Budget_Player_Cadet:
I’ve been increasingly unimpressed by PZ Myers the more I’ve heard of him, and this does not break the pattern. His proffered explanation is just as ad-hoc as Cochran’s, but does not actually simplify the problem. He offers two ad-hoc explanations for something, as opposed to Cochran’s one. He doesn’t really offer a reason why Cochran’s explanation is necessarily wrong, just an alternative hypothesis which is not as interesting.
So then we are still left with one interesting theory with very little to no genetic support as usual.
Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence, often referred to as "Jewish genius", is a subject that explores the perception that Ashkenazi Jews tend to have a higher intelligence than all other ethnic groups and excel disproportionately in many fields and has been an occasional subject of scientific controversy.
The average IQ score of Ashkenazi Jews has been calculated to be from a range of 108–115 under some studies, which would be significantly higher than that of any other ethnic group in the world.
A ...
Genetic studies have suggested that most Ashkenazi Jewish congenital diseases arose from genetic drift after a population bottleneck, a phenomenon known as the founder effect, rather than from selective pressure favoring those genes as called for by the Cochran, et al. hypothesis.[16][21] To take one example, the mutation responsible for Tay-Sachs disease arose in the 8th or 9th century, when the Ashkenazi Jewish population in Europe was small, just before they spread throughout Europe. The high frequency of this disease among Ashkenazi Jews today might simply be the result of their not marrying outside their group, not because the gene for Tay-Sachs confers an advantage that more than makes up for the fact that the disease usually kills by age three.[16] However, an examination of the frequencies and locations of the genes for 21 Ashkenazi Jewish congenital diseases suggested that six of them do appear to result from selective pressure, including the mutation for Tay-Sachs.[21] There is still no evidence one way or the other about whether the reason for this is increased intelligence for commercial skills or something else.[22]
Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker suggested that “[t]he most obvious test of a genetic cause of Ashkenazi the advantage would be a cross-adoption study that measured the adult IQ of children with Ashkenazi biological parents and gentile adoptive parents, and vice versa”, but noted, “No such study exists, so [Cochran]'s evidence is circumstantial.”[23]
AFAIK PZ Myers background in Biology is still counts more, And I do remember that a previous discussion on one of Cochran’s book “The 10,000 Year Explosion” did not leave a great impression.
And others did agree on being underwhelmed, like evolutionary anthropologist Cadell Last:
From my personal perspective, understanding recent human evolution and
I have to mention here what Marley23 pointed in a past thread, that deals with the past poster that I replied to, also pointed at the Nobel price winners as a good metric for the Ashkenazi’s IQ; not so much:
And you have to equate winning the prize with intelligence, and we have to assume that everybody has an equal chance of winning - the nominators and judges must be unbiased and equally aware of all possible laureates. In other words, I doubt it can be used as a reliable metric.