Thinking positively: The genetics of high intelligence

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136 points gwern | 1 comments | 01 Nov 15 23:33 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

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danieltillett ◴[02 Nov 15 09:50 UTC] No.10490915[source]▶

I would be very surprised if high intelligence was anything other than the extreme edge of a normal distribution of the human population. For it to be anything other than this it would require people of high intelligence to be a sub-population that did not breed with the rest of humanity.

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douche ◴[02 Nov 15 13:03 UTC] No.10491579[source]▶

>>10490915 #

Ashkenazi Jews would seem to be a well-studied sub-population that tends to possess above-average intelligence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence

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1. ZeroGravitas ◴[02 Nov 15 14:08 UTC] No.10491858[source]▶

>>10491579 #

I notice in that page it compares the number of "full" Ashkenazi Jews in the population, to the number of people who won various academic prizes who had "full or partial" Ashkenazi ancenstry, which seems like a very blatant distortion.

On reading slightly further I see someone else has already spotted this and added that disclaimer to the text.

Seems like it would be relatively easy to compare like with like here, which makes me suspicious of why it isn't done. Does that mean that the effect disappears when you do that comparison? It's certainly going to be reduced.

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