Race and Intelligence

 
PZ Myers has stirred up a hornet'e nest by quoting Jim Watson's politically insensitive comments about race and IQ [Eminent scientist behaving badly]. As usual, the dispute rages around the question of whether Africans have lower IQ's than Caucasians or Asians.

Meanwhile, the connection between race and intelligence often goes unchallenged when it comes to other ethnic groups. For example, in the posting on the Ashkenazi Jewish Population I mentioned some explanations for higher intelligence among this group and not a peep was raised about IQ and race [Evolution in the Ashkenazi Jewish Population]. Isn't this strange? If it's okay to talk about one race having a difference in IQ then why isn't it okay to talk about another? [Let my meaning be clear. I doubt very much whether there's a real difference in intelligence between Askenazi Jews and other "races" but I'm willing to entertain the possibility.]

Here's the abstract of a paper by David and Lynn (2007).

A number of studies have found that Ashkenazi Jews in the United States have a high average IQ. It has been proposed by Cochran, Hardy and Harpending (2006) that this can be explained by the occupational constraints imposed on the Ashkenazi for many centuries in Europe, when they were largely confined to money-lending. They propose that this selected for the high verbal and mathematical intelligence that has several times been found in American Ashkenazim. The current study investigates how far this theory holds for European and Oriental Jews in Israel. A review of studies shows that Oriental Jews in Israel have an average IQ 14 points lower than that of European (largely Ashkenazi) Jews. It is proposed that this difference can be explained in terms of the Cochran, Hardy and Harpending theory because Oriental Jews were permitted to engage in a much wider range of occupations and hence did not come under the selection pressure to develop the high verbal and mathematical intelligence that was present for Ashkenazim.

It seems pretty silly to me but it still got published in the scientific literature. Jared Diamond has also favored explanations like this for the higher IQ of this population.

So, the question of the day is why don't we see the same storm of criticism over a paper like this? Basically what they're saying is that the non-Jewish Europeans had lower IQ's than the Jewish population. How is this more politically correct than saying that blacks have lower IQs than whites in America?

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David, H. and Lynn, R. (2007) Intelligence differences between European and oriental Jews in Israel. J Biosoc Sci. 39:465-73.