to suggest that general intelligence, which is an adaptive* trait(one that often governs how well an entity survives), may not be equally well developed in all populations of men? I mean, it's far harder to survive in the steppes than to survive in some pleasant, tropical place that has lots of rain and shine and where stuff grows easily and the chief problem is to keep the monkeys from eating it.
It's also freaking obvious that Jews are someone's chosen people. According to IQ** tests, most of them have higher verbal intelligence, supposedly it's about 115 on average, at least in European Jews. Now, I don't feel threatened by that, as my general intelligence is nearly one standard deviation higher, supposedly... but it is a damned interesting thing to think about.
The explanation is either that during their millenia long history, Jews who couldn't hack the tora were shamed and maybe cast out, or that during the middle ages, when Jews in Europe were banned from agriculture and restricted to trade and money-lending, the smart ones were far better at these occupations, which enabled them to support bigger families. This went on for centuries.
If you're interested in the technical side of that debate, google ashkenazi intelligence and plenty of articles will come up.
Another group of geneticists claim it may have been founder's effect, that most of European Jews today are descended from a small population of Jews who were probably smart.
There is also the fact that Jews suffer from a lot of interesting genetical diseseas akin to sickle cell anemia in that they're thought to be related to their higher intelligence, but sometimes are fatal.
The diseases are neural system related(Tay Sachs disease for example), and only express themselves if there's an unlucky match(in plain-speak). It's thought that these diseases are caused by rapid evolution that had happened to Jews back whenever it was they've gotten so smart..
I've gotten banned from places just for pointing out Jews are smarter, which... is chanelling 2nd Lt. Obvious due to the number of geniuses their tribe has produced.. but really. But these were mostly crypto-antisemitic places ran by New-Zealand survivalist libertarian types.
Most people don't know about it, but in the past, certain elite US schools had Jew quotas, so they only took a certain number of Jews in each year, which kind of reminds me that today, certain US schools supposedly don't take people by merit, but also have racial quotas on asian-americans and other fanatical student types.
**yeah, I know they don't really measure anything, but it seems they correlate pretty well with stuff like SAT results, personal income, the chance to end up in prison and distaste towards hip hop and rap music and one's ability to write anything useful quickly in C++
*I may be off here, but anyway, it's obvious general intelligence is useful. For some things, like mathematics or physics or programming or indeed anything worthwhile
