Steven Pinker shares a laugh with Seed editor-in-chief Adam Bly. On the morning after his lecture, Pinker visited the Seed offices.
Of the twelve billion people who have graced this earth, fewer than one hundred have earned the title of "Gentile Adored by My Jewish Grandmother."
Mark Twain successfully infiltrated the order when he penned Concerning the Jews, an article discussing the intellectual prowess and survival skills of the Jewish people. The membership otherwise consists largely of Europeans who helped Jews during the Holocaust and political leaders who have gone out of their way to make peace with Israel.
Three University of Utah anthropologists have done their darndest to reach that rarified group close to my grandmother's heart: Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending collaborated on "The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence," a paper recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Biosocial Sciences. In the article, they unveil a theory for why Jews have an average IQ that's one standard deviation above the European norm.
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If there's one thing that Jews love more than gentiles raving about Jews, it's Jews raving about Jews, which is probably why a lecture I attended last week was completely packed with Jewish blue-hairs. Steven Pinker, rock star cognitive scientist, bestselling author, and Yid-to-the-core, was to give his take on the paper, and the exiles from Egypt flocked to the Center for Jewish History on 16th Street for the occasion. Never one to miss a meeting of the Mutual Admiration Society, I flocked, too.
Upon entrance, we had to pass through metal detectors. On the same day the Transportation Security Administration lifted the ban on small scissors in airplanes, the woman in front of me was told she had to remove her tiny shears from her bag before she could go any further. Perhaps she was planning to crop the speaker's luxuriant, flowing hair and thereby deprive him of his superhuman intellectual strength. More than likely, she probably wanted to clip her nails.
It's possible that the center has these metal detectors up every day, but the message for this lecture was clear: We must acknowledge that others will be jealous of our brilliance and seek to destroy us for it. Forget the subways, a concentration of New York Jewish intellectuals is too good a target for anyone to pass up.
I sat down next to a sophomore anthropology major from NYU and scanned the audience: Jews all the way down with maybe the occasional goy hoping to catch a glimpse through the chosen peephole. Not many. And a black guy. Just one.
Steven Pinker climbed onto the stage and immediately laid out his most convincing credential: a fully-stocked reservoir of Jewish linguistic humor. He defined such words as "jewbilation"—pride in finding out that one's favorite celebrity is Jewish and "meinstein"— slang for, "my son, the genius."
The crowd was hooked; the man could do no wrong. And so the substance of the lecture began.
Apparently, Ashkenazi Jews—the Eastern European ones—really do have an average IQ that's eight to 15 points higher than the northern European average. The Cochran/Hardy/Harpending paper says about four out of every thousand northern Europeans have an IQ of 140 or above. So, if Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 110, that means 23 out of every thousand Askenazi Jews have above a 140 IQ. Sephardic Jews, those descended from Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th century, have the same IQ distribution as the rest of Europe.