Brilliant judges rule that administrative detention is copacetic

Not only junk science, but science reporting with a decidedly Zionist bias. Here’s Ha’aretz’s blurb:

To his credit, Ostrer also addresses the third rail of discussions about Jewishness and race: the issue of intelligence. Jews were latecomers to the age of freethinking. While the Enlightenment swept through Christian Europe in the 17th century, the Haskalah did not gather strength until the early 19th century. By the beginning of the new millennium, however, Jews were thought of as among the smartest people on earth. The trend is most prominent in America, which has the largest concentration of Jews outside Israel and a history of tolerance.

Although Jews make up less than 3% of the population, they have won more than 25% of the Nobel Prizes awarded to American scientists since 1950. Jews also account for 20% of this country’s chief executives and make up 22% of Ivy League students. Psychologists and educational researchers have pegged their average IQ at 107.5 to 115, with their verbal IQ at more than 120, a stunning standard deviation above the average of 100 found in those of European ancestry. Like it or not, the IQ debate will become an increasingly important issue going forward, as medical geneticists focus on unlocking the mysteries of the brain.

Many liberal Jews maintain, at least in public, that the plethora of Jewish lawyers, doctors and comedians is the product of our cultural heritage, but the science tells a more complex story. Jewish success is a product of Jewish genes as much as of Jewish moms.
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Jon Entine is the founder and director of the Genetic Literacy Project at George Mason University, where he is senior research fellow at the Center for Health and Risk Communication.

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an entirely different interpretation of Ostrer’s findings on “Jewish Genius:”

In the early 20th century, a folklorist and statistician named Joseph Jacobs wrote that “there is about twice as much chance of finding a distinguished person among Jews as among Englishmen.” Jacobs’s true specialty was fairy tales, but the notion of Jewish intellectual superiority has been taken as fact by several scholars, including Charles Murray in the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve. He and his co-author wrote that European Jews score higher on IQ tests than any other ethnic group, and Murray followed that with a 2007 Commentary article arguing that smarts were in Jewish genes.

After studying actual Jewish genes, Harry Ostrer is dubious of a strong DNA connection. Jews have been linked to many negative traits—greed, mental illness—as well as positive ones, so Ostrer in his new book, Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, explores whether genes are really involved.

In regard to intelligence, Ostrer argues (as have others) that a better explanation is that Jews were in the right place at the right time. Many studies have shown that IQ tends to rise as education systems improve over time. When the measurements trumpeted by Murray and others were done, Jews had been living at times and in places in which schools were getting better. “There still could be a genetic component,” Ostrer says. “But it’s not likely one that affects the whole population.” He cites one genome-wide study of identical twins (who share all their genetic material) of various religions that looked for DNA that might be linked to varying intelligence. It accounted for just 0.4 percent of the effect.

The Chronicle does mention a higher incidence of bi-polar swings from grandiosity to depression among Jews than non-Jews. The Ha’aretz author likes to cite Jewish mothers for credit for distinctions on genius. I’ll leave other analogies to Mooser.