When I was thinking about Will Saletan's essay on the supposed innate mental inferiority of Africans, I thought about this comment from behavorial geneticist Eric Turkheimer over at Cato's blog ...

If I may address my fellow Jews for a moment, consider this. How would you feel about a line of research into the question of whether Jews have a genetic tendency to be more concerned with money than other groups? Nothing anti-semitic, mind you, just a rational investigation of the scientific evidence. It wouldn’t be difficult to measure interest in money and materialism, and it wouldn’t surprise me if as an empirical matter Jews scored a little higher on the resulting test than other groups. As a behavioral geneticist I can assure you without reservation that the trait would be heritable, and, if anyone bothered to take the time to find out, specific genes would have small associations with it. Of course, this research program has already been carried out, at least to the extent the relevant technology was available in 1939. While we are at it we could open a whole scientific institute for the scientific study of racial stereotypes, and finally pull together the evidence on sneaky Japanese, drunken Irish, unintelligent Poles, overemotional women and lazy Italians.

Yes, just so. Actually, as Will noted in his piece in Slate, Jews have substantially higher IQ scores on average than the baseline white population in the United States, by something like a dozen points. Do we think they're genetically superior in intelligence to the mere flotsam of un-Jewified caucasians sloshing around the country?

Well, I guess I spoke my unspoken hypothetical a bit too soon. It turns out that Will does seem to think Jews may be the product of intellectual superior genetic stock, as he argues in this Slate piece from earlier this month. His discussion is based in part on a panel he attended at AEI, with panelists including Charles Murray, on the topic.

I don't have any strong argument for proving that higher average IQs for American Jews (which predominantly means European or 'Ashkenazi' Jews) is rooted in culture and child-rearing as opposed to genetic programming. But reading Will's piece it doesn't seem that he has much of any argument for the converse either. I guess a little broader familiarity with history provides a sense that it's not uncommon for ethnic groups or nationalities with a marginal or partly alienated relationship to the dominant culture to excel in rates disproportionate to their numbers. Look at the Scots in British culture in the 18th century.

In any case, put me down as unconvinced. It's quite true that there are no topics we should leave unexamined when evidence of new realities are clearly before us. But it's equally true that there are some topics that are odd to speculate about if there's no evidence for them at all, like the genetic intellectual superiority of the Jewish 'race'. As Yglesias says, there's something distinctly prurient about the fascination.

And as long as it's just free inquiry we're interested in, can we move ahead with that study into the Jewish propensity to dominate host nations and guile them into hopeless wars for their own enrichment? Or at least suss out the implications if the theory turns out to be true?