Are Jews Smarter?

One lesson I learned at Brown: if a classmate was out for a Jewish holiday, they were probably a good person to study with for the final. Yes, in my own anecdotal experience Jews are, on average, a decent bit smarter than us golfing, NASCAR watching, easter-egg hunting goys. And that's cool. What's not cool is saying this explicitly in academia, and pointing to nature as well as nurture in explaining it. But a team of scientists from the University of Utah has done just that.

In a paper just accepted by the Journal of Biosocial Science (published by Cambridge University Press), they offer an evolutionary explanation--arguing that medieval Central and Northern European Jews, in order to thrive amidst centuries of oppressive circumstances, self-selected smart mates who could help them survive and thrive. Their data suggests that this self-selection produced a group that is on the whole both more intelligent and more vulnerable to certain diseases.

I'm no scientist, but their argument, which carries wildly un-PC implications (the idea of inheritied biological differences in intelligence sort of makes people uncomfortable), is being taken seriously by an academic community that really doesn't want to deal with it being true.


Einstein discovered the theory of relativity and was down with the lunar calendar

Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker admits that though it's "hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is...it's certainly a thorough and well-argued paper, not one that can easily be dismissed." Not only do I lack the expertise to assess the science, I lack the expertise to assess the assessments of the science. But I'm interested to follow this discussion...

If you have the time and the gusto, read the actual paper here.