Guardian | The recent revival of ideas about race and IQ began with a seemingly
benign scientific observation. In 2005, Steven Pinker, one of the
world’s most prominent evolutionary psychologists, began promoting the
view that Ashkenazi Jews are innately particularly intelligent – first
in a lecture to a Jewish studies institute, then in a lengthy article
in the liberal American magazine The New Republic the following year.
This claim has long been the smiling face of race science; if it is true
that Jews are naturally more intelligent, then it’s only logical to say
that others are naturally less so.
The background to Pinker’s essay was a 2005 paper
entitled “Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence”, written by a trio
of anthropologists at the University of Utah. In their 2005 paper, the
anthropologists argued that high IQ scores among Ashkenazi Jews
indicated that they evolved to be smarter than anyone else (including
other groups of Jews).
This evolutionary development supposedly took root between 800 and
1650 AD, when Ashkenazis, who primarily lived in Europe, were pushed by
antisemitism into money-lending, which was stigmatised among Christians.
This rapid evolution was possible, the paper argued, in part because
the practice of not marrying outside the Jewish community meant a “very
low inward gene flow”. This was also a factor behind the
disproportionate prevalence in Ashkenazi Jews of genetic diseases such
as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher’s, which the researchers claimed were a
byproduct of natural selection for higher intelligence; those carrying
the gene variants, or alleles, for these diseases were said to be
smarter than the rest.
Pinker followed this logic in his New Republic article, and elsewhere
described the Ashkenazi paper as “thorough and well-argued”. He went on
to castigate those who doubted the scientific value of talking about
genetic differences between races, and claimed that “personality traits
are measurable, heritable within a group and slightly different, on
average, between groups”.
In subsequent years, Nicholas Wade, Charles Murray, Richard Lynn, the
increasingly popular Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and others
have all piled in on the Jewish intelligence thesis, using it as ballast
for their views that different population groups inherit different
mental capacities. Another member of this chorus is the journalist
Andrew Sullivan, who was one of the loudest cheerleaders for The Bell
Curve in 1994, featuring it prominently in The New Republic, which he
edited at the time. He returned to the fray in 2011, using his popular
blog, The Dish, to promote the view that population groups had different innate potentials when it came to intelligence.
Sullivan noted that the differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic
Jews were “striking in the data”. It was a prime example of the rhetoric
of race science, whose proponents love to claim that they are honouring
the data, not political commitments. The far right has even rebranded
race science with an alternative name that sounds like it was taken
straight from the pages of a university course catalogue: “human
biodiversity”.
A common theme in the rhetoric of race science is that its opponents
are guilty of wishful thinking about the nature of human equality. “The
IQ literature reveals that which no one would want to be the case,”
Peterson told Molyneux on his YouTube show recently. Even the prominent
social scientist Jonathan Haidt has criticised liberals as “IQ deniers”,
who reject the truth of inherited IQ difference between groups because
of a misguided commitment to the idea that social outcomes depend
entirely on nurture, and are therefore mutable.
Defenders of race science claim they are simply describing the facts
as they are – and the truth isn’t always comfortable. “We remain the
same species, just as a poodle and a beagle are of the same species,”
Sullivan wrote in 2013. “But poodles, in general, are smarter than
beagles, and beagles have a much better sense of smell.”
The
race “science” that has re-emerged into public discourse today –
whether in the form of outright racism against black people, or
supposedly friendlier claims of Ashkenazis’ superior intelligence –
usually involves at least one of three claims, each of which has no
grounding in scientific fact.
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