
A University of Utah study suggests that higher intellectual ability amongst
the Ashkenazi Jews of central and northern Europe is the result of natural
selection for enhanced intellectual ability. The study says the selective force
was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe for about 900 years to
occupations that required more than usual mental agility. In describing what
they see as the result of the Ashkenazic mutations, the researchers cite the
fact that Ashkenazi Jews make up 3 percent of the American population but won
27 percent of its Nobel prizes, and account for more than half of world chess
champions. They say that the reason for this unusual record may be that differences
in Ashkenazic and northern European I.Q. are not large at the average but become
more noticeable at the extremes; for people with an I.Q. over 140, the proportion
is 4 per 1,000 among northern Europeans but 23 per 1,000 with Ashkenazim.

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The place of chess in European culture closely reflects the rise and fall
of the educated elite, for whom it was the recreation of choice. The story
begins with an image that records one of the great encounters of modernity:
a group portrait, painted in 1856 by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, which depicts
three major figures of 18th-century thought—the dramatist Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing, the Swiss divine Johann Caspar Lavater and the Jewish philosopher
Moses Mendelssohn. The focus of the picture, around which these ornaments of
the Enlightenment are stationed, is a chessboard.
The progress of chess from pastime to artistic or scientific maturity was
accelerated by Jewish assimilation, which transformed the German-speaking Bildungsbürgertum,
or educated middle class, of Mitteleuropa into agents of modernist reform.
Chess is a special case of a more general phenomenon – the higher than
average IQ of Ashkenazic Jews of European origin, which begs many questions
and still defies simple explanation. We do not know whether Jews had an inherent
disposition to excel at chess, or were attracted to the game because this intellectually
demanding, competitive, sedentary sport fitted the prevailing Jewish stereotype
in 19th-century Europe. What we do know is that what Gerald Abrahams identified
as "the chess mind" – a combination of memory, logic and imagination
– has much in common with skills that were and are characteristic of
Jewish intellectual life.
What follows is a very readable cultural history of chess in Europe over
the centuries. It culminates in the conclusion:
Once it was combined with that very English institution, the club, chess
became one of the great socialising forces, an equaliser of class, race, sex
and generation. It requires no infrastructure: just a few pieces of wood or
plastic. So much has been owed by so many to chess that it can be seen as a
microcosm of our endeavours, our constant companion through the ages. If all
that were left of mankind were the game of chess, aliens would know us for
what we are: not only Homo sapiens, but also Homo ludens.
Thanks to Ray Cheng of Virginia Beach, Va, and Frank Strzyzewski of Offenbach
am Main, Germany, for sending us these links.
While it is not our policy to editorialise on news articles, as a Philosophy
major with a background in evolutionary biology and ethology I cannot resist
adding a few comments. The conclusions of University of Utah study seem dubious
since no actual mechanism for the postulated "natural selection forces"
is given. An evolutionary conclusion is being drawn, but natural selection
always requires direct procreational advantages if distinctive traits are to
emerge. Intellect is not a quality generally associated with this, at least
not in civilised human society. In fact, if anything, it may be observed that
intellectually talented individuals tend to have a smaller number of offspring
than the average of the population.
On the other hand social environment and cultural heritage are orders of magnitude
better at producing excellence in intellectual fields – like jumbo jets
compared to continental drift. In our case we must assume that millions of
chess talents go completely unnoticed simply because the individuals were not
exposed to the game, or did not have a chance of receiving encouragement or
proper lessons in their formative years. However, in an environment where chess
(or music, science, mathematics) is vigorously pursued, a larger number of
exceptional talents will be discovered. If the Ashkenazi population encouraged
these activities for many generations, then that is where the explanation for
the unusual excellence will most likely be found – not in the incredibly
ponderous evolutionary process and with the biological mechanisms of selection
and procreational advantage.