Quoted By:
At the risk of sounding jealous I would say that the Jewish people have "cheated", though it isn't their own fault. They have an extremely high rate of genetic diseases, tay-sachs, Gaucher and mucolipidosis to name a few. Some evidence suggests that the heterozygote version of these genes increases intelligence, in fact it's practically guaranteed they do. While the IQ statistic looks good on paper, nobody wants to have these genetic diseases in their genepool, yet removing them would most certainly decrease their group's intelligence. So they're essentially at a "false start", where a significant number of their "extra" points are just going to get removed by IVF and genetic testing in the coming decades in order to eliminate such diseases. I don't blame them, and I think it's the correct thing to do.
This is the problem with such rapid evolution, they gained those points in only about 500 years, far far too quickly, and such genetic diseases are the direct product. In fact about 1/3 of all Jewish people in NY carry a genetic disease. Europeans seem to have evolved non diseased versions of those genes convergently, but those genes are at a frequency which is too low to really make a difference, a half a percent, and they also have a lower effect size than the diseased versions meaning they don't increase intelligence as much. What I care about is the future, and while they have been successful, carrying such genetic diseases isn't good at all, they can pretty much only lose IQ points this century.
