Both scientific and athletic achievements have an alternative explanation: culture. If there was a good sample of adopted children from a group with such achievements, one could examine these hypotheses in more detail.
That's an incredible statistic. If the cause is cultural then
it's a wonder there isn't a plethora of books advising on how to raise children the Ashkenazi way. Are there any such books?
Typical HN racism and misogyny aside, why not go to the top of the intellectual world and listen to Chomsky and Einstein? There's no end of opinions from them. Chomsky in particular answers emails quickly. So no need to ape some culture's forms, but rather ask their most successful members.
The problem is, their answers don't please many who'd ask such questions. Einstein claimed:
"This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career."
Or take Chomsky:
"A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it's designed for obedience and passivity. From childhood, a lot of it is designed to prevent people from being independent and creative. If you're independent-minded in school, you're probably going to get into trouble very early on. That's not the trait that's being preferred or cultivated. When people live through all this stuff, plus corporate propaganda, plus television, plus the press and the whole mass, the deluge of ideological distortion that goes on, they ask questions that from another point of view are completely reasonable...."
So let's turn the question around (because it's not about Jews being the Master Race or being culturally superior to say Africans): how do we triumph over dominant institutions which are out to turn us into idiots?
We don't want to know what Chomsky or Einstein thought about the educational system, that's irrelevant. What we really want to know is how their parents treated them. Actually, we want something more general -- commonalities in Jewish upbringing, especially of those who went on to be successful.
I'm not sure who "we" are, and why "we don't want to know" things despite wanting to be smarter. In any case, Chomsky certainly wasn't secretive about his education and parenting. Did you look it up?
"My father was, professionally, a Hebrew scholar, and worked with Hebrew grammar. And my mother was a Hebrew teacher. My father sort of ran the Hebrew school system in the city of Philadelphia, and my mother taught in it. He taught in Hebrew College later. There's a Graduate University of Jewish Studies, Dropsie College, which he taught in."
"Actually, I happen to have been very lucky myself and gone to an experimental-progresive Deweyite school, from about the time I was age one-and-a-half to twelve [John Dewey was an American philosopher and educational reformer]. And there it was done routinely: children were encouraged to challenge everything, and you sort of worked on your own, you were supposed to think things through for yourself -- it was a real experience. And it was quite a striking change when it ended and I had to go to the city high school, which was the pride of the city school system. It was the school for academically-oriented kids in Philadelphia -- and it was the dumbest, most ridiculous place I've ever been, it was like falling into a black hole or something. For one thing, it was extremely competitive -- because that's one of the best ways of controlling people. So everybody was ranked, and you always knew exactly where you were: are you third in the class, or maybe did you move down to fourth? All this stuff is put into people's heads in various ways in the schools -- that you've got to beat down the person next to you, and just look out for yourself."
Ok, raised by teachers/scholars who even ran a school system, and went to a school which cultivated critical thinking. Surprising that he turned out to be such a successful academic...
No need to turn to racist theories, or cultural mysticism. Answers are quite simple, but not everyone wants to hear them.
These kind of studies have been done, and it is my recollection that genetics still appear to have a significant impact. Of course, people can still argue that various sociological effects can explain most of this, like lowered expectations for certain races, etc.
What that picture doesn't show, though, is that there are a lot of almost-world-class sprinters who are european, asian or of other ethnicities. The edge that being of a certain ethnic background gives you in sprinting is only really important at the very top of the competition. I'd imagine that for the majority of people, training and dedication make up a far larger component of their success or failure at sprinting.
Interestingly, in the article it indicated that genetics appeared to play a bigger role in the intelligence of wealthy people. I'd imagine this is a similar situation. Genetics may give you a slight edge at the very top of academia, but otherwise education is the key.
Education is the low hanging fruit in increasing overall intelligence.
Right, but my question is for only the genetic effects (even with adopted children of different cultures there will be other differences that are not genetic). It would be difficult to determine, but there are enough statistical techniques that one could get a good idea. Surely different races can't have identical distributions of various "skills" -- the only question is how much they are offset from each other.
