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Scientist cited in push to oust Harvard’s Claudine Gay has links to eugenicists
(www.theguardian.com)
The 2019 paper is entitled Polygenic Scores Mediate the Jewish Phenotypic Advantage in Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability Compared With Catholics and Lutherans. It argues that the high cognitive abilities of Ashkenazi Jews are “significantly mediated by group differences in the polygenic score” – that is, genetically caused. They speculate that “culture-gene coevolution” may influence “Jewish group-level characteristics” like high cognitive abilities.
It's controversial to say that different groups have different average IQ's now?
On the paper’s claims about Jews’ innately high intelligence, Panofsky said that this was a persistent trope among white supremacists that “fits into a larger narrative about Jewish conspiracies and the idea that Jews are controlling the problems of the world from behind the scenes”.
...and this is equivalent to blood libel? What an absurd position to take. Noting that Ashkenazim are smarter and have higher educational attainment on average doesn't imply that they secretly control the world.
There's lots of ways to criticize categorizing groups by IQ scores: point out that this is the average and incredibly intelligent individuals can emerge from many groups, cite the cultural bias of most IQ tests and how IQ tests may not be accurately measuring G, note that groups are adapted to different environments and on average each have different abilities because of these adaptations and none are objectively superior to another, point out that IQ is only ~57-80% heritable meaning that intelligence can arise, (or diminish,) from any group, etc.,
Honestly it seems like they are proving this asshole's point, that academia, (or at very least The Guardian,) is biased against information that doesn't fit with a political narrative. That said, many of his other views and conclusions drawn are abhorrent and I disagree with them vehemently; one can recognize group differences without suggesting racial hierarchy.
Edit: Originally I posted that heritability of IQ was 85%, and that was inaccurate.