Yes, smarter people are less religious. Really

Larry Auster is miffed at research which shows that atheists have higher IQs. He explains it as smart but impressionable young minds being brainwashed by liberal atheist college professors.

While I agree that this partly explains why people who self-identify as liberals have higher IQ (on average), it is most certainly not the reason why people with higher IQs are more likely to be atheist.

I actually previously discovered that Larry’s speculation is false. In the General Social Survey, it is primarily Wordsum score and not years of schooling which correlates with less religiosity. It should also be noted that the correlation of higher IQ with less religiosity was observed in the 1920s, before liberals took over the colleges. And even before the invention of IQ tests, it can be observed though the study of history that the elites tended to be more secular than the masses.

In the United States where belief in God is the norm, self-identifying as an atheist means you are likely to have thought about the issue, which indicates higher intelligence. But beyond this, it seems obvious to me that smarter people find the Bible hard to believe, so even when smarter people claim to believe in God, their religious beliefs tend to be more like universal Unitarianism than traditional Christianity with its reliance on supernatural events for which there is no historical or scientific evidence.

* * *

This topic does, however, make me mad at the smugness of liberals who enjoy reading about how liberals have higher IQs. In other contexts, they would insist that IQ measures nothing but the ability to take tests. But when IQ seems to validate their believe system, suddenly it becomes relevant.

* * *

It should also be noted that smart people are more likely to behave the way they are supposed to behave, so there’s the phenomenon that smart people are more likely to attend church even though they are less likely to believe in the religion, if attending church is deemed to be the proper behavior in their social group.

I’ve also noted the irony that smarter people are less likely to believe that premarital sex is wrong, yet at the same time they are less likely to actually engage in the activity. And I wrote that more than two years before the absurdity of Christian anti-premarital sex Sarah Palin with her unmarried pregnant teenage daughter. The lack of future time orientation and self control required to live up to the standards of their belief system is evidence of lower IQ.

* * *

Mitt Romney’s devout Mormism still mystifies me.

Comments

[rob]

"I’ve also noted the irony that smarter people are less likely to believe that premarital sex is wrong, yet at the same time they are less likely to actually engage in the activity."

When something might be a bad idea, and you really, really want to do it, thinking it's super wrong might provide some restraint. Cold-blooded smart people mostly don't want to do all that stupid shit. The ones that do, largely can handle it. So the upper middle-class mainly has first hand experience of the harm that violating taboos and commiting victimless crime causes because they are taboo or crime. Sure, legalize prostitution, your daughter won't be a whore. Decriminalize pot, you like it, and who really cares that blacks shoot each other over drugs and drug money. Have premarital sex, what kind of retard can't avoid pregnancy?

Before criticizing religion in the white working class, take a good look at the black underclass and the British slums. Some people need fire 'n' brimstone. Without religion, all of Palin's daughters might have 3 or 4 chilluns, and who knows where the babbydaddies be at.

"Romney’s devout Mormism still mystifies me." To be a Mormon, you gotta be pretty devout. There's not really a Mormon version of reform Judaism, where they hang and network with their own. Romney climbed pretty high as Mormon: he drops it, his political career is over. What could he say "I was just pretending because I liked the social structure," or "hey, I just realized that I should speak in tongues be an effing snake-handler!"

[someone]

This is totally unrelated to the topic but I thought you might be interested in this post about students paying placement firms thousands of dollars for internships.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-0301-interns-story--20100301,0,1567115.story

[Lugo]

"it seems obvious to me that smarter people find the Bible hard to believe,"

Except for the thousand plus years of history when the smartest people either believed it or kept quiet about the fact that they didn't for political reasons. Today smart people are more likely to signal disbelief for political reasons. What you're really measuring is political opinion, not smartness per se. As Auster said, the fact that the smartest people in the USSR were Communists does not indicate that Communism was true or that smart people arrived at believing Communism through a process of ratiocination.

[HS: During those thousand years, the people who benfitted from the social order were self-interested in keeping things the way they were. But there's lots of evidence the elite weren't true believers. Like the King Henry VIII kicking out the Catholic Church; he clearly saw religion as a way to help himself rather than something he personally believed in. Karl Marx correctly identified the fact that the rich used religion to control the poor.]

[Peter A]

smarter people are less likely to believe that premarital sex is wrong, yet at the same time they are less likely to actually engage in the activity.

I'd say that's simply because they have less opportunity. Sex generally requires a consenting partner...OTOH I bet smarter people masturbate more. To be less snarky - I also suspect on average that smart people mature physically a little later than people of lower intelligence.

Even smart people have limited time on this earth and tend to cut corners here and there. I suspect Romney just doesn't give his religion that much conscious thought - maybe at some level realizing he shouldn't go there. He uses his exceptional brain power for business, family and politics and may not be that reflective. Not that unusual even among "the smart". If you sat Romney down in a room with nothing else to focus on for 3 hours and asked him to justify his religious beliefs he'd probably find himself in a quandary.

[concerned netizen]

Larry Auster's favorite words are "profound", usually preceding the word "evil" and "gnostic."

Thus Stanley Fish, who writes sympathetically of religion in the public sphere, is described as "profoundly evil."

"He explains it as smart but impressionable young minds being brainwashed by liberal atheist college professors. "

This is pure bullshit. I went to an Ivy League school and I can assure you that being openly religious was not only completely kosher but somewhat valorized. It depends on the kind of religion. Being an anti-abortion Evangelical, a Mormon, or a Hassidic Jew would have been derided or shunned.

But being an artsy but devout Catholic, a somewhat mystical high church Protestant, or Modern Orthodox Jew was admired.

It depended on the STYLE. And that's what being an Ivy Leaguer is all about, isn't it? Style.

[Sid]

"This topic does, however, make me mad at the smugness of liberals who enjoy reading about how liberals have higher IQs. In other contexts, they would insist that IQ measures nothing but the ability to take tests. But when IQ seems to validate their believe system, suddenly it becomes relevant."

In general, I think that social liberal attitudes (such as less reservations about sex) make sense for intelligent, self-controlled people with almost sterile personalities. I'll provoke some controversy here, but R.J. Hollingdale in an introduction to Schopenhauer wrote that many intellectuals have a sensuous side to them, which is strikingly against Rushton's observation (small brains = big genitals). I believe this is in part because smart, reserved people often have weaker emotional connections with others, and often turn to sex to relieve this isolation. They then subsequently write long books against traditional, more puritanical social codes which associate sex with the irrational, animalistic side of man, largely because intellectuals feel queesy and guilty about the animalistic passions they had. Any criticism they receive, from whichever source, convicts them in their minds.

Well, let them get in the hay and feel better about themselves. But as for people with low IQs and minimal self-control, society needs to instill monogamous values and sexual restraint into them, for even a modicum of civility among them. I'm not saying that the black community was in great shape before the 1960's, but I agree with Steve Sailer that liberal social attitudes, when profligated to more than just shy brainiacs, is devasting for the hot-blooded.

[Richard Hoste www.hbdbooks.com]

"Mitt Romney’s devout Mormism still mystifies me."

You answered it yourself.

"It should also be noted that smart people are more likely to behave the way they are supposed to behave, so there’s the phenomenon that smart people are more likely to attend church even though they are less likely to believe in the religion, if attending church is deemed to be the proper behavior in their social group."

His social group is Mormons, not Ivy league eggheads.

[Matt]

Funny comments, but I can with absolute certainty tell you that Romney has thought about religion, and he believes it unequivocally. Maybe he's dumber than you. Maybe he knows more than you. But he doesn't think like you. I don't know Mitt Romney, but I know his friend Clayton Christensen, who is definitely smarter and probably more devout than Mitt. A former Rhodes Scholar and current Harvard Business School professor, Clay wrote an interesting essay about why he believes.
There is a link at the end of this bio:
http://www.claytonchristensen.com/bio.html

[John]

"Mitt Romney’s devout Mormism still mystifies me."

There are exceptions to every rule. I'll give Romney the benefit of the doubt, and assume he really believes in Mormonism. It just shows that even high IQ people can buy in to some really stupid shit.

[John]

@rob: "Decriminalize pot, you like it, and who really cares that blacks shoot each other over drugs and drug money."

Bad analogy.

People shoot each other over drugs because they're illegal, and that black market generates huge profits. Decriminalization actually solves that problem. There's a reason why we don't have gang wars over alcohol and tobacco. You can argue that decriminalization would cause all sorts of new problems, and that on balance, it wouldn't be a good idea. But prohibitionists have to own the violence -- they're causing it.

[OneSTDV]

Chicken or the egg in regards to elites and secularism.

But then you look at who is the most religious: blacks, white proles, Hispanic Catholics, etc. It becomes obvious then.

[JB]

That study is crap.

Read the article to find out how they define "liberal" and tell me if it makes any sense.

[green mamba]

So what? Smarter people are also more PC.

There have been plenty of religious geniuses throughout the ages. Check them out.

[Peter A]

"the fact that the smartest people in the USSR were Communists does not indicate that Communism was true or that smart people arrived at believing Communism through a process of ratiocination."

Actually I would think this assertion is demonstrably untrue, at least by, say, 1935. The original Bolsheviks were certainly not the brightest bulbs in Tsarist Russia - they had two brilliant men, Lenin and Trotsky, and maybe Bukharin counts as "smart". The rest were mediocrities prepared to follow orders. Under Stalin people of middling intelligence, at best, took over most of the bureaucracy. Being too smart became a liability. WWII allowed some smart people to percolate back up, and there were many smart people who learned to play in the system by Khrushchev's time, but very few, if any, were devout Communists. It's an interesting counterpoint with Hitler's Germany where a number of high IQ people, i.e Heidegger, Speer, von Braun - seemed to have sincerely believed in National Socialism.

[The Asian of Reason]

If you look at studies done on masturbation percentages by race, it perfectly matches race rankings for IQ. Asian, White, Black. Black people don't masturbate nearly as much as the other two races, and Asians masturbate at twice the frequency as blacks. Woo!

As to Mitt Romney's Mormonism, I think he has strong political and social motivations for remaining Mormon. I highly doubt he believes in the Angel and the gold plates, but his social circle of powerful Mormons pressure him to stay Mormon. If he defects, his rich and powerful Mormon buddies will desert him, and everyone else will think he is a giant phony. It's political suicide for him to defect. The only thing he would gain is the wonderful feeling of being honest with himself.

Mark Regnerus's Forbidden Fruit is a great study of religion and pre-marital (or NON marital sex, because that's the correct definition), with some race thrown in. He stays away from the HBD conclusions, but you can easily toss HBD into the sociological mix.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0195320948 I've blogged about this book.

[The Engineer]

IQ and belief in, say, Communism, are probably also positively correlated. So what's your point? It's no innovative insight that intelligent people overestimate the power of their own intellect, and underestimate the societal knowledge reflected in customs, rules of thumb, religions, etc. etc. etc.

[Tino]

I have looked at the average I.Q of atheists from the NLSY97.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/are-atheists-smarter-than-average.html

[Tino]

P.S

For the record, I have also looked at the I.Q of Mormons. Like atheists, mormons have above average I.Q.

Non-hispanic white mormons have an average I.Q of 107.2.

[J1]

The entire study is here:

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/SPQ2010OnlineFirst.pdf

As somebody above pointed out, while it says higher IQ people are more likely to be liberal and less religious, using the study's definition of liberalism would make the religiously observant the most liberal people in our culture.

I'm curious what evidence there is that people with high IQs are more likely to be liberal. Granted, you have to use education and party affiliation as proxies, but there's a clear correlation between level of education and party affiliation, and that correlation says the more education you have, the more likely you are to lean republican. The effect tapers off for those with postgraduate degrees, but for a variety of reasons, I suspect people with postgraduate degrees have a lower average IQ than people who have only a bachelor's degree.

[SFG]

"It's an interesting counterpoint with Hitler's Germany where a number of high IQ people, i.e Heidegger, Speer, von Braun - seemed to have sincerely believed in National Socialism."

It worked pretty well until he attacked Russia.

[The Undiscovered Jew]

In addition to predicting intelligence, Atheism/agnosticism/non-religiosity *very* strongly correlates with liberalism among white Americans.

[David Alexander]

**Black people don't masturbate nearly as much as the other two races, and Asians masturbate at twice the frequency as blacks**

While I serve as an anecdotal story at best, I suspect that my masturbation habits have more in common with Asian norms in lieu of black norms. Mind you, I've given up on the use of real women for sexual purposes.

[rob]

John,

Good point. I should have said something like "smoke pot, who cares if it's illegal and people die getting it to you. They don't live in your 'hood." And of course hard drugs make pot look a weed that grows in your yard.

The general point though, that smart people don't live around the consequences of drug use, prostitution, bastard children, etc. makes them think that there're no reasons to discourage those things.

[AverageBarbarian]

There are lots of dumb atheists, while IQ matters it is not the be all and end all for exceptions to the rule.

How one is schooled, what ideas they are exposed to and the quality of their thinking matters just as much.

An untrained high IQ is nice to have but on the whole human beings are pathetic at rational thinking regardless of IQ, they have other systems that flummux rational thought because they are severely computationally constrained, the human mind evolved to take shortcuts, it's wholly unnatural thing to sit in school for close to 15 years and the years of schooling have gone up over the last 200 years tremendously.

In the early 1900's you could find a decent paying job with a grade 8 to highschool level education.

Technology replcaes people, regardless of your IQ, I really hate when people calle other people "unskilled" when they have been DE SKILLED everyone has the skills to survive, it's that we socially enforce being a dick because most human beings regardless of IQ's are morons.

Capitalism and private property are not perfect just systems, the fact that we have billionaires and homeless people living side by side is proof that human systems are NOT rational. I'm sure there are tonnes of smart people who could put money of the rich to better use then most rich people.

Smart people tend to confuse the law of large numbers with "merit" and "success", in any sufficiently large population you are going to have winners by default.

[Fred]

Bad writing: "Karl Marx correctly identified the fact that..."

Good writing: "Karl Marx correctly observed..."

Seven clunky syllables and a shopworn phrase after "correctly" in the first instance, versus two syllables and no shopworn phrases in the second.

[Twain]

"it's wholly unnatural thing to sit in school for close to 15 years and the years of schooling have gone up over the last 200 years tremendously"

It's also unnatural to sit in a cubical for 40 years while looking at a computer. I guess we are like the whales at Sea World who need to be freed.

Schopenhauer said that Christianity and Buddhism were the best at helping people to deny the "will to live" and become spiritual. I agree with him that the sex drive is an illusion put in people by the species to propagate it. Once we "get the girl" it turns out to be a big disappointment and we start looking for another.So, we need to overcome this illusion through the denial of the will. He didn't believe the religions literally, but thought these helped people through life . He thought the eastern religions were better and he said we need to think it's true and not true at the same time and most people can't do it. They really need to believe it and it's harder to believe it in modern times,especially for smarter people.

Understand that Mormonism is more than just a religion. It is a cohesive, positive, self-replicating, cultural/semi-ethnic group. Mormons are similar to Jews in many ways; and how many Jews actually believe in the doctrine?

[CC]

Understand that Mormonism is more than just a religion. It is a cohesive, positive, self-replicating, cultural/semi-ethnic group. Mormons are similar to Jews in many ways; and how many Jews actually believe in the doctrine?

[KingM]

I was raised Mormon. My Mormon family are among the Utah elite. A great uncle was governor of Utah and my great grandfather was a rich businessman with a building named after him at BYU. Among my dozens of cousins I count numerous attorneys, software engineers, businessmen, etc.

I assure you, based on discussions where they defend Mormonism tooth and nail, that these people really do believe. I would be very surprised if Mitt Romney was not also a believer.

[tehag]

And I wrote that more than two years before the absurdity of Christian anti-premarital sex Sarah Palin with her unmarried pregnant teenage daughter.

Is there a word or some punctuation missing from this sentence?

* * *

Bad writing: "Karl Marx correctly identified the fact that..."

Good writing: "Karl Marx correctly observed..."

Good Judgment: "Karl Marx was wrong."

[Late July]

Posted by: Matt | March 01, 2010 at 02:16 PM "http://www.claytonchristensen.com/bio.html"

The first part of his article about why he belongs to the Mormon church is excellent. Almost makes me want to join except for the Christianity part. However, the second part of the article, where he describes how *deeply* he tried to understand whether or not the Book of Mormon was "true", is almost laughable. It is obvious that he did not read it critically but out of self justification. It oozes out of his descriptions, culminating in his spiritual experience. Typical religious nonsense.

[The Undiscovered Jew]

"Understand that Mormonism is more than just a religion. It is a cohesive, positive, self-replicating, cultural/semi-ethnic group. Mormons are similar to Jews in many ways; and how many Jews actually believe in the doctrine?"

I don't see how Mormonism can be considered an ethnic group in any way.

And the only reason Judaism is a semi-ethnic group is because Christian and Muslim authorities banned Jewish proselytism in the Dark Ages. Prior to the rise of Christianity and Islam, Judaism was a universalizing faith that sought converts from any ethno-racial group.

The European segment of Ashkenazi DNA (60% of our total) comes from Greek and Roman converts to Judaism during the Greco-Roman epoch. Since the Dark Ages and per Dienekes' anthropology blog, there has been very little European DNA inflow into the Ashkenazi genome.

As for the other 40% of Ashkenazi genome, Jewish Middle Eastern DNA is primarily Armenian-Anatolian - not Palestinian/Arab - which came from Anatolian converts when Jews had a large demographic presence in Asia Minor following the wars of Alexander I.

Jewish "Middle Eastern" Y-DNA consists of Haploytpe G - which is common in Armenians and other peoples of the Caucasus Mountains such as Georgians - and Haplotype J2 is common among Anatolians. However, neither Haplotype J2 nor G are common among Palestinians and other Northern Levantine peoples.

Had Europeans and Muslims not banned Jewish proselytism in the Dark Ages, there would be no Jewish ethnic groups, just Europeans and various Middle Easterners who converted to the religion.

European Christians banned Jewish proselytism because a sect of heretical Christians - who were called "Judaizers" - got confused in age of large scale illiteracy and believed Christians were simply Jews who both obeyed the Mosaic laws *and* believed Jesus was the Messiah (Judaizers were sort of the original "Jews for Jesus").

[tehag]

I live near a synagogue, HS. I'l looking forward to your speaking to them to explain to the worshippers their that they're all stupid, compared to a smart atheist such as yourself. Your explanation that if these opiated Jews would give up their covenant, dietary laws, Torah, and those tablets of Moses, they'd be set free from the terrible oppression of their rulers, who created and still use this Judaism as an means to addle them, will excite their applause I'm sure. Tell them if only they'd stopped their silly worship in Egypt, then Pharaoh wouldn't have bothered them. That'll be a winner.

And after you're done, and every single one has abandoned Judaism for atheism then, what's a Jew?

By your logic, Jews can't be smart because they're Jews.

[nebbish]

TUJ,
The 60% figure for European admixture in Ashkenazim is likely an upper bound and has been reported in a single conference abstract -- no paper published yet. There is some evidence for descent from more generic Middle Eastern populations at the uniparental DNA level (e.g. Y-haplogroups J1 and E1b1b*, mtDNA haplogroup N1b, etc.). But the autosomal studies do show that there is a significant, likely southeast European, non-Middle Eastern component to Ashkenazi population ancestry.

*E1b1b is complicated in that the Greek population also demonstrates high levels. However the variants common in Jewish populations do not completely overlap with those prevalent among the Greeks.

[The Undiscovered Jew]

"The 60% figure for European admixture in Ashkenazim is likely an upper bound"

Previous estimates for European admixture (such as Hammer from way, way, back) were flawed because they only compared Ashkenazim with Northern Europeans. But still those older studies which excluded Southern Europeans came up with a lower bound of ~40% European.

In light of a 40% lower bound from earlier studies 60% is probably more or less correct when Southern Europeans are included into the analysis. More recent studies are comparing us to Southern Europeans as well as Northern Europeans.

"There is some evidence for descent from more generic Middle Eastern populations"

Yes, but WHICH Middle Eastern ethnic group are we descended from?

Remember that Middle Eastern isn't a population group - Persians are genetically different from Saudi Arabians, Armenians differ from Lebanese, and so on.

Jews actually cluster well with the Caucasus ethnic group called the Adygei as well as Armenians per Bauchet, while we do not cluster well with Palestinians.

I think the evidence is mounting (Haplogroup G and J2) that the Middle Eastern component of Ashkenazi and probably Euro-Sephardic Jews is Armenian and Anatolian (and related groups in Asia Minor and the Caucasus) rather than Arab/Levantine.

"*E1b1b is complicated in that the Greek population also demonstrates high levels."

The Greeks had large colonies along the Ionian coast of Turkey going all the way back to 700 B.C.

Because of this Greek demographic influence, Western Turkey is probably the source of Jewish E1b1b Y-DNA, not Greece proper.

PS: Do you know how E1b1b is distributed elsewhere in Asia Minor, the Levant, and Arabia?

Do Palestinians have E1b1 or have not enough studies come out yet?

I assume that if you are correct that E1b1b is high among Greeks, then it also must be high among Turks, Armenians and other Caucasus ethnic groups.

[nebbish]

TUJ,
The Hammer article from 2000 stated that there was _less than_ one half of one percent admixture per generation setting an upper bound of 40% based on its admittedly very dated analysis of Y chromosome DNA. The fact that Ashkenazim cluster in a similar position to the Adygei on an autosomal PCA plot does not necessarily indicate that they are related populations. As Razib stated when asked about the similar positions of Jews and Adygei in comment #7 to his post "How Ashkenazi Jewish Are You?": "I doubt that means much, probably similarities due to south-north gene flow over time."

E1b1ba is the most prominent E1b1b lineage in the Balkans including Greece. E1b1bc is the most common E1b1b lineage among both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews per wikipedia. However, neither lineage is population-specific.

My point with all of this back and forth is NOT to dispute that there has been European introgression into the Ashkenazi populations. There has been, and it may well have come from the sources you mentioned. However, you should be aware that the final admixture percentage (and its source populations) is not yet well-established. Moreover, your claim that "the other 40% of Ashkenazi genome, Jewish Middle Eastern DNA is primarily Armenian-Anatolian - not Palestinian/Arab" goes too far. Simple percentage tallying of Y-haplotypes a la Hammer 2000 significantly overestimates the level of that connection, but it's still there.

[The Undiscovered Jew]

"The fact that Ashkenazim cluster in a similar position to the Adygei on an autosomal PCA plot does not necessarily indicate that they are related populations."

Possibly, but even in the same graph Ashkenazi cluster even less with Palestinians.

"Moreover, your claim that "the other 40% of Ashkenazi genome, Jewish Middle Eastern DNA is primarily Armenian-Anatolian - not Palestinian/Arab" goes too far."

Based on your knowledge of Ashkenazi Y-DNA do you think it is our Y-DNA is more Armenian-Anatolian or more Palestinian/Levant Arab?

The Palestinians seem low on Haplogroup J2 compared to Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinians#DNA_and_genetic_studies

DNA and genetic studies

Palestinian coffee house in Jerusalem, c. 1858
Palestinian children in NazarethIn genetic genealogy studies, Negev Bedouins have the highest rates of Haplogroup J1 (Y-DNA) among all populations tested (62.5%) followed by the Palestinian Arab 38.4%, Ashkenazim Jewish 14.6%, and Sephardim Jewish 11.9% according to Semino et al. (2004). Semitic populations, including Jews, usually possess an excess of J1 Y chromosomes compared to other populations harboring Y-haplogroup J.[93][94][95][96][97][98][99] The haplogroup J1, associated with marker M267, originates south of the Levant and was first disseminated from there into Ethiopia and Europe in Neolithic times. In Jewish populations J1 has a rate of around 15%, with haplogroup J2 (M172) (of eight sub-Haplogroups) being almost twice as common as J1 among Jews (<29%). J1 is most common in the southern Levant, as well as Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and Arabia, and drops sharply at the border of non-semitic areas like Turkey and Iran. A second diffusion of the J1 marker took place in the seventh century CE when Arabians brought it from Arabia to North Africa.[95]

Haplogroup J1 (Y-DNA) includes the modal haplotype of the Galilee Arabs (Nebel et al. 2000) and of Moroccan Arabs (Bosch et al. 2001) and the sister Modal Haplotype of the Cohanim, the "Cohan Modale Haplotype", representing the descendents of the priestly caste Aaron.[100][101][102] J2 is known to be related to the ancient Greek movements and is found mainly in Europe and the central Mediterranean (Italy, the Balkans, Greece).

A study found that the Palestinians, like Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqis, and Bedouins have what appears to be substantial gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa, amounting to 10-15% of lineages within the past three millennia.[103]

According to a 2002 study by Nebel et al., on Genetic evidence for the expansion of Arabian tribes, the highest frequency of Eu10 (i.e. J1) (30%–62.5%) has been observed so far in various Muslim Arab populations in the Middle East. (Semino et al. 2000; Nebel et al. 2001).[104] The term “Arab,” as well as the presence of Arabs in the Syrian desert and the Fertile Crescent, is first seen in the Assyrian sources from the 9th century B.C.E. (Eph'al 1984).[105]

In recent years, many genetic surveys have suggested that, at least paternally, most of the various Jewish ethnic divisions and the Palestinians — and in some cases other Levantines — are genetically closer to each other than the Palestinians or European Jews to non-Jewish Europeans.[106]

Results of a DNA study by geneticist Ariella Oppenheim appears to match historical accounts that Arab Israelis and Palestinians,[13][14] together as the one same population, represent modern "descendants of a core population that lived in the area since prehistoric times", albeit religiously first Christianized then largely Islamized, and all eventually culturally Arabized.[13] Referring to those of the Muslim faith more specifically, it reaffirmed that Palestinian "Muslim Arabs are descended from Christians and Jews who lived in the southern Levant, a region that includes Israel, Sinai and part of Jordan." Geneticist Michael Hammer praised "the study for 'focusing in detail on the Jewish and Palestinian populations.'"[13]

While both the Palestinians and the world's distinct Jewish populations have mixed with invading and host populations respectively, Oppenheim's team found "that Jews have mixed more with other populations, which makes sense because they were more likely to leave the Levant."[13]

However, a follow-up study [Nebel et al. 2001] corrected that Jews were found to be more closely related to the peoples north of the Fertile Crescent (Kurds, Turkish "Turks" of Anatolia, and Armenians) than to the Arabic-speakers of Israel/Palestinian and other neighboring now Arabic-speaking Levantines.[107][108]

[DanS]

Actually, the New Testament book of First Corinthians supports the premise. Why? Read 1 Cor. 1:19-29. God's methodologies employ an inverse principle which is contra pride and contra high IQ-related. That's not to say that some religious individuals are not highly intelligent, they are. Born-again Christians exclusively participate in a cognitive realm closed to those who refuse the epistemological door of the Gospel. Read 1 Cor. 2:6-16.

[Peter A]

"Jews were found to be more closely related to the peoples north of the Fertile Crescent (Kurds, Turkish "Turks" of Anatolia, and Armenians) than to the Arabic-speakers of Israel/Palestinian and other neighboring now Arabic-speaking Levantines."

Mightn't that suggest that the Jews who returned from Babylonian exile had bred extensively with their captors? Or may have even been really Babylonians who used Judaism as an ideological tool for justifying their subjugation of the native Samaritans? History replaying itself over and over...

[The Undiscovered Jew]

"Mightn't that suggest that the Jews who returned from Babylonian exile had bred extensively with their captors?"

I doubt there is much if any "Babylonian" DNA left in European Jews, or even non-Iraqi Mizrahi Jews because the Babylonian exile occurred way back in the 6th century B.C.

Whatever genetic impact the exile had on Jews has long since been diluted by Jewish Diaspora movements over the past 2,500 years.