Maggie Wittlin in Seed:
Steven Pinker climbed onto the stage and immediately laid out his most convincing credential: a fully-stocked reservoir of Jewish linguistic humor. He defined such words as “jewbilation”—pride in finding out that one’s favorite celebrity is Jewish and “meinstein”— slang for, “my son, the genius.”
The crowd was hooked; the man could do no wrong. And so the substance of the lecture began.
Apparently, Ashkenazi Jews—the Eastern European ones—really do have an average IQ that’s eight to 15 points higher than the northern European average. The Cochran/Hardy/Harpending paper says about four out of every thousand northern Europeans have an IQ of 140 or above. So, if Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 110, that means 23 out of every thousand Askenazi Jews have above a 140 IQ. Sephardic Jews, those descended from Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th century, have the same IQ distribution as the rest of Europe.
More here. [Pinker shown with Seed Chief-Editor Adam Bly in picture.]