Dangerous ideas

The american-jewish Online-Magazine "Jewcy" is going further to "improve" our thinking. (Jewcy) Most important is, I think, what it is reporting about social scientist Richard Herrnstein (author of "The Bell Curve" [1994]). I don't buy the rest of the argument of the article, that the IQ of children is formed at a larger extent by "good mothers" and good "kindergartens". Not IQ - but a lot of other traits are formed by mothers (and kindergarten's) - for example social traits. I only want to give the text here to show, of what sort of dangerous ideas Steven Pinker spoke of several months ago. (Edge) The article does not mention the fact, he is speaking about the whole time, that there is not only a black-white-IQ-gap of 15 points, but also a black-ashkenazi Jews-IQ-gap of 30 points (!) (and a white-ashkenazi Jews-IQ-gap of 15 points).

"... The social scientist Richard Herrnstein disagreed. (...) A perfect meritocracy, he proposed in a seminal 1971 Atlantic article, would allow the naturally brightest to end up on top. Those bright people would pair up and produce bright children and the American meritocracy would wind up looking less democratic than aristocratic. But unlike aristocratic Europe, where inbred imbeciles like George III ended up ruling empires,modern aristocracies would be fair . Even more alarming, this new, fair aristocracy would look like a racial caste system, Herrnstein theorized, citing a study showing a 15-point gap in the average IQs of whites and blacks.

In his important 1992 book, The End of Equality, Jewish pundit Mickey Kaus cautiously came to Herrnstein’s defense. Social mobility was beginning to decline, he theorized, because a perfect meritocracy had been nearly achieved. Those groups that had what it took to move up had already moved up. Meritocracy was like a centrifuge that spun the best to the top and left the dregs on the bottom. “At some point,” Kaus wrote, “we may run out of new groups to run through the centrifuge.”

Just as Herrnstein predicted, American society has become more aristocratic. (We even have George II, a dim-witted heir, running our country.) It is tempting, then, for Jews to take up the position Herrnstein outlined in 1971, essentially defending and legitimating hierarchy. After all, anti-meritocratic policies like legacy preferences at Ivy League colleges that used to hurt Jews now help them. (...)

Though Herrnstein was Jewish, many Jews were wary of embracing a view that sounded so much like eugenics, the pseudo-science that worked to legitimate the social order back when Jews were towards the bottom. Explaining away inequality as the result of black/white IQ differences sounded like something out of 1930s Germany—not the kind of argument most Jews want to defend. But once the racial element was removed, the argument became more appealing, even flattering. Perhaps there really was something superior about us. (...) claiming to be some kind of black-haired, brown-eyed master race (...)."

The article is speaking about really, really dangerous things. But I think it is doing it not in the right way. Not with enough responsibility. For example: It does not differentiate enough between facts and "wishes". - But because there is so much speaking now about Richard Herrnstein, I have looked for photos of him. There are not so many available in the internet, I have found only two:

Right: Genetics and IQ Conference, New York, 1990 (Herrnstein in the middle)
Bottom row, L to R: Mrs. H.J. Eysenck, Hans J. Eysenck, Arthur R. Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, Richard Lynn, Marian Van Court. Top row: Helmuth Nyborg, Linda Gottfredson, Ernst van den Haag, Robert Nichols, Michael Levin, J. Philippe Rushton, Chris Brand.

Ashkenazi Jewish subgroups and founder events

Ashkenazi Jews "constitute a model population for the search of disease-causing mutations and disease-susceptibility genes".

A new genetic study about Ashkenazi Jews (1) confirms

"the interpretation of little or no gene flow of the local non-Jewish communities in Poland and Russia to the Jewish communities in these countries" over the last 1000 years. "The differences between Jews and non-Jews are far larger than those observed among the Jewish communities." So, the study says, Ashkenazi Jews are "an isolated population that has undergone a recent bottleneck".

But its main result is, that researchers claim to have found a difference in haplogroup frequencies (mostly of mitochondrial haplogroups K and H) between Ashkenazi Jews from Russia and Ashkenazi Jews from Poland and Romania.

And because the differences are not caused by non-jewish genetical influence it is most likely that they reflect founder events, researchers say. So they claim the results are "consistent with the view that the ancestry of the Ashkenazi Jewish population is a result of at least four different founder events."

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1. Feder, J., Ovadia, O., Glaser, B. et al. Ashkenazi Jewish mtDNA haplogroup distribution varies among distinct subpopulations: lessons of population substructure in a closed group. Eur J Hum Genet 15, 498–500 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.ejhg.5201764, https://www.nature.com/articles/5201764

Group selection - a very simple thing ...?

Does one crucial heritable trait like intelligence can change inborn altruism inside of a society?

I think: Yes. If you are more intelligent than another person, you can be more efficient with your altruistic deeds. And if a whole group is more intelligent than another group this gives this group an advantage.

But we know: Nowadays inborn intelligence of human groups does not "per se" correlate with fitness. Sometimes yes - for example in modern Israel, for example (broadly spoken) in the Western Hemisphere between 1500 and 1900. But often (today in the Western Hemisphere): No. So let us say: There is a difficult connection between intelligence and fertility in humans.

But IF human groups act mostly like the Western Hemisphere between 1500 and 1900 and like modern Israel today it is clear, that we would say, that more efficient altruism would evolve by group selection, because it is different fertility of genetically different groups that shapes human variability of traits at any given period.

And I think this is what happened in human history and evolution mostly. Aszkenazi Jews where seperated enough from other groups for thousand years and were able to evolve (by this) a "more efficient altruism" than all the other human groups have today AND they had another fertility rate than Sephardic Jews. This has not happened by extinction of (other) groups - only by separation.

I think there are a lot of other heritable traits that influence altruism in this way or another. We do not have "one" gene for altruism ...

(Razib Khan had some thoughts about group selection and motivated me for this post.)