Soviet Scientists by Ethnicity in 1973

Commentator jimmyriddle finds statistics about the ethnic composition of scientific cadres in the Soviet Union in 1973 via Cassad (the original comes via the blogger Burkino Faso).

ethnicity-of-soviet-scientists-1973

 

Drawing on earlier statistical data, although on a more limited sample of different ethnicities, we have the following sets of correlations:

  • 1926 Census, literacy amongst 50 years olds+ – r = .92
  • 1926 Census, overall literacy – r = .72
  • 1939 Census, overall literacy – r = .61
  • 1939 Census, high school graduation – r = .93
  • 1939 Census, higher education – r = .99

Considering this without Jews who are huge outliers everywhere here:

  • 1926 Census, literacy amongst 50 years olds+ – r = .82
  • 1926 Census, overall literacy – r = .74
  • 1939 Census, overall literacy – r = .72
  • 1939 Census, high school graduation – r = .91
  • 1939 Census, higher education – r = .93

So the two best predictors are:

(1) The literacy rate amongst the last Tsarist era generation, i.e. people who were 50+ years old in 1926, hence were born before 1876. That was before the advent of mass schooling in the Russian Empire, so I suspect that was when the literacy rate amongst the various regions of the Russian Empire was also the most “g loaded” (apart from places where the Protestant factor was also at play).

(2) Even more so, the share of people with higher education according to the 1939 Census. This stands to reason.


PISA suggests that the Georgians have very low IQs. I mean literally India-like, in the low 80s. However, the above suggests that its underperformance is more a result of massive brain drain – as in other countries that score ridiculously lower than expected based on their ethnic composition, such as Moldova and Puerto Rico, and before the 1990s, Ireland – as well as possibly the collapse of the schooling system to an extent that didn’t happen elsewhere. Probably the two most highly achieving Georgians today are historical detective fiction writer and political oppositioner Boris Akunin (Chkhartishvili) and the controversial but undoutedbly very talented Moscow based sculptor Zurab Tsereteli.

Armenia does not participate in PISA, but its results from TIMSS were significantly lower than Russia’s, at around Ukraine’s or Romania’s level. However, it might be grossly underperforming for the same reasons that Georgia is. First off, a massive amount of the brainier Armenians have emigrated to Russia and the West. In both places they are prominent relative to their numbers, with a powerful lobby in the US (even if it has nothing on the Jewish lobby) and a very powerful lobby in Russia that one could argue stretches all the way to Sergey Lavrov himself, who is half-Armenian. Former chess champion and oppositionist Gary Kasparov is half-Armenian, while the older Soviet chess champion Tigran Petrosian was fully Armenian. They are also the closest cousins of the Jews in terms of genetic distance. A mischievous observation one can make is that like the Jews, Armenians also seem to be unduly prone to political radicalism when abroad, from Sergey Kurginyan and Gary Kasparov (in their own ways) in Russia to Maoist nutjob Bob Avakian and SJW figurehead Anita Sarkeesian in the US, but maintain a safely homogenous and culturally rightist (if dumber) society at home.

In the overall scheme of things, from Jews down to Gypsies, there are no really big surprises.

Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.

 

Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.

 

Apart from writing booksreviewstravel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.

Comments

  1. “A mischievous observation one can make is that like the Jews, Armenians also seem to be unduly prone to political radicalism when abroad…”

    For obvious reasons I’m curious about market dominant minorities in general. To what extent do they tend to be political, do the politics of such minorities form a pattern?

    From the wiki on the Hakka:

    “The Hakkas have had a significant influence, disproportionate to their smaller total numbers, on the course of modern Chinese and world history, particularly as a source of revolutionary, political and military leaders.[19]

    Hakkas started and formed the backbone of the Taiping Rebellion,[50] the largest uprising in the modern history of China.”

    “Hakkas continued to play leading roles during the Xinhai Revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty and the republican years of China.”

    “The Communist Party of China already have many Hakkas in its ranks before the outbreak of the Civil War. Li Lisan was the top leader of the party from 1928 to 1930. The Jiangxi-Fujian Soviet was the largest component territory of the Chinese Soviet Republic (中华苏维埃共和国) which was founded in 1931. It reached a peak of more than 30,000 square kilometres and a population that numbered more than three million, covering mostly Hakka areas of two provinces: Jiangxi and Fujian. The Hakka city of Ruijin was the capital of the republic. When it was finally overrun in 1934 by the Nationalist army in the Fifth of its Encirclement Campaigns, the Communists began their famous Long March with 86,000 soldiers, of which more than 70% were Hakkas.”

    “When the People’s Liberation Army (人民解放军) had its rank structure from 1955 to 1964, the highest number of generals, totalling 54, came from the small Hakka county of Xingguo in Jiangxi province. The county had also previously produced 27 Nationalist generals. Xingguo county is thus known as the Generals’ County (将军县) in China. During the same period, there were 132 Hakkas out of 325 generals in Jiangxi, 63 Hakkas out of 83 generals in Fujian, and 8 Hakkas out of 12 generals in Guangdong respectively, not mentioning those from Guangxi, Sichuan and Hunan.”

  2. I should say that I don’t have an intuitive understanding of what all of these Chinese revolutions were really about. Chinese history is many times more opaque to me than Western and Russian history.

    On the one hand China underperformed its economic potential during the Mao years, on the other hand he kept China sovereign and independent. A Kuomintang China would have been as dependent as Taiwan, Japan and South Korea are now. Sacrificing material comforts for the sake of independence is a fundamental human behavior.

  3. The Hakka are “guest people” (kejia) – ancient immigrants to South China from the North, they traditionally lived in fortified compounds in mountainous areas. A seedbed for martial virtues.

  4. [Probably the two most highly achieving Georgians today are historical detective fiction writer and political oppositioner Boris Akunin (Chkhartishvili) and the controversial but undoutedbly very talented Moscow based sculptor Zurab Tsereteli.]

    Come now! I know of several Georgian physicists, mathematicians, etc. who are not frauds or charlatans.

  5. I was interested by the more obscure high performers. From Wikipedia:

    • The Krymchaks (Krymchak: sg. кърымчах – qrımçax, pl. кърымчахлар – qrımçaxlar) are Jewish ethno-religious communities of Crimea derived from Turkic-speaking adherents of Orthodox Judaism.[2] They have historically lived in close proximity to the Turkic Karaites who also follow Judaism (Karaite Judaism).

    • The Buryats (Buryat: Буряад, Buryaad; Mongolian: Буриад/Buriad), numbering approximately 500,000, are the largest indigenous group in Siberia, mainly concentrated in their homeland, the Buryat Republic, a federal subject of Russia. They are the major northern subgroup of the Mongols.[4]

    • The Tat people (also: Tati, Parsi, Daghli, Lohijon, Caucasian Persians, Transcaucasian Persians) are an Iranian and ethnic Persian people, presently living within Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia (mainly Southern Dagestan). … Tats are mainly Shia Muslims, with a significant Sunni Muslim minority.

    • The Ossetians or Ossetes (Ossetian: ир, ирæттæ, ir, irættæ; дигорæ, дигорæнттæ, digoræ, digorænttæ) are an Iranian ethnic group of the Caucasus Mountains, indigenous to the region known as Ossetia.[12][13][14] They speak Ossetic, an Iranian language of the Eastern branch of the Indo-European languages family, with most also fluent in Russian as a second language. The Ossetians are mostly Eastern Orthodox Christian, with a Muslim minority.

  6. The “King Arthur” movie starring Clive Owen from about a dozen years ago was based on the notion that King Arthur was a Roman Legionnaire from Ossetia who stayed on in England after the Legions were called home in 410 AD.

  7. This graph once against demonstrates that UC Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine’s otherwise fine 2004 book “The Jewish Century” gets off to a bad start by asserting a conceptual grouping of Jews and Gypsies as “Mercurians.”

  8. There was a lot of petty anti-Semitic career discrimination in the USSR by 1973, so the Jewish talent advantage was probably even greater than this chart shows.

    My wife’s uncle, a USAF colonel with a Ph.D. in metallurgy, used to spy behind the Berlin Wall in the 1970s-1980s with Soviet Jewish rocket scientists who were headed to Israel (or America) after their five year cooling off periods. He’d cross into East Berlin as a tourist and meet a Russian Jewish scientist who was vacationing in East Berlin who was parked on a dark street and debrief him about what his Soviet counterparts were up to.

    I wonder how much of Israel’s economic explosion as a high tech center over the last few decades is driven by the exodus from the old Soviet Union?

  9. Anatoly Karlin says

    Ossetians are most famous for:

    (1) Being the last direct descendants of the Sarmatians left alive;

    (2) Being at the focal point of the 2008 South Ossetian War.


    Incidentally, Burkino Faso’s chart unfortunately leaves out quite a few groups. For instance, I can see no major Dagestani ethnicities (Avars, Lezgins, Laks, etc; Tats are a truly tiny ethnicity with 10,000 members) there. And of course ethnic Germans are missing too.

  10. Anatoly Karlin says

    There was a lot of petty anti-Semitic career discrimination in the USSR by 1973, so the Jewish talent advantage was probably even greater than this chart shows.

    Not necessarily (see 2).

    https://akarlin.com/2012/06/russian-anti-semitism-or-just-affirmative-action-in-action/

    (1) The 1920’s were a philo-Semitic period and AFAIK quotas on Jews entering universities weren’t present during this period. I do not know if there were formal quotas against Jews in the later, “anti-Zionist” period of Soviet history but it IS anecdotally known that barriers to entry into many institutions were higher than for other Soviet citizens. Certainly this played a major role in setting Soviet Jews against the regime. This is the well-known version which stresses Russian anti-Semitism.

    (2) The other explanation is that by 1989 when more than half of Jews had higher education the percentage of Jews who could access it even based on pure meritocracy had been maxed out. Let’s crudely assume a mean IQ of 100 for Russians and 115 for Jews with an S.D. of 15. This means that 16% of Russians and 50% of Jews will have an IQ of 115 or above. Let’s say that this is the part of the population that had access to a higher education in the Soviet era (this makes sense: The system was, for the most part, meritocratic, and standards for entry where far higher than today when higher education is far more accessible). According to our stats, the actual higher education achievement figures in 1989 were 14% for Russians and 56% for Jews, i.e. Jewish access to education was actually higher than what you would get by assuming reasonable mean IQ’s and no anti-Semitic discrimination. Of course even slight differences in the actual mean IQ levels (e.g. a Russian mean IQ of 97, not 100 – as may be more realistic) will have substantial impacts but they would not cardinally change the overall picture.

    My preliminary conclusion is that anti-Semitic discrimination at least in terms of higher education was negligible at least as indicated by this simple thought experiment. A more detailed model would be preferable but I do not see how it could invalidate any of this.

    Its scale was probably comparable to AA discrimination against Asian Americans (i.e. what Unz is campaigning against now).

    Of course Jews are much better at complaining than East Asians, who adhere so well to the reigning ideology that a considerable percentage of them are happy to sabotage Unz’s efforts to help them.

  11. Estonia ranks lower and Lithuania much higher than I would expect.

    What you said about Georgian high achievers makes me wonder about whether you ever really believed that Hitler had an IQ barely out of average bright range.

  12. Looking it up, I see that the Clive Owen movie asserts that King Arthur was a Sarmatian from north of the Black Sea rather than an Ossetian from the Caucasus per se.

    I think I got the idea about a Sarmatia-Ossetia link from the War Nerd, so refer to him, not me!

  13. Anatoly Karlin says

    Finns are also notable for their high IQ/low(er than expected) achievement pattern.

    Most parsimonious explanation supported by psychometric evidence? Lower S.D. Probably a consequence of high high hunter-gatherer ancestry and the relative lack of cognitive stratification selected for in those societies.

    Estonians are very closely related to Finns; their PISA results are now virtually identical. But presumably they will also share the Finns’ lower IQ S.D.’s, hence their modest but still quite high placing in this chart.

  14. Shaikorth says

    In PISA2012 math results (though not in other areas) Finland has below OECD average (92) standard deviation, about the same as Ireland and Russia (85-86). Latvia, Estonia and Denmark (unlike Sweden and Norway) are even further below the average SD (81-82).

    Interestingly, so is the Swedish-speaking population of Finland (80).

    De svenska elevernas poäng brukar i PISA-utvär-
    deringarna ligga väldigt samlade; standardavvikelsen är
    liten. I PISA 2012 hade Österbotten, Huvudstadsregio-
    nen, Åland och Nyland (utom HR) alla en väldigt liten
    spridning i matematikpoängen med variationstal på mel-
    lan 78 och 80 medan Åboland hade 86 och Språköarna
    81. Spridningen för de svenska skolorna sammantagna
    var 80, vilket också i statistiskt hänseende är lägre än de
    finskspråkiga skolornas 86 och OECD-medeltalet 92. Av
    grannländerna hade Estland 81 och Danmark 82 medan
    Norges, Sveriges och Islands variationer låg kring OECD-
    medeltalet.

  15. There is indeed a link. Ossetians are still called Alans, and the ancient Alans were a variety of Sarmatian.

  16. Too bad there isnt a break down of the various cossack groups. I am assuming being hard hit by the communist take over would have produced a brain drain in some of those groups.

  17. After WWII it was no longer cool to have a “German” ancestry in USSR.

    Still I note the absence of Koreans/Karays in the list, since Koreans claim they are so smart, and there were quite a few hundred thousand Koreans in Central Asia, relocated by Stalin.

  18. The “anti semitism” in the USSR is probably as valid as the discrimination claimed by BLM in the USA. The fact is that the USSR was a jewish creation, the jews claiming “anti semitism” were probably just doing so to gain international sympathy and move to places to make more money. Also, all those “scientists” are likely to be yet another example of a tight knit community given jobs to their own (like in Hollywood and Wall Street), most of those positions were probably administrative jobs. The myth of the jewish ubermensch is simply their ability to siphon off money to themselves and to have no qualms in being corrupt and unscrupulous.

  19. A mild surprise to me is that some of the Finno Ugric peoples of Russia do quite badly: Khantis, Maris, Veps, Udmurts, Mansi, Modvinians and Karelians are in the bottom third of the table (an exception are the Estonians who are sixth overall). One would suppose that these cousins to the Finns would have done better.

  20. Jacques Sheete says

    I see one religious group on the list while the rest appear to be ethnic groups. What’s up with that? I thought Judaism was a religion and a proselytizing one at that. I doubt that Jews are any more homogeneous that the various Christian sects derived from Judaism.

    “In short, the Jewish People, according to Sand, are not really a “people” in the sense of having a common ethnic origin and national heritage…

    http://inventionofthejewishpeople.com/

    “The Invention of the Jewish People,” first published in Hebrew in Israel with the title, Matai ve’ech humtza ha’am hayehudi?, is by Shlomo Sand, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University.

    It explains and clarifies a lot about Zionism as well as “Semitism.”

    The book was a bestseller in Israel for several months …”

    http://mondoweiss.net/2011/12/new-york-times-implies-anti-zionism-is-anti-semitic.html

  21. Shaikorth says

    They are linguistic cousins to Finns and Estonians, but assuming they would do better based on that is like assuming gypsies would do better because they are linguistic cousins to the Germans.

  22. The Peter the Great monument that Tsereteli put up in Moscow looks good to me. If 10 is perfection and 5 is my like/dislike boundary, then the old Bronze Horseman in St. Petersburg is an 8 and Tsereteli’s version is a 6. Anything above 5 is rare in modern sculpture.

  23. Jacques Sheete says

    Why are Jews (people of a religion) compared with ethnic groups here?

    Jews are probably no more homogeneous ethnically than Christians or Muslims which should come as no surprise since all three groups are members of proselytizing religions.

    “…the Jewish People, according to [Shlomo Sand, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University], are not really a “people” in the sense of having a common ethnic origin and national heritage. They certainly do not have a political claim over the territory that today constitutes Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, including Jerusalem.”

    http://inventionofthejewishpeople.politics.webfactional.com/

  24. Readers see also:

    Clannishness – The Series: Zigzag Lightning in the Brain – The Unz Review

    Georgians have very low IQs. I mean literally India-like, in the low 80s. However, the above suggests that its underperformance is more a result of massive brain drain – as in other countries that score ridiculously lower than expected based on their ethnic composition, such as Moldova and Puerto Rico

    Armenia does not participate in PISA, but its results from TIMSS were significantly lower than Russia’s, at around Ukraine’s or Romania’s level. However, it might be grossly underperforming for the same reasons that Georgia is.

    Then why do we see this sort of selective migration from those groups and not others?

    Great find! This chart will serve to be quite useful.

  25. The Jews mentioned in that graph are overwhelmingly Ashkenazi Jews, a group to which I, a lifelong atheist, happen to belong. Ashkenazi Jews are a homogenous ethnicity. Jews in general are not. Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Persian, Caucasus, Syrian, etc. Jews are related to each other but not very closely. Jews in general are a heterogenous group of related ethnicities, most of which are internally homogenous.

  26. “PISA suggests that the Georgians have very low IQs. I mean literally India-like, in the low 80s.”

    It is plain silly to think that that you can measure IQ, or that it is even a meaningful concept, for a country like India. Karlin should read Chapter 9 of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, which has the best discussion of the Flynn Effect that I have seen. Pinker points out that IQ tests in the US have had to be continually re-normed over the past century, and that if an average teenager went back to 1910, he or she would score 130 an IQ test. Its not that people have gotten that much smarter over the last century, but that as a country becomes more urban, industrialized and educated, people begin to get collectively better in abstract reasoning, which raises national IQ scores. India not only has a large, uneducated rural population, but one that suffers from malnourishment and disease.

    What the average IQ would be for India if the great majority of people were ever to become educated and well-nourished is anybody’s guess, but a rough indication is provided by the Punjabi Sikh and Hindu peasants who emigrated to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s to work in factories and foundries. Two or three generations later, their descendants outperform white Brits educationally (and in fact outperform every ethnic group except the Chinese), and with the Sikh community being the 2nd wealthiest by religious affiliation.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3521989/Betrayal-white-pupils-16-white-British-children-lag-12-ethnic-groups-alarming-report-says-let-schools-parents.html

  27. Jacques Sheete says

    Thank you! My thinking must be on the right track. The graph should have specified the ethnic subgroup of Jews it’s talking about then, no?

  28. Shaikorth says

    Perhaps. There were small Jewish minorities in the Soviet Union besides the Ashkenazi, like the Mountain Jews, but Ashkenazi were the largest group and the one renowned for achievement.

  29. The jews call themselves an ethnic group and they certainly are not a proselytizing religion, it is an exclusive racial religion. As for them miscegenating with other races, from whites, Arabs or Ethiopians, they still maintain their common racial origins. To be able to immigrate to Israel, religion is in fact not a requirement, only being able to show jewish racial roots is needed. It is no accident that the Nuremberg laws enacted in the Third Reich to classify what a jew is and the Israeli right of return laws are not that different. Being a jew is racial, religion has no great role to play in it, nobody is surprised when a jew calls themselves an atheist jew, when somebody calls themselves an atheist Christian or Muslim, that clearly does not work.

  30. TemporaryMax says

    “PISA suggests that the Georgians have very low IQs. I mean literally India-like, in the low 80s. However, the above suggests that its underperformance is more a result of massive brain drain – as in other countries that score ridiculously lower than expected based on their ethnic composition, such as Moldova and Puerto Rico, and before the 1990s, Ireland ”

    Any thoughts on whether this explains the low PISA (and possibly IQ) scores that come out of southern Italy/Sicily? Did all the bright southern Italians emigrate elsewhere (The U.S., Argentina, Northern Italy, France, etc…) or are they really just a little slower in the south of that beautiful country?

  31. Anatoly Karlin says

    It is plain silly to think that that you can measure IQ, or that it is even a meaningful concept, for a country like India.

    Since you can even measure g for chimpanzees and dogs rest assured you can measure it for any country.

    Karlin should read Chapter 9 of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, which has the best discussion of the Flynn Effect that I have seen.

    I have read Better Angels and if that is the best discussion of the Flynn Effect you’ve seen you probably haven’t seen much.

    For instance: http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Armstrong-Woodley-2014.pdf

    Which addresses your next point. In short, for the tests that actually matter – verbal proficiency, arithmetic, etc. – Flynn gains have been real but far more modest.

    India not only has a large, uneducated rural population, but one that suffers from malnourishment and disease.

    Have literally never said otherwise. In fact relative to people like Lynn or Woodley I’m an environmentalist if anything.

    What the average IQ would be for India if the great majority of people were ever to become educated and well-nourished is anybody’s guess, but a rough indication is provided by the Punjabi Sikh and Hindu peasants who emigrated to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s to work in factories and foundries.

    (1) This emigrant group was still self-selected.

    (2) The typical British Indian IQ averaged from many different tests tends to converge to the mid- to high-90s.

  32. Buzz Mohawk says

    There are at least three possible explanations for this, all different and two not obvious.

  33. Respectfully, this is not a good analogy. Yes, Gypsies speak an Indoeuropean language, but their ancestors and modern Germans ancestors have been separated for at least 6,000 years, or more. The Fino Uralic peoples are ethnically far closer together (Mansi is the closest language to Hungarian) – I think there are other reasons why these “minor” Finno Ugril people do badly in this list, one might be that the very strong policies toward assimilation from the Russian and Soviet state, make many of them, once they move to a Russian city and have an university degree, identify as Russian (their names are russified, anyway). Those who stick to their native culture remain in the countryside and very few of them get to go to an university to pursue a scientific career,

  34. Some of the top Scientists and Artists (not to mention politicians) of the Soviet Union were Georgian, despite not being a very numerous people (around 4 million today, maybe one or two million more in Soviet times), so the idea that Georgians have a low IQ is dubious. Georgians do have a clannish culture (as is common in the Caucasus and in the Middle East) and clannishness can sometimes be confused with not very high intelligence.

  35. This seems correct to me.

  36. The main reason is that the Finno-Ugrics in the Empire were, and are, easily assimilated as Russian, and that has been going on ever since the Kievan Rus went through the forests to establish the ring of towns including Moscow, Vladimir, etc. E. g., The most celebrated late Imperial historian, Kliuchevsky, was a Mordvin.

    There was a film a few years back which explored the theme of non-Russians living in a Russian world in the general area of Moscow. Of course, part of the problem is that these non-Russians are only non-Russian in essentially trivial ways.

  37. Patriarch Nikon, who reformed the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century, was of Mordovian origin. The Wikipedia says that the current patriarch has Mordovian roots too, and in fact his surname (Gundyayev) doesn’t mean anything in Russian.

    It’s a bit like Germans slowly assimilating local Slavs in East Germany. They started doing this in the Middle Ages but there are still remnants. Lots of modern Germans (Dirk Nowitzki came to my mind first) have Slavic-sounding names.

    The Basque-speaking area in Spain has shrunk over the centuries and lots of very Spanish Spaniards have Basque surnames today – same kind of a long-term process.

  38. Shaikorth says

    There’s genetic distance to consider in addition to linguistic distance. Hungarians speak an Ugric language, and have been separated from the ancestors of the Mansis for perhaps 2000 years, but the Mansis are less related to them than gypsies are, and actually this latter point stands for all Europeans. It’s not far-fetched to assume genetic links related to academic performance would be even less significant than linguistic ones in this case.

    Nevertheless I agree with the idea of assimilation-induced brain drain. Wouldn’t you say the ethnicities most affected by that are the Orthodox Christian minorities on European Russia though (Belarusians, Ukrainians, Mordvins, Karels…)?

  39. Anonymous says

    A lot of really interesting surprises. Who knew Ukrainians, Belorussians and Lithuanians were so dumb? Like average IQ in the low 90s.

    Also who knew Azeris would perform so well. Are they the smartest brown ethnic group?

  40. Azeris aren’t brown. The smartest brown ethnic group is probably Iyers, Tamil Brahmins.

  41. Anonymous says

    Excluding the smart Indian groups (Tamil Brahmins, Jains, Parsees, maybe Marwaris, and anyone else?), it looks like Azeris are the smartest browns.

    I count Azeris as brown because they are non-whites in the brown world (south Asia, west Asia, north Africa). Obviously its at this edge of civilizations that racial classification looks like a social construct but I think generally people here will agree with my methodology that labels Azeris as brown because they are (1) Muslims in (2) a part of the brown world.

    If they were Muslims a bit more north (like Chechens in the Caucasus they would be white). If they were Christians at the edge of the brown world like Levant Christians they would be white. That’s my take based on what I think is other people’s opinion too.

  42. No cultural or religious criteria must be allowed to influence whiteness, which should remain a purely biological expression. Fortunately whole-genome studies seem to draw a satisfactorily sharp line around Europe.

  43. Anonymous says

    I don’t really care what’s supposed to be the right answer or whether constructing who is white is purely biological or subject to other factors. I was posting my take of what I think is the general opinion of readers here: Lebanese Christians and Chechens are white and Azeris (and Persians and Turks) are brown.

  44. Anonymous says

    Two major streams of Indian emigrants to the UK in the first decades after WWII were NHS workers and merchant families pressured out of East Africa due to decolonisation. That kind of self selection should add at least 5 IQ points to the emigrant population from the Indian average.

  45. I seriously doubt it’s a widely held opinion anywhere that Chechens are white but Azerbaijan Turks are brown.

  46. Azeris are basically Turks, the Azeri language is basically a dialect of Turkish. I would say most Turks are white, like most people in the Mediterranean basin, with their complexion going from the clearly white to the more swarthy

  47. Anonymous says

    There is a convenient cutoff mark. The Caucasus is in Europe and Azerbaijan is where Asia starts. I don’t see why the general opinion in the HBD sphere isn’t reflected in what I said about Chechens, Azeris, etc.

  48. The Caucasus is not in Europe.

  49. {Azeris are basically Turks, the Azeri language is basically a dialect of Turkish. I would say most Turks are white, like most people in the Mediterranean basin, with their complexion going from the clearly white to the more swarthy}

    You are partially correct: Azerbaijani language is a Turkish dialect.
    But there is no such ethnos as ‘Azeri’.
    The country of Azerbaijan had/has several ethnicities.
    Some are indigenous, such Talysh, Tats, etc.
    The current leader of Azerbaijan and his clan are ethnic Kurds (the Aliyev clan).
    ‘Azeri’ is a newly cooked up name.
    Turkic tribes inhabiting the area of current Azerbaijan were simply called Tatars before about early 1930s or so.
    Sort of like Singapore: there is a nationality ‘Singaporean’, but its constituent ethnicities are Chinese, Indians, and indigenous Malay. There is no ethnos ‘Singaporean’.

    { most Turks are white,..}

    What does ‘white’ mean?
    Do you mean Caucasian/Caucasoid?
    btw: the word Caucasian comes from Caucasus, where the arch-type of Caucasoids was identified. Don’t remember the scientist’s name, but he based his physical description of Caucasoid base on people he studied there, specifically what is now Republic of Georgia.

    Turks are originally from Uyguristan, near China.
    Over centuries, their appearance has changed.
    But little else.

  50. What justifies your claim that Azeris are the smartest brown people? Their cultural, economic and scientific achievements are on par with Kurds and Arabs.

  51. Physical anthropology does move ahead in two hundred years, although not nearly as fast as other sciences, and the identification by Blumenbach and others of the white race as associated with the Caucasus (whence the jargon of American police blotters ultimately derived) was based essentially on biblical texts rather than scholarly results of lasting value.

  52. It would be interesting to know the differences between the various Jewish ethnicities, e.g. Ashkenazi Jews, Georgian Jews, Mountain Jews, Bukharian Jews, etc. They somehow separate the Krymchaks from just ‘Jews’, though.

    I find Armenians a bit puzzling. If Armenians are so smart then how come Armenia was relatively poor even before the problems post-independence? Perhaps hard to judge now as there’s an economic blockade on two sides of their border (Turkey and Azerbaijan), and they had a huge war in the 90s. But even before this Armenia was pretty poor.

    Armenians were the main market dominant community in the Middle East for centuries, with mercantile communities being established from Singapore to Amsterdam. For centuries people used to comment on how smart and entrepreneurial Armenians were. Today they do not seem to stand out in any way. There are large Armenian communities in Iran and Arab countries where they seem to do a bit better than average, but again nothing remarkable. In the United States today I don’t think the Armenian population are any more successful than ordinary white people (in economic terms).

    Is there a possibility Armenians went through dysgenics?

  53. {and the identification by Blumenbach…}

    Apparently was not the biblical texts.
    I don’t have the time or the desire to provide alternative sources, nor to verify the references therein, and I do realize Wiki is not a reliable source for contentious issues (….anybody can claim pretty much anything).

    But please factually refute this assertion:

    {The name “Caucasian” derived from the Southern Caucasus/Transcaucasia region (or what are now the countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) because he considered the people of this region to be the archetype (cf. taxonomical “neotype”) for the grouping.

    Meiners’ classification was not grounded on any scientific criteria. It was Blumenbach who gave it scientific credibility and a wider audience, by grounding it in the new quantitative method of craniology. Blumenbach did not credit Meiners with his taxonomy, however, claiming to have developed it himself — although his justification clearly points to Meiners’ aesthetic viewpoint:}

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race

    Thanks.

  54. Am I reading this correctly: 3,244 Jewish scientists per 100,000 people, general population? If so, we have USSR population in 1970: 242,000,000

    Let’s divide by 100,000 to see how many 100,000-strong groups are there.
    242,000,000 : 100,000 = 2,420 groups, 100,000-strong each.

    Now, each such group can boast of eg 3,224 Jewish scientists. And so we have:
    2,420 x 3,224 = 7,802,080 Jewish scientists in all groups, or in the entire 1970 population.

    Now, cannot find the size of the Jewish population in the 1970 USSR. But was it higher than 7.8 million? I doubt it.

    The religious made up a significant minority of the Soviet Union prior to break up. In 1990, the religious makeup was 20% Russian Orthodox, 10% Muslim, 7% Protestant, Armenian Apostolic, Georgian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic, less than 1% Jewish and 60% atheist.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Union

  55. {Is there a possibility Armenians went through dysgenics?}

    No.

    There are very specific reasons for some of your observations, e.g. relative poverty in Republic of Armenia today. Maybe I’ll address it later, but too many sites and too little time….
    Basically, being smart is no defense against being physically exterminated.
    A common street thug with an IQ of 80 can murder an Einstein: his genius is no defense against physical violence.

    One anecdotal evidence of non-dysgenics: the greatest chess player, ever, Garry Kasparov is half-Armenian (mother) and half-Jew (father). He went off the rails when he got involved in politics, but his genius is a matter of record. Lots of Armenian chess grandmasters today and in former USSR.

  56. Japhet was supposed to be the ancestor of Europeans and an inhabitant of the Caucasus at the same time. There’s a character in Proust who declines to discuss the Dreyfus affair with a Jew because “I only speak about this matter with fellow Japhetians”.

  57. jimmyriddle says

    Only 30,000 Ugandan Asians who were expelled by Idi Amin ended up in the UK (out of a million Indians).

    There are lots of Indian doctors, but I’m not sure there are enough to effect IQ averages much.

    I recently drove an aunt to her appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon at a London teaching hospital. The only White medical students I met were a couple of guys with South African accents. A non-typical sample, one hopes.

  58. [Armenia Wins World Chess Title, Ukraine Takes Third ]
    http://www.rferl.org/content/armenia_wins_world_team_chess_title/24278984.html

    A tiny republic of 3 million, about 98% ethnic Armenian, wins World Chess Championship.

    Hardly a case of dysgenics. No?

    btw: Armenian team was leader Levon Aronian is half-Armenian (mother) and half-Jew (father)
    [Talking about his background, Aronian stated in an interview, “I feel much more Armenian than Jewish, although there are sides to me which are more Jewish culturally, involving the arts and music.”]

  59. I ask you to factually refute your own assertion about Blumenbach, and you are giving me some mumbo-jumbo about some biblical Japhet character.

    If you believe in the “scientific” basis of biblical characters, you must also believe Earth is 6,000 years old, and there were no dinosaurs roaming the Earth. Yes?

  60. I think we all know what we mean by white – the native inhabitants of Europe, some of its nearby places – Northern Africa, the Caucasus and the Middle East, as well as their descendants in their settler colonies in the Americas, Oceania and Southern Africa. I don’t use the word Caucasian (a word that as far as I know is only used in the US) since it is based on the discredited theory that white people originated from the Caucasus.

    As far as the Turks, it is well known the original Turkic people were from Central Asia and Central Siberia. Thus, some of the Turkic peoples like the Kazakhs, the Yakuts, the Kirguiz and so forth look distinctly East Asian. When Turkic tribes migrated to Anatolia at the dawn of the second millenium, they were able to give their new subjects their language but their genetic legacy eventually became diluted among the native populations – thus today most Turks and Azeris look white.

  61. The people who wrote Genesis divided humanity into three main groups: Middle Easterners (descended from Shem), Europeans (from his brother Yaphet) and Africans (from their brother Ham). This proves beyond a doubt that they’d never seen an East Asian, because if they had, they would have invented a fourth brother to account for them. It’s also likely that had they seen any East Indians, a fifth brother would have appeared in the story.

    It’s really amazing that modern PC leftism was able to come up with a classification of humanity (“everyone’s the same”) that is even cruder and further from the truth than that of Iron Age Levantine folk tales.

  62. Oh dear. I explain to you whence the “Caucasian” complex historically derives, and you blow a gasket. Go and have a lie down.

  63. So you’re saying the Armenian genocide had an impact on the success of Armenians?

    I know of Armenian chess grandmasters, but a large number are also of partial Jewish backgrounds (Kasparov, but also Levon Aronian). I’m just saying Armenians today seem to have the rate of success of people with IQs of around 100. It’s strange considering they’ve historically had a tradition of being very prominent.

  64. Sorry but are these figures per 100,000 people of their own ethnicity, or per 100,000 Soviet citizens in general?

  65. jimmyriddle says

    And because Noah was Jewish, he disliked Ham.

  66. There’s a passage in the OT which implies that π is equal to 3.0. By analogy with Shem, Ham and Japhet the race-is-a-social-construct lie is like π = 0. It’s a giant step backwards from even the Iron Age understanding of things. I’m going to use that to troll PC people.

  67. Oh dear, oh dear:

    {Japhet was supposed to be the ancestor of Europeans and an inhabitant of the Caucasus at the same time. There’s a character in Proust who declines to discuss the Dreyfus affair with a Jew because “I only speak about this matter with fellow Japhetians”.}

    Is that your alleged explanation of whence the “Caucasian” complex historically derives ?
    Maybe you have been lying down too much: maybe you need sit up more at your desk and study more, instead of spreading nonsense.

    [In Biblical as well as Quranic tradition, Japheth is considered to be the progenitor of European, and some Asian, peoples…]

    ‘Biblical’, as in mumbo-jumbno.

  68. {… the discredited theory that white people originated from the Caucasus.}

    Show me where is was discredited.

  69. I see you like engaging in pointless arguments. I don’t know what academic geography says about where Europe starts (and as I’m making clear I’m not trying to debate technical definitions). But I am concerned about generally used vocabulary. By that standard the Caucasus is in Europe and is the edge of Europe.

  70. I see you like claiming that arguments you lose are pointless. One needs only the most cursory acquaintance with geography to know that since ancient times Asia has begun at the Bosphorus. So your assertion is that it then ends somewhere in the mountains of eastern Anatolia? And the great divide separates Azerbaijan Turks from Lezgins?

  71. Anonymous says

    I think brain drain must have contributed to lower PISA scores in southern Italy, but they’re also improving at a fast pace now because of better schooling.

    http://italianthro.blogspot.it/2012/12/pisa-test-score-gap-closing.html

  72. I am saying this discussion is pointless because you are needlessly pedantic. For some unbalanced reason you keep on arguing along these lines when I’ve told you I’m not here to argue over technical definitions. The whole time I’ve pointed to a general viewpoint standard. So I don’t care what in ancient times people regarded as the starting point of Europe.

    I am maintaining as I have from the start that I think the general view of people here is the Caucasus is in Europe and Azerbaijan is where Asia starts.

  73. As my old science teacher used to say, you can measure a sponge with a micrometer, but that does not make the measurement more accurate.

  74. jimmyriddle says

    But IQ studies tend to replicate and are very predictive to boot.

  75. German_reader says

    “Am I reading this correctly: 3,244 Jewish scientists per 100,000 people, general population?”

    No, I think it refers to ethnic groups (e.g. 3,244 Jewish scientists per 100 000 Jews). At least that’s how I read it.

  76. couldn’t express it better.
    Soviet system and antisemitic?
    The “semites” have benn everywhere leading everything planing everything executing.
    All christian values have been destroyed (or there was an attempt to destroy them) all jewish values have been preserved AND promoted.
    The author got this one upside-down.
    I attended a school for elites of that regime in Slovakia, from 1968 to 1972 and there have been almost only Jewish children around me; either apparatchik jewish children OR JEWISH DISIDENTS’ children, at least 50%.
    I went to tech. university, most of those jews opted for human universities with jus, med, social networking, journalism, actors….and they got it, because most of the lectors, you guess it, have been jews as well.

  77. TemporaryMax says

    Oh good. Thanks for putting this out there.

  78. Anonymous says

    Not related to this one, about your thought on China vs India in 2012,

    Science is in the hands of very few people. So modern western emocracy is anti-science.
    Modern human right and optimization can’t coexist.
    In a word, modern western democracy and modern human right make good planning impossible.
    It is ridiculous to blame government, as it doesn’t even have the power to function properly.

    Before 1960s, good planning was still possible because :
    One, though people voted, but respected decisions by government,
    Two, “Give me the f123ing money or I will screw you” was not part of human right.

    BTW, Gandhi prolonged caste system for at least 100 years.

  79. Sean the Neon Caucasian says

    Gypsies? Seriously? That was one group I certainly didn’t expect to have any representation in science, let alone as a group be stationary long enough to be counted for anything.

  80. The USSR was not a ‘Jewish creation’. It is not a ‘fact’, unless you’ve read the same ‘sources’ over and over again without questioning it. It’s a seventy-year-old myth and people still believe it.

    Talk about useful idiots. You don’t live up to your name.

  81. You are free to offer a complete debunking of the article rather than spew memories out of your fictitious memoir. Maybe if you worked harder you could have gotten the positions, eh?

  82. Too bad the pie chart in the original blog post wasn’t mentioned. It shows that of the total million or so researchers, a majority were Russian. Only 3% were Jewish. Interesting nonetheless.