Hank Pellissier • San Francisco • Jul 19, 2011

Hi Kim—nice try with bringing up the money factor.  You might have a tiny point, because wealth does have a correlation with high IQ, but it is not as significant as you imagine.

If your hypothesis was right, for example, the wealthiest nation in the world per capita - Qatar ($76,108) - would also have the highest IQ, which it doesn’t - it is a mere 78.

Meanwhile, CHina (100 IQ) has a tiny per capita income of only $4,382.  Your argument thus collapses.

Furthermore, your contention insinuates that the Ashkenazim always had high wealth, and thus had high IQ.  But in reality, the Ashkenazim, as you surely know, have been dispossessed of their capital innumerable times.  Most recently, after World War II, boatloads of destitute Ashkenazim concentration camp survivors were unloaded in Israel, the United States, and elsewhere, to economically start all over again. Which they did. Successfully.  So the equation really is this:

High IQ—-> Wealth

not the inverse, that you have conjectured






Ronaldo • • Jul 19, 2011

There are some very questionable assertions above, and I’d like to address them. This, despite the fact that I agreed with most of Hank’s article:

1. Any genetic explanation should not rely on the (mostly) discredited theory of “inheritance of acquired characteristics”. For instance, is the “build up the precuneus in the superior parietal lobe, and the caudate nucleus, a part of the basal ganglia in the subcortical region” truly inheritable?

2. “In 64 A.D., the high priest Joshua ben Gamla insisted that Jewish fathers educate their sons in the Torah. This demanding edict reduced the Jewish population from 4.5 to 1.2 million, by pushing out the lower IQs.” —-> I can’t figure out why you blamed the population decline on this edict as opposed to the Roman oppression/conquering of Israel not long afterwards.

3. “If we promoted high IQ behavior to humans everywhere, globally, would we all become… enhanced? Better humans? ”—-> I’m definitely not saying “no”, but it’s probably true that the people with the highest overall IQ in the world in the 1930s were the Germans. (They were really into classical music, too, by the way.)

4. Jason Berg writes: “While the smartest Catholics were being locked up in seminaries where they couldn’t reproduce, Jews were marrying their daughters to the brightest boychiks in the hood. ”—-> I would expect that both the smart and the dumb men were marrying, with rates just like in every other (non-Catholic, that is) culture.

5. Daniel Gene writes: “What I find amazingly positive though is that the world is more and more freeing it’s mind and starting questioning things”—-> I agree totally. Speaking of this, and speaking of Nobel prizes, check out this quote:

A friend once asked Isidor I. Rabi, a Nobel prize winner in physics, “Why did you become a scientist, rather than a doctor or lawyer or businessman, like the other immigrant kids in your neighborhood?” Rabi responded:

  My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: “So? Did you learn anything today?” But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” That difference—asking good questions—made me become a scientist!

6. Daniel wrote: “Israel is one of the most democratic countries in the world” and iPan retorted to that statement. However, the retort did nothing to dent the truth of that statement.

7. Karl wrote: “I would like to put forth an alternate explanation for the disproportionate number of Ashkenazi emmy winners, nobel holders, professors, and ivy leaguers… the Ashkenazim are biased to accept and professionally promote other Ashkenazim. ”—-> This answer might be partially true, but it ignores the fact that for many years, Jews couldn’t even get into ivy league schools.

8a. xexon writes: “They’re not smart because they’re Jews. They’re smart because of the lineage they came from before becoming Jews.”—-> Are you saying the answer is mostly genetic? It sure sounds like it. That seems to be a very unpopular opinion here.

8b. He further writes: “When this group embraced the religion of Judaism, they dominated it. ”—-> I can’t even figure out what this means.

8c. He further writes: “Zionists are atheistic.”—-> No over-generalization there!

8d. He further writes: “But they are smart. They got the UN to give them a country. ” —-> Unless he’s being facetious, he should really check out the history of how the UN voted to make Israel a country. Also, if they were so smart, they would’ve figured out how to prevent Syria from being on the UN human rights council and North Korea on the Disarmament Conference.





Hank Pellissier • San Francisco • Jul 20, 2011

@ Ronaldo - thank you for your well-organized contribution to this discussion.

regarding your third point, i.e., Germany perhaps having the world’s highest IQ in the 1930’s, you might be correct.  I didn’t find info from that era, but a recent report claims Germany had the highest IQ in Europe in 2006.  Germany’s 107 IQ was well ahead of Britain’s 100 and France’s 94.

This detail is interesting because Ashkenazim descended from Germany’s Alsace and Rhineland regions, and an Emory University study estimates “that between 35 and 55 percent of the modern Ashkenazi genome comes from European descent”

that link is: http://www.physorg.com/news202047256.html

My essay isn’t really about high “Jewish” IQ because Sephardic IQ is quite moderate.  Ashkenazim are, it appears, a mixture of Jewish and German descent.

——-

regarding your second point, about the decline in Jewish population - your point here is also quite valid.  The Diaspora began in 70 AD, just six years after the edict. My suggestion that the population decline was due to the stringency of learning to read the Torah isn’t my own, I am passing it on from Dr. Richard Nisbett, who advances it in his book, “Intelligence and How to Get It.”