There is a popular claim in White Nationalist circles that Jews have been involved in the suppression of IQ and race related research. They can list persons like:
- Leon Kamin, old school heritability denialist, co-author of The Science and Politics of IQ (1974) and Not in Our Genes (1984)
- Steven Jay Gould, author of infamous The Mismeasure of Man (1981)
- Richard Lewontin, mostly famous for Lewontin’s fallacy and some older work in population genetics
- Steven Rose, also author of Not in Our Genes
- Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)
- Robert Sternberg, ad hoc critic of Jensen, mostly famous for his odd triarchic model
- Daniel Goleman, proponent of emotional intelligence
In fact, the first 4 are the top 4 mainstream critics. In recent years, the mantle has passed to people like Ken Richardson and Oliver James, but they don’t appear to be Jewish. Same is true for Richard Nisbett.
But then again, Jews are smart and are present in large numbers in most areas of science. So, maybe this is just cherry picking. How about the other side, can we also name a bunch of Jews there too? Yes, we can:
- Arthur Jensen, the most famous proponent of the hereditarian view for race and IQ. Danish-Jewish background.
- Richard Herrstein, co-author of The Bell Curve (1994).
- Seymour Itzkoff, editor of a number of IQ related books, including Jensen’s.
- Hans Eysenck, prominent psychologist, wrote a defense of Jensen’s views in Race, Intelligence and Education (1971). German Jewish background, literally fled from Nazi Germany.
- David Wechsler, of the famous test battery
- Ulric Neisser, chairman of the APA committee on IQ
- Steven Pinker, author of famous The Blank Slate (2002)
- Michael H. Hart, author of Understanding Human History (2007) which is essentially a reply to Gens, Germs and Steel.
Charles Murray does not seem to be Jewish, and neither does Richard Lynn or Phil Rushton.
Can one find more Jews? Certainly, but it depends on how low one sets the bar for inclusion. Should we include various left-wing social thinkers to the list? Other psychologists who have occasionally made critical remarks of IQ? Every time, one will have to look for equally minor players on the other side. There’s a lot of Jewish economists who are generally critical of left-wing social ideas. And indeed, Jews active in all kinds of advocacy.
One cannot prove a Jewish conspiracy or tendency to undermine IQ and race related science by cherry picking names of lists. It would need a detailed, large-scale quantitative study. This is possible. One way would be to obtain a list of English language nonfiction books published since, e.g. 1945 and metadata. One could then derive tags, themes etc. from the metadata and the title. Similarly, one can derive ancestry status from the author names and any metadata one can find, e.g. via Wikipedia. Finally, one would book for associations between ancestry and content. If there is any Jewish tendency, it will show up here.
