Jordan Peterson is not above saying extraordinarily wacky things in his role as a YouTube celebrity. Ask about feminism, political correctness, Hitler, the Holocaust, Jungian archetypes, witches, enforced monogamy, birth control, involuntary celibates, red meat or lobsters and he’ll take you into territory both weird and disturbing.1 But on race, he treads more carefully, preferring to shake his head in despair, skirt around the edges, cherry-pick his answers and move on. Interviewed by the alt-right podcasting star Stefan Molyneux, Peterson said that ‘the IQ literature reveals that which no one would want to be the case.’2 In another YouTube interview, he sighs heavily and says: ‘This is something you can’t say anything about without immediately being killed so I am hesitant to broach the topic.’3
But Peterson can’t resist, so broach it he does, even if his answers are carefully calibrated. He begins with an extremist perspective on IQ, basically all-nature-no-nurture. He equates IQ with intelligence, and declares it to be biological, permanent and to carry profound practical consequences. It is also ‘irremediable’, meaning that cognitive training ‘does not produce an increment in actual IQ and general intelligence – doesn’t happen!’4 (He likes to end his sentences with shouty bits.) Peterson says the army ‘has experimented with IQ tests since 1919’ – actually, 1917 – ‘and in the last twenty years a law was passed that it was illegal to induct anyone into the armed forces that had an IQ of less than 83.’5 There is no such law, and the US military uses the Armed Forces Qualification aptitude test, not IQ tests. Peterson adds, with a look of sad resignation, that his sub-83 figure represents 10 per cent of the population and reflects the ‘cognitive stratification of society that was laid out in The Bell Curve in the 1990s’.6
I’ve included these little corrections to show that Peterson doesn’t always get his facts right. But it’s more than that: none of his outpourings on IQ give any hint of any awareness of the overwhelming evidence that contradicts his assertions; of how adoption into a middle-class home can substantially increase IQ; of how separated identical twins can have huge IQ gaps when brought up in backgrounds of different class; of how practising IQ tests, and even playing some computer games, can increase your IQ score considerably. Peterson ignores the ‘Flynn Effect’ of generational rises in IQ and how this affects different populations differently. One can only conclude that his reading on IQ is very limited and very dated.
Peterson has a way of sounding convincing to those, mostly young American white men, who seek conviction, certainty and intellectual self-confidence. There’s a fair amount of aggression in his delivery and he’s not beyond comical bravado. He once tweeted a reply to a critic: ‘You sanctimonious prick. If you were in my room at the moment, I’d slap you happily.’7 When he declaims, he uses emphatic hand movements and angry assertions, based on an absolute conviction that he’s right about everything, and an impatient dismissing of contrary ideas. This makes his talk of IQ appear authoritative to anyone who likes that kind of thing and has not delved into the subject.
Yet despite his self-righteous swagger, Peterson treads on tip-toes when extending his general points about IQ to ‘ethnic’ groups. He likes to start by drawing from his rich seam of sex-related analogy, telling his listeners the reason most engineers are men is because ‘men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people’; about 15 per cent more, he insists. I investigated this claim in my book on genes and gender;8 the evidence against it is persuasive but for Peterson, counter-arguments, such as the fact that a hundred years ago almost all doctors were men or that the proportion of female engineers is rising, are not worthy of consideration. His point is that greater male interest in things, on average, means that at the top end of the scale, where people are hyper-interested in things and become engineers, most will be men because you get ‘walloping differences at the tails and the tails are important because we draw exceptional people from the exceptions’.9
This opens the way for him to bring out the one ethnic example he feels safe to use, that of Ashkenazi (European) Jews. Whenever he’s asked about race and IQ, Peterson reaches for the Ashkenazim. The reason this argument is safe, and therefore used so often, is that Jews are widely believed to be smart, so asserting this is not likely to upset too many people; it’s not like saying that white people are smarter than black people. But its convenience for those who believe in race science is that it works well as a cat’s paw for a wider acceptance of innate racial differences in intelligence. Accept that Jews are innately smarter than the rest, and you’re accepting the founding principle of race science, and its inevitable corollary that other groups are innately less smart.
Peterson asks why Jews are so over-represented in ‘positions of competence’ and declares only two answers are feasible: a Jewish conspiracy (which he dismisses) or superior Jewish IQ. ‘Now it’s not like we have more geniuses than we know what to do with’, he says:
… and if Jews happen to be producing more of them, which they are by the way, then that’s a pretty good thing for the rest of us, so let’s not confuse competence with power and authority even though that’s a favourite trick of the radical leftists who always fail to make that distinction.10
He claims Ashkenazi Jews have a ‘15-point IQ advantage over the rest of the Caucasian population’ (most studies suggest a 7 or 8 per cent gap). This is ‘sufficient to account for their over-representation in positions of authority and influence and productivity’ because those at the top percentiles all come from the group with the small edge.11
In Peterson’s two-tone world, the only compensation for those ‘ethnic groups’ with lower IQs is that it doesn’t imply they aren’t nice people, because intelligence and human value aren’t the same thing:
You can be pretty damn horrific as a genius son-of-a-bitch. There doesn’t seem to be any relationship whatsoever between intelligence and virtue so if it does turn out that nature and the fates do not align with our egalitarian presuppositions, which is highly probable, we shouldn’t therefore make the mistake of assuming that if group A or person A is lower on one of these attributes than group B or person B, that is somehow reflective of their intrinsic value as human beings.
He leaves us to guess who group A and group B might be.
A final point on Peterson’s logic: even if we accept his group-based hereditarian premises and dismiss the case that Jewish learning cultures explain the IQ gap, the fact of scoring higher on IQ tests on average would not imply that those at the top would be Jewish. The 33 per cent greater genetic variability among sub-Saharan Africans could negate that; the group with more genetic variability could have the highest IQs even if its average was lower. Peterson does not seem to be aware of this genetic variability point, but more seriously, he seems unaware of any of the environmental arguments relating to the higher IQs of Ashkenazi Jews, the subject of the rest of this chapter.
Probing the roots of Jewish intellectual success, and asking why it persists, may be a worthwhile line of inquiry. The same could be said for inquiries into the intellectual success of Germans, Asians and others. But the answers won’t be found in genetics, IQ scores or brain measurement. To illustrate this point, it’s worth going back in time to see how Jews scored in the tests of earlier eras.
Jews didn’t do well in the nineteenth century when the skull-filling George Morton was at work on brain measurement (something still embraced by Richard Lynn). He claimed Jewish brains were smaller than Teuton and Anglo-Saxon brains, reflecting their intelligence levels. The same is true of early IQ tests, including those given to immigrants at Ellis Island, before the First World War. If we take those tests at face value and retain Henry Goddard’s faith that IQ measures innate intelligence, we might conclude that Jewish immigrants were dullards. Goddard tested thirty-five immigrants (via a Yiddish translator) in 1913 and found that 83 per cent were ‘morons’. Jews came second to last on his ‘feeble-minded’ scale, just above the Russians. The nation of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Stravinsky and Nabokov kept the people who produced Maimonides, Kafka, Einstein, Mahler and Roth off the bottom rung.12
Next came the First World War army tests. Charles Yerkes and Carl Brigham found that Jewish recruits scored low on IQ tests. Brigham explained that Jews were distinctly inferior to Nordics in terms of average innate intelligence but were also a more variable bunch. The fact that the Jewish average IQ was low didn’t mean there were no geniuses, although Brigham suspected people were rather too keen to recognise exceptional Jews. ‘The able Jew is popularly recognised not only because of his ability but because he is able and a Jew,’ Brigham suggested, before asserting: ‘Our figures … would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.’13
The conservative economist Thomas Sowell subjected The Bell Curve to a withering critique for underplaying the low IQ scores of Jews and other immigrants early in the twentieth century. ‘Strangely’, he wrote:
Herrnstein and Murray refer to ‘folklore’ that ‘Jews and other immigrant groups were thought to be below average in intelligence.’ It was neither folklore nor anything as subjective as thoughts. It was based on hard data, as hard as any data in The Bell Curve. These groups repeatedly tested below average on the mental tests of the World War l era, both in the army and in civilian life. For Jews, it is clear that later tests showed radically different results – during an era when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of American Jews.14
After the war, results did indeed change. A paper published in 1928, referring to American IQ studies, notes that ‘four of them find that Jews are not more intelligent than the non-Jewish population and four of them find that they are.’15 By the latter half of the twentieth century Jews were routinely scoring above average on IQ tests. Were they becoming genetically more intelligent? Or was something else involved? Perhaps the answer could be gleaned from studies of two generations of Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews, conducted in Israel in 1972. The first generation had a mean IQ of 92.8 but the second generation, more acclimatised to Israeli life, had a mean IQ of 101.3.16
Despite overwhelming evidence that tests of Jewish IQ in early-twentieth-century America and late-twentieth-century Israel showed lower than average IQ, the myth of perpetually high Jewish IQ persists. Steven Pinker said the Jewish IQ advantage was ‘long standing and has been around for as long as there have been IQ scores of Jewish populations’.17
Ashkenazi Jews are not the only American population group whose IQs rose more quickly than average. The IQ theorist Jim Flynn focused on Chinese Americans born in 1948. In their senior high school year (aged seventeen or eighteen) their non-verbal IQs showed a below-average score of 97. Yet they matched their white peers on high school grades and surpassed them thereafter. Similar figures emerge from university entrants. In 1966, American-born Chinese-American entrants to UC Berkeley had IQs averaging seven points below those of white Americans, yet their university grades matched their white contemporaries’. By 1980, when they were thirty-two years old, 55 per cent of the Chinese members of the class of ’66 were in managerial, professional or technical occupations, compared to 34 per cent of white members, and their average income was 20 per cent higher.18 Flynn said the reason lay in cultural differences relating to learning. Their parents surrounded them with more cognitively demanding environments than was typical for white American children, creating a passion for educational achievement. ‘If an Irish lad qualifies for an elite university and his fiancée wants him to stay at home, he may do so,’ Flynn noted. ‘A Chinese youth is likely to get a new fiancée.’19
The children of the Chinese-American class of ’66 grew up in wealthier environments, living through preschool years that were more cognitively demanding. The result was that their IQ rose faster than those of white Americans. Among the class of 1990, Chinese Americans had average IQs of 108.6 at the age of six and 103 at eighteen, three points above the white average.20 White American IQs were also rising, due to the ‘Flynn Effect’; but Asian IQs were rising more quickly. However, high achievement preceded high IQ, rather than the reverse. The fact that the adult IQ average of Chinese Americans is three points above that of white Americans is, says Flynn, ‘a good measure of the cognitive advantage conferred by their distinctive sub-culture’.21 And their economic presence in the most prestigious professions is magnified. Asian Americans comprise fewer than 6 per cent of the US population but made up 21 per cent of the numbers in American medical schools in 2017,22 three and a half times the percentage of twenty-five years earlier.23
There is an obvious logic: bring up each generation of a population in a more educationally stimulating environment, in which learning is highly valued, they are challenged intellectually, exposed to various forms of abstract logic from their early years and parents have the resources and time to focus on their children, and IQs will rise faster than those of a population in which these things are less valued. Yet, as we have seen, since 2000, a group of ardent hereditarians has come to the opposite conclusion regarding Ashkenazi Jews: their rise in IQ is entirely the result of genetics.
The notion of Jewish intellectual superiority tended to be kept in-house until recently, partly because claiming superior smarts might not go down so well outside but also because it might open Pandora’s box. My own father, who was Jewish, believed Jews were blessed with special smarts, citing favourite examples of intellectuals to prove his point, from his mother, who’d been the youngest-ever science graduate of the University of Cape Town, to his political heroes Benjamin Disraeli and Golda Meir. But he never entered this territory beyond the confines of the family. Apart from questions of manners, there’s the problem of where it might lead. If Jews evolved superior brain-power, what other traits evolved? And if one group is brighter, it follows that others would be dimmer.
After I left home, at seventeen, I thought some more about this question, and the counter-view made more sense. It was well put by one of my favourite Jewish intellectuals, the historian Tony Judt, in response to claims that Jews were more intelligent than others: ‘My own, statistically naive impression these days is that intelligence, ignorance and bigotry are distributed among Jews in proportions comparable to their presence in society as a whole.’24 Outside households such as mine, the question of the reasons behind the disproportionate intellectual success of Jews was left to lie, until Murray, Lynn, Pinker, Peterson and Henry Harpending got in on the act.
Lynn was first, noting the number of Ashkenazi Jews who had been awarded Nobel Prizes. ‘Jews must have had a high IQ to have achieved this astonishing over-representation,’ he said. The average American Jewish IQ was 7.5 points above the white average, he added, meaning there would be, relative to population, four times as many Jews with IQs over 130. This edge, he said, was mainly genetic in origin.25 In a later paper he wrote that Jewish high achievement was unrelated to ‘work ethic’; it was all down to IQ.26
However, he emphasised this was restricted to Ashkenazi Jews and did not apply to Sephardic (Spanish) or Mizrahi Jews. He said European and American Jews had IQs averaging 108 but the Israeli Ashkenazi average was 103, because of migration by non-Jews from the Soviet Union, while his estimate for Israeli Mizrahi Jews was 91. He pulled this together in his book The Chosen People,27 in which he argued that Mizrahi Jews were less intelligent than Ashkenazi Jews because of a differentiated gene pool, playing down the fact that the Mizrahi had lived for centuries in cultures with lower education levels, more authoritarian families and less exposure to cognitive stimulation and abstract logic. Lynn’s work on Jewish IQ remained on the intellectual fringes; on the rare occasions it received mainstream reviews, such as in the Times Higher Education Supplement, it was slated.28
Three anthropologists from the University of Utah, Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending, received a far rosier reception in 2005 when they published a paper, ‘Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence’ in the Journal of Biosocial Science (which once went by the name of the Eugenics Review). This was trumpeted in the New York Times, The Economist, New York magazine and National Geographic News and received a huge boost when Steven Pinker, the doyen of evolutionary psychology, endorsed it.
We first met Harpending and Cochran in Chapter 2, and their claims that genetic changes nudged a select group of Africans in the direction of Eurasia, where they continued evolving, with cultural innovation prompting fresh selection pressures. Those with favourable genes got moving and continued to evolve intellectually; those without stayed behind. They argued that these adaptations varied across populations, so that among Africans and Amerindians there were fewer genetic changes and among Australian Aboriginals, none.29
Harpending is described by the geneticist David Reich as having ‘a track record of speculating without evidence on the causes of behavioural differences among populations’.30 In 2009, Harpending gave a talk on ‘Preserving Western Civilization’ in which he claimed that people with sub-Saharan ancestry lacked the inclination for hard work. ‘I’ve never seen anyone with a hobby in Africa,’ he said, explaining this was because Africans had not gone through the kind of natural selection for hard work that some Eurasians had.31 He also rallied to the defence of the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, from the London School of Economics, who got into trouble for writing that black women were innately ugly.32
The Utah threesome start with Lynn’s point that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQs. In common with Lynn, they claim no similar elevation of intelligence among Jews in classical times, nor among today’s Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. They say higher Ashkenazi IQ kicked in 1,200 years ago and that they now have average IQs of ‘one standard deviation’ (fifteen points) above the north-western European average (presumably the source of Peterson’s figure).33 Additional evidence that this is innate comes from the number who have received Nobel Prizes, Turing awards and won the world chess championships, although we’re told their visuo-spatial abilities are lower than average.34 The picture is of a brainy, geeky people, which would be news to the scores of outstanding Jewish professional boxers who won world titles in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
After citing a ‘who’s who’ of race-based IQ theorists (Lynn, Jensen, Herrnstein, Gottfredson, Eysenck, Murray), they insist IQ is ‘a biological rather than a social variable’, proved, they say, by twin studies. Just as mental illness is a ‘biological phenomenon’, so is IQ. They claim a ‘neurobiological’ basis, related to brain volume and density and ‘brain glucose utilisation rate’.35 Children’s IQs may be influenced by class or home environment but these factors ‘are essentially gone in adulthood’.36 They explain the ‘Flynn Effect’ by saying that it may reflect ‘real improvements in biological well-being’ such as improved nutrition, vaccination and antibiotics, and that it also reflects greater familiarity with testing.37
Cochran and his colleagues admit little is known about early Ashkenazim but speculate that ‘unusual selective pressures’ favoured intelligence.38 They explain that the Jewish requirement for literacy gave them the entrée into more cognitively demanding work, such as money lenders, estate managers, merchants and tax farmers.39 The high-IQ rich had more surviving children, raising IQ over the generations. Low-IQ Jews would be less likely to find spouses and would drift out of the community. In five hundred years, they guess, IQ would increase by sixteen points. In contrast, they say, Jews of the Islamic world tended to have ‘dirty’ jobs that were not cognitively demanding, meaning there was no IQ increase.
This theory is based on the idea that the Ashkenazim was an isolated population with ‘very low inward gene flow’ because during the period when they became super-bright (800 to 1650 CE) marriage outside the faith was discouraged.40 A higher gene flow would ‘limit the natural increase in locally favourable mutations’41 but the flow from non-Jewish populations averaged ‘less than 0.5 per cent per generation’.42 However, this imposed costs, reducing genetic fitness for ‘more typical environments’ such as farming (tell that to the kibbutzniks). More importantly, it was a factor in the introduction of Ashkenazi genetic diseases, such as Tay–Sachs, Gaucher’s and Niemann-Pick, a range of conditions known as DNA repair diseases, and torsion dystonia, congenital hyperplasia, and others.43
There’s a twist here, and the authors devote half their paper to it. They claim most of these diseases took root 1,200 to 1,300 years ago when the Ashkenazim were making their mark in the niche of finance, and that the pattern of these diseases suggests ‘selective forces at work’, relating to intelligence.44 In other words, Ashkenazi diseases were a by-product of selection for IQ. They say some of these mutations ‘look like IQ boosters’45 and confidently predict that those carrying genes for Gaucher’s, Tay–Sachs and Niemann-Pick ‘will have higher IQ than control groups, probably in the order of five points’46. They acknowledge they lack direct evidence but point to indirect evidence from Gaucher’s patients in brainy professions and high IQ scores among some of those suffering from other Ashkenazi diseases. In addition to the ‘unusual selective pressures’ of their brainy, baby-boosting careers, there’s an added dimension: intelligence genes are responsible for horrible diseases. It’s a bit like sub-Saharan Africans and malaria: one copy of the recessive allele and people are protected against malaria; two copies and they have sickle cell anaemia. For European Jews, inherit two copies of a recessive allele and they end up with one of the Ashkenazi diseases; one copy, and they have superior intelligence. This, they say, had an impact on the average intelligence of the entire Ashkenazi population.
After the first excited wave of media attention, the paper received critical comment from scientists working in this area. Harry Ostrer, who led New York University’s human-genetics programme, said: ‘It’s bad science – not because it’s provocative but because it’s bad genetics and bad epidemiology.’47 More recently, Reich has described Harpending’s statements as ‘racist’ because of the way they make speculative jumps to race-based conclusions ‘with no scientific evidence’.48
Earlier in this book I dealt with their claims about the genetic component of IQ suggested by adoption studies but a key pillar of their argument relates to a different fallacy, that of Ashkenazi genetic isolation. Recent studies have shown that European Jews are less genetically discrete than once assumed. This applies particularly to mitochondrial DNA, which descends through the maternal line. Genetic analysis by nineteen scientists, published in 2013, found that European women, not women from the Middle East, were the main female founders of the Ashkenazi population.49 The four main sources of mitochondrial DNA all emerged from Europe: 81 per cent was European, 8 per cent from the Levant, 1 per cent from further east in Asia and 10 per cent was ambiguous.50 The prime source was in Italy, via the Roman Jewish community, which included converts made through mass conversions to Judaism in the Empire, where an estimated six million citizens practised the religion, but the 2013 study also indicates later conversions in Western and Central Europe. The Ashkenazim ‘carry a substantial fraction of maternal lineages from their “host” communities’.51
Most genetic studies suggest the male lineage is mainly Middle Eastern. Some studies put the European contribution at as little as one-eighth and others up to 50 per cent.52 This is consistent with what we know of proselytising in the days when Judaism was a patrilineal religion. At least until the time of the historian Josephus, in the first century CE, Judaism was passed on by the father. Christianity and Islam proved to be more aggressive proselytisers, after which Judaism became a matrilineal religion; a surer way of ensuring Jewish identity – you can always be sure of the mother; never the father. But even after this there were periodic conversions, including of the royalty and aristocracy of the Khazars (a Turkic people from the Caucasus) from the eighth to the eleventh centuries. The 2013 DNA study found no evidence of Khazar DNA among modern Ashkenazim, a view disputed by the Israeli geneticist Eran Elhaik, who said mass conversion of the Khazars was the only way to explain the growth of the Ashkenazim from 25,000 in the Middle Ages to more than 8.5 million by the start of the twentieth century. He criticised the study for not analysing the DNA of Jews from the Caucasus and compared the genetic signatures found in Jewish populations using modern Armenians and Georgians as stand-ins for the Khazarians, finding that they were genetically related. Elhaik’s results have also been disputed, including by critics who note that Armenians originated in the Middle East, but were welcomed by the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, who argued that the Ashkenazim descended mainly from converts and that the descendants of the original Jews included the current Palestinians.53 Either way, what is clear is that the Ashkenazim were not a genetically isolated population.
Cochran, Hardy and Harpending can’t avoid acknowledging that IQ scores are rising but they bypass the fact that average IQs are rising at different rates in different populations and ignore the reasons Flynn offers for this. Instead, they say it’s of no relevance, because it applies to all groups, and they venture no further than nutrition, antibiotics and familiarity with testing as the reasons. Flynn, in contrast, shows that the prime reason for the rise is exposure to a scientific way of viewing the world. This varies hugely from one population to the next, which is why IQs are rising faster in, for example, Kenya than in Western Europe.
What of the view that money-lending prompted selection for higher intelligence? It might be true that the rich had more surviving children, but they didn’t form enough of the population to make much difference. One study of Jews in Breslau, Poland in the fourteenth century estimated the wealthy at 7 per cent of the population.54 More significantly, were the rich really more intelligent? Cochran and his colleagues paint a picture of a meritocracy but a critique by Brian Ferguson, professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, Newark, shows that Ashkenazi society was highly stratified and wealth was inherited.55 In each community, specific families dominated for centuries. Class stratification grew over time, as rich married rich.
This stratification also applied to money-lending; a few families did most of the lending and the big lenders were tax collectors, merchants and clergy, who also controlled financial courts, set tax rates, negotiated with political authorities, decided who should live where and made civic appointments.56 It was not smart genes that made you a big money lender or trader but, rather, the luck of birth. If you didn’t have capital, you wouldn’t be able to lend. Nor did money-lending require braininess. Loan contracts from the Middle Ages are simple documents that anyone with a background in the business could have drawn up. And money-lending wasn’t a constant in Ashkenazi history; it rose and fell at different times in different parts of Europe. There also were other forms of trade and management. Jews were butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, craftsmen and peddlers, while the entrepreneurs employed bookkeepers, clerks and debt-collectors. No doubt some were smarter than their better-heeled bosses. The argument that Ashkenazi society fast-tracked high-IQ people, who then had more children, doesn’t hold.
Finally, there’s the claim about Ashkenazi diseases as a by-product of selection for intelligence. The Utah authors say they arose through natural selection, but geneticists agree that they do not exhibit the mutation patterns, allele frequencies and geographic distribution of naturally selected genetic diseases. Instead, they spread through genetic drift.57 As Reich shows, the authors’ entire case is contradicted by evidence that these diseases emerged through ‘random bad luck – the fact that during the medieval population bottleneck that affected Ashkenazi Jews, the small number of individuals who had many descendants happened to carry these mutations’.58 The history of the diseases is also consistent with the bottleneck theory; when the Ashkenazi moved around Europe, small groups with commercial assets moved first. Only later did communities develop and persecution, plague and famine reduce particular Ashkenazi populations to isolated islands of settlement. In the period considered by Cochran and his colleagues, populations rose and fell. When they fell to a few hundred, this led to higher rates of intermarriage and therefore a higher chance of particular mutations taking root in the confined gene pool, and subsequently spreading.
But if, for argument’s sake, we accept these diseases took root through natural selection, what of their view that this involved selection for higher IQ by reducing inhibitions on neural growth, thus allowing more neural connections and boosting IQ? Reviewing the literature, Ferguson says this suggestion is ‘predicated on a simplistic view of neurological development’, that most inherited conditions highlighted by the authors do not have ‘even a suggested pathway to higher intelligence’ and their claimed connection to higher IQ is ‘very inconsistent with current research on the genetics of IQ’59; in some cases it has been decisively discredited60 while in others there is no indication of higher IQ.61 The Utah authors confidently predicted that future tests of those carrying the best-known Ashkenazi disease, Tay–Sachs, would show they had enhanced IQs but as Ferguson puts it, this is ‘the dog that did not bark’. He adds that this dog’s non-bark ‘is particularly loud’.62 In the 130 years since Tay–Sachs was first researched, no studies have shown a connection with intelligence.
In fact, only a small minority of Ashkenazim carry the alleles for which the authors made IQ-related claims: Gaucher’s 1:15, CAH 1:27, Tay–Sachs 1:30; Nieman-Pick 1:90; idiopathic torsion dystonia between 1:2,000 and 1:6,000. None are Ashkenazi-specific diseases: Tay–Sachs is common among Cajuns and French Canadians, non-classical adrenal hyperplasia among Italians and Hispanics, Gaucher’s one in a hundred of the non-Ashkenazi population. Yet there are no claims about higher intelligence for any of these other groups.
We can see that none of authors’ contentions about Ashkenazi IQ survive inspection. Not their genetic diseases hypothesis, not their money-lender IQs idea, not their isolation idea and not their IQ theory. But this has not stopped hereditarians reacting as if the case had been proved beyond doubt. Andrew Sullivan, for one, endorsed this view, noting that the IQ differential between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews was ‘also striking in the data’.63
The Times once dubbed Pinker the ‘stud muffin of science’. Half of that description resonates (actually, he’s not really a scientist). He’s sixty-five but has a more youthful appeal. The sparkle in his blue eyes and his delight in ideas makes for an attractive combination. The shoulder-length curls hint at vanity but also suggest a residue of the sixties, when he grew up in a Jewish-Canadian family in Montreal. Most of the words spouted by this Harvard psychology professor fit the image. Even if, like me, you think his Swiss army knife view of the mind, his Dawkins-prompted view of human nature and his Chomsky-inspired take on language acquisition is all hocus pocus, it comes across as hocus pocus in its most acceptable form. For one thing, he writes with panache.
Despite the fervour of his attacks on what he terms radical feminism and Marxism (often neither), he’s by no means a conventional figure of the right. It is only in one area that the thrice-married Pinker is, well, rather more glinty-eyed than we might expect: women. Let’s just say he goes a good deal further than vive la différence. Like Jordan Peterson, he’s a virulent proponent of a faux-scientific version of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and his fervour can take him over the edge. He once joked that the ‘technical term’ for those stressing nurture rather than nature on gender differences was ‘childless’. Then again, when the childless Steven Pinker goes over the edge, he usually does so in a way that sounds so mensch-like that the barbs are easy to dismiss as mere over-exuberance.
One thing to admire is his willingness to debate with scientists. He has locked horns with Stephen Jay Gould64 and Steven Rose65 and even the most blinkered Pinker fan would be hard-pressed to claim he came out on top. But his most interesting debate was with Elizabeth Spelke, a cognitive psychologist from Harvard. He argued men were the more variable sex – ‘more prodigies, more idiots’ – and had evolved different intellectual abilities.66 Piece by piece, Spelke showed that what he had assumed was innate was anything but. She drew an analogy between what Pinker was saying about women and what was once said about race. ‘Let’s consider who the nineteenth-century mathematicians and scientists were’, she began:
They were overwhelmingly male, just as they are today, but also overwhelmingly European, not Asian. You won’t see a Chinese face or an Indian face in nineteenth-century science. It would have been tempting to apply this same pattern of statistical reasoning and say there must be something about European genes that give rise to greater mathematical talent than Asian genes do. If we go back still further and play this debate in the Renaissance, I think we would be tempted to conclude that Catholic genes make for better science than Jewish genes, because all those Renaissance scientists were Catholic. If you look at those cases, you see what’s wrong with this argument.
Spelke concluded in a way that should have made the stud muffin of psychology take note. ‘What’s wrong with the argument’, she said:
… is not that biology is irrelevant. If Galileo had been switched at birth with some baby from the Pisan ghetto, the baby raised by Galileo’s parents would not likely have ended up teaching us that the language of physics is mathematics. I think that Galileo’s genes had something to do with his achievement but so did Galileo’s cultural and social environment: his nurturing. Genius requires huge amounts of both. If, in that baby switch, Galileo had found himself growing up in the Pisan ghetto, I bet he wouldn’t have ended up being the example in this discussion today either. So yes, there are reasons for this statistical bias. But I think we want to step back and ask, why is it that almost all Nobel Prize winners are men today? The answer to that question may be the same reason why all the great scientists in Florence were Christian.67
Pinker ignored these wise words, coming out in measured support of the Ashkenazi IQ thesis in a speech entitled ‘Jews, Genes and Intelligence’, given at an event hosted by the Institute for Jewish Research in New York.68 One audience member described it:
[T]o my ear what Pinker presented was a spirited endorsement of the Cochran-Hardy-Harpending paper … Pinker emphasized the reasonableness of the authors’ hypotheses, the generally better quality of the genetic evidence over the environmental, the non-rational basis of much of the opposition and the paper’s strong foundation in the current state of knowledge.69
A Seed magazine report noted: ‘People will hear what they want to hear. And many in attendance were there to hear that Jews are naturally smarter than everyone else.’70 Pinker followed this with a piece in the New Republic, repeating the points he’d made in his speech and describing the paper as ‘thorough and well-argued’.71
After spelling out his Jewish credentials, Pinker parrots the Utah authors’ points on Jewish Nobel Prize winners and on IQ, agreeing it is ‘highly heritable’ and measures general intelligence. He concedes Flynn’s point that differences between groups are not necessarily genetic (in fact, Flynn says they are probably not genetic) but suggests Cochran, Hardy and Harpending were right that genes are involved. ‘The Ashkenazi advantage has been found in many decades, countries and levels of wealth,’ he writes, ignoring evidence of early-twentieth-century low IQ scores among Ashkenazim, ‘and the IQ literature shows no well-understood environmental factors capable of producing an advantage of that,’ he adds, echoing the authors’ position that families ‘have no lasting effect on intelligence’.72
Pinker endorses their view that Ashkenazim tended to ‘marry their own’, allowing intelligence-related genes to proliferate. He also backs the idea that Ashkenazim were concentrated in occupations requiring high intelligence, which led to greater economic success, and richer Jews who had more surviving children. On Ashkenazi diseases, he admits the evidence is ‘iffy’ but notes that ‘a gene might raise a child’s IQ but also predispose him to a genetic disease.’ He declares that the Ashkenazi paper ‘meets the standards of a good scientific theory’ but gives himself a get out of gaol card by acknowledging it ‘could turn out to be mistaken’.73 Towards the end of the paper, Pinker takes his nascent race science beyond the Ashkenazim by claiming that ‘personality traits are measurable, heritable within a group and slightly different, on average, between groups,’ noting that we will soon develop ‘the power to uncover genetic and evolutionary roots of group differences in psychological traits’.74
Pinker added to this the following year, when he formulated Edge’s Annual Question: ‘What is your dangerous idea … dangerous not because it is assumed to be false but because it might be true?’ His own answer was: ‘Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments.’ In his essay on this topic, he cited the Utah paper and one on race differences written by Charles Murray, before complaining that ‘[l]arge swathes of the intellectual landscape have been re-engineered to try to rule these hypotheses out a priori.’75 He invents a straw man version of those who think differently: ‘[P]rogress in neuroscience and genomics has made … shibboleths (such as the non-existence of intelligence and the non-existence of race) untenable.’76 I’m not aware of anyone who says intelligence doesn’t exist but it’s hardly surprising that the all-nature, no-nurture Pinker holds a more fixed idea about it. However, his statement also suggests an expansive idea of race that includes innate differences in intelligence and personality, which seems out of sync with his earlier emphasis, set out in his book The Blank Slate. ‘My own view, incidentally’, he said there, ‘is that in the case of the most discussed racial difference – the black-white IQ gap in the US – the current evidence does not call for a genetic explanation.’77
Pinker has subsequently dug in on his view that different populations might have different innate intellectual abilities, reiterating his Ashkenazi idea and tweeting in favour of other race science promoters such as Murray78 and Linda Gottfredson79 who had faced ‘no platform’ pressure. Gottfredson has a thirty-year history of race science, including being the author of the founding document of the modern version of this calling.80 Pinker described her as an ‘expert on … intelligence’, referencing a story on the right-wing website Quillette to back her.81
Charles Murray also mounted the Jewish IQ bandwagon. Writing in the right-wing American magazine Commentary, he extolled Jewish achievement in the arts and sciences, saying its source was superior intelligence, illustrated by the fact that Jews have exceptional verbal and reasoning skills, with a mean IQ of 110.82 He claims IQ is primarily biological, and would therefore not be boosted by an educationally rich Jewish home life. Instead, he considers two reasons why Jews evolved for higher IQ: persecution (only the smartest survived) and marrying for brains (‘scholars and their children were socially desirable spouses’). He plumps for the latter, combining it with the Utah authors’ argument about occupational selection, economic success and reproductive success being closely bound.83
However, he also deviates, arguing that high Jewish intelligence is not confined to Ashkenazim, pointing to examples of exceptional Jewish achievement in Spain and the Muslim world.84 He claims that selection for high IQ happened far earlier than 800 CE, pointing to the introduction of compulsory education in 64 CE, which encouraged a move away from farming and into occupations involving commercial transactions, prompting selection for these IQ-rich activities. Warming to this theme, he says the requirement of being able to read the Torah had evolutionary implications, because ‘to be a good Jew meant that a man had to be smart’. Those who struggled moved away from the religion, with many farmers abandoning Judaism, leaving the brighter traders and money men; a process exacerbated by persecution that reduced the world Jewish population by two-thirds.85
Murray also proposes an alternative thesis, going back to 586 BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonians captured soldiers, craftsmen and artisans and left the rest behind. By the time the elite returned, more than a century later, many of that rump would have been absorbed into other religions. The smart exiles therefore formed the bulk of the reconstituted Jewish community, he speculates. Or we could go even further back: throughout Jewish history fathers taught their children the complicated Jewish law, which required exceptional verbal skills. The less intelligent would have left Judaism because of their failure to grasp it. Murray ends by asking why all this learning kicked off; why only one tribe at the time of Moses evolved elevated intelligence. The answer he proposes, acknowledging it is ‘uniquely parsimonious and happily irrefutable’, is: ‘The Jews are God’s chosen people.’86
None of this survives scrutiny. The information that underpins Murray’s Babylonian thesis is drawn solely from the Old Testament. This is not a book on Biblical history but when Murray treats the Bible as an historical document, it’s hard to take him seriously. Yet even if, despite writing hundreds of years after the event, the authors of Kings and Ezra reflected a mythologised version of history rather than pure myth, their words can only aid a genetic version of racial intelligence if you start from that position. Who is to say that the captured soldiers, craftsmen and artisans were innately smarter than the poor, the women and the children left behind? Murray is transporting the views he promoted in The Bell Curve (the poor are poor because they’re stupid) 2,600 years back, to a time when social class was set by birth.
Other items of speculation are nothing but guesswork. Murray contradicts himself, swearing by innate IQ but then rejecting what it’s telling him. If you come from Murray’s position, you have to accept that superior intelligence applies only to Ashkenazi Jews and that Oriental Jews are below average. If you live by IQ faith, you die by it too. But Murray doesn’t like this conclusion, so he ignores its implications and presses on with his ‘all Jews are smart’ thesis, taking it all the way back to the mythical Moses. If that is true, then there is something wrong with IQ testing. But I guess we knew that anyway.
Perhaps the most objectionable version of this faux-science came from Nicholas Wade, whose book A Troublesome Inheritance87 ascribes just about every racial stereotype to genetics. In 2018, I wrote a long feature in the Guardian on the revival of scientific racism, in which I noted that Wade’s book repeated three race-science shibboleths: that the notion of ‘race’ corresponds to profound biological differences among humans, that human brains evolved differently from race to race and that this is supported by different racial averages in IQ scores.88 Wade objected to this last point, saying he never took sides in the race and IQ debate. Yet that’s precisely what he argues when discussing Jews, noting that higher than average IQ ‘helps explain why the Jewish population, despite its small size, has produced so many Nobel Prize winners and others of intellectual distinction’.89
Like the Utah anthropologists whose paper he embraces, Wade understates the genetic flow into the Ashkenazi population, while echoing Cochran, Hardy and Harpending’s money-lending idea and applauding their Jewish diseases thesis without reservation. His only hesitation is that, like Murray, he thinks Jewish braininess is not restricted to the Ashkenazim. His additional explanation relates to the decline of the Jewish population from 5.5 million in 65 CE to 1.2 million in 650 CE, mainly as a result of conversion to Christianity by those who ‘lacked the ability or commitment to become literate’; a similar argument to Murray’s.
These, and subsequent adaptations, meant the Jewish population includes ‘proportionately more individuals of higher cognitive capacity than most others’.90 He draws direct analogies between the biological adaptations of the Tibetans for living at high altitude and of the ‘Eskimos’ for living in the Arctic, and Jewish evolution for business and braininess. As he puts it: ‘The adaptation of Jews to capitalism is another such evolutionary process.’91 Which invites the question: where have we heard that one before?
What factors in Ashkenazi culture might have boosted IQ if we dispute the genetics case? Jordan Peterson can’t think of any. Nor can Steven Pinker, who concedes that an environmental explanation ‘can’t be ruled out’ but then dismisses the obvious candidates such as home environment and the impact of enhanced educational expectations: ‘[I]f wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Mere expectations cannot produce a brilliant mind.’92 Let’s help Professors Pinker and Peterson along.
The place to start is to acknowledge the extraordinary record of Jews in science, maths, literature, psychology and politics and then to ask why Jews have had such consistent intellectual success – and not just Ashkenazim: the great economist David Ricardo and my father’s Victorian hero, Benjamin Disraeli, were Sephardic Jews, as were Maimonides, Spinoza and Bohr. One reason today’s Ashkenazim have higher than average IQs is that they tend to be wealthier. Most belong to the middle classes, which wasn’t the case when soldiers were tested in the First World War. Unless, like Murray, you believe wealth is caused by higher IQ, you must accept it as a well-established independent variable that boosts test results. But this doesn’t explain the Jewish intellectual record over centuries and across continents.
We know the Talmudic educational tradition, motivated by the need to learn scripture, started before Christianity, and long before the emergence of the Ashkenazim. The equivalent of what we’d call primary education for boys was close to universal by the first century CE, and many received something like secondary education. This began when most Jews were farmers, not money-lenders, so there was no financial advantage. Centuries later, when urban centres developed, literate and numerate Jews moved into commerce and out of farming and Talmudic academies provided a leg-up for boys. Those who made it were higher status but even Cochran and his colleagues acknowledge that the ‘marry a rabbi’ argument for Jewish IQ doesn’t wash; there were too few rabbis to have a genetic impact. However, the cultural impact was immense, helping build admiration for intellectual achievement and for ideas. Residues of the Talmudic tradition have rippled through Jewish communities over the centuries, influencing even poorer homes. To repeat the question: why are there so many smart Jews? Ferguson’s answer is that many Jews ‘inherit traditions that foster scholarship and abstract thought to an extent that few other cultures can match’.93
To return to my own family, my Ashkenazi Jewish father grew up in a home in which learning was valued and debating was an everyday affair. He was taught by his mother, a science graduate, to be proud of his brain, to embrace ideas, to be intellectually ambitious and to love a good argument, and he passed this on to his children. My mother, who came from Danish and British stock, was not brought up in an intellectually driven family and was less inclined to read, argue and theorise. She wanted to go to university, but her parents said this was for boys. They paid for her sports-mad brother to study abroad, while she attended a training college for nursery teachers. In some ways my mother was sharper and more perceptive than my father but I doubt she’d have done as well in an IQ test. My experience illustrates that a cultural tradition favouring a love of learning, of sharing and debating ideas, and placing a value on intellectual achievement, is more likely to produce intellectuals than one in which books, learning and debating are less valued. Contrary to what Pinker, Peterson, Murray and the rest claim, early learning, exposure to abstract logic and intellectual confidence make a significant difference in IQ tests.
Spend any time patrolling alt-right websites and social media feeds and it won’t take long to strike a thick vein of anti-Semitism running alongside the wider racism. How does this fit with claims that Ashkenazi Jews, or all Jews, have innately superior intelligence? At first blush their views seem to be pro-Semitic. Are they?
Anti-Semitism seldom pictures Jews as stupid. Instead, they are portrayed as clever, cowardly, manipulative, cabalistic plotters. Today’s alt-right conspiracy theories revive the ancient trope of a rich Jewish bogeyman pulling the strings and providing the funds (the currently favoured personification is George Soros). The idea of Jews having high IQs hardly contradicts this. Peterson’s point that ‘you can be pretty damn horrific as a genius son-of-a-bitch’ is apposite. Wade went further, claiming that Jews were naturally selected for capitalism, while the Utah authors said that the Jewish brain evolved to deal with money.
The University of Virginia psychology professor Eric Turkheimer extends this logic to demonstrate the problems in leaping to unsupported conclusions, such as that racial IQ gaps have a genetic base. He illustrates the implications with a different assertion: that Jews are more materialistic; not very far from the idea that Jews are adapted to capitalism. Turkheimer, who’s Jewish, suggests it’s not unreasonable to believe that materialism may be partly heritable, that Jews differ ancestrally from non-Jews and that we may even possibly find different average levels of materialism. ‘If you were persuaded … that the black-white IQ gap is partially genetic but uncomfortable with the idea that the same kind of thinking might apply to the personality traits of Jews, I have one question: Why?’ The reason most people don’t believe this anti-Semitic trope, he says, is because ‘the horrific recent history of false hypotheses about innate Jewish behaviour helps us see how scientifically empty and morally bankrupt such ideas really are.’94
This returns us to Pinker, who gave a thumbs up to the Utah authors’ Ashkenazi intelligence thesis and yet worried aloud whether this really was good for Jews, expressing his concern that ‘someday someone could test whether there was selection for personality traits that are conducive to success in money-lending and mercantilism’ and also how such findings ‘would be interpreted in, say, Cairo, Tehran and Kuala Lumpur’.95
If we follow Pinker and Turkheimer’s logic, the ‘smart Jews’ idea is not only available as a cat’s paw for race science more generally; it also lends itself to undisguised forms of anti-Semitism.