Neurons
show more axonal growth when exposed to higher levels of sphingolipids (last
figure) (Cochran et al. 2006)
Jewish
achievement is a difficult topic. Recently, it has been addressed by Jordan
Peterson, as in this interview with the Forward:
"You can assume that they [Jews] are intelligent and have a culture of learning, or you can think that there's some kind of cabal," Peterson told the Forward. "So if I'm gonna hit the hornets nest, I might as well hit it on the side that takes the wind out of the sails of far-righters and their idiot anti-Semitism." (Feldman 2018)
That quote appeared under the headline "Is Jordan Peterson Enabling Jew Hatred?" There was also a photo montage (since removed) juxtaposing his image with that of Hitler. It's hard to believe that this topic was freely discussed in the mainstream a mere decade ago. At that time Commentary ran an article by Charles Murray on "Jewish Genius":
From 1870 to 1950, Jewish representation in literature was four times the number one would expect. In music, five times. In the visual arts, five times. In biology, eight times. In chemistry, six times. In physics, nine times. In mathematics, twelve times. In philosophy, fourteen times.
[...] What accounts for this remarkable record? A full answer must call on many characteristics of Jewish culture, but intelligence has to be at the center of the answer. Jews have been found to have an unusually high mean intelligence as measured by IQ tests since the first Jewish samples were tested. (The widely repeated story that Jewish immigrants to this country in the early 20th century tested low on IQ is a canard.) Exactly how high has been difficult to pin down, because Jewish sub-samples in the available surveys are seldom perfectly representative. But it is currently accepted that the mean is somewhere in the range of 107 to 115, with 110 being a plausible compromise. (Murray 2007)
Murray then discussed a paper by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending, likewise published in a mainstream journal. The authors argued that Ashkenazi Jews had historically worked in occupations that select for cognitive ability, i.e., sales, finance, and trade. Non-Jews usually worked in intellectually less demanding occupations, most often farming. Sephardic Jews were similarly selected, but not to the same extent. They tended to work in a wider range of occupations, with more emphasis on crafts than on finance. Furthermore, beginning in the 17th century, Ashkenazi craftsmen were more entrepreneurial than their Sephardic counterparts; they produced for a larger market, geographically and demographically, where the rewards for success were greater and where successful craftsmen had only one way of increasing their workforce to meet demand: marrying younger and having more children (Frost 2007).
This
theory is supported by a striking piece of evidence: the high incidence among
Ashkenazim of certain genetic disorders: Tay-Sachs, Gaucher, Niemann-Pick, and
mucolipidosis type IV (MLIV). All four of these disorders affect the same
metabolic pathway: the capacity to store sphingolipid compounds that promote
the growth and branching of axons in the brain. Although these disorders are
deleterious in the homozygote state, they're a net benefit in the much more
frequent heterozygote state. They provide the brain with higher levels of
sphingolipids without the adverse health effects (Cochran et al. 2006).
This
is not to say that only these four disorders explain the higher mean IQ of
Ashkenazim. They're simply witnesses to
a selection pressure that has probably acted on the many thousands of genes
that in one way another influence cognitive ability.
A strange collapse
If
Jewish achievement is genetically based, it should be relatively stable,
shouldn't it? Yet it has been far from stable over the past forty years. Ron
Unz (2012) has ably documented what he calls "the strange collapse of
Jewish achievement":
-
In the U.S. Math Olympiad, over 40% of the top students were Jewish during the
1970s. During the 1980s and 1990s, the percentage averaged about one-third.
During the thirteen years since 2000, two names out of 78 or 2.5% appear to be
Jewish.
-
On the Putnam Exam (a mathematics competition for American college students)
over 40% of the winners were Jewish before 1950. Between that year and the
1990s, the percentage was 22-31%. Since 2000, it has been under 10%, without a
single likely Jewish name between 2005 and 2012.
-
Of the national finalists for the Science Talent Search, 22-23% were Jewish
from the 1950s to the 1980s. The percentage was 17% in the 1990s, 15% in the
2000s, and 7% from 2010 to 2012. Of the thirty top students over the last
period, only one seems to have been Jewish.
-
Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics Olympiad from 1986
to 1997. During the 2000s the percentage was 5%.
-
From 2000 to 2012, only 8% of the top students in the Biology Olympiad were
Jewish, with none from 2010 to 2012.
-
Between 1992 and 2012, only 11% of the winners of the Computing Olympiad had
Jewish names, as did 8% of the Siemens AP Award winners.
-
From 2010 to 2012, none of the Chemistry Olympiad winners had a probable Jewish
name.
A
similar decline seems to be under way in Israel. Rindermann (2018, p. 148)
cites student assessment studies that indicate a decrease in that country's IQ from 101 in the 1960s to 95 today.
Yet the intervening years saw a large influx of Jewish immigrants from the
former Soviet Union—about 979,000 between 1989 and 2006 (Wikipedia 2018b). The
Ashkenazi proportion of Israel's population is consequently higher today than
it was in the 1960s.
So
what is driving this decline in academic performance? Ron Unz opts for a
social/cultural cause: "today's overwhelmingly affluent Jewish students
may be far less diligent in their work habits or driven in their studies than
were their parents or grandparents, who lived much closer to the bracing
challenges of the immigrant experience."
Hmm
...It's a bit of a stretch to say that most Jewish American kids were still the children or grandchildren of immigrants as late as the 1970s. In this, Ron is
echoing the frequent claim that the immigrant experience has a transformative
effect, turning slackers into strivers or at least encouraging the slackers to
stay home.
Let's
take off the rose-tinted glasses and look reality in the face: most immigrants
are not high achievers. Either today or back in the challenging 1970s. As for
the minority who are, they typically come from groups that were already that
way in their countries of origin. So the immigrant experience, in itself, has
little explanatory value. The explanation is that certain cultures have
selected for mental and behavioral traits that make high achievement possible.
Unz
is on firmer ground when he says that over the last two decades up to half of
the Jewish winners of the Math Olympiad were recent immigrants from the former
Soviet Union. But why, then, did the mean IQ of Israel decline when that
country took in a similar influx of Soviet Jews? That influx was much larger
proportionately—almost a million in a country of eight and a half million.
Today, Russian Jews number 1.2 million in Israel, if one includes non-Jewish
household members (Wikipedia 2018a; Wikipedia 2018b).
Perhaps
Soviet Jews who went to the United States were somehow different from those who
went to Israel. In the U.S., about half
of them arrived under the Lautenberg
amendment (1990) which authorizes the entry of religious minorities
"with a credible, but not necessarily individual, fear of
persecution." In Israel, they arrived under the Law of Return, which lets in anyone with at least one Jewish
grandparent or a Jewish spouse.
Israel
is thus more open to immigrants from the former Soviet Union ... as long as
they have some sort of Jewish affiliation. The affiliation is often weak:
In 1988, a year before the immigration wave began, 58% of married Jewish men and 47% of married Jewish women in the Soviet Union had a non-Jewish spouse. Some 26%, or 240,000, of the immigrants had no Jewish mother, and were thus not considered Jewish under Halakha, or Jewish religious law, which stipulates one must have a Jewish mother to be considered Jewish. (Wikipedia 2018b)
Out-marriage has increased considerably in those countries that provide Israel with immigrants, not only the former Soviet Union but also the United States, Canada, and France. If Jews are becoming less and less Jewish by ancestry, it should be no surprise that anything specific to them genetically is likewise becoming less and less, whether they live in Israel or in the United States. This genetic change should be most noticeable on the right tail of the bell curve ... among the most gifted.
Conclusion
So
the decline in Jewish achievement may be both an argument for and an argument
against a genetic cause. Ron Unz sees an argument against: "the innate
potential of a group is unlikely to drop so suddenly." Well, only if the
group has a closed membership. According to a 2013 American survey, the
intermarriage rate is now 58% among all Jews and 71% among non-Orthodox Jews.
Yet 81% of all Jews still raise their children as Jewish (Goodstein 2013). It
seems that "Jewishness" is increasingly self-defined and
self-ascribed.
Besides
out-marriage, something else may be going on. There are signs that fertility is
sharply declining among the most intelligent women (Kanazawa 2014). Jewish
Americans would be harder hit in this respect, but the problem may be a much larger
one, as indicated by the recent slowing down and reversal of the Flynn Effect
and by the steady increase in reaction time from about the year 1980 onward (Flynn 2007,
pp. 143; Frost 2014; Madison 2014; Teasdale and Owen 2005).
In
conclusion, the decline in Jewish achievement may have a genetic cause, a
social/cultural one, or both. It nonetheless looks real. Much has been written
about the bleak outlook for Jewish Americans due to their high out-marriage
rate and their low fertility rate. But what if, on top of this numerical
decline, there has also been a cognitive and intellectual one?
What
will happen when Jewish millennials and post-millennials pick up the torch,
move up in the world, and begin to make their mark? We may see another
collapse: that of the remarkable Jewish presence in American life and culture.
References
Cochran,
G., J. Hardy, and H. Harpending. (2006). Natural history of Ashkenazi
intelligence, Journal of Biosocial
Science 38: 659-693.
https://antville.org/static/sites/kratzbuerste/files/AshkenaziIQ.pdf
Feldman,
A. (2018). Is Jordan Peterson enabling Jew hatred? Forward. May 11
https://forward.com/news/national/400597/is-jordan-peterson-enabling-jew-hatred/
Flynn,
J.R. (2007). What is Intelligence? Beyond
the Flynn Effect. Cambridge University Press.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=qvBipuypYUkC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Frost,
P. (2007). Natural selection in proto-industrial Europe. Evo and Proud, November 16.
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2007/11/natural-selection-in-proto-industrial.html
Frost,
P. (2014). What happened in the 1980s to reaction time? Evo and Proud, May 3.
http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/05/what-happened-in-1980s-to-reaction-time.html
Goodstein,
L. (2013). Poll shows major shift in identity of U.S. Jews. The New York Times, October 1.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/us/poll-shows-major-shift-in-identity-of-us-jews.html
Kanazawa,
S. (2014). Intelligence and childlessness. Social
Science Research 48: 157-170.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Satoshi_Kanazawa/publication/263666009_Intelligence_and_childlessness/links/59dc1174458515e9ab45299c/Intelligence-and-childlessness.pdf
Madison,
G. (2014). Increasing simple reaction times demonstrate decreasing genetic
intelligence in Scotland and Sweden, London Conference on Intelligence, Psychological comments, April 25, #LCI14 Conference proceedings
http://www.unz.com/jthompson/lci14-questions-on-intelligence/
Murray,
C. (2007). Jewish Genius. Commentary,
April 1
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/jewish-genius/
Rindermann,
H. (2018). Cognitive Capitalism. Human
Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations. Cambridge University Press.
Teasdale,
T.W., and D.R. Owen. (2005). A long-term rise and recent decline in
intelligence test performance: The Flynn Effect in reverse. Personality and Individual Differences
39(4): 837-843.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2005.01.029
Unz,
R. (2012). The myth of American meritocracy. The American Conservative, November 28
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
Wikipedia (2018a). Russian
Jews in Israel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Jews_in_Israel
Wikipedia (2018b). 1990s
Post-Soviet Aliyah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post-Soviet_aliyah 
