Zoo Station

University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending and colleagues Gregory Cochran and Jason Hardy have an upcoming paper in Journal of Biosocial Science, titled "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence". Quoting from its abstract:

This paper elaborates the hypothesis that the unique demography and sociology of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe selected for intelligence. Ashkenazi literacy, economic specialization, and closure to inward gene flow led to a social environment in which there was high fitness payoff to intelligence, specifically verbal and mathematical intelligence but not spatial ability.

I am obviously not qualified to comment on the merits of the paper or on the standing of its authors in their community. I have no doubt that several readers will be sceptical of the paper's use of IQ as a measure of intelligence, though I personally don't see a problem with that. The paper offers some additional anecdotal evidence of unusually high intelligence among Ashkenazim:

During the 20th century, they made up about 3% of the US population but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes and 25% of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of [sic] world chess champions.

I can certainly add to this type of anecdotal evidence. I see plenty of it within the research communities I am familiar with: theoretical computer science and combinatorics. I also see plenty of it within my hobby community of tournament Scrabble players; an overwhelming majority of grandmaster-level Scrabble players in the US and Canada are Askhenazi Jews.

For further discussion, I refer you to the article "Natural Genius?" from the latest edition of The Economist that talks about this paper, leading off with the fantastic sentence "The idea that some ethnic groups may, on average, be more intelligent than others is one of those hypotheses that dare not speak its name."