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by danieltillett 3883 days ago
It is in principle possible for a sub-popualtion like Ashkenazi Jews to have a higher mean intelligence and hence many more individual with extremely high intelligence without there being alleles with large affects on intelligence. It would just mean that they have a higher frequency of the small positive effect alleles. More importantly, people have looked for such alleles in the Ashkenazi population and have failed to find them.

As far as I am aware there in no genetic disorder that only Ashkenazi’s suffer from that is not also present in the rest of the human population, the only difference is frequency.
2 comments
cba9 3882 days ago
> More importantly, people have looked for such alleles in the Ashkenazi population and have failed to find them.

They have? I'm not aware of any GWASes targeting intelligence using Ashkenazi samples.

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Mz 3883 days ago
It is in principle possible for a sub-popualtion like Ashkenazi Jews to have a higher mean intelligence ...

As far as I am aware there in no genetic disorder that only Ashkenazi’s suffer from that is not also present in the rest of the human population, the only difference is frequency.

Do you honestly see no possible connection between these two things?

That's a serious question, not intended as argumentative per se.

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danieltillett 3883 days ago
I think what you are asking is do I think there is any connection between the sorts of mutations found more frequently in the Ashkenazi population and intelligence and the answer is there may well be some, but the contribution for any one mutation is very small.

I don’t think anyone has shown that being a carrier for any of the common mutations found in the Ashkenazi population increases intelligence in a measurable way, but if anyone knows of such a study I would love to read it.

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Mz 3883 days ago
One of my best search skills appears to be ego surfing, so here is a link from a previous discussion I participated in about ten years ago:

www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/7/29/20293/9910

Edit: It contains the stats I was trying to reference above but was misremembering. They are 3% of the population and 27% of U.S. Nobel Prize winners.

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danieltillett 3883 days ago
Yes Ashkenazi Jews are found disproportionally in professions where having a high intelligence increases the probability of success, however, no one really knows why. It is possible that it is genetic (I would be surprised if there was not at least some genetic component), but it could also be cultural.
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