If it was still the nineteenth century, you could compare European Jews in big urban centers to those who lived in shtetls, who would be more rural but might be more (culturally/genetically/etc) Jewish.
It's interesting that people in China are selling self-help books about the secret to Jewish success. Have they invented a euphemism equivalent to "tiger mom?" In the west it seems like most people who talk about Jewish achievement spend very little time exploring possible cultural differences and are most interested in providing support for hereditarian theories of intelligence.
Occurs to me that disparate impact and other explanations (cultural or genetic) aren’t exclusionary. Everyone always looks for the “REASON” as if the one fact will Single handedly explain all things.
Literally everything could be true at the same time (or not true).
I guess Jewish success is not uniquely interesting compared to other examples of minority overperformance, and once you factor in selective migration and urbanisation the factor that's unique to Jewish people (or to any other successful minority) is likely very small. But if the goal is to make a more equal society, understanding why some groups of people do better than others is definitely interesting.
"The main implications are that average immigrant attainment is inversely related to the number admitted from a source country and positively related to the population of that source country."
I wonder if this is true of immigrants more generally (that is to say, globally and not just in the US). Immigration systems always have some degree of selectivity baked in just based on the difficulties of moving to a new country.
> It’s fun to sit around reading about the historic empires that were ruled over by your own racial or religious or ethnic group, and to think “Wow, I am the heir to greatness!”
The idea is so foreign to me. I do not feel any kinship or relation to anyone who I've never met. It would mean nothing to me to find out that I was descended from any group or particular person (other than maybe genetic health stuff). Obviously, I'm in the minority on this and I've always been really interested in knowing why I'm so different on this dimension.
Maybe I should restate that. I feel some sort of kinship to people I've never met, dead or alive. After all, I donate to effective charities. However, it's not a feeling along the same dimensions of feelings that would make me interested or excited that I was related to them in some way.
What about selective conversion to Christianity and Islam? Orthodox Judaism is a religion which requires men to read Hebrew, pray three times a day, understand some Jewish law etc. There has been huge pressure to convert to Christianity and Islam. Might less intelligent Jews preferentially convert from a religion where they feel they are less at home to one (Christianity) where they just need to do what the priest says... Should be stronger effect in Europe than in Muslim countries and least in Muslim countries where Arabic is not the spoken language.
No, that's silly. The reverse is true: _more intelligent_ Jews preferentially converted, at least in XIX century Europe, either because that was a precondition to being employed in positions of trust and responsibility in gentile society, and/or because it was a big plus for social advancement, such as marriage into gentile aristocracy. (In America, Anglo Protestants switched to more prestigious denominations for similar reasons.) On the other hand, if you are staying put in the stetl because you don't clear the bar for First Guild trader or whatever, there is no need or pressure to convert and you can stay with your familiar religion. This phenomenon was well known in Imperial Russia, and I think also in Germany and Austria. I don't know of statistical sources - they might not exist for the Russian Empire, where census categories were based on religion rather than nationality - but you can read contemporary (i.e. XIX and early XX century) books and journalism.
I thought much conversion from Judaism to Christianity was in the (then small) professional classes, in that there were places where it really made the exercise of your profession possible ? Also, post-Enlightenment, conversion to Christianity (what we would call mainline or liberal Protestantism) being seen as a "ticket of admission to European culture" and so forth. Which centuries are you thinking of?
Historically, most Jewish conversion to other religions has been the result of outside coercion via pogrom or government decree mandating conversion or expulsion.
Regarding reading Hebrew and other requirements, if that's how you were raised and what you were exposed to when you were growing up, why wouldn't you feel at home? Intellect has nothing to do with it. Just as our children learned their native language and grew up in our respective religions, Orthodox children learn Hebrew while growing up. In fact, the Orthodox outside Israel learn both their native language AND Hebrew.
PS - my thinking is informed by who became a Muslim or Christian in India - mostly people from lower castes. Who drops out of Haredi society in Israel today - I don't think it is mostly the smartest people...
Jews don't help to prove or disprove that. To whatever degree we can measure intelligence, we can measure it at the *individual* level; there's no need to measure it at the *group* level.
I agree with the individual approach for all practical purposes, but if I was a geneticist interested in identifying genes associated with intelligence, finding an ethnic group with higher intelligence would be very exciting - you need thousands of people to get a Genome Wide Association Study to work and confirm that a mutation correlated with higher intelligence *might* be having the effect you think it has. It at least gives you something to go on.
You could measure it at an individual level and then compare groups, but I doubt that would give you anything useful, there are too many different genes responsible for brain function to get anything from such a diverse group.
I'm personally ambivalent about these genes - it would be nice to one day know how our brains worked, but I'd prefer that we wait until we actually understand what these intelligence linked genes are before declaring that there are genetic differences in intelligence between groups.
A polygenic score is produced, because any complex effect is produced by many different genes, but that's based on the interaction of many individual variants that correlate with a trait, and those variants may be worth looking into further to see what they do. GWAS is generally used to look at disease, but in theory a similar technique could look at something else, like longevity or intelligence. I'd imagine finding a community with unusual longevity could be equally interesting for the purpose of research (although environmental factors will also play a big role).
I hesitate to bring it up because the GWAS technique is possibly worthless garbage - I mentioned it being used to look for longevity because that's interesting and was also retracted for being badly done.
The main problem with the claims of Jewish overachievement is that they are coming mainly from people who want to use the reputation of Jews as a rhetorical stepping stone in an argument that (usually northern) Europeans are a superior race. It's the same old shabby pseudo-scientific racism, still ignoring the implications of Mendel's findings, still imagining that evolution is a process of refining and competition among subspecies.
Without even getting to the problems with the case that arise with a little thinking and investigation - eg that insularity is suggested to have cultivated a sub-community with above-average intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews, despite the objective lack of insularity revealed in DNA studies and the implication of meiosis that insularity slows evolution - one might think that the proponents of scientific racism might at least have watched Idiocracy and had a doubt or two about the notion that high intelligence correlates with prolific reproduction.
And, by the same token, the success of black africans (some--e.g. Nigerian Americans--from the very same parts of Africa where African descendents of slaves trace ancestry to) is "very powerful proof" that intelligence is not genetic
That should be obvious anyway - humans are basically genetically identical because of population bottlenecks, but non-Africans are even more identical for the same reason. There are more ethnicities outside Africa because they're more geographically spread out, but that doesn't mean anything.
Also, even if you found a hereditary effect it's probably not caused by genetics because there are several more important steps in the causal chain.
At the same time, the fact that humans are more intelligent than chimpanzees (even if you attempt to raise a chimpanzee like a human) on most (not all) measures of intelligence does suggest that intelligence is in part genetic. There has to be something to explain why only humans have a civilisation.
You obviously meant to assert that "intelligence variation between human populations" is not genetic, but I just don't think that we know enough to confidently say that. It would be very unusual if there was no genetic variation in human intelligence, or if it was totally evenly distributed across all human populations, that's just not how genetic variation works.
But when I say we don't know, I actually mean that - maybe it'll turn out that Africans, on average, have more intelligence correlated genes, and that environmental factors and (more recently) colonial exploitation just have a much stronger effect on metrics like Nobel-Prize winning and success on IQ tests.
If we ever want to find out how much of intelligence is genetic, we'll first have to create a much fairer and more equitable society.
If you were a geneticist, you'd think differently about the relationship between ethnic groups and genetic lineages. The reason all complex life forms replicate with meiosis is that meiosis speeds sharing of novel beneficial mutations horizontally across the broad population this speeding evolution. Beneficial differences are far more likely to be shared than neutral ones, so these rapidly spread out from original ethnic groups: e.g. the moat common lactose tolerance genes were confined to neolithic south Russian steppe pastoralists c. 8000 years ago and now are all over northern and central Europe and spread as far as India and present among about a quarter of Ashkenazi.
No geneticist thinks evolution ever ends, but 500 or so generations since the Mesolithic is not much evolution, and the evidence points to other factors entirely aside from intelligence explaining notable reproductive successes of particuar groups - eg gracility in the neolithic, later reversing to robustness in both Europe and Africa, and presences vs absence of disease resistance as a huge factor. If civilized living breeds IQ genes then Iraq to Egypt should be the world's concentration of genius, Ashkenazi should be a step down and we northern Europeans should be way behind. In short there's a huge gap between what the science says about how evolution works and the illogical ill informed amateur conjectures put forward in an attempt to claim without evidence that genes explain test score variations among self reported ethnicity or race.
I definitely don't think genetics is the best explanation for most between-group variation in intelligence, environment is a much bigger factor. However, as environmental variation decreases (assuming society becomes more equal - this could go the other way!), the role of genetics will increase (that's how heritability works). I'm personally in favour of just admitting that we don't understand this topic well enough to rule one way or another, and I think it's just as unscientific to declare that all variation is environmental as it is to declare that it's all genetic.
Counterpoint to your final paragraph - you're assuming there's a strong selection pressure in favour of higher intelligence. I'm honestly sceptical that being of above average intelligence (in the way that IQ tests measure) gives you much of a selective advantage in evolutionary terms, especially in the past. Not saying being smart isn't useful, but just off the top of my head, I suspect resistance to disease was historically much more important! So for this reason, I'd expect most of the variation in intelligence to be random, which doesn't mean evenly distributed across all human populations.
Well here you sound reasonable. I'm sure intelligence variations are partly genetic though mind that "heritable" seems a vaguer term possibly encompassing parenting. I also leery of the suggestion that intelligence is unevenly distributed as there's really no evidence for that. Simple test scores are not really evidence and self reported ethnicity and especially race tells little of genetic proximity (there is more genetic variation among sub Saharan Africans than among the rest of the world). My point was of course against assuming a link between intelligence and reproductive success.
>But when I say we don't know, I actually mean that - maybe it'll turn out that Africans, on average, have more intelligence correlated genes, and that environmental factors and (more recently) colonial exploitation just have a much stronger effect on metrics like Nobel-Prize winning and success on IQ tests.
g is just like height. That is the best model for intelligence. We've known this since Plato, all research confirms it, and everyone who says otherwise is a deceiver trying to trick you so they can control you and steal from you. Consequently, while g may feel brainal, while psychoanalysis may tickle your fee fees, reading books to your kids or sending them to school has no effect on their height, so it has no effect on their g. In practice, only malnourishment can stunt height and g. That's it. Therefore, we have an environmental gap in intelligence only where we have malnourished children.
To clarify - the main thing distinguishing the human mind from the minds of animals is its ability to create and transmit culture, so I'd expect genes related to "intelligence" to be about learning, inclination and personality, rather than just being inherently better at any specific task.
You're wrong, HBD people have been talking about the meme nigerians for decades. Your comment is symptomatic of a larger issue -- all people who spew evil lies like "intelligence is not genetic" these days have clearly never read a single study on the topic in their lives. It's clear that your understanding is totally formulated by TV and bad blog posts such as this one. You obviously have 0 understanding of behavioral genetics. What arguing can be done with people like you? None, you know nothing. Yet instead of being humble you spew your crap. Shut up and go read Plomin and Jensen.
"And, by the same token, the success of black africans (some--e.g. Nigerian Americans--from the very same parts of Africa where African descendents of slaves trace ancestry to) is "very powerful proof" that intelligence is not genetic"
The most qualified Nigerians have the highest chance of being able to move to the US. The most intelligent Nigerians have the highest chance of being the most qualified. Therefore it's not surprising that the average Nigerian-American is more intelligent than the average Nigerian, including for genetic reasons.
I don't think that selective immigration counters disparate impact/systemic racism in a particularly interesting way. If the disparate impact/systemic racism hypothesis was stated as "there is no way for one ethnic group to earn higher average incomes than another other than by constructing systems of advantage and oppression" then sure, the fact that it's also possible to end up with a group with high average incomes by only letting rich people from that group enter the country is an argument against. But it's an argument on a technicality, and has very little to say about group advantage and disadvantage among people who aren't recent immigrants. And absent any sort of cultural/genetic/endogenous group prestige explanation for the group's success, it would suggest that regression to the oppression-adjusted mean should happen pretty much immediately, regardless of cultural assimilation or intermarriage.
On the other hand, if it's possible for some distinctive cultural groups to be persistently higher-achieving on some domains than others, it suggests that even persistent inequality among non-immigrants might be due to stuff like social structure, cultural norms, values, etc. That would suggest that people who want to improve the quality of life in their communities might benefit from trying to encourage people to imitate practices of other cultural groups that they admire. And it suggests that there would be some benefit to having schools try to impose cultural norms onto students.
I think the better argument for why Jews are _not_ evidence that culture or genetic engineering can produce sustained success is selective exit from Judaism. For 2000 years, Judaism has imposed uniquely strong educational requirements on practitioners, and has exposed practitioners to oppression. This made Judaism costly for people who weren't great learners and who didn't expect to be in a literate profession or trade, but made Judaism valuable for people who were, since it connected them to a network of literate professionals. The result is that even though Jewish migration to the US wasn't highly selected (your own numbers suggest that Jews should be less selected than almost any other ethnic group), the Jewish population in Europe was disproportionately urban and professional due to who continued to be Jewish. The book "The Chosen Few" makes this argument really well. This is slightly different from selective "attribution" of Judaism, because it's an argument that people are really more likely to stay Jewish, regardless of their parent's ethnicity or religion, if they're professionals, educated, and/or literate. This could still have created a uniquely productive culture or selected for genetics connected to intelligence, but to know that we'll have to look at the educational achievements of people without an exit path--maybe third-generation Israelis.
I agree with you that selective immigration is a very important (and clear) explanation of high achievement among some Asian ethnicities. If we want to know why Chinese-American kids do better in school on average than do US-born kids, the simplest explanation is that their parents are more likely to be highly educated, even when their parents are working low-wage jobs. You don't need to conclude that Chinese-American kids are getting favorable treatment by institutions. My point is that while this is important for understanding recent immigrants, it really doesn't get to the heart of whether differences in socioeconomic status between groups of people can be generated and maintained by anything other than systemic or institutional racism.
To your point about regression to the mean taking a long time, I agree partially. I guess in my mind I want to distinguish between "Vanilla" selective immigration and something like "Selective Immigration Plus." In "Vanilla," we'd say that the kids of doctors do better than the kids of farmers, on average. Since Chinese immigrants are disproportionately doctors, their kids do better than average. Since it's still helpful to have doctor parents if they have to work as taxi drivers for regulatory reasons, second-gen Chinese Americans also have high rates of upward mobility. But if there aren't any sort of cultural/community affects of being in a doctor-heavy subculture, none of this would help Chinese-American kids whose parents are farmers. They'd be just as likely to earn a high income as Laotian-American kids whose parents are farmers. And the grandkids of Chinese Americans would do about as well as you'd expect them to do given their parents incomes and educations. The great-grandkids would do about as well as you'd expect given _their_ parents incomes and educations. In other words, regression to the mean would be about as fast or slow for immigrant groups (after the first generation) as it is for everybody else.
Under "Selective Immigration Plus," there might be some broader consequences of coming from an elite community, above and beyond the consequences of having elite parents. Maybe when you're sent to night classes to learn Chinese, you make friends whose parents are doctors, even if your parents are farmers. In a doctor-heavy social milieu, everyone learns to reward kids for studying, to think about college when kids are in elementary school, to save money, etc. On top of that, Chinese-American kids might have more people to ask about where to go to college, more friends to recommend them for high-earning jobs, and more friends and relatives who can loan them money to start a business. In this case, if those social influences are strong enough, we might see Chinese-American kids doing better than we'd expect based on their parents' incomes and educations for a long, long time.
And that would suggest that communities can maintain advantages over the long run without gaining control of legal and political institutions and rebuilding them to their own advantage.
This is a fascinating topic, and it's not going away whatever Noah or Scott say. But I think Noah needs to do more work on the generic side "4) Genetic superpowers" is a weird way to talk about genes. The gene hypothesis is that genes matter, not that some people have "superpowers". Noah is very concerned to talk about people who are heavily invested in genetic explanations. But perhaps we're just observing something and drawing a conclusion. I think Noah is heavily invested in non-genetic explanations - regardless of what they might be. You don't like this one? Here's another non-genetic explanation, the answers got to be somewhere else.
Selective immigration certainly has its effects, across all immigrant groups. Having said that, what if it were shown that the second and third generation Jewish Americans have above-average SAT scores? In a world in which life outcomes correlate well with SAT scores -- even *within* the Systemically And Systematically Privileged Groups That Perpetuate Oppression -- wouldn't it be quite interesting for society to further investigate why this is the case? (or at least a tiny bit more interesting than churning out the umpteenth Jewish conspiracy theory to "explain" the statistical difference in Jewish outcomes?)
The SAT results of the second and third generations strongly hint at some form of heritability being involved, given that they patently cannot be explained by selective immigration. Genetic heritability? Cultural heritability? I'm aware that the Standard Model in US academia considers the genetic heritability of intelligence to be conceptually impossible - and am thus aware of how much I'm discrediting my own intelligence by admitting I believe it to be possible - but whatever mode of heritability has whichever amount of influence, gaining further insights into the whole thing would be interesting and beneficial.
As you remarked, China is already vested in studying the cultural angle. Either they are wasting their time, or they aren't. What would you say?
"But note that in his post, Scott spends quite a bit of time arguing against the idea that selective immigration is responsible for Jewish achievement. Why?"
The point is to argue against disparate impact broadly - including with groups where selective immigration isn't an applicable explanation. Group outcomes can differ due to group differences beyond selective immigration.
The highest expression of Jewish observance is immersion in Torah. In other words, literacy and scholarship are highly valorized in Jewish culture. Over many generations this surely has had a powerful effect on the Jewish people, including, one would think, genetic selection.
Regarding the Russian census, that would actually probably provide pretty good data. In the Soviet Union, you had a национальность, a "nationality" -- Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, &c. And interestingly, wherever you were born, if you were Jewish, you'd be put down as еврейский, "Jewish". This was a matter of legal status, so it's unlikely there would be any selection effects there.
If it was still the nineteenth century, you could compare European Jews in big urban centers to those who lived in shtetls, who would be more rural but might be more (culturally/genetically/etc) Jewish.
It's interesting that people in China are selling self-help books about the secret to Jewish success. Have they invented a euphemism equivalent to "tiger mom?" In the west it seems like most people who talk about Jewish achievement spend very little time exploring possible cultural differences and are most interested in providing support for hereditarian theories of intelligence.
That's an interesting thought.
Occurs to me that disparate impact and other explanations (cultural or genetic) aren’t exclusionary. Everyone always looks for the “REASON” as if the one fact will Single handedly explain all things.
Literally everything could be true at the same time (or not true).
I guess Jewish success is not uniquely interesting compared to other examples of minority overperformance, and once you factor in selective migration and urbanisation the factor that's unique to Jewish people (or to any other successful minority) is likely very small. But if the goal is to make a more equal society, understanding why some groups of people do better than others is definitely interesting.
"The main implications are that average immigrant attainment is inversely related to the number admitted from a source country and positively related to the population of that source country."
I wonder if this is true of immigrants more generally (that is to say, globally and not just in the US). Immigration systems always have some degree of selectivity baked in just based on the difficulties of moving to a new country.
I think so.
> It’s fun to sit around reading about the historic empires that were ruled over by your own racial or religious or ethnic group, and to think “Wow, I am the heir to greatness!”
The idea is so foreign to me. I do not feel any kinship or relation to anyone who I've never met. It would mean nothing to me to find out that I was descended from any group or particular person (other than maybe genetic health stuff). Obviously, I'm in the minority on this and I've always been really interested in knowing why I'm so different on this dimension.
Maybe I should restate that. I feel some sort of kinship to people I've never met, dead or alive. After all, I donate to effective charities. However, it's not a feeling along the same dimensions of feelings that would make me interested or excited that I was related to them in some way.
This article is a Jewish achievement. QED. :)
it's crazy how quickly folks do this...
... "she's jewish? she must be super-smart!"
... i swear i heard this just last week (on twitter). lol.
So far, no one has accused me of trying to downplay Jewish achievement in order to lower expectations for myself... ;-)
What about selective conversion to Christianity and Islam? Orthodox Judaism is a religion which requires men to read Hebrew, pray three times a day, understand some Jewish law etc. There has been huge pressure to convert to Christianity and Islam. Might less intelligent Jews preferentially convert from a religion where they feel they are less at home to one (Christianity) where they just need to do what the priest says... Should be stronger effect in Europe than in Muslim countries and least in Muslim countries where Arabic is not the spoken language.
That is also something I thought of, especially in the context of Russia.
No, that's silly. The reverse is true: _more intelligent_ Jews preferentially converted, at least in XIX century Europe, either because that was a precondition to being employed in positions of trust and responsibility in gentile society, and/or because it was a big plus for social advancement, such as marriage into gentile aristocracy. (In America, Anglo Protestants switched to more prestigious denominations for similar reasons.) On the other hand, if you are staying put in the stetl because you don't clear the bar for First Guild trader or whatever, there is no need or pressure to convert and you can stay with your familiar religion. This phenomenon was well known in Imperial Russia, and I think also in Germany and Austria. I don't know of statistical sources - they might not exist for the Russian Empire, where census categories were based on religion rather than nationality - but you can read contemporary (i.e. XIX and early XX century) books and journalism.
I thought much conversion from Judaism to Christianity was in the (then small) professional classes, in that there were places where it really made the exercise of your profession possible ? Also, post-Enlightenment, conversion to Christianity (what we would call mainline or liberal Protestantism) being seen as a "ticket of admission to European culture" and so forth. Which centuries are you thinking of?
Historically, most Jewish conversion to other religions has been the result of outside coercion via pogrom or government decree mandating conversion or expulsion.
Regarding reading Hebrew and other requirements, if that's how you were raised and what you were exposed to when you were growing up, why wouldn't you feel at home? Intellect has nothing to do with it. Just as our children learned their native language and grew up in our respective religions, Orthodox children learn Hebrew while growing up. In fact, the Orthodox outside Israel learn both their native language AND Hebrew.
PS - my thinking is informed by who became a Muslim or Christian in India - mostly people from lower castes. Who drops out of Haredi society in Israel today - I don't think it is mostly the smartest people...
This is at a time when the vast majority of the population was illiterate. So, reading any language is pretty intellectual.
You obviously hate to admit that intelligence is genetic.. and Jews are a very powerful proof of that.
Jews don't help to prove or disprove that. To whatever degree we can measure intelligence, we can measure it at the *individual* level; there's no need to measure it at the *group* level.
I agree with the individual approach for all practical purposes, but if I was a geneticist interested in identifying genes associated with intelligence, finding an ethnic group with higher intelligence would be very exciting - you need thousands of people to get a Genome Wide Association Study to work and confirm that a mutation correlated with higher intelligence *might* be having the effect you think it has. It at least gives you something to go on.
You could measure it at an individual level and then compare groups, but I doubt that would give you anything useful, there are too many different genes responsible for brain function to get anything from such a diverse group.
I'm personally ambivalent about these genes - it would be nice to one day know how our brains worked, but I'd prefer that we wait until we actually understand what these intelligence linked genes are before declaring that there are genetic differences in intelligence between groups.
Don't GWASs find polygenic scores that represent the postulated interaction of many genes?
A polygenic score is produced, because any complex effect is produced by many different genes, but that's based on the interaction of many individual variants that correlate with a trait, and those variants may be worth looking into further to see what they do. GWAS is generally used to look at disease, but in theory a similar technique could look at something else, like longevity or intelligence. I'd imagine finding a community with unusual longevity could be equally interesting for the purpose of research (although environmental factors will also play a big role).
I hesitate to bring it up because the GWAS technique is possibly worthless garbage - I mentioned it being used to look for longevity because that's interesting and was also retracted for being badly done.
The main problem with the claims of Jewish overachievement is that they are coming mainly from people who want to use the reputation of Jews as a rhetorical stepping stone in an argument that (usually northern) Europeans are a superior race. It's the same old shabby pseudo-scientific racism, still ignoring the implications of Mendel's findings, still imagining that evolution is a process of refining and competition among subspecies.
Without even getting to the problems with the case that arise with a little thinking and investigation - eg that insularity is suggested to have cultivated a sub-community with above-average intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews, despite the objective lack of insularity revealed in DNA studies and the implication of meiosis that insularity slows evolution - one might think that the proponents of scientific racism might at least have watched Idiocracy and had a doubt or two about the notion that high intelligence correlates with prolific reproduction.
And, by the same token, the success of black africans (some--e.g. Nigerian Americans--from the very same parts of Africa where African descendents of slaves trace ancestry to) is "very powerful proof" that intelligence is not genetic
That should be obvious anyway - humans are basically genetically identical because of population bottlenecks, but non-Africans are even more identical for the same reason. There are more ethnicities outside Africa because they're more geographically spread out, but that doesn't mean anything.
Also, even if you found a hereditary effect it's probably not caused by genetics because there are several more important steps in the causal chain.
>Also, even if you found a hereditary effect it's probably not caused by genetics because there are several more important steps in the causal chain.
Vague horseshit. Go read Plomin, Jensen, and an introductory genetics textbook.
At the same time, the fact that humans are more intelligent than chimpanzees (even if you attempt to raise a chimpanzee like a human) on most (not all) measures of intelligence does suggest that intelligence is in part genetic. There has to be something to explain why only humans have a civilisation.
You obviously meant to assert that "intelligence variation between human populations" is not genetic, but I just don't think that we know enough to confidently say that. It would be very unusual if there was no genetic variation in human intelligence, or if it was totally evenly distributed across all human populations, that's just not how genetic variation works.
But when I say we don't know, I actually mean that - maybe it'll turn out that Africans, on average, have more intelligence correlated genes, and that environmental factors and (more recently) colonial exploitation just have a much stronger effect on metrics like Nobel-Prize winning and success on IQ tests.
If we ever want to find out how much of intelligence is genetic, we'll first have to create a much fairer and more equitable society.
If you were a geneticist, you'd think differently about the relationship between ethnic groups and genetic lineages. The reason all complex life forms replicate with meiosis is that meiosis speeds sharing of novel beneficial mutations horizontally across the broad population this speeding evolution. Beneficial differences are far more likely to be shared than neutral ones, so these rapidly spread out from original ethnic groups: e.g. the moat common lactose tolerance genes were confined to neolithic south Russian steppe pastoralists c. 8000 years ago and now are all over northern and central Europe and spread as far as India and present among about a quarter of Ashkenazi.
No geneticist thinks evolution ever ends, but 500 or so generations since the Mesolithic is not much evolution, and the evidence points to other factors entirely aside from intelligence explaining notable reproductive successes of particuar groups - eg gracility in the neolithic, later reversing to robustness in both Europe and Africa, and presences vs absence of disease resistance as a huge factor. If civilized living breeds IQ genes then Iraq to Egypt should be the world's concentration of genius, Ashkenazi should be a step down and we northern Europeans should be way behind. In short there's a huge gap between what the science says about how evolution works and the illogical ill informed amateur conjectures put forward in an attempt to claim without evidence that genes explain test score variations among self reported ethnicity or race.
I definitely don't think genetics is the best explanation for most between-group variation in intelligence, environment is a much bigger factor. However, as environmental variation decreases (assuming society becomes more equal - this could go the other way!), the role of genetics will increase (that's how heritability works). I'm personally in favour of just admitting that we don't understand this topic well enough to rule one way or another, and I think it's just as unscientific to declare that all variation is environmental as it is to declare that it's all genetic.
Counterpoint to your final paragraph - you're assuming there's a strong selection pressure in favour of higher intelligence. I'm honestly sceptical that being of above average intelligence (in the way that IQ tests measure) gives you much of a selective advantage in evolutionary terms, especially in the past. Not saying being smart isn't useful, but just off the top of my head, I suspect resistance to disease was historically much more important! So for this reason, I'd expect most of the variation in intelligence to be random, which doesn't mean evenly distributed across all human populations.
Well here you sound reasonable. I'm sure intelligence variations are partly genetic though mind that "heritable" seems a vaguer term possibly encompassing parenting. I also leery of the suggestion that intelligence is unevenly distributed as there's really no evidence for that. Simple test scores are not really evidence and self reported ethnicity and especially race tells little of genetic proximity (there is more genetic variation among sub Saharan Africans than among the rest of the world). My point was of course against assuming a link between intelligence and reproductive success.
>I just don't think that we know enough to confidently say that.
This is incorrect, we know enough to confidently say that 100% of group IQ differences in the US are genetic. If you don't know enough, read moar, but don't posture like you know about this stuff. See https://juliusbranson.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/an-examination-of-the-causes-behind-the-black-white-iq-gap/
>But when I say we don't know, I actually mean that - maybe it'll turn out that Africans, on average, have more intelligence correlated genes, and that environmental factors and (more recently) colonial exploitation just have a much stronger effect on metrics like Nobel-Prize winning and success on IQ tests.
g is just like height. That is the best model for intelligence. We've known this since Plato, all research confirms it, and everyone who says otherwise is a deceiver trying to trick you so they can control you and steal from you. Consequently, while g may feel brainal, while psychoanalysis may tickle your fee fees, reading books to your kids or sending them to school has no effect on their height, so it has no effect on their g. In practice, only malnourishment can stunt height and g. That's it. Therefore, we have an environmental gap in intelligence only where we have malnourished children.
To clarify - the main thing distinguishing the human mind from the minds of animals is its ability to create and transmit culture, so I'd expect genes related to "intelligence" to be about learning, inclination and personality, rather than just being inherently better at any specific task.
Unless the highly intelligent Nigerian leaders of the time sold their least capable countrymen to slave traders...
You're wrong, HBD people have been talking about the meme nigerians for decades. Your comment is symptomatic of a larger issue -- all people who spew evil lies like "intelligence is not genetic" these days have clearly never read a single study on the topic in their lives. It's clear that your understanding is totally formulated by TV and bad blog posts such as this one. You obviously have 0 understanding of behavioral genetics. What arguing can be done with people like you? None, you know nothing. Yet instead of being humble you spew your crap. Shut up and go read Plomin and Jensen.
"And, by the same token, the success of black africans (some--e.g. Nigerian Americans--from the very same parts of Africa where African descendents of slaves trace ancestry to) is "very powerful proof" that intelligence is not genetic"
The most qualified Nigerians have the highest chance of being able to move to the US. The most intelligent Nigerians have the highest chance of being the most qualified. Therefore it's not surprising that the average Nigerian-American is more intelligent than the average Nigerian, including for genetic reasons.
I don't think that selective immigration counters disparate impact/systemic racism in a particularly interesting way. If the disparate impact/systemic racism hypothesis was stated as "there is no way for one ethnic group to earn higher average incomes than another other than by constructing systems of advantage and oppression" then sure, the fact that it's also possible to end up with a group with high average incomes by only letting rich people from that group enter the country is an argument against. But it's an argument on a technicality, and has very little to say about group advantage and disadvantage among people who aren't recent immigrants. And absent any sort of cultural/genetic/endogenous group prestige explanation for the group's success, it would suggest that regression to the oppression-adjusted mean should happen pretty much immediately, regardless of cultural assimilation or intermarriage.
On the other hand, if it's possible for some distinctive cultural groups to be persistently higher-achieving on some domains than others, it suggests that even persistent inequality among non-immigrants might be due to stuff like social structure, cultural norms, values, etc. That would suggest that people who want to improve the quality of life in their communities might benefit from trying to encourage people to imitate practices of other cultural groups that they admire. And it suggests that there would be some benefit to having schools try to impose cultural norms onto students.
I think the better argument for why Jews are _not_ evidence that culture or genetic engineering can produce sustained success is selective exit from Judaism. For 2000 years, Judaism has imposed uniquely strong educational requirements on practitioners, and has exposed practitioners to oppression. This made Judaism costly for people who weren't great learners and who didn't expect to be in a literate profession or trade, but made Judaism valuable for people who were, since it connected them to a network of literate professionals. The result is that even though Jewish migration to the US wasn't highly selected (your own numbers suggest that Jews should be less selected than almost any other ethnic group), the Jewish population in Europe was disproportionately urban and professional due to who continued to be Jewish. The book "The Chosen Few" makes this argument really well. This is slightly different from selective "attribution" of Judaism, because it's an argument that people are really more likely to stay Jewish, regardless of their parent's ethnicity or religion, if they're professionals, educated, and/or literate. This could still have created a uniquely productive culture or selected for genetics connected to intelligence, but to know that we'll have to look at the educational achievements of people without an exit path--maybe third-generation Israelis.
I agree with you that selective immigration is a very important (and clear) explanation of high achievement among some Asian ethnicities. If we want to know why Chinese-American kids do better in school on average than do US-born kids, the simplest explanation is that their parents are more likely to be highly educated, even when their parents are working low-wage jobs. You don't need to conclude that Chinese-American kids are getting favorable treatment by institutions. My point is that while this is important for understanding recent immigrants, it really doesn't get to the heart of whether differences in socioeconomic status between groups of people can be generated and maintained by anything other than systemic or institutional racism.
To your point about regression to the mean taking a long time, I agree partially. I guess in my mind I want to distinguish between "Vanilla" selective immigration and something like "Selective Immigration Plus." In "Vanilla," we'd say that the kids of doctors do better than the kids of farmers, on average. Since Chinese immigrants are disproportionately doctors, their kids do better than average. Since it's still helpful to have doctor parents if they have to work as taxi drivers for regulatory reasons, second-gen Chinese Americans also have high rates of upward mobility. But if there aren't any sort of cultural/community affects of being in a doctor-heavy subculture, none of this would help Chinese-American kids whose parents are farmers. They'd be just as likely to earn a high income as Laotian-American kids whose parents are farmers. And the grandkids of Chinese Americans would do about as well as you'd expect them to do given their parents incomes and educations. The great-grandkids would do about as well as you'd expect given _their_ parents incomes and educations. In other words, regression to the mean would be about as fast or slow for immigrant groups (after the first generation) as it is for everybody else.
Under "Selective Immigration Plus," there might be some broader consequences of coming from an elite community, above and beyond the consequences of having elite parents. Maybe when you're sent to night classes to learn Chinese, you make friends whose parents are doctors, even if your parents are farmers. In a doctor-heavy social milieu, everyone learns to reward kids for studying, to think about college when kids are in elementary school, to save money, etc. On top of that, Chinese-American kids might have more people to ask about where to go to college, more friends to recommend them for high-earning jobs, and more friends and relatives who can loan them money to start a business. In this case, if those social influences are strong enough, we might see Chinese-American kids doing better than we'd expect based on their parents' incomes and educations for a long, long time.
And that would suggest that communities can maintain advantages over the long run without gaining control of legal and political institutions and rebuilding them to their own advantage.
This is a fascinating topic, and it's not going away whatever Noah or Scott say. But I think Noah needs to do more work on the generic side "4) Genetic superpowers" is a weird way to talk about genes. The gene hypothesis is that genes matter, not that some people have "superpowers". Noah is very concerned to talk about people who are heavily invested in genetic explanations. But perhaps we're just observing something and drawing a conclusion. I think Noah is heavily invested in non-genetic explanations - regardless of what they might be. You don't like this one? Here's another non-genetic explanation, the answers got to be somewhere else.
Selective immigration certainly has its effects, across all immigrant groups. Having said that, what if it were shown that the second and third generation Jewish Americans have above-average SAT scores? In a world in which life outcomes correlate well with SAT scores -- even *within* the Systemically And Systematically Privileged Groups That Perpetuate Oppression -- wouldn't it be quite interesting for society to further investigate why this is the case? (or at least a tiny bit more interesting than churning out the umpteenth Jewish conspiracy theory to "explain" the statistical difference in Jewish outcomes?)
The SAT results of the second and third generations strongly hint at some form of heritability being involved, given that they patently cannot be explained by selective immigration. Genetic heritability? Cultural heritability? I'm aware that the Standard Model in US academia considers the genetic heritability of intelligence to be conceptually impossible - and am thus aware of how much I'm discrediting my own intelligence by admitting I believe it to be possible - but whatever mode of heritability has whichever amount of influence, gaining further insights into the whole thing would be interesting and beneficial.
As you remarked, China is already vested in studying the cultural angle. Either they are wasting their time, or they aren't. What would you say?
"But note that in his post, Scott spends quite a bit of time arguing against the idea that selective immigration is responsible for Jewish achievement. Why?"
The point is to argue against disparate impact broadly - including with groups where selective immigration isn't an applicable explanation. Group outcomes can differ due to group differences beyond selective immigration.
Sure, but the fact of selective immigration is a lot more useful for this argument than hypotheses about Jews!
Not if you want to argue against disparate impact with black/white differences.
The highest expression of Jewish observance is immersion in Torah. In other words, literacy and scholarship are highly valorized in Jewish culture. Over many generations this surely has had a powerful effect on the Jewish people, including, one would think, genetic selection.
Regarding the Russian census, that would actually probably provide pretty good data. In the Soviet Union, you had a национальность, a "nationality" -- Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, &c. And interestingly, wherever you were born, if you were Jewish, you'd be put down as еврейский, "Jewish". This was a matter of legal status, so it's unlikely there would be any selection effects there.
Interesting that replying to a Scott Alexander article gets you so many creepy HBD apologists in your replies. I wonder what that's about.