Cremieux said Israel's genetic average is probably more like 97 not 95, with Israeli Jews being 102-103 and the Arabs pulling the average down. You had mass Mizrahi migration in the early years of the state and historically Mizrahi TFR was higher. Nowadays Ashkenazi TFR is higher. Haredi Ashkenazi have tons of kids and the girls do well on the PISA despite not getting as good of a secular education.
In the US it's just intermarriage causing demographic decline, and competition with Asians for top spots. Ron Unz has lots of wrong statistics though (he is a deranged Holocaust denier), read Nurit Baytch's debunking.
The demographic decline is driven by intermarriage and low fertility, although both of these factors are changing with the rising proportion of Orthodox Jews within the American Jewish population.
One important aspect was left out. In an Ashkenazi person's career, in addition to their own genetics/skills, their network of contacts also plays a big role. A person's close social network of people with whom he or she has intellectual and social connections is in the hundreds. The average Jewish person (IQ110) will have 9 people in the IQ range above 130 in his network of contacts, while the average European (IQ 100) will have 2... In addition to mixed marriages and the end of endogamy, the decline in Ashkenazi performance is also associated with a decline in the smart fraction of their network of contacts.
Yes, networking with other smart people amplifies any personal advantage one might have. I would probably be better known if I got out of my comfort zone and invested more time in networking.
It is an interesting thought that monogamy is beneficial because it increases the reproductive importance of upper-class women. In a world of high infant mortality this makes perfect sense, as the lower-class pairings would simply have fewer children and in a polygamous society the upper-class men share resources with children from upper and lower class. A very good point that I had not thought about before.
Great article. Any resource on the idea that high status polygynous men had more sex with lower iq 2nd, 3rd etc wives? I guess it makes sense that the manner in which most societies practiced polygyny would not have been eugenic
By definition, female hypergamy is about lower-status women seeking higher-status men.
Female hypergamy correlates with polygyny, probably by making it easier for higher-status men to obtain second or third wives. Higher-status men are thus more likely to have children who are average in mental endowment if they are polygynous than if they are monogamous.
Pierre van den Berghe (1960) argued that the combination of female hypergamy and polygyny tends to reduce genetic stratification within a society. There is thus less clustering of alleles for high cognitive ability within the gene pool.
In Cameroon, Bartiaux (2016) found a correlation between monogamy and educational level of women, i.e., women who reach higher levels of education are less likely to live in polygynous households. Of course, the common factor might simply be Westernization and Christianization.
Polygyny seems to reduce the fertility of first wives, see Bean and Mineau (1986), Josephson (2002), and Winking et al. (2013)
References
Bartiaux, F. (2016). Matching Spouses in Monogamous and Polygynous Households of Cameroon. In African Households (pp. 194-207). Routledge.
Winking, J., Stieglitz, J., Kurten, J., Kaplan, H., & Gurven, M. (2013). Polygyny among the Tsimane of Bolivia: an improved method for testing the polygyny–fertility hypothesis. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 280(1756), 20123078. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.3078
Some of the events he describes predate the middle ages. There is also an argument that ashk iq is a function of attrition from judaism as education became the mainstay of the community’s social status
It was a good article when it came out in 2007. Since then, there have been a number of key findings, particularly in the areas of polygenic scores and aDNA. I agree that cognitive ability is generally higher in Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews than in surrounding Middle Eastern populations. The main difference between them and Ashkenazim is that they lived in a less dynamic economic environment. So the selection pressure was not as strong, particularly during the post-medieval demographic expansion of Jews in Eastern Europe.
What about all the illustrious Quaker-dynasties? Not mentioned much among all you IQ-nerds. I guess they sort of died out, so there's so current data to study. But I guess they kind of started the whole hereditary genius-thing. Guess Galton also was inspired by them?
I'm not really an IQ nerd. Cognitive evolution is only one of my interests.
I've looked for data on the Quakers, but to no avail. The Freemasons are also a personal interest of mine (my mother's family was Freemason). If a religious group practices endogamy, it will tend to deviate from its surrounding population over time.
Thanks, very interesting. I assume plenty of losses in the competitions are explainable by outcrowding by asians, but still seems like a solid evidence.
Out of curiosity, is there any way to try to estimate Amish IQ?
Intelligence may be a blessing or a curse - depending on the support and accept from your culture/etnic group and/or culture. - Interesting, I think, section about the alleged super-genius Christopher Langan vs. Bob Oppenheimer:
"In comparing the lack of academic and life success of Langan to the successes of Robert Oppenheimer, journalist Malcolm Gladwell, in his 2008 book Outliers, points to the background and social skills of the two men. Oppenheimer was raised in a wealthy cosmopolitan neighborhood in Manhattan. His father was a successful businessman and his mother was an artist, he was educated at the Ethical Culture School and summered in Europe, and studied at Harvard University and subsequently started a PhD at Cambridge University. Gladwell points to an illustrating example: when Oppenheimer tried to poison his tutor at Cambridge, he used his social savvy and his parents used their influence to have Oppenheimer merely sent for psychiatric help without any criminal or academic consequences; in contrast, when Langan's mother missed a deadline for financial aid, Langan lost his scholarship and when Langan tried to convince college administration at Reed College to switch a class to a later time (owing to a broken down car) his request was denied. Langan grew up in poverty and had an unsettled early life filled with abuse, which created a resentment of authority which Gladwell reported Langan still carried during his interview decades after his academic hardships. He had had little or no guidance from his parents or his teachers, and never developed the social skills needed to cope with and overcome his challenges.[7]: 108–110 "
One more thing - promise: So the Catholic church basically killed off the smartest, most bookish people via celibacy for almost 2000 years? Priests, monks and nuns? Cool -not! May also have had positive societal effects though - surplus poeple (men) may just have started even more wars.
But may be an area of study: Orthodox, Jews, Lutheran and non-European religions didn't neuter their best brains. Maybe the ascendancy of North-West Europe was due to the Lutheran priest suddenly being able to marry and procreate. Of course e.g. Weber writes about Protestant ethics as factor behind capitalism and such. But what about smart genes suddenly not being lost from arund 16th century?
And what about Orthodox priest-effect in places like Russia? In Germany and Scandinavia for sure there were/are dynasties of Protestant priests for 10+ generations (who from around 1850 diversified to law, science, medicine, arts etc).
I digress: What about homosexuals and intelligence. Some indication that they (men) score quite high. If there's such a thing as homo gene and IQ, they probably had to procreate like it or not (marriage and procreate being the done thing). A lot of these now probably don't procreate and maybe adopt, but generally are much less "forced" to procreate compared to before. So will homesexuals die out (and maybe some IQ-"talent") due to less societal pressure to marry like "normal" people?
A hypothesis has to be tested before it can be accepted. Even then, acceptance remains tentative. It may be that the celibacy of priests, monks, and nuns had an impact on cognitive evolution in Europe. But that impact does not show up in the genetic data, at least not in the two studies done to date:
1. Woodley of Menie et al. (2017) found a steady rise in mean cognitive ability among Europeans and Central Asians between 4,560 and 1,210 years ago. This finding is based on DNA from 102 individuals, mainly from the early Bronze to early Iron ages, with none from the Imperial Roman era. Cognitive evolution was therefore progressing among Europeans at least during Late Antiquity and the early Medieval period (300 to 800 CE). This was a time when Catholicism was dominant, so clerical celibacy was widely practiced.
REFERENCE
Woodley of Menie, M.A., S. Younuskunju, B. Balan, and D. Piffer. (2017). Holocene selection for variants associated with general cognitive ability: Comparing ancient and modern genomes. Twin Research and Human Genetics 20: 271-280. https://doi.org/10.1017/thg.2017.37
2. Piffer et al. (2023) found a steady rise in mean cognitive ability among Romans (central Italy) during Late Antiquity and into medieval and modern times. This finding is based on DNA from 127 individuals who had lived in central Italy over a period extending from the Neolithic to early modern times.
REFERENCE
Piffer D, E. Dutton, and E.O.W. Kirkegaard. (2023). Intelligence Trends in Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of Roman Polygenic Scores. OpenPsych. Published online July 21, 2023. https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2023.07.21
We still need more data, but the current data seem to suggest that mean cognitive ability was already rising among Europeans before the Reformation and the rise of Protestantism. In fact, it began to rise around the time when Catholicism became dominant in the fourth century. The main drivers of cognitive evolution seem to be 1) monogamy, 2) limits on male polygyny and female hypergamy, and 3) no limits on the demographic replacement of the lower class by downwardly mobile individuals from an expanding middle class (cf. works by Gregory Clark).
For what it's worth, I'm Protestant, so I don't have a personal bias.
In the case of Russia and Eastern Europe in general, I believe there was a similar process of cognitive evolution, but it was impeded by the persistence of serfdom (which disappeared in Western Europe much earlier). Serfs perform a limited range of cognitive tasks and have little incentive to take on new ones.
As for male homosexuality and intelligence, I have no firm opinion. It looks like male homosexuality has several possible causes: overfeminization through selection for paternal investment; infection by a pathogen that manipulates neural circuity to propagate itself via sex with as many people as possible; birth order effects, etc.
This kind of research has been done largely in the U.S., where the Jewish community is mostly Ashkenazi. IQ research in Israel shows no IQ advantage among the Sephardim. No research has been done yet in terms of their polygenic scores. They don't have high incidences of sphingolipid mutations, but they do have a high prevalence of some mutations that may be cognitively related (e.g., the 187delAG BRCA1 mutation for DNA repair).
Charles Murray argues that mean cognitive ability among the Sephardim was high during their "Golden Age" in Islamic Spain. It then declined after their expulsion to North Africa and the Middle East, where economic conditions were less dynamic.
Cremieux said Israel's genetic average is probably more like 97 not 95, with Israeli Jews being 102-103 and the Arabs pulling the average down. You had mass Mizrahi migration in the early years of the state and historically Mizrahi TFR was higher. Nowadays Ashkenazi TFR is higher. Haredi Ashkenazi have tons of kids and the girls do well on the PISA despite not getting as good of a secular education.
In the US it's just intermarriage causing demographic decline, and competition with Asians for top spots. Ron Unz has lots of wrong statistics though (he is a deranged Holocaust denier), read Nurit Baytch's debunking.
The demographic decline is driven by intermarriage and low fertility, although both of these factors are changing with the rising proportion of Orthodox Jews within the American Jewish population.
Yeah in the second paragraph I meant just intermarriage and low tfr causing decline in US.
One important aspect was left out. In an Ashkenazi person's career, in addition to their own genetics/skills, their network of contacts also plays a big role. A person's close social network of people with whom he or she has intellectual and social connections is in the hundreds. The average Jewish person (IQ110) will have 9 people in the IQ range above 130 in his network of contacts, while the average European (IQ 100) will have 2... In addition to mixed marriages and the end of endogamy, the decline in Ashkenazi performance is also associated with a decline in the smart fraction of their network of contacts.
Yes, networking with other smart people amplifies any personal advantage one might have. I would probably be better known if I got out of my comfort zone and invested more time in networking.
It is an interesting thought that monogamy is beneficial because it increases the reproductive importance of upper-class women. In a world of high infant mortality this makes perfect sense, as the lower-class pairings would simply have fewer children and in a polygamous society the upper-class men share resources with children from upper and lower class. A very good point that I had not thought about before.
There's also evidence that polygyny reduces the fertility of the first wife, probably because the man is having less sex with her.
Great article. Any resource on the idea that high status polygynous men had more sex with lower iq 2nd, 3rd etc wives? I guess it makes sense that the manner in which most societies practiced polygyny would not have been eugenic
By definition, female hypergamy is about lower-status women seeking higher-status men.
Female hypergamy correlates with polygyny, probably by making it easier for higher-status men to obtain second or third wives. Higher-status men are thus more likely to have children who are average in mental endowment if they are polygynous than if they are monogamous.
Pierre van den Berghe (1960) argued that the combination of female hypergamy and polygyny tends to reduce genetic stratification within a society. There is thus less clustering of alleles for high cognitive ability within the gene pool.
In Cameroon, Bartiaux (2016) found a correlation between monogamy and educational level of women, i.e., women who reach higher levels of education are less likely to live in polygynous households. Of course, the common factor might simply be Westernization and Christianization.
Polygyny seems to reduce the fertility of first wives, see Bean and Mineau (1986), Josephson (2002), and Winking et al. (2013)
References
Bartiaux, F. (2016). Matching Spouses in Monogamous and Polygynous Households of Cameroon. In African Households (pp. 194-207). Routledge.
Bean, L. L., & Mineau, G. P. (1986). The polygyny–fertility hypothesis: a re-evaluation. Population Studies, 40(1), 67-81. https://doi.org/10.1080/0032472031000141846
Josephson, S. C. (2002). Does polygyny reduce fertility?. American Journal of Human Biology, 14(2), 222-232. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.10045
Van Den Berghe, P. L. (1960). Hypergamy, hypergenation, and miscegenation. Human Relations, 13(1), 83-91. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872676001300106
Winking, J., Stieglitz, J., Kurten, J., Kaplan, H., & Gurven, M. (2013). Polygyny among the Tsimane of Bolivia: an improved method for testing the polygyny–fertility hypothesis. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 280(1756), 20123078. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.3078
Thanks for this!
While I have you, i am curious about what you think about some of the theories charles murray floats in this article: https://www.commentary.org/articles/charles-murray/jewish-genius/
Some of the events he describes predate the middle ages. There is also an argument that ashk iq is a function of attrition from judaism as education became the mainstay of the community’s social status
It was a good article when it came out in 2007. Since then, there have been a number of key findings, particularly in the areas of polygenic scores and aDNA. I agree that cognitive ability is generally higher in Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews than in surrounding Middle Eastern populations. The main difference between them and Ashkenazim is that they lived in a less dynamic economic environment. So the selection pressure was not as strong, particularly during the post-medieval demographic expansion of Jews in Eastern Europe.
What about all the illustrious Quaker-dynasties? Not mentioned much among all you IQ-nerds. I guess they sort of died out, so there's so current data to study. But I guess they kind of started the whole hereditary genius-thing. Guess Galton also was inspired by them?
I'm not really an IQ nerd. Cognitive evolution is only one of my interests.
I've looked for data on the Quakers, but to no avail. The Freemasons are also a personal interest of mine (my mother's family was Freemason). If a religious group practices endogamy, it will tend to deviate from its surrounding population over time.
Thanks, very interesting. I assume plenty of losses in the competitions are explainable by outcrowding by asians, but still seems like a solid evidence.
Out of curiosity, is there any way to try to estimate Amish IQ?
Yes, Asians are becoming the new cognitive elite.
Old Order Amish students outperform non-Amish students on achievement tests, with the exception of language tests.
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED035947
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
Intelligence may be a blessing or a curse - depending on the support and accept from your culture/etnic group and/or culture. - Interesting, I think, section about the alleged super-genius Christopher Langan vs. Bob Oppenheimer:
"In comparing the lack of academic and life success of Langan to the successes of Robert Oppenheimer, journalist Malcolm Gladwell, in his 2008 book Outliers, points to the background and social skills of the two men. Oppenheimer was raised in a wealthy cosmopolitan neighborhood in Manhattan. His father was a successful businessman and his mother was an artist, he was educated at the Ethical Culture School and summered in Europe, and studied at Harvard University and subsequently started a PhD at Cambridge University. Gladwell points to an illustrating example: when Oppenheimer tried to poison his tutor at Cambridge, he used his social savvy and his parents used their influence to have Oppenheimer merely sent for psychiatric help without any criminal or academic consequences; in contrast, when Langan's mother missed a deadline for financial aid, Langan lost his scholarship and when Langan tried to convince college administration at Reed College to switch a class to a later time (owing to a broken down car) his request was denied. Langan grew up in poverty and had an unsettled early life filled with abuse, which created a resentment of authority which Gladwell reported Langan still carried during his interview decades after his academic hardships. He had had little or no guidance from his parents or his teachers, and never developed the social skills needed to cope with and overcome his challenges.[7]: 108–110 "
One more thing - promise: So the Catholic church basically killed off the smartest, most bookish people via celibacy for almost 2000 years? Priests, monks and nuns? Cool -not! May also have had positive societal effects though - surplus poeple (men) may just have started even more wars.
But may be an area of study: Orthodox, Jews, Lutheran and non-European religions didn't neuter their best brains. Maybe the ascendancy of North-West Europe was due to the Lutheran priest suddenly being able to marry and procreate. Of course e.g. Weber writes about Protestant ethics as factor behind capitalism and such. But what about smart genes suddenly not being lost from arund 16th century?
And what about Orthodox priest-effect in places like Russia? In Germany and Scandinavia for sure there were/are dynasties of Protestant priests for 10+ generations (who from around 1850 diversified to law, science, medicine, arts etc).
I digress: What about homosexuals and intelligence. Some indication that they (men) score quite high. If there's such a thing as homo gene and IQ, they probably had to procreate like it or not (marriage and procreate being the done thing). A lot of these now probably don't procreate and maybe adopt, but generally are much less "forced" to procreate compared to before. So will homesexuals die out (and maybe some IQ-"talent") due to less societal pressure to marry like "normal" people?
A hypothesis has to be tested before it can be accepted. Even then, acceptance remains tentative. It may be that the celibacy of priests, monks, and nuns had an impact on cognitive evolution in Europe. But that impact does not show up in the genetic data, at least not in the two studies done to date:
1. Woodley of Menie et al. (2017) found a steady rise in mean cognitive ability among Europeans and Central Asians between 4,560 and 1,210 years ago. This finding is based on DNA from 102 individuals, mainly from the early Bronze to early Iron ages, with none from the Imperial Roman era. Cognitive evolution was therefore progressing among Europeans at least during Late Antiquity and the early Medieval period (300 to 800 CE). This was a time when Catholicism was dominant, so clerical celibacy was widely practiced.
REFERENCE
Woodley of Menie, M.A., S. Younuskunju, B. Balan, and D. Piffer. (2017). Holocene selection for variants associated with general cognitive ability: Comparing ancient and modern genomes. Twin Research and Human Genetics 20: 271-280. https://doi.org/10.1017/thg.2017.37
2. Piffer et al. (2023) found a steady rise in mean cognitive ability among Romans (central Italy) during Late Antiquity and into medieval and modern times. This finding is based on DNA from 127 individuals who had lived in central Italy over a period extending from the Neolithic to early modern times.
REFERENCE
Piffer D, E. Dutton, and E.O.W. Kirkegaard. (2023). Intelligence Trends in Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of Roman Polygenic Scores. OpenPsych. Published online July 21, 2023. https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2023.07.21
We still need more data, but the current data seem to suggest that mean cognitive ability was already rising among Europeans before the Reformation and the rise of Protestantism. In fact, it began to rise around the time when Catholicism became dominant in the fourth century. The main drivers of cognitive evolution seem to be 1) monogamy, 2) limits on male polygyny and female hypergamy, and 3) no limits on the demographic replacement of the lower class by downwardly mobile individuals from an expanding middle class (cf. works by Gregory Clark).
For what it's worth, I'm Protestant, so I don't have a personal bias.
In the case of Russia and Eastern Europe in general, I believe there was a similar process of cognitive evolution, but it was impeded by the persistence of serfdom (which disappeared in Western Europe much earlier). Serfs perform a limited range of cognitive tasks and have little incentive to take on new ones.
As for male homosexuality and intelligence, I have no firm opinion. It looks like male homosexuality has several possible causes: overfeminization through selection for paternal investment; infection by a pathogen that manipulates neural circuity to propagate itself via sex with as many people as possible; birth order effects, etc.
Interesting. Just browsed through - don't have time for detailed comment. But interesting.
Is there similar research on Sephardic Jews?
This kind of research has been done largely in the U.S., where the Jewish community is mostly Ashkenazi. IQ research in Israel shows no IQ advantage among the Sephardim. No research has been done yet in terms of their polygenic scores. They don't have high incidences of sphingolipid mutations, but they do have a high prevalence of some mutations that may be cognitively related (e.g., the 187delAG BRCA1 mutation for DNA repair).
Charles Murray argues that mean cognitive ability among the Sephardim was high during their "Golden Age" in Islamic Spain. It then declined after their expulsion to North Africa and the Middle East, where economic conditions were less dynamic.