Science and Ethnicity Watch

Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending of the University of Utah recently wrote a paper in which they proposed (a) that Ashkenazic Jews are said to be smart because they ``really'' are; (b) that this is so because Ashkenazim spent nearly a thousand years in Europe in a social "niche" that required brains—traders and financiers in a society that forbade them to be farmers or soldiers; (c) that certain genes found among Ashkenazim are the cause of their high intelligence; and (d) that these same genes are also responsible for a cluster of hereditary diseases, including Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's, and breast cancer, that are more common among Ashkenazim than they are in other groups.

You can quarrel with the paper's assumptions. For its points about intelligence, it relies on IQ tests, for instance, which is controversial -- and anyway how do we know what the Jews of 1400 would score on a test invented in the 1920's? But the paper's also an interesting example of how once-separate levels of analysis are being linked, as scholars created a new science of human kinds.

Anyway, my take on it is here, at Nextbook.com .