Smarty Pants

So I woke up Saturday morning to discover I was brilliant. That’s what the Los Angeles Times reported, right there on the front page of the paper, Column One, Section A.

“Jewish legacy inscribed on genes?” asked the headline, but the juice was in the subhead: “Ashkenazi Jews have a higher rate of some deadly genetic diseases — and of high IQs. Scientists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending say that’s no coincidence.”

Bernie Madoff is sitting in a jail, thousands of his brilliant investors are broke, Israel just took three months to seat a government, the financial services and health care sectors are a shambles, print and broadcast media are dying, Hollywood is cutting back, lawyers are being laid off, and the NSA supposedly wiretapped a Jewish congresswoman making promises to Israeli spies (she denies it). In short, every sector where Jews are over-represented is in trouble. Boy, imagine how bad off we’d be if we were stupid.

Not to mention I spent a half-hour on Friday night trying to get the foil cutter on my five-dollar corkscrew to open, until I finally gave up and stashed it in the back of a drawer. Genius!

But here was Karen Kaplan’s article to tell me we really are, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor, way above average. Kaplan explained how two researchers, Cochran and Harpending, developed a hypothesis that the reason Jews of European descent have so many inherited diseases — Tay Sachs, Canavan, etc. — is that the same genes that pass on these afflictions also serve a beneficial evolutionary purpose.

As Kaplan writes, “The ‘faulty’ genes, Cochran concluded, make Jews smarter.”

How could a responsible newspaper feature such incendiary theories on its front page, a friend asked me over the weekend. All week long people have been telling me how uncomfortable the story made them feel. The Web site Jewlicious accused Kaplan and The Times of launching “a mainstream, anti-Semitic canard that Jews’ intellectualism is genetically based.”

I didn’t take as much umbrage, maybe because I read the same story in The Economist four years ago, and, um, in The Jewish Journal. The Harpending/Cochran hypothesis was our cover story on June 10, 2005. Hey, no one ever accused us of inheriting the responsibility gene.

Since then, the theory has generated four years worth of speaking engagements, controversy and derision. The controversy and derision come from scientists and laymen who say the pair have done no research of their own, nor gathered any original evidence to back up their claim, and that linking genetics to intelligence is not just dumb, but dangerous.

“What are their theories about those on the opposite end of the spectrum?” Kaplan quotes Neil Risch, director of the Institute for Human Genetics at UC San Francisco. “Do they have genetic theories about why Latinos and African Americans perform worse academically?”

The speaking engagements come mostly from Jewish groups. It might be dumb and dangerous to tell us we are innately brilliant, but, please, go on.

Harpending and Cochran, neither of whom is Jewish, have done no experiments to back up their claim. As far as I could tell, their research still consists of reading “more than 15 genetics textbooks.” If you read their study and scan their bibliography, you’ll see they also quote from the work of Kevin MacDonald, the Cal State Long Beach professor whom civil rights experts have dubbed America’s “foremost anti-Semitic thinker.”

Harpending and Cochran write that, “Though Jews make up less than 3 percent of the U.S. population, they have won more than 25 percent of the Nobel Prizes awarded to American scientists since 1950, account for 20 percent of this country’s chief executives and make up 22 percent of Ivy League students.” Impressive yes, but all that proves is the pair get the same kinds of e-mails I do.

To sum up their theory, the Jews who came to Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries were constrained by prejudice to practice professions that required brains over brawn. Since Jews didn’t intermarry, the smarter families made more money and consequently had more surviving children. Fast forward 40 generations, or about 1,000 years, and “an increase of just 0.3 points per generation would have added up to a cumulative advantage of 12 points.”

“People are perfectly willing to admit that some people are taller or some people are shorter,” Cochran said to Kaplan. “But no one wants to say ‘This group is smarter.’”

He’s not exactly right: People are willing to admit it provided there is proof.

Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker — now there’s a smart Jew — has spoken and written widely on this subject. There is little doubt that IQ is highly heritable and not affected by family environment, he said. As for Ashkenazi Jews and the Harpending theory, Pinker said the idea is “extremely testable: Take several sets of Jewish siblings. Test their IQs. Test their blood for these genes. Is there a strong correlation between gene presence and high IQ? Yes? Babe, you’ve just got yourself a validated hypothesis.”

No one has done that yet to science’s satisfaction, so in the meantime, Ashkenazi Jews will just have to labor under the onerous burden of a theory that says they’re naturally smarter. The only people who know, definitively, that nothing could be further from the truth are, of course, Sephardic Jews.

My own theory is that what explains Jewish achievement is not how smart we are, but how smart we act. And that is not a function of IQ, but of how big we dream, how dutifully we nurture our gifts, innate or guilted into us, of compassion, justice, imagination and humor. The advantage of my theory is that we can gather evidence every day, from every Jew we know, from our communities, from our very own lives — and the jury is always out.

“I never came upon any of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking.”

Who was it who said that? What kind of idiot would insinuate that brains and IQ are not all they’re cracked up to be? Oh yeah, Albert Einstein.