Today we’re seeing clear evidence of genetic differences between classes: causal differences. People with higher socioeconomic status have ( on average) higher EA polygenic scores. Higher scores for cognitive ability, as well. This is of course what every IQ test has shown for many decades.

It’s driving regional migration in the UK: people with higher scores in depressed areas (like mining towns) are leaving for London, leaving those towns even more depressed.

There is ongoing decline in those polygenic scores, as observed in other studies and as predicted by demographers and science-fiction writers many years ago.

So we have classes that are genetically different, with upper classes genetically smarter. Could we have populations or ethnic groups that were genetically smarter? Obviously: simply create one by dropping a bunch of high-SES ( or high-scoring) people on a deserted island. Do we already have such populations? ( although, if I’m not mistaken, that would be racist.)

Well, sometimes a group has high scores, high ability because it is a far-from-random sample, while not being particularly genetically distinct or separate. ( either today or in the past). College professors are smarter than average, at least in fields like math and natural science, but they are drawn from many populations and do not marry entirely or primarily within their group. In fact they hardly breed at all, nowadays. Los Alamos High has the highest test scores in New Mexico: that’s an unrepresentative sample.

Nigerians in the UK seem to be a very non-random sample, highly selected: most of them have at least some college while maybe 5% of the general population in Nigeria does. I was was somewhat surprised to see this: most of the migrations I’m more familiar with (mostly US major immigration streams) are not so unrepresentative. Of course if they stayed in the UK and almost entirely married among themselves, they’d be a new, smarter-than Nigerian ethnic group. But that, too, would be racist.

Let’s look at Ashkenazi Jews in the United States. They’re very successful, averaging upper-middle-class. So you’d think that they must have high polygenic scores for EA (and they do).

Were they a highly selected group? No: most were from Eastern Europe. “Immigration of Eastern Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, in 1880–1914, brought a large, poor, traditional element to New York City. They were Orthodox or Conservative in religion. They founded the Zionist movement in the United States, and were active supporters of the Socialist party and labor unions. Economically, they concentrated in the garment industry.”

And there were a lot of them: it’s harder for a sample to be very unrepresentative when it makes up a big fraction of the entire population.

But that can’t be: that would mean that Europeans Jews were just smarter than average. And that would be racist.

Could it be result of some kind of favoritism? Obviously not, because that would be anti-Semitic.