To Be Young, Gifted, and ...

There's an essay in TNR by someone named Steve Pinker explaining the "Ashkenazi Advantage" (an essay that might be of special interest at Left Behinds, where just about everybody except for me is what Pinker would call a "Meinstein"). As Pinker humbly writes, "Jewish achievement is obvious; only the explanation is unclear." He analyzes a recent buzzed-about bit of scholarship that concluded that Ashkenazi intellectual advantage is the result of natural selection over the first millenium of the group's history, and that certain Ashkenazi diseases (such as Tay-Sachs) are byproducts of this selected trait. Pinker's conclusion is basically that the verdict is still out, but the hypotheses are testable and should be tested.

I liked this bit at the end, about whether or not this research should be conducted, politically and ethically speaking:

Reality is what refuses to go away when you do not believe in it, and progress in neuroscience and genomics has made these politically comforting shibboleths (such as the non-existence of intelligence and the non-existence of race) untenable.

...

Group differences, when they exist, pertain to averages, not to individual men and women. There are geniuses and dullards, saints and sinners, in every race, ethnicity, and gender. Political equality is a commitment to universal human rights, and to policies that treat people as individuals rather than as representatives of groups; it is not an empirical claim that people are indistinguishable. Many commentators seem unwilling to grasp these points.

Talk amongst yourselves.