,” Slate.com, January 18, 1997

[3] Nicholas Lemann, “The Bell Curve Flattened,” Slate.com, January 18, 1997

[4] Charles Murray and Richard Hernstien, “Race. Genes, and IQ – An Apologia,” The New Republic, October 31, 1994

[5] Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1997), 20

[6] Bell Curve, 288

[7] WAQAR AHMAD, “Race is a four letter word,” New Scientist, July 22, 1995, 44

[8] Nevertheless, Murray and Herrnstein venture an estimate of African IQ, drawn mainly from an article by Lynn that appeared in Mankind Quarterly in 1991. It should be noted, for a start, that the authors of The Bell Curve misreport Lynn's data. They say he found a median IQ of 75 in Africa (p. 289). But in his article, "Race Differences in Intelligence: The Global Perspective," Lynn said that the mean African IQ--not the median--was 70. (26)

[9]For instance Howard Gardner noted that the authors admit that IQ has gone up consistently around the world during this century—15 points, as great as the current difference between blacks and whites, which is obviously not a function of genetics. “The Bell Curve” does admit that when blacks move from rural southern to urban northern areas, their intelligence scores also rise, which would seem to contradict their thesis as well, but they glide over this challenge. So too, the fact that when black youngsters are adopted in households of higher socioeconomic status, they too demonstrate improved performance on aptitude and achievement tests. Again, this is an unanswered challenged. And the education professor Nathan Glazer pointed out that during the second world war, a US army study found that Northern black recruits not only scored higher than southern black recruits on intelligence exams, they also scored higher than southern white recruits. The study was detailed in Otto Klineberg’s easily available “Race Differences,” but nowhere is it mentioned in The Bell Curve. See Nathan Glazer, “Scientific Truth and the American Dilemma” in The Bell Curve Wars, Stephen Fraser edit, (New York: Basic Books,1995) p.145. Even Thomas Sowell, the conservative black sociologist writing in the conservative publication, the American Spectator, while, pointedly defending the authors against the charge of racism, found its scientific shoddiness impossible to defend. “Perhaps the most intellectually troubling aspect of The Bell Curve,” he wrote, “is the authors' uncritical approach to statistical correlations. One of the first things taught in introductory statistics is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten, and one of the most widely ignored facts in public policy research. The statistical term "multicollinearity," dealing with spurious correlations, appears only once in this massive book. See Thomas Sowell, The American Spectator, February 1995, “Ethnicity and IQ”

[10] Michael Nunley, “The Bell Curve:: Too smooth to be true “September/October 1995"

[11]Quoted in Tim Beardsley, Scientific American, January 1995, Vol. 272, #1 BCW,, 244.

[12]Leon J. Kamin, “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics,” R. Jacoby & N. Glauberman (Eds.), The bell curve debate: History, documents, opinions. (New York: Times Books. 1995) pp.81-105

[13] See Charles Lane, “The Tainted Sources of the Bell Curve,” The New York Review of Books; New York; Dec 1, 1994; See also New Scientist July 22, 1995, 44 According to the book’s bibliography and to back issues of the Mankind Quarterly, the seventeen are W.J. Andrews, Cyril Burt, Raymond B. Cattell (eight citations), Hans J. Eysenck, Seymour Itzkoff, Arthur Jensen (twenty-three citations), Richard Lynn (twenty-four citations), Robert E. Kuttner, Frank C.J. McGurk (six citations), C.E. Noble, R. Travis Osborne (three citations), Roger Pearson, J. Philippe Rushton (eleven citations), William Shockley, Audrey Shuey, Daniel Vining (three citations), and Nathaniel Weyl.The ten who are or were either editors or members of the editorial board are: Cattell, Eysenck, Itzkoff, Kuttner, Lynn, McGurk, Noble, Pearson, Shuey, and Vining.

[14] See Charles Lane, the Tainted Sources of the Bell Curve, The New York Review of Books; New York; Dec 1, 1994; See also New Scientist July 22, 1995, 44 “Race is a four letter word” by WAQAR AHMAD

[15] Leon J. Kamin, “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics,” R. Jacoby & N. Glauberman (Eds.), The bell curve debate: History, documents, opinions. (New York: Times Books. 1995) pp.81-105

[16] Mickey Kaus, “October 31, 1994"

The view that human genetic history stopped when cultural history began is probably very wrong. Evidence of fairly recent selection within populations is starting to pile up.

tiny tim, natural selection of that sort really does take either a lot of time (in generational terms) or a very rapidly changing environment that makes existing adaptations untenable. It's far from obvious that in the various societies of the last couple thousand years we're talking about, any of your claims (e.g., unintelligent people being more likely to die in accidents before they can reproduce) are actually true and have been consistently true enough to impact the genetic distribution of a population today. I suppose it's still possible, but you really want to be able to point to a mechanism more tangible than the hazy appreciation for intelligence that Jews supposedly have. As it is, the reasonable default position pretty much has to be that evolution on such a short timescale has not taken place.

misteryes, liberals fight for gay rights because homosexuals are people. Genetics has nothing to do with it.

The level of factual knowledge, logical reasoning, and appreciation of reality displayed in this thread would be below the average even on a Creationist website denouncing Darwin.

Strong words, Steve. Please enlighten us with your formidable knowledge of genetics. Explain to us, in your very own rational, charming, and thoroughly unscientific way, just how the Jew got his shrewd nature.

The view that human genetic history stopped when cultural history began is probably very wrong. Evidence of fairly recent selection within populations is starting to pile up.

I certainly wouldn't dispute that. At issue is the relative importance of cultural and biological selection. Nearly everyone in a society can survive and reproduce if there are institutions to support them. The relative success of those institutions becomes the most powerful selection factor.

I think that the relative importance is the issue for historians. But for scientists another issue is really just trying to figure out what the connections might be between cultural and biological evolution. Cultural developments like the rise of cattle husbandry can go hand in hand with biological developments like lactose tolerance. There may be similar connections for other cultural developments.

Thank you, Commentary and Charles Murray!

Who knew the master race would turn out to be Jewish?

Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes...

Ok tp212, let me reword.... Liberals fight for gay rights USING the arguement of genetic determinism. I think most liberals also believe that homosexuality has a genetic component. I certainly subscribe to this view.

Why can't this same framework be applied to intelligence? I'm actually curious about the liberal/conservative split among which traits are genetically programmed. I think it is very interesting. Not grinding an axe.

tiny tim,

Wouldn't your proposed "natural selection" mechanism for increasing intelligence apply equally well to *all* people? That is, how can it work to increase the intelligence of one subgroup more than another?

Henry, the connection between lactose tolerance and cattle husbandry is a classic example because it's a single point mutation and the evidence is so unambiguous. Dairy farming increased the level of population the land could support, and the increase came largely from the offspring of those whose consumed dairy products. You'd be hard pressed to make such a strong connection for a complex cognitive or behavioral trait. Not to say such connections don't exist, but they will almost certainly be more subtle.

I certainly wouldn't say that the relative importance of cultural and biological selection is merely an issue for historians. It's also important for biologists to take a stand against people who promote bad science for political gain.

Charles Murray and Steve Sailer are very bright guys who have a good grasp of statistics and logical reasoning, and they can weave anecdotes and thought-experiments into compelling stories. But they have absolutely no interest in the science of genetics except as a means to political ends. They don't talk about random clustering, or the founder effect, or all the other less sexy explanations for differences between groups of people. They have an almost teleological view of the world, where natural selection plays the role of God, carefully fine-tuning every single difference between people, and favoring the predetermined elite.

There are also many people on the Left who are overly resistant to thinking about intelligence and behavior in genetic terms for political reasons. I think it's important to allow researchers to follow the evidence wherever it leads, while resisting the urge to seize upon the results in any particular research paper to promote a political agenda.

Re dr. steve b.

It is my recollection that Herrnstein, back in the 1960s also contributed articles to Mankind Quarterly. Back in those days, Herrnstein, Jensen, et. al. liked to quote the work of Sir Cyril Burt. As is well known, it has now been conclusively demonstrated that Burt was a phony and his studies on identical twins were fraudulent. However, Herrnstein, Jensen et. al. never recanted their previous work which was heavily based on Burts' fraud.

Re Nathan

Mr. Nathan, in his response apparently agrees with me that the regression analyses in the Bell Curve are questionable, at best. He has, however, failed to support his contention that punctuated equilibrium has been discarded by the evolutionary biology community. Stephen Jay Gould certainly needs no defense from me. I would refer the interested reader to the book by Michael Shermer, "Why Darwin Matters, the Case against Intelligent Design," which if I recall correctly, has an entire chapter on the late Prof. Gould.

It should also be pointed out that Commentary Magazine also publishes David Berlinskis' crap on the Theory of Evolution, which has been totally demolished by any number of reputable mathematicians.

In my experience, it is proven time and time again that my people are better than other people.

Re the comment "First you would have to prove that success -- or not even success, but mere presence -- in academia has some correlation not even to genetics, but simply to intelligence in any objectively measurable way. And it's not."
-------
You're not kidding.

Look at Forbes' list of the richest people in the USA. Most of those self-made billionaires -- Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs,etc -- are COLLEGE DROPOUTS!! So are those very wealthy actors in Hollywood ,like Tom Cruise.

Spending $300,000 plus seven years of hard work to get worthless piece of paper -- all so that you can get a crappy, low paying job that MIGHT get you tenure -- strikes me as the height of stupidity.

And if we're talking about Ashkenazis, it was Golda Meir who pointed out that establishing Israel on the one spot in the Middle East without a drop of oil was not exactly the height of genius.

I'm also curious re what "natural selection" is working to raise intelligence in Ashkenazi males.

The ones I know seem to have been "selected" to spend 50 years of their lifespan working themselves into the grave trying to pay off an ever growing charge account at Bloomingdales.

This in exchange for some sexual services of mediocre quality in the distant past. A transaction which hardly selects for high intelligence -- to the contrary, I would think.

How does Charles Murray explain Jonah Goldberg?

misteryes, at its core sexual orientation is a very low-level human trait and its manfiestations quite easily identifiable and describable, the same doesn't go for 'intelligence'

"Spending $300,000 plus seven years of hard work to get worthless piece of paper -- all so that you can get a crappy, low paying job that MIGHT get you tenure -- strikes me as the height of stupidity."

Is it news that 'intelligence' and 'wisdom' aren't the same thing?

At the moment, probably the greatest evolutionary impact on intelligence is the widespread availability of ceasarian sections. A bigger brain (relative to body mass, of course!) is the simplest route to higher intelligence, but we've been trapped in an evolutionary tug of war between the drive for bigger brains, and the need for women to be able to walk upright, which precludes much wider pelvises. You can see how much evolutionary 'presure' there is for larger brains, by the way we're skating the bare edge of being able to give birth.

The C-section has blown that barrier to increased intelligence wide open. It's the kind of situation where evolution happens extremely rapidly.

the connection between lactose tolerance and cattle husbandry is a classic example because it's a single point mutation and the evidence is so unambiguous.

There's plenty of evidence for Jewish intellectual ability. Which Murray talks about, at least some of, in his article. Not to mention IQ testing here in America. Is it "unambiguous"? Depends on the level of proof one demands, I guess, but I am convinced. I know of no evidence of Ashkenazim as anything other than gifted, except for a few early IQ studies done on people that did not speak English well enough to be tested fairly.

Where Jewish IQ is different from lactose tolerance is just that there is no smoking genetic gun. Yet. I'd place good money there will be. (Anyone want a bet?)

So Mr. LaFollette, what nefarious "political ends" do you think Murray has in propounding the idea that Jews are smart? What about Sailer? I'm genuinely curious here. I don't see what's in it for them. To the extent that they are identified with the Right, you'd think that touting Jews as smart would hurt them, not help them, seeing as most Jews are on the Left.

Yeah, I thought it was hilarious at the time that Murray was being painted as a racist for declaring that Asians were smarter than his own ethnic group. ;)

There's some evidence of higher IQ among people with DYT1 torsion dystonia, Gaucher disease, and non-classical CAH congenital adrenal hyperplasia). You see suggestive changes -increased dendritic growth - in Tay-Sachs and Niemann-Pick.
When you duplicate the metabolic error in Gaucher disease in vitro, you see longer and branchier axons.
Those are, of course, all mutations that are unusually common among the Ashkenazi. You don't see them at high frequency among the non-Ashkenazi Jews.
As for narrow-sense heritability of IQ, 0.3 is plenty: if parents average _one point_ higher than the population from which they're drawn, you'd see a 12-pt IQ change in 40 generations (~ 1000 years). That's just standard quantitative genetics.

Here's a genuine, non-rhetorical question: why is everyone so passionate about this?

We can argue this question all day (in fact, we already have), and we will get not one inch closer to the truth until the following conditions are met:

1. "intelligence" is operationally defined in a meaningful way
2. "jew" is operationally defined in a meaningful way (not as easy as it sounds)
3. A set of genes significantly correlated with intelligence are identified, that together entirely explain the genetic contribution to intelligence.
4. The relative frequency in those genes in jewish and non-jewish populations are known.

But just for the sake of argument, let's assume all of the above occur, and it turns out these 'smart' genes are more prevalent amongst jews. I'm willing to accept that this is possible. But in all sincerity, I ask of those of you who are not geneticists or psychologists, who cares?

The information would have little or no practical value. It would not make your jewish friends smarter. It would not make your goyim friends dumber. And it would not make selecting friends, employees, or mates on the condition of their jewishness or lack thereof a good decision, even from a statistical standpoint. Why? Because as has already been pointed out, there are plenty of factors other than 'intelligence' that are better predictors of life success.

So again I ask, why do we care so much about this?

One problem is that most of the people talking about these subject don't know much genetics, especially cutting-edge genetics. For example, someone mentioned the lactase persistence allele - good for him. It lets you digest milk as an adult: judging from the linkage disequilibrium pattern, it has gone from one copy in a single mutant individual some six thousand years ago to a gene frequency of over 90% in most of Northern Europe.
The Voight-Pritchard study found 185 genes in Europeans under going similar selective sweeps, average age about 6600 years. Alleles conferring resistance to type II diabetes,
changing carbohydrate metabolism, changes in DNA repair, changes in disease resistance, changes in serotonin metabolism,
changes in factors controlling skeletal growth. They found about the same number of selective sweeps under way in China and Japan: most of the genes changing were different.
In Africa, about 200 sweeps underway , with an average age of about 11000 years. Most different from those underway in Europe or East Asia.
The Ashkenazi story is interesting, but the big picture - the fact that human evolution is has speeded up wildly in the Holocene and is now running some 100 times faster than the long-term average since the split with the chimps - is even more interesting. And inevitable, once you think it through.

"Liberals fight for gay rights because homosexuality is at least partly genetically determined."

That's not why all liberals fight for gay rights. It's certainly not why I fight for gay rights.

As for this claim about intelligence, I'll take it seriously when 1) there is a reliable definition and quantification of "general intelligence" that is precise enough to account for the small differences in subpopulations; or 2) this theory uses a well-defined subset of intellectual skills that is quantified and with a known strong genetic link. Anecdotal "all the Jews I know are smart" are not science. And anyone who thinks using occupation as a proxy for measuring a genetic differential in intelligence is an idiot.

I say all this as someone who has come to largely reject the blank slate view. I'm certain a lot of human behavioral traits are strongly genetic. But the notion of comparing "races" with regard to "general intelligence" is a compounding of two fallacies.

For those inclined to think that evolutionary psychology supports this idea, you've got another think coming. EV flatly disputes the idea of general intelligence and flatly asserts that the collection of intellectual adaptations of humans are universal.

Stephen Jay Gould, who was Jewish, thought IQ was a bunch of bullshit. I, who am not, agree with him.

Plus it needs to be pointed out that a child gets his genes from his mother as well as from his father.

I may be wrong, but I have the impression that some Jewish billionaires have a taste for blond goyim with big tits.
I haven't heard of them making said blonds take SAT tests.

"Liberals fight for gay rights because homosexuality is at least partly genetically determined."

That's got the causation backwards: Liberals (care to) defend the idea that homosexuality is at least partially genetically determined, because it's rhetorically advantageous when defending gay rights. That it's probably true is gravy.

"I ask of those of you who are not geneticists or psychologists, who cares?"

Well, human biology was my second major in college, so I might not be in the target list for your question, but...

The heritability of intelligence, and it's distribution among ethnic groups, (And genders!) has all sorts of implications for public policy. It makes a hash of assuming that disparate impact is proof of discrimination, for instance. It makes achieving equality of outcome, rather than rights, a futile quest. And it raises the spectre of the wealthy paying for genetic enhancements that the poor can't afford, thus making them not just richer, but smarter, too.

It has so many implications that some people don't like, that their minds are closed to it.

If you understood how a given mutation increased IQ by, say, 10 points, and could duplicate the effect with some drug, no one would be interested in taking it, any more than anyone would spend good money on prep courses for the SAT. Certainly hedge fund managers wouldn't. I mean, several may have _called_ me and asked me to give talks about this stuff, but that's probably just idle curiosity.

Leonard, I suggest reading ALL of my comments in this thread before trying to deduce my opinions on the subject. OK? Thanks.

So Mr. LaFollette, what nefarious "political ends" do you think Murray has in propounding the idea that Jews are smart? What about Sailer?

I'm far less concerned about the nefarious political ends of the "Jews are smart" meme than the closely related "non-whites are dumb" meme that Murray and Sailer are also noted for supporting.

Responding to Lackluster:

People are passionate about intelligence because in a very raw sense, intelligence is conceptually bonded to notions of self-worth. Nobody likes being called stupid; everyone enjoys being called smart.

Murray claims Jews are naturally (genetically? culturally?) smarter than Gentiles.

What about Indian Jews?

Do they have an even greater yet propensity to be "doctors, professors, engineers or makers of popcorn movies"? The mind boggles at the thought of the possible discovery of the ultimate ubermenschen... fortunately for me, I'm lucky enough to have some in my own family!

Oh no! The world may not be ready for this new large-nosed super-race...not to mention curry-flavored cream cheese...

Unfortunately for me, I guess the reason why I don't have that special Jewish intelligence is that I have a merely average sized nose ...

Shh! Don't reveal your genetic deficiency! I advise you to go get nose-enlargement surgery right away...You may still be able to secure a spot in the Jewish/Indian World Conspiracy...

(Warning: the Conspiracy actually mostly just involves overeating and arguing about various topics until all the women leave the room in exasperation...)

"I advise you to go get nose-enlargement surgery right away...You may still be able to secure a spot in the Jewish/Indian World Conspiracy...

(Warning: the Conspiracy actually mostly just involves overeating and arguing about various topics until all the women leave the room in exasperation...)
Posted by: Mr. Noah on April 3, 2007 10:32 PM"

Welcome to New York. Why, Mr. Noah, have you been spying on my life?

A few points people might want to keep in mind.
1.There is nothing "ironic" about gentiles claiming that Jews are more intelligent. Hitler, Eichmann and Rosenberg would probably have agreed - it was the supposed "cleverness of the Jew" that made them so dangerous in Nazi eyes, and intellectual ability was not one the Nazis favorite traits - so the true irony is Commentary printing an article that probably could have run in Volkischer Beobachter with little editing.

2. Anyone who cites Stephen Jay Gould as an expert in an argument on evolution is only demonstrating how little they know about evolutionary theory.

3. While the "Bell Curve" adherents certainly contain many noxious racists, there is nothing inherently "racist" in the 19th/20th century sense about believing that intelligence is inheritable, and that certain population groups are smarter than others. Indeed evolutionary theory would suggest that some population groups are certainly smarter, or more athletically gifted, or taller or more aggressive than others. I think the racist angle comes in when you try to define such a group too broadly. The subset "blacks" is such a large group that it almost meaningless. Even the group "Jews" is too large to be meaningful. I am certain I can define a group of blacks such that they would be on average smarter than some other group of Jews. Remember also we are talking averages, so even if Murray were 100% right it does not by any means that a given Jew must be smarter than a given African-American. Probably the majority of African-Americans are smarter than Jonah Goldberg, for example. It does unfortunately seem very possible that some of the less successful members of our society - many of whom are white - are through genetic as well as social reasons less likely to succeed - no matter what education or resources you throw at them, they will remain below average. There are Yankee families in New Hampshire for example that have been poor and dumb for the last 300 years. But that does not mean a just society is one where those people are thrown away or eugenicized. Intelligence as measured by IQ is certainly not the only useful talent humans have to offer, and is probably overvalued in the USA today. We should remember that a diverse gene pool is far better for the long-term survival of humanity than a narrow one.

tps12 -- evolution happens every 30 seconds, namely whenever a baby is born.

The sheer number of offspring is not the bottom line for genetic success. Tori Spelling is not especially fit (in my estimation), yet she can select the fittest of mates due to her station in life. Put another way, her father Aaron Spelling advantaged his own genes not by number of offspring, but rather by becoming wealthy. His daughter is likely to mix his genes with those of a singularly fit mate.

"It's far from obvious that in the various societies of the last couple thousand years we're talking about, any of your claims (e.g., unintelligent people being more likely to die in accidents before they
can reproduce) are actually true"

The unintelligent really are more likely to use a scaffolding on a slope or to try and pull some twine out of a revolving tractor power takeoff or etc etc. They have poorer impulse control and really do end up in prison more often. They really do attract less fit mates. Just as compounded interest can produce dizzying sums, a few generations of natural selection produce surprisingly predictable results. I don't remember the figure, but were it not for the advantage conferred on nieces and nephews by homosexuality, it would be selected away with extraordinary rapidity, in the tens of generations.

"you really want to be able to point to a mechanism more tangible than the hazy appreciation for intelligence that Jews supposedly have."

As I said, Jews have an extraordinary run for Nobel Prizes and have a monopoly on the MIT math department. That's concrete.

My understanding is that by far the biggest selective pressure on humans over the last several thousand years has been selection in favor of resistance to various infectious diseases. When half of the Eurasian population was killed off by the bubonic plague, those who survived were not the smartest, but those most able to fight the disease. Infectious diseases were basically the leading cause of death until the last century, at least (witness the Spanish Flu, which killed more people than World War I). Given the very high selective pressures in favor of disease resistance, it seems that selective pressure in favor of higher intelligence is going to be pretty much insignificant.

Weichi:

"Wouldn't your proposed 'natural selection' mechanism for increasing intelligence apply equally well to *all* people? That is, how can it work to increase the intelligence of one subgroup more than another?"

A population of subsistence farmers has less need for intelligence than does a cosmopolitan population. Sure, a wise subsistence farmer is better, but so long as he can remember when to plant the potatoes he might be better off with another attribute, perhaps physical endurance.

Urbanites might need to understand interest rates, leases, auctions, and so forth in order to succeed.

China is a good example of a country with both subsistence farmers and modern cities. Where do you suppose a stupid fellow would fit better? What about someone with a good head for numbers?

Jews are overwhelmingly cosmopolitan.

Misteryes: "Liberals fight for gay rights because homosexuality is at least partly genetically determined."

"Why can't they stomach the idea that intelligence might also have genetic origins?"

"On the other hand, many Conservatives dismiss the genetic origins of homosexuality but seem to gravitate towards Bell Curve-like arguements."

Along those same lines, conservatives think it's wrong to abort a fetus but ok to kill a criminal, and liberals are just the opposite. It's strange all right.

"Along those same lines, conservatives think it's wrong to abort a fetus but ok to kill a criminal, and liberals are just the opposite. It's strange all right."

Nothing strange about that. The conservative figures that the fetus is innocent, and the criminal guilty, and that somehow this is relavant. The liberal figures that the fetus stands a good chance of growing up to be a Republican, but that the criminal is almost a sure Democratic vote. ;)

Anyway, it has been pointed out that subsistance farmers are in a radically different position, evolution-wise, depending on the local climate. In climates where you have this thing called "winter", the subsistance farmer who doesn't show a rather large amount of foresight and impulse control starves to death before the next year's crop comes in. Not so much the case in climates where you can raise several crops a year.

In climates where you have this thing called "winter", the subsistance farmer who doesn't show a rather large amount of foresight and impulse control starves to death before the next year's crop comes in. Not so much the case in climates where you can raise several crops a year.

Wouldn't that be irrelevant in a feudal country like Russia where the peasants were forced to work on large estates? Certainly Russians are not famous for their foresight or impulse control.

Re vanya

As I noted on a previous comment, one should read a chapter from Michael Shermers' book, "Why Darwin Matters, the Case against Intelligent Design," which defends the late Stephen Jay Goulds' reputation as a scientist and an expert on evolution. Even an extreme adaptationist like Richard Dawkins considers that Gould was such an expert, even though they disagreed about certain aspects of the theory.

Re Don Williams

Is Mr. Williams perhaps referring to the owner of the Washington Deadskins, one Daniel Snyder who has certainly not shown much intelligence in his operation of the aforesaid football franchise.

Saying that we shouldn't consider scientific hypotheses about the heritability of intelligence until some mythical day when the term "intelligence" is defined to everyone's satisfaction is ridiculous.

Would you say that, before people completely understood the chemical reactions that produce fire, they should have ignored its existence?

Its true that people vary in the types of intelligence they have, but its also true that there is a positive correlation between them, hence a "general intelligence".

An analogy to some of the arguments about intelligence I've heard is that I could argue that we cannot say that any one person is stronger than another because one person might have stronger legs, and the other person stronger arms. Hence, the concept of strength is invalid. This conclusion is ridiculous. We can just define "general strength" as being a person's aggregate strength over their whole body, and give a single score to that. Doing so does not mean we aren't aware that strength varies in different parts of the body.

Daniel Snyder who has certainly not shown much intelligence in his operation of the aforesaid football franchise.

Depends on your perspective, the team may play like crap, but the franchise is also consistently one of the most profitable in the NFL. Arguably Snyder is one of the smartest owners around, just not a great football mind.

Gould was a paleontologist who refused to accept many of the consequences of following the theory of evolution to its natural conclusions. You're right that I probably dismissed him too lightly, and he is certainly worth reading but he does not represent the mainstream of scientific thinking on evolution.

"The unintelligent really are more likely to use a scaffolding on a slope or to try and pull some twine out of a revolving tractor power takeoff or etc etc. They have poorer impulse control and really do end up in prison more often. They really do attract less fit mates. Just as compounded interest can produce dizzying sums, a few generations of natural selection produce surprisingly predictable results. I don't remember the figure, but were it not for the advantage conferred on nieces and nephews by homosexuality, it would be selected away with extraordinary rapidity, in the tens of generations."

People used to get married rather young before many traits relating to future success always came into play. Remember how Americans up until the 1980's pretty much got married right out of high school? Who do high school girls like more, the science geek or the football star? Class differentiation also plays a role in selecting mates. If we believe that more successful = higher class = more intelligent, then the this target population subset is rather small and has been rather small for centuries to the point one has to question their genetic significance.

"A population of subsistence farmers has less need for intelligence than does a cosmopolitan population. Sure, a wise subsistence farmer is better, but so long as he can remember when to plant the potatoes he might be better off with another attribute, perhaps physical endurance.

Urbanites might need to understand interest rates, leases, auctions, and so forth in order to succeed.

China is a good example of a country with both subsistence farmers and modern cities. Where do you suppose a stupid fellow would fit better? What about someone with a good head for numbers?"

I hadn't realized that the Shanghai stock exchange had existed far back in Chinese history. You've really opened my mind! Major differentiation between urban and rural life and society started roughly in the late Tang period. So how where the Chinese beforehand? Considering that people who make such arguments for years claimed that "China had no cities before imperialism," your claim is a little odd. Did the Irish suddenly evolve tenfold or so since the Irish Potato Famine? Really, how old are the concepts of "interest rates, leases, auctions, and so forth" in human history?

tiny tim,

More "just so" stories. I could just as easily argue that:

"A population of subsistence farmers has more need for intelligence than does a cosmopolitan population. Sure, a wise cosmopolitan is better, but so long as he can remember where the corner grocery is, he might be better off with another attribute, perhaps stronger lungs to help him survive all the pollution in cities.

Farmers might need to understand crop rotations, principles of genetics (to breed better cows & plants), animal husbandry, weather patterns, soil properties, and so forth in order to succeed."

In other words: do you have any actually *evidence* for your claim that an urban environment selects more for "intelligence" than a rural one?

Jews are overwhelmingly cosmopolitan. - tiny tim

Actually, I think most of us Jews prefer straight up whiskey (except on Passover ;) or martinis to cosmopolitans.

I tend to come down with Dennett on Gould - Gould knew what he was talking about, but he used language that overstated the difference between punctuated equilibrium and standard evolutionary theory. In doing so he opened a door for creationists to adopt his language in attacking evolution.

Re vanya

1. Interestingly enough, I once heard an interview with the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, in which he actually claimed that Jews were intellectually superior to other groups. Perhaps it's not surprising that Mr. Murray is making the same claim. Birds of a feather flock together.

2. With respect to Daniel Snyder, if the object of owning a sports franchise is to make money, Snyder is certainly successful (although he could probably make more money by spending less on lousy players). However, the evidence is that Snyder desperately wants to win football games which is his professed top priority. His profligate spending tends to support that conclusion. Thus, it appears that he has demonstrated a serious lack of competence in attaining his top priority.

Regarding the idea that Jews have more selection pressure to be intelligent:

It's an old (and very Eurocentric) idea, actually. It isn't that non-intelligent Jews were selected against so much as intelligent Jews were selected for, whereas intelligent non-Jews were selected against.

Consider the situation in medieval Europe. If you were a smart Christian, what did you do? You become a priest/monk/nun. Which meant (at least in theory) you wouldn't have any kids. OTOH, if you were a smart Jew, you would become a Rabbi -- and have lots of children.

So, if this mechanism by which Jews are supposedly more intelligent is true, then non-Jewish Western and Central Europeans should be equally less intelligent than the world-wide average. And are non-Jewish Western and Central Europeans particularly dumb?

"...he actually claimed that Jews were intellectually superior to other groups. Perhaps it's not surprising that Mr. Murray is making the same claim."

Here's a crazy idea I'll just throw out there: Perhaps its because they consistently score higher on IQ tests.

History was malthusian, almost all the time and just about everywhere, until about 1800. Births and deaths came closed to balancing: population growth was very slow. If one class of people managed to have more than two kids survive, other people were having less than two survive - which mean that they were dying out.
Traits that tended to put you into the more successful class were favored by natural selection. Disease resistance gene were selected, sure, but they only only account for a sixth or so of the genes now known to have undergone strong selection in recent millenia.

As for S.J. Gould - well, as Paul Krugman says, he was the John Kenneth Galbraith of evolutionary biology.

Gould nearly killed me; I had a long drive to make some years ago, and grabbed a book on tape of his to keep me awake. Bad move; I drifted off during a 45 minute extended explaination of diffusion into state spaces based on baseball metaphors, and woke on my way into a ditch. Diffusion into state spaces is interesting enough, but baseball is so BORING!

DAS:

"When was the last time you heard a monkey talk? I mean in real life. - Jim W"

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

"Didn't G.W. Bush give a speech this morning?

Come-on ... I thought we were a bunch of liberals in the grips of an irrational Bush hatred -- and yet nobody has yet made that response? Perhaps could the right be wrong about our "irrational Bush hatred"? Maybe they are wrong about other things?"

Were you unloved as a child? You were so desperate to be praised for not bringing up the Bush-monkey comparison in this thread that you brought up the Bush-monkey comparison?

OK DAS, here's your praise: You are very special, DAS. In fact, you are more special than most, because you are liberal and thus compassionate.

Re "Here's a crazy idea I'll just throw out there: Perhaps its because they consistently score higher on IQ tests."
------

Yes, but who CREATES the IQ tests?

[Cut to image of Mel Brooks dressed in his medieval merchant garb, waving his finger , grinning and saying "Ah HAH" ]

Sometimes you don't need intelligence. Sometimes you just need to put your thumb on the scales.

Unfortunately, the crafty Asians got hold of the crib sheet.
So the next revision of the SAT will look as follows:
http://dafyomi.shemayisrael.co.il/shabbos/quiz/sh-qz-002.htm

It's a conspiracy. A secret cabal which you can join by learning to fake reading Hebrew and getting a circumscision.
( The latter is to keep out the riff-raff and the idly curious --unfortunately, the rabbis didn't plan for Madonna.)

The benefits of joining are ..er..well, it's not clear exactly.
Possibly the idea that your descendents 200 years hence will be more intelligent due to the Darwinian pressure of matching wits with generations of highly formidable mothers-in-law.

weichi:

You ignored my questions. Would the dull fellow do better on a subsistence farm or in the big city? Would the fellow with a head for numbers do better in the city or on the subsistence farm? It's plain as the nose on your face.

Also, you seem not to understand the lot of the subsistence farmer. They are unaware of many of the things you mentioned. I happen to know something about Chinese subsistence farmers, they grow exactly the same things in the same way as their ancestors. Thus farmers in different parts of China has different and utterly predictable diets.

tinytim,

'You ignored my questions. Would the dull fellow do better on a subsistence farm or in the big city? Would the fellow with a head for numbers do better in the city or on the subsistence farm? It's plain as the nose on your face.'

I did not ignore your question. Very often, things that are "as plain as the nose on your face" are in fact wrong. That's why science demands *evidence* for claims.

In other words, your *subjective opinion* about who would do better is irrelevant. The question is what does the *evidence* show?

So ... do you have any evidence for your claim?

DAS --

I preface the following with an apology for comparing Jews to bacteria.

As you've probably heard, epidemiologists often state that modern animal farming is tantamount to a laboratory for producing antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Similarly, since the diaspora Jews have lived in big cities throughout the world, using their wits rather than scratching radishes out of the earth. Yiddish literature constantly addresses dragging by forelocks, the meanness of the goyim, pogroms, the holocaust, etc etc. The lot of the Jew has been hard. Radish farmers differ by maybe a factor of two or three in terms of their productivity. City folk can get rich or eat out of a trash can.

"Consider the situation in medieval Europe. If you were a smart Christian, what did you do? You become a priest/monk/nun. Which meant (at least in theory) you wouldn't have any kids. OTOH, if you were a smart Jew, you would become a Rabbi -- and have lots of children."

Two things. Clergy are often sexually active. Consider the Holy Roman Empire, where the Popes were generally debased.

Interestingly, there's a probable link between clergy/medicine men/rabbis/shamans etc and schizophrenia. Richard Sapolsky addresses this in a couple of places. Schizos have difficulty with analogy, eg Jesus walked on the water, and are susceptible to obsessive compulsive disorder, eg the rabbi who oversees the ritualistic animal slaughter thousands and thousands of times. OCD accompanies the susceptibility to schizoprhenia. Thus schizo traits are useful in religious and healer types.

Schizo susceptibility rarely leads to full-on schizophrenia. Schizo susceptibility is a worthwhile tradeoff because of the potential advantage it confers to shaman/religious figures.

"So, if this mechanism by which Jews are supposedly more intelligent is true, then non-Jewish Western and Central Europeans should be equally less intelligent than the world-wide average. And are non-Jewish Western and Central Europeans particularly dumb?"

It's not just the success that accompanies being a rabbi. Becoming wealthy also allows your offspring to choose fit mates.

As for 'supposedly' more intelligent, how do you explain the strong showing in the Nobel Prize, or the population of doctors, mathematicians, or physicists? Sorry Charlie.

Another example of how these arguments can be made to work in any direction you want, consider Guns, Germs and Steel. Jarred Diamond has a section where he argues that people in New Guinea who lived in hunter gatherer societies until the mid 20th century are more intelligent than the rest of us humans whose ancestors were farmers and city dwellers for the past several thousand years.

He argument was that to be a successful hunter-gatherer you have to remember all sorts of things about which plants were good to eat, animal habits, etc etc. Whereas once the agricultural revolution hit, life was easy - intelligence became a far less important trait.

I recall him offering no evidence for this, and my strong impression was that he let his obvious great love for the New Guineans cloud his judgment. The point is that humans are very good at making up arguments to justify their own prejudices, and we should all be extremely wary of doing this.

Reality Man:

"People used to get married rather young before many traits relating to future success always came into play. Remember how Americans up until the 1980's pretty much got married right out of high school?"

Your parents' success influences your own fitness, thus in my example above Tori Spelling has an extraordinary choice of mates based on her father's success. Anyway, you can gauge someone's fitness pretty well in high school.

"Who do high school girls like more, the science geek or the football star?"

What's your point? Both are evidence of fitness.

"Class differentiation also plays a role in selecting mates. If we believe that more successful = higher class = more intelligent, then the this target population subset is rather small and has been rather small for centuries to the point one has to question their genetic significance."

I can't make any sense out of this.

"I hadn't realized that the Shanghai stock exchange had existed far back in Chinese history. You've really opened my mind!"

What you are trying to say, albeit like an ass, is that city life is no more demanding than subsistence farming. Bollocks.

"Major differentiation between urban and rural life and society started roughly in the late Tang period."

If you are correct, this is a period when evolution would start smiling on those who succeed in the city.

"So how where the Chinese beforehand? Considering that people who make such arguments for years claimed that 'China had no cities before imperialism,' your claim is a little odd."

Again I don't see your point.

"Did the Irish suddenly evolve tenfold or so since the Irish Potato Famine?"

'Evolving tenfold' is nonsensical. But the answer you're looking for is no, but this demonstrates nothing.

"Really, how old are the concepts of 'interest rates, leases, auctions, and so forth' in human history?"

Again you are asserting that the intelligent have no advantage in city life. City life has always been more complex than subsistence farming.

weichi:

"Another example of how these arguments can be made to work in any direction you want, consider Guns, Germs and Steel. Jarred Diamond has a section where he argues that people in New Guinea who lived in hunter gatherer societies until the mid 20th century are more intelligent than the rest of us humans whose ancestors were farmers and city dwellers for the past several thousand years."

There is more evolutionary pressure for intelligence in a hunter/gatherer than in a subsistence farmer. You misrepresent him when you say "more intelligent than the rest of us humans whose ancestors were farmers and city dwellers" though.

Diamond repeatedly says that people in PNG are smarter than than the average European or American.

Which is why they're in demand as engineers and scientists, as hedge fund guys, win poker championships and Putnam competitions out of proportion to their number, and so forth.

Hmmm... I guess during the diaspora some Jewish explorers hit it like mad in PNG.

Oh dear.

weichi,

"I did not ignore your question."

Oh, I thought that since you didn't answer it you were ignoring it.

"Very often, things that are 'as plain as the nose on your face' are in fact wrong. That's why science demands *evidence* for claims."

That's very *insightful*. I'm a better *person* for having learned it.

"In other words, your *subjective opinion* about who would do better is irrelevant. The question is what does the *evidence* show?"

Please *teach* me about your fascinating *non-subjective* opinions! I'll let you know if I can find some *evidence* about Jewish intelligence. I'll peruse the list of Nobel Prize winners, maybe there *are* a few Jews on that list -- perhaps they are even *over represented*!

"...Jarred Diamond has a section where he argues that people in New Guinea who lived in hunter gatherer societies until the mid 20th century are more intelligent than the rest of us humans..."

This was the one off-note in an otherwise awesome book.

I don't know about intelligence, but I'll bet you that hunter gatherers have better eyesight than we do, on average.

Re "selective pressures" , anyone want to evaluate the relative value of Tay Sachs disease vs hybrid vigor?

I've had bred dogs and I've had mutts. The mutts have generally seemed more healthy over the long term.

Becoming wealthy also allows your offspring to choose fit mates. - Tiny Tim

But does wealth necessarily coincide with intelligence? Or even more to the point success in scholarly endevours?

Even among us Jews, being a Talmid Chachem, while a position of great honor, ain't gonna make you rich (although it might have traditionally net you some wealthy inlaws). And whose richer in today's society -- a professor or some MBA-drone who's managed to reach the level of upper management? And who's more intelligent? To use a fictional example: who's more intelligent, Dilbert or Pointy-Haired Boss? Who's more likely to be wealthy (and who's more likely to have reproduced more)?

One needs to be careful about the correlation between wealth/reproductive fitness and intelligence, which correlation is often overstated. Even among the stereotypical view of the urban Jew (and did we Eastern European Jews loose intelligence as we lived in small towns?) making money by his wits -- the smartest Jews were not the ones making the most money: the smartest Jews weren't the bankers but the Rabbis, e.g. Now maybe there's some sort of heterozygous advantage here (have two intelligent genes and you're a Rabbi, have one and you're a successful banker, have none and all you can do is be a subsistence farmer) ... but I thought the idea is that many of the "intelligence genes" produced intelligence as the heterozygous advantage (and something bad when homozygous).

I'm still thinking culture has a large role here -- let's have this discussion in a few years when Jews are very much assimilated and see whether even "pure-bred" Jews (what about converts to Judaism?) are still excelling in academic pursuits disproportionally. Based on the number of Jews with whom I went to grad school and the number of younger Jewish profs. relative to the older generation -- I think Jewish intelligence is somewhat of a bubble phenomenon that can best be explained by cultural factors.

Were you unloved as a child? You were so desperate to be praised - Fred

Not quite. I am a red-head. You get a lot of attention being the red-headed kid. After a while you get addicted to being the center of attention even if, at first, being so is something you find un-welcome.

A mild correlation between IQ and wealth - say 0.3 - is probably enough to make this process work. I never thought rabbis had much to do with it - they were too few and not that rich.
The sorts of things people call culture don't seem to have much lasting effect on IQ. For example the correlation between the IQ of adopted kids and their parents is.. zero, within error.

It is easier to disbelieve in the heritability of IQ if you don't know your friends' parents - a typical scenario in suburban American or in college. In a small town, it leaps out at you. Sometimes literally.

Diamond argues that there aren't really significant differences in cognitive or psychological traits between different populations. To do this he of course has to pretend that IQ tests don't exist, because they show plenty of differences. Or that IQ has no predictive value - but it does. On top of that, there are plenty of selective sweeps underway on genes involving neurological functions - different sweeps in different populations. So he's almost certainly wrong.
Biogeographical factors certainly affected the development of civilization, but they affected regional evolution as well. People changed.

tinytim,

I thought you and I were arguing about whether urban life selects more for intelligence than rural life, not whether some subset of Jews are smarter than average. Or are you saying that your evidence that urban life selects more for intelligence than rural life is that Jews whose ancestors have lived in cities for the past thousand (or whatever) years are smart?

If this is not what you are say, what exactly *are* you saying?

I'd find myself part-way between Weichi and TinyTim.

I think under normal circumstances, the relative selective pressures for increased intelligence are much greater in urban than in rural life. Obviously, smarter peasants probably do better, but other pressures (e.g. physical robustness, mental stoicism, nutritional efficiency, tedium-tolerance) are probably much, much greater pressures for peasants ekeing out a living.

However, if Weichi is Chinese (as his name might suggest) he might be interested that there's considerable evidence that the political-economy of rural Chinese was historically rather unique in providing much, much stronger pressures for intelligence than did rural Europe or probably anywhere else in the world. Since this Chinese system stayed in place for around 2000 years, this might or might not have some connection to the apparently high intelligence levels of the Chinese people.

RKU,

I'm not saying that tinytim's position is wrong (though I'm skeptical). I'm asking what his *evidence* is for it.

Have I not been clear about this?

As far as the rural Chinese, do you have a reference? I'm very curious how people would go about measuring and quantifying this.

Although I'm no specialist in this field, my impression is that there's just a vast store of documented historical evidence regarding selective pressure for city-dwellers. Still, most urban jobs seem to require much more intellectual than physical labor compared to being a peasant, so it seems pretty plausible.

One important case where some documented evidence does actually exist is for European Jews over the last few centuries, since their population was so small and concentrated and they tended to keep better written records. You should probably take a look at the classic Cochran-Harpending-Hardy paper to see how persuasive you find the analysis.

As for rural China, there was actually a tremendous amount of fairly sophisticated business/financial activity going on regarding land and food, tremendously advanced compared to the crude simplicity of European serfdom/peasantry. Also, the population had long since reached the Malthusian carrying-capacity, and probably each generation 15-30% of the least economically successful portion of the population dropped out of the gene pool, either through starvation or being unable to afford to buy wives for their children.

Finally, the custom of Fenjia---equal division of land among all sons---meant that the children of landlords often all started life as poor peasants---and had to succeed on their own or disappear (poor peasants themselves had few if any children).

A hundred generations of ruthlessly Malthusian downward mobility can obviously have a huge impact on culture, and perhaps on genes as well. Obviously intelligence would have been only one of a number of different physical and psychological characteristics being selected for under these harsh circumstances.

Anyway, if you're really interested I can provide a few references, though hardly anything up to the rigor of quantum physics.

Oops! First sentence should read "no vast store"

RKU,

Thanks. I do hope to look at the Cochran et.al. paper at some point. I'll only point out that if their analysis holds in the case of the Ashkenazi, it's far from clear that the argument would generalize to *all* urban populations. But it would certainly be an important result nonetheless.

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