jews intelligence

One basic question to be answered in assessing a genetic explanation of unusual intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews is whether today's Ashkenazi Jews really do, as a group, have unusual intelligence. Assessing intelligence, especially of ethnic groups, is notoriously difficult and subject to racist and political biases. One observational basis for inferring that Ashkenazi Jews have high intelligence is their prevalance in intellectually demanding fields. From 1901–2010, 21.5% of Nobel prize winners were Jewish, while Jews make up a much smaller fraction of the population of the countries represented. For example, 36% of Nobel prize winners from the United States have been Jewish, while Jews make up 2.1% of the U.S. population.[7] G. Cochran, J. Hardy and H. Harpending additionally cite the disproportionately high percentage of Ashkenazi Chess Grandmasters and Fields Medalists in mathematics, as well as winners of the Turing Award in computer science.[1] However, such statistics do not rule out factors other than intelligence, such as institutional biases and social networks. A more direct approach is to measure intelligence with psychometric tests (although the validity of such tests as a measure of intelligence has often been disputed). Different studies have found different results, but most have found above-average verbal and mathematical intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews, along with below-average spatial intelligence.[8][9][10] Some studies have found IQ scores amongst Ashkenazi Jews to be a fifth to one full standard deviation above average in mathematical and verbal tests. However, most studies of Jewish intelligence have used samples which were either poor representations of the whole population or were too small to give reliable results, and some studies from the beginning of the 20th century had found Ashkenazi groups to have below-average intelligence.[10] In reference to the latter, G. Cochran, J. Hardy and H. Harpending argue that it is "a widely cited misrepresentation by Leon Kamin (Kamin, 1974) of a paper by Henry Goddard (Goddard, 1917). Goddard gave IQ tests to people suspected of being retarded, and he found that the tests identified retarded Jews as well as retarded people of other groups. Kamin reported, instead, that Jews had low IQs, and this erroneous report was picked up by many authors including Stephen Jay Gould, who used it as evidence of the unreliability of IQ tests (Seligman, 1992)."[1]