Some commenters have questioned my conclusions of the American Ashkenazi IQ. I noticed in one Unz article a reference to a paper from 2008. It uses fairly old data from 1997. Just to mention, in 1997 Finnish average IQ was given as 97, today it is given as 101 though there has not been any genetic change, so these kind of data is quite much influenced by environmental factors. The paper is by Helmut Nyborg from Aarhus, Denmark
and it gives a table where the IQ distribution of American Jews in 1997 is presented. The average IQ is announced as 110 and the data supports it, but look carefully at this distribution
American Jewish IQ distribution
IQ range
60-70 70-80 80-90 90-100 100-110 110-120 120-130 130-140 140-
percentage
0 0 3 17 23 24 22 10 1
Let us write the percentages of IQ distribution with the mean 110 and SD=15
IQ range
60-70 70-80 80-90 90-100 100-110 110-120 120-130 130-140 140-
percentage
0.4 1.88 6.82 16.2 24.7 24.7 16.2 6.82 2.28
Notice that the Jewish IQ distribution is more narrow at both ends. My explanation to it is that the distribution is a result of selective immigration. I mean, it is not my idea, it is from Lynn. Let us first take a distribution where the mean is 100, the standard deviation is 15, and the half below IQ 100 is removed. This would be the result if immigrants had to pass an IQ test and only above 100 passed. Of course, selective immigration can give the same result also without screening by IQ tests.
Let us write the percentages of IQ distribution with the mean 110 and SD=15
IQ range
60-70 70-80 80-90 90-100 100-110 110-120 120-130 130-140 140-
percentage
0 0 0 0 49.4 32.4 13.64 3.76 0.8
This IQ distribution has the mean 110, but the distribution is clearly not normal.
Let us wait for a generation. All subsets IQ1-IQ2 spread to both sides. In the normal distribution such spreading does not change the shape of the curve, but this is a truncated distribution and it will become closer to a normal distribution. Higher IQ1-IQ2 ranges will not spread symmetrically to both sides as they have a tendency to regress towards the original mean.
IQ range
60-70 70-80 80-90 90-100 100-110 110-120 120-130 130-140 140-
percentage
0 0 0 0 49.4 32.4 13.64 3.76 0.8
←20 18→ ←1.5 0.5→
←14 11→
←8 5→ ←0.6
_________________________________________________________________
0 0 0 20 25.4 25.4 13.14 7.36 0.9
In the next generation it will still spread and it will be fairly close to the American Jewish IQ distribution. The main characters will stay: the number of very high IQ people will be about twice as many as in the non-truncated distribution, and the number of very low IQ people will be much smaller than in the non-truncated distribution. Especially, you cannot estimate the number of very high IQ people in such a distribution by taking the mean and standard deviation and applying it to a normal distribution. Locally, for above 100 IQ people the standard deviation of this truncated and flattened distribution is close to 15, but it is still not normal.
There are some additional aspects in Nyberg’s paper. Table 6 gives the average IQ of white Americans as 106. As internationally the Great Britain/Nordic Europeans are set to 100, the figures in Nyberg are 6 points too high. This seems to be because he uses raw scores and converts them to IQ without subtracting the Flynn effect. This gives the IQ of American Jews in 1997 as 110-6=104.
Additionally the small samples used were too small. Table 2 gives the actual samples that Nyberg took from the large data. Thus, Jews were represented by 70 people, Episcopals by 61 people and so on. In Table 7 the total IQ distribution is not normal (it is suppressed on high IQ values), which shows that the samples were too small to be representative even as a total, or that migration to the USA for all whites has been selective, or that the results reflect low interest in doing well in school/tests, and more intelligent people in the USA become less religious as the modern culture claims that religions are false. All of these effects are very probably real: in earlier times the whites who migrated to the Wild West were not the successful people, but often hard working farmers who were looking for new land, so Lutherians in the USA need not be representative of Lutherians in Europe and so on. Interest in doing well in the school was notoriously low in the USA in the 1960s-1970s. Intelligent people in those times believed everything scientists told them, so they become Agnostics.
I think the data of Nyborg’s paper supports my original conclusions, that is, Lynn is correct. In 1997 the average IQ of American Jews was about 104. Additionally there are the findings of Ron Unz in his meritocracy articles according to which the average IQ of American Jews is today much lower than in 1997 and is only 2-3 points above the white average, i.e., they have 6% of the school contest winners. The propaganda about the high Ashkenazi IQ is most probably all false. The reasons for a high number of Nobel Prizes must be searched from a high fraction of Jews in universities getting these prizes.