Evolution of Intelligence in Jews

When natural selection, mutation, history, and religion get mixed up. An article I'm sure many EVC-ers will find fascinating.Natural genius? | The Economist

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Ashkenazim generally do well in IQ tests, scoring 12-15 points above the mean value of 100, and have contributed disproportionately to the intellectual and cultural life of the West, as the careers of Freud, Einstein and Mahler, pictured above, affirm. They also suffer more often than most people from a number of nasty genetic diseases, such as Tay-Sachs and breast cancer. These facts, however, have previously been thought unrelated. The former has been put down to social effects, such as a strong tradition of valuing education. The latter was seen as a consequence of genetic isolation. Even now, Ashkenazim tend to marry among themselves. In the past they did so almost exclusively.

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Dr Cochran, however, suspects that the intelligence and the diseases are intimately linked. His argument is that the unusual history of the Ashkenazim has subjected them to unique evolutionary pressures that have resulted in this paradoxical state of affairs.

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I never considered Freud any kind of genius.He was in the right place at the right time with the right accent for people to buy his BS.

I give them credit for any intelligence but does that make us arrogant racist. The intermarriage, jew to jew , and no one else does education have a bearing on that? Gene pooling for instance.
Closed society, that's not the educated that's the persicuted. You don't mind me asking if that's suppose to be jehova from vahala, i just don't pay attention. Do they have another place of eternal rest?

When looking at intelligence, we should keep in mind the Flynn effect.

It's important to remember that IQ tests are not known to measure any inherent mental quality, but simply your level of education and test-taking skill relative to the average score of your similarly-aged peers.

You sure Crash?I was taught that IQ tests were a measure of one's ability to process information: to recognize specific shapes and patterns, etc: an innate ability if you will. I'm probably wrong, but it can't hurt to ask.

One thing I do know is that IQ tests were originally designed to identify seriously deficient individuals.It was never meant to be used to rank "normals".

Pretty sure. Look, here's the five areas tested by the current Stanford-Binet IQ test:

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Fluid Reasoning
Knowledge
Quantitative Reasoning
Visual-Spatial Processing
Working Memory

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I mean, the test says right out in the open that it's testing your knowledge. What would make anybody think that IQ tests assess some kind of innate mental ability? There's nothing in that list, of course, that you couldn't improve with either practice or study. Surfing the web might improve your knowledge. Playing a video game might improve your visual-spacial processing.It's like saying that your time on the mile-run assesses your "innate" physical condition. While it's true that the test is going to crudely detect the difference between a parapaligic and a thoroughbred stallion, two examples of test participants whose scores would be limited by their innate physical differences, for everybody else, your score on the test is going to be affected much more by how many miles you've run in the past, not some innate, abstract quantity a that you were born with and that environment and practice have no control over.

Freud was a genius by any standard despite his intolerable atheism. He is well known for his contributions to abnormal psychology, but his work in normal psychology is equally remarkable and has repelled all falsification attempts.Ray

But IQ is heavily biologically heritary and the degree to which it is so increases with age, implying that they are strongly linked to innate biological factors.Saw this work a while back; interesting stuff - I'd love to see what comes of it.

can I agree wtih you? you know, so that you become wrongyeah Crash, I always thought that the IQ tests determined how well you processed information. something that can change as yor excercise (or not) your mind.last time I took one, the only thing that might pass for testing knowledge was the math. If you don't know how math works, you'll bomb those questions. other than that, no history, no science, no lieterature, mothing like those, unlike say, your SAT and SAT2 tests.

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All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

I guess I'd like to see more on that. Also, well-known in IQ tests is the "Flynn effect", the phenomenon where everybody's scores on IQ tests are constantly going up, around the world - to the extent that they have to periodically re-zero the IQ scale, lest it lose any kind of historical relevance. That alone would seem to counterindicate a heritable, inherent biological factor.

The conclusions of the APA, in particular I refer you to the Conclusions section where it states:

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In the case of IQ, [heritability]* is markedly lower for children (about .45) than for adults (about .75). This means that as children grow up, differences in test scores tend increasingly to reflect differences in genotype and in individual life experience rather than differences among the families in which they were raised.

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* - h² in the original, earlier defined as heritability. Only if you take a staggeringly naive view of how genotype can affect phenotype. To take a very simple example, no-one is going to argue that height is not heritable, yet we see effects that exactly parallel the Flynn Effect with height as well (most notably among the Japanese). Genetics, in most cases, controls potential and how the organisms interacts with the environment rather than directly influencing phenotype. To be a great athlete, having a strong genetic hand is required, but so is a good diet and a well structured and performed exercise regime. Red Siskins are only red if they are fed on a diet high in carotenes, but Wrens fed the same diet don't turn red - phenotype is a function of environment and genetics.Which, of course, means that it is entirely possible that any measured difference in the IQ of any particular ethnic group* may be, in fact, down to environmental differences rather than genetic ones. But I would be surprised if all such differences were so explained given that there are measurable and significant differences between ethnic groupings in other genetic areas.

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Freud was a genius by any standard despite his intolerable atheism. He is well known for his contributions to abnormal psychology, but his work in normal psychology is equally remarkable and has repelled all falsification attempts.

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Freud's work wasn't scientifically rigorous, to put it mildly.It consists almost entirely of his personal musings and conjectures regarding many individual case studies.It is not taken seriously in any branch of science-based Psychology these days, and hasn't been for decades.Only the clinical Freudian analysts think Freud is any kind of great shakes.

i'll beat him to the punch. now that you have disagreed with him, he's happy. why?becuase you're disagreement has proven him right, so he's glad he didn't get your approval of his view.some people are really crazy.

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All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences