The greatest controversy in psychological science today – perhaps in all science – is that regarding the heritability of intelligence. Although the science itself is reasonably clear, the topic is so heavily politicised that certain positions have become entrenched.
The anti-hereditarian side can be dubbed the Jewish Position. This is for two reasons. One – the foremost supporters of the position are all Jews, and two – almost all Jews adhere to this position. Both of these assertions become clear if one examines the history of the debate around the heredity of intelligence.
Franz Boas was the earliest major opponent of the hereditarian position. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Wikipedia says of him that “Boas’s main project was to distinguish between biological and cultural heredity, and to focus on the cultural processes that he believed had the greatest influence over social life”.
This belief – that cultural influences have the greater influence on human behaviour and biological ones the lesser, or none at all – is the Jewish Position in a nutshell.
Boas introduced the concept of cultural relativism to the psychological sciences. Before him, it was assumed that the more civilised a culture was, the superior. After him, it was claimed that no-one could say that any culture was superior to any other. This attitude, which is essentially that of slave morality, is political and not scientific in nature. It’s the attitude of someone who promotes tolerance for the sake of tolerance and not for the sake of alleviating suffering.
When Boas’s supposed finding that American and European whites have significantly different skull sizes was proven to have been made up, Jewish professor Jonathan Marks defended his co-ethnic, claiming that those who had debunked Boas had themselves “been quickly rebutted by more mainstream biological anthropology.”
According to Marks’s Wikipedia page, he is “skeptical of genetic explanations of human behavior” and “of ‘race’ as a biological category.” These two attitudes are core components of the Jewish Position, the intent of which is to encourage out-group favouritism and to discourage in-group favouritism. As such, it strenuously denies any scientific evidence that suggests an out-group might be genetically inclined to behave violently or criminally.
Marks once wrote, citing fellow Jew Richard Lewontin (see below) that “…the point of the theory of race was to discover large clusters of people that are principally homogeneous within and heterogeneous between, contrasting groups. Lewontin’s analysis shows that such groups do not exist in the human species…” The Jewish Position denies that race is an valid concept.
Boas heavily influenced co-ethnic Elliot Aronson, born in 1932. Aronson’s ‘Nobody Left to Hate‘ continued the established Jewish trope that exclusion is to blame for pathological behaviour. The book suggested that the reason for the Columbine High School shooting may have been that Klebold and Harris had been excluded by the other students, and therefore the solution to violence is to reduce out-group antipathy.
Central to the Jewish Position is the idea that all exclusion on the basis of genetic or biological grounds is inherently immoral. Further, any in-group preference exercised on genetic or biological grounds is immoral. Proponents of the Jewish Position draw a connection between border control and concentration camps. For them, all lines between folk groups – whether lines of inclusion or exclusion – are evil.
Also born in the 1930s was Richard Lewontin. Lewontin pushed the Jewish Position so hard, a fallacy was named after him. A stubborn opponent of genetic determinism, Lewontin’s approach was typical of the Marxist that he proudly claimed to be. As is often the case with both Jews and Marxists, he opposed genetic determinism in part because it downplays the value of social activism.
Lewontin was one of the harshest critics of Edward O. Wilson’s landmark work Sociobiology. As is typical of those pushing the Jewish Position, his criticism of the work equated genetic determinism with fascism. He went on to co-write, with two other Jewish authors, a book called ‘Not In Our Genes‘, a groundbreaking work of biology denial.
One of the co-authors, Steven Rose, was from Britain, whereas the other two were from America. This reveals the degree to which the Jewish Position is supranational: Jews everywhere believe it, no matter which country they’re living in. In Australia, South Africa, Brazil, just as in America and Europe – everywhere there are Jews, the Jewish Position is asserted.
Lewontin collaborated closely with Stephen Jay Gould, another co-ethnic who prominently supported the Jewish Position. Gould had no shame about equating genetic determinism with Nazism, going as far as to blame people who believe in IQ science for the Holocaust. Gould took issue with anyone who believed in border control at all, also equating this to Nazism.
Gould was criticised for his 1981 propaganda masterpiece, The Mismeasure of Man, in which he smeared intelligence researchers as racists. It has been observed that “Gould’s Marxist political beliefs made him attack intelligence research because he saw it as a threat to his egalitarian social goals.” Ironically, Gould was aware that a person’s social goals affected what that person considered to be accurate science. He just didn’t apply this criticism to himself.
Robert Wright wrote in a letter to the New York Review of Books that “many evolutionary biologists consider Gould’s writings a serious impediment to popular understanding of Darwinian thought.” This is of true of everyone who takes the Jewish Position, which in its essence prioritises political expedience over truth and knowledge. It is a form of science denial, in particular biology denial.
The most prominent Jewish anti-hereditarian in popular culture today is Jared Diamond. Diamond’s most famous work, Guns, Germs and Steel, sought to show that the European dominace of recent centuries was a geographical fluke and not due to any inherent genetic superiority. According to Diamond, if Africans had had more plants suitable for domestication and a more pronounced East-West axis, they would have dominated the world instead.
In Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond describes as “loathsome” the use of biological differences to explain economic outcomes. Yet, as a critique of Diamond’s points out, Diamond’s environmental determinism cannot account for why natural resource-poor Japan is wealthy, or why natural resource-wealthy Nigeria is poor. A biological determinist, aware that the most valuable human capital is the IQ of the people, can easily account for both.
The most prominent Jewish anti-hereditarian in academia today is Robert Sternberg. Sternberg is foremost in pushing nonsense like stereotype threat, the laughable idea that the low academic performance of blacks is because they’ve internalised white supremacist ideas about blacks being dumb.
Stereotype threat has been cited by Jewish researchers such as Joshua Aronson (the son of Elliot menioned above) as the reason for black academic underachievement. The reality is that, like all the other excuses made by people holding the Jewish Position, stereotype threat is a political concept and not a scientific one.
The political conclusion that Sternberg is desperately trying to avoid is that schools ought to be resegregated. To that end, he promotes the narrative that white people are to blame for black underachievement. Sternberg and his stereotype threat narrative claim that blacks only underachieve because white people expect them to, and thus black underachievement is due to white moral failure.
In summary, the Jewish Position is biology denial applied to the subject of human behaviour.
It’s fair to call it the Jewish Position because almost all of the people promoting it are Jews (as mentioned above) and because almost all of the people opposing it (Francis Galton, Ronald Fisher, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, James Watson, Hans Eysenck, Arthur Jensen, Phillipe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Charles Murray, Satoshi Kanazawa, Linda Gottfredson et al.) are non-Jews. Jewish hereditarians, like Richard Herrnstein, are rare.
It’s worth noting that cultures without a heavy Jewish academic and media presence, such as China, India, Japan and Korea, near uniformly reject the Jewish Position. It’s only in the West, which does have a heavy Jewish academic and media presence, where the Jewish Position is taken seriously. Everywhere else, the genetic influence on intelligence is treated much the same as the genetic influence on height, i.e. as an obvious truth.
It’s also worth noting that the Jewish Position is never taken with regards to Israel. Where Israel is concerned, not only are borders and exclusion considered perfectly legitimate, but biological science (in the form of DNA analysis) can even be used to tell if someone is Jewish or not. In Israel, people can have a marriage licence denied if they can’t prove Jewish ancestry by DNA test.
Such policies would result in howls of outrage from all of the Jewish intellectuals mentioned above if any Western country introduced them – yet Israel may do so without a peep of protest.
The reasons why Jews almost uniformly hold the Jewish Position are probably best explained by Kevin MacDonald in his Culture of Critique. It’s enough for this essay to establish the trend that Jews who hold academic positions in the life sciences almost always reject hereditarianism, whereas non-Jews in similar positions in the life sciences almost always accept it.
The sum total of all of these facts is that no-one should ever trust a Jew or anyone pro-Jewish (such as a universalist Abrahamist) when it comes to discussions about heredity and the effect of genetics on human behaviour. They cannot be trusted to be honest on such issues any more than Nazis can, because they have a vested political interest in misrepresenting the truth (an example of what this column has previously called the Palestinian Paradox).
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