High Jewish and Asian IQ: real

contra the Collinses

The Collinses have recently released two videos arguing that both Jews and Asians are not superior in intelligence to Whites (the implicit reference population).

The arguments for both cases are different, so I will divide this post into three different sections:

Jewish IQ

Asian IQ

Polygenic scores

With no further ado:

Jewish IQ

Their argument goes more or less like this:

1. The largest, highest quality, and representative study (which uses the Project Talent) finds that Jews score disproportionately well on verbal tests and badly on spatial tests.

2. Richard Lynn selectively presented data (???) which estimates differences in crystallized ability (e.g. verbal, mathematical) and not nonverbal ability between Jews and Whites.

3. The meta-analysis of Jewish IQ cannot be trusted because it involves non-representative studies or incomplete measurements of intelligence

So, first, their description of Backman 1972 is accurate: Jews do well on VKN (verbal/general information), and MAT (math), but not so well on VIS (visual ability) and MEM (memory).

The existence of differences in group factors of intelligence does not imply no difference in general ability. In fact, the differences in group factors could be due to genetics, as group factors of intelligence are heritable as well.

from here

Second, there are studies that have used that dataset and calculated an advantage in general ability:

• Dunkel, C. S., Reeve, C. L., Woodley of Menie, M. A., & van der Linden, D. (2015). A comparative study of the general factor of personality in Jewish and non-Jewish populations. Personality and Individual Differences, 78, 63–67. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2015.01.014 

2.4.3. Intelligence A primary objective of the PT ability battery was to survey a wide variety of human abilities (Flanagan et al., 1962, p. 57). A general cognitive ability factor has been shown to underlie the variance among the tests of the PT battery (Carroll, 1993; Reeve, 2004). The PT ability battery is comprised of 11 tests that assess narrow abilities, including fluid intelligence (Abstract Reasoning, Arithmetic Reasoning, Mechanical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, 2D Rotation, 3D Rotation, and Table Reading) and crystallized intelligence (Vocabulary, Biological Sciences Knowledge, Social Sciences Knowledge, and Literature Knowledge). We followed recommendations of Jensen and Weng (1994) and Reeve and Blacksmith (2009) to obtain a viable g-score. The first unrotated principal component based on the 11 tests was extracted. This component accounted for 48.72% of the observed score variance in the operational sample. Scores on this component are reported on a standard IQ metric with a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 10. To check the accuracy of this method, we also computed g-loadings using Principal Axis factoring. In the current data, the vector of g-loadings derived using PCA correlated r = .996 with g-loadings derived using PAF.

from here

Besides that study, I also have access to this data, and have found that Jews score about 8.5 points higher than the average White gentile, and they score higher on tests that have higher g-loadings (aka better measurements of intelligence):

As expected, they do the best on tests of knowledge or mathematical/verbal ability, and the worst on rural knowledge (e.g. farming knowledge, hunting knowledge) or spatial ability (e.g. three dimensional reasoning, mechanical reasoning). But this does imply that there is an advantage in general ability.

Cremieux has also found a slightly larger difference (13 points) between Jewish Whites and non-Jewish Whites using a latent model and a different method of identifying Jews.

from here

As for Lynn’s meta-analysis, many of the studies were estimates of the difference in crystallized ability, but this is not unusual. They’re administered more often, which makes them more likely to show up in meta-analyses.

Contrast this to Murray’s analysis of Black/Hispanic/White differences:

from here

from here

North East Asian IQ

The first argument I hear from the Collinses is that Asian socioeconomic achievement over Whites is not due to intelligence. This is not correct: the answer is it partially explains it, but it’s honestly not something I’m invested in proving. I’ll just focus on the main question.

The next thing they brought up in the video is that Asians try harder in academics than Whites. This is true (and have written about this before), but it’s not relevant to whether they are more intelligent or not. It will cause the differences in academic ability between races to be biased measurements of intelligence, and tests of IQ as well, since many IQ subtests (e.g. arithmetic, reading) are also measurements of academic ability.

I could argue that Asian-Americans have higher measured IQs than Whites (which is true), but it would not be an apt rebuttal as it could be dismissed as academic effort. So allow me to go to a different datasource: national IQs.

National IQs (the accurate ones, at least) tend to come from international scholastic test scores, which North East Asians score higher than Europeans in (with the exception of North Korea, which had their IQ estimated based on refugees).

from here

This could be argued to be a function of higher levels of academic effort in Asia, fortunately, Becker has sorted his national IQs into two different categories: psychometric tests, which are mostly matrices tests, and scholastic ones.

On these psychometric tests, North East Asians still score higher on the nonverbal tests than British Whites (100):

from here: UW is unweighted mean, NW is sample size weighted mean, QNW is quality-weighted mean.

Polygenic scores

Polygenic scores rely on genome-wide association studies that are done by correlating individual SNPs (small locations in the genome) with a certain trait (e.g. intelligence). These GWAS are then used to calculate people’s genetic predisposition to traits by adding up the predicted effects of all of their genetic variants.

These are the group differences in scores for educational attainment:

from here

For cognitive ability:

from here