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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Race, Intelligence, and the Asian Student Question

With and Appendix on Jewish Nobel Prizes

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Could Asian students outsmart us?

It is a provocative question, partly because it sounds as though it should be easy to answer and partly because it opens one of the most politically and scientifically treacherous questions in psychology: to what extent are observed differences in intellectual performance between human populations caused by genes, and to what extent by culture, education, social conditions and history?

There is a remarkably straightforward answer to the first part of the question. If by “Asian students” we mean students in several East Asian education systems, then yes: on many standardized measures of academic performance, they already outperform students in Europe and North America by a substantial margin. But if the question is whether this demonstrates that “Asians are genetically smarter,” the answer is no. The data do not establish that conclusion.

And the distinction matters enormously.

The uncomfortable facts

The first thing to resist is the temptation to make the subject disappear because it is politically uncomfortable. There are real differences in average educational performance between populations and countries. Pretending otherwise does not constitute scientific sophistication.

The OECD's PISA assessments provide a particularly striking example. In PISA 2022, Singapore was the highest-performing education system in mathematics, reading and science. Six East Asian systems—Singapore, Macao, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea—occupied the top group in mathematics.

The magnitude of the difference is not trivial. Singapore's mathematics score was 575, compared with an OECD average of 472. Forty-one percent of Singaporean students reached the two highest mathematics proficiency levels, compared with 9 percent across the OECD.

So the stereotypical image of the Asian student as exceptionally strong in mathematics and science is not simply a Western fantasy. There is a substantial empirical phenomenon behind it.

But here we immediately encounter our first conceptual trap.

PISA measures performance, not innate intelligence. It measures what 15-year-olds can do after fifteen years of biological development, family life, schooling, cultural conditioning, nutrition, socialization and enormous amounts of practice. A test score is therefore the outcome of a developmental system, not a direct reading of someone's genome.

The same distinction applies to IQ tests. Intelligence is a genuine psychological construct with considerable predictive validity. It is associated with educational attainment, occupational performance and various other life outcomes. But intelligence itself is not synonymous with academic achievement, and neither intelligence nor achievement is synonymous with genetic potential. The APA describes intelligence in terms of abilities such as learning from experience, adapting to the environment, deriving information and reasoning.

This already makes the phrase “racial intelligence” problematic.

Race is not the same thing as ancestry

There is another problem. “Asian” is an extraordinarily broad category.

A Japanese child, an Indian child, a Chinese child, a Filipino child and a child from rural Mongolia are all “Asian,” but this tells us remarkably little about their genetic ancestry, culture, socioeconomic circumstances or educational environment.

Modern genomics has made this problem increasingly obvious. The National Academies has explicitly warned that race should not be used as a proxy for human genetic variation. Race is a social classification; ancestry is a biological and genealogical concept. They overlap imperfectly.

This does not mean that human populations have no genetic differences. They obviously do. Nor does it mean that population history is irrelevant to biology. It means that the categories Americans or Europeans ordinarily call “Black,” “White,” “Asian” and so forth are crude instruments for investigating genetic variation.

If we want to investigate genetic contributions to cognitive differences, we need ancestry, genomic data and carefully defined phenotypes—not racial labels.

That distinction becomes crucial when someone observes that East Asian populations perform particularly well academically and then jumps directly to genetics.

The heritability fallacy

One of the most persistent misunderstandings in the race-and-IQ debate concerns heritability.

Intelligence is substantially heritable within populations. That finding is well established. But it does not follow that differences between populations in average intelligence must therefore be genetic.

This is a fundamental point in quantitative genetics.

Suppose height is highly heritable within a population. That does not mean that an average difference in height between two populations must be genetic. If one population has abundant nutrition and the other experiences chronic childhood malnutrition, environmental differences can produce large differences in average height even while genetic differences explain a substantial fraction of variation within each population.

The same logic applies to cognitive ability.

The fact that genes contribute significantly to individual differences in intelligence does not tell us what proportion of an observed difference between populations is genetic.

The APA has emphasized precisely this difficulty in discussing race, genetics and intelligence, stressing the importance of examining gene-environment interaction rather than treating racial categories as biological explanations.

This is not a semantic loophole. It is basic quantitative genetics.

But environment cannot simply explain everything either

At this point the discussion often swings to the opposite extreme.

One hears: “It is all culture.”

That is also too easy.

Culture clearly matters. Education matters. Family expectations matter. Socioeconomic status matters. Nutrition matters. Childhood health matters. The amount of time devoted to studying matters. The structure and quality of schools matter. Expectations about academic achievement matter.

But demonstrating that environmental factors affect intelligence does not demonstrate that genes play no role in group differences.

Richard Nisbett, one of the prominent psychologists who has challenged genetic explanations of racial differences in IQ, has argued strongly for the importance of culture, social class and education. At the same time, he acknowledged that the causes of observed racial differences cannot simply be reduced to one environmental variable such as income.

The intellectually responsible position is therefore not “genes” versus “environment.”

It is genes x environment.

Human development is an interaction between biological inheritance and developmental circumstances. Genes influence how individuals respond to environments, while environments influence how genetic potentials are expressed. And environments themselves are partly constructed by culture.

The Asian achievement puzzle

This brings us back to the Asian student.

Why are some East Asian educational systems so extraordinarily successful?

There are several plausible explanations that do not require invoking racial differences in innate intelligence.

One is educational culture. Mathematics and academic achievement have unusually high prestige in several East Asian societies. Parents may devote considerable resources to education, children may spend more time studying, and social expectations may strongly reinforce academic achievement.

Another is selection. East Asian societies such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore are highly educated, technologically advanced societies. Their students grow up in environments where literacy, numeracy and formal education are deeply institutionalized.

Another is the structure of schooling itself. PISA is not measuring an abstract “Asian brain.” It is partly measuring what educational systems manage to teach their students.

And there is a striking natural experiment hiding in plain sight: East Asian educational systems have changed dramatically over historical time.

If an entire population can move from relatively ordinary international academic performance to exceptional performance within a few generations, genetic evolution cannot plausibly be the principal explanation. Human gene frequencies do not reorganize themselves rapidly enough to produce such transformations.

The Flynn effect makes the same point from another direction. Average IQ scores have changed substantially across generations in many countries. The APA notes that such historical changes cannot be explained by changes in the human gene pool over such short periods.

Human cognitive performance is extraordinarily sensitive to developmental conditions.

But what about the genes?

Here the discussion becomes more interesting.

It would be scientifically naïve to conclude that genetics has nothing to do with population differences merely because culture provides powerful explanations for observed differences.

Modern genetics can identify enormous numbers of variants associated statistically with educational attainment and cognitive traits. Polygenic scores can predict some individual differences in educational outcomes. A 2024 meta-analysis, for example, found that polygenic scores showed measurable associations with educational attainment and achievement. But it also found a major limitation: the overwhelming majority of the underlying estimates came from people of European ancestry, making extrapolation to other populations problematic.

This is an important warning.

Finding genetic variants associated with educational attainment does not automatically tell us whether different populations possess different frequencies of intelligence-enhancing variants. And even if population differences in relevant allele frequencies were eventually demonstrated, establishing that they cause differences in average cognitive performance would be another enormous scientific step.

The causal chain is much longer than it appears:

gene → biological mechanism → cognitive trait → development → educational behavior → measured performance.

At every stage there are interactions and confounding variables.

Anyone claiming to have reduced the entire phenomenon to “Asians have smarter genes” is skipping most of the science.

The missing concept: distributions

There is another statistical mistake that repeatedly contaminates this debate.

Suppose Population A has an average IQ of 100 and Population B an average of 105.

That does not mean that a randomly selected person from B is necessarily more intelligent than a randomly selected person from A.

Human populations have enormous overlapping distributions.

The same applies to educational achievement. Even when average differences are substantial, individual variation within every population is much larger than racial stereotypes imply.

There are extraordinarily gifted Europeans, Africans, South Asians and East Asians. There are also mediocre students in every population.

Population averages are not individual destinies.

This distinction is particularly important because people tend to convert statistical statements into categorical ones. “Group X scores higher on average” mysteriously becomes “members of group X are smarter.” That inference is statistically invalid.

Could Asians actually be smarter?

Now we can formulate the question more precisely.

Could populations with particular ancestral histories eventually turn out to differ genetically in some cognitive characteristics?

In principle, yes.

There is nothing in evolutionary biology that makes this impossible. Human populations have experienced different demographic histories, selection pressures, founder effects and genetic drift. There is no scientific principle stating that every psychologically relevant trait must have exactly the same population distribution.

But “possible” is not “demonstrated.”

At present, the evidence for East Asian educational superiority does not justify the conclusion that East Asians possess a genetically superior general intelligence.

And there is a deeper reason for caution.

Intelligence is not one simple biological substance that evolution can maximize. Human cognition consists of numerous interacting capacities: working memory, processing speed, reasoning, verbal ability, spatial ability, quantitative reasoning, executive function, motivation and many others. Selection on one component can produce trade-offs with another.

Even the phrase “smarter population” therefore conceals a substantial conceptual problem.

Smarter at what?

Mathematics? Memorization? Spatial reasoning? Verbal fluency? Creativity? Abstract reasoning? Entrepreneurial problem-solving? Social cognition? Scientific originality?

A society can become extraordinarily good at producing high scores on particular academic measures without having produced a new biologically superior form of Homo sapiens.

The uncomfortable possibility of cultural selection

There is, however, a fascinating possibility that deserves more attention.

Perhaps the important evolutionary story is not simply genetic selection for intelligence, but cultural selection for cognitive performance.

Cultures can select for particular behaviors extremely effectively.

A society that rewards mathematical competence, academic achievement, delayed gratification and intensive study will systematically produce more people who excel in those domains. Children inherit not only genes but languages, institutions, norms, expectations, educational techniques and entire developmental environments.

In this sense, culture can behave almost like an evolutionary inheritance system.

And culture can transform populations much faster than biological evolution can.

That may be one reason why the East Asian achievement phenomenon is so interesting. It demonstrates what human cognitive development can accomplish under particular institutional and cultural conditions.

The lesson may therefore be less flattering to Western societies than the racial interpretation.

If Singapore can produce 41 percent top-level mathematics performers while the OECD average is 9 percent, the most immediate question is not “What is different about the Asian genome?” It is “What are they doing that produces this outcome?”

That is a much more scientifically productive question.

The danger of the model minority

There is also a danger on the other side.

The stereotype of Asians as naturally brilliant can sound complimentary, but stereotypes are not harmless merely because they are positive.

The “model minority” stereotype turns a statistical observation into an expectation imposed on individuals. An Asian child who struggles with mathematics can experience the stereotype as a personal failure: if Asians are supposed to be good at mathematics, what does my failure say about me?

Psychological research has demonstrated that beliefs about intelligence and group stereotypes can affect academic performance. The APA summarizes evidence concerning stereotype threat and the benefits of treating intelligence as malleable rather than fixed.

A society obsessed with ranking groups can therefore create some of the differences it subsequently attributes to biology.

This is one of the paradoxes of the race-and-intelligence debate: beliefs about intelligence can themselves become environmental influences on intelligence.

And what about Western decline?

There is a legitimate question behind the provocative title.

If some East Asian societies are producing extraordinarily strong mathematics and science students while Western educational performance stagnates or declines, perhaps Western societies really are being outcompeted.

That possibility should not be dismissed.

But “outcompeted” does not mean “racially defeated.”

Educational systems compete. Institutions compete. Cultures compete. Nations compete.

And the competition is not static.

PISA 2022 recorded a dramatic decline in average mathematics and reading performance across OECD countries following the pandemic, with mathematics falling by about 15 points from 2018.

The appropriate response is therefore not racial anxiety but institutional curiosity.

Why do some educational systems produce better outcomes?

Which pedagogical practices work?

How much does parental involvement matter?

What is the relationship between academic pressure and creativity?

Does intensive preparation produce better scientists or merely better test-takers?

And perhaps most importantly: can successful practices be transferred between cultures?

Those are questions we can actually investigate.

The race-and-IQ debate needs a higher standard

Historically, race and intelligence have attracted two symmetrical intellectual temptations.

The first is biological essentialism: observed group differences are assumed to reveal innate racial differences.

The second is environmental essentialism: because racial categories are socially constructed and environmental influences are powerful, biological explanations are ruled out in advance.

Neither position is sufficiently scientific.

The first mistakes correlation for causation. The second mistakes the inadequacy of one explanation for proof of another.

A genuinely scientific position has to tolerate uncertainty.

There may be genetic contributions to some population differences. There certainly are genetic contributions to individual differences in intelligence. But we currently lack sufficient evidence to conclude that the superior academic performance of East Asian populations is primarily, or even substantially, the result of genetically higher general intelligence.

What we do know is much less exciting—and much more useful.

Human cognitive performance is remarkably malleable. Education can transform populations. Culture can cultivate intellectual habits. Institutions can raise or depress achievement. Expectations can influence performance. And enormous differences in educational outcomes can arise without requiring different kinds of human beings.

So, could Asian students outsmart us?

Absolutely.

In mathematics, science and several other academic domains, millions of them already outperform millions of Western students.

But the most interesting conclusion is not that Asians are smarter than “us.”

It is that human beings are capable of becoming much smarter—or much less academically capable—depending on the environments we construct.

That is a considerably more unsettling conclusion.

Because if the explanation were simply genes, there would be little we could do about it.

If the explanation is substantially culture, education and institutions, then we have to ask a much more embarrassing question:

What are they doing better than we are?

And unlike the question of racial superiority, that is a question for which we might actually be able to do something about the answer.

Appendix: And What About Jews? The Nobel Prize Puzzle

If the East Asian academic achievement discussed above raises questions about population differences in cognitive performance, the Jewish case presents an even more striking puzzle.

Jews constitute roughly 0.2% of the world's population, yet estimates indicate that at least 220 of the 965 individual recipients of the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences through 2025 were Jewish or had at least one Jewish parent—about 22% of all individual recipients. In several scientific categories the proportion is even higher: approximately 24% in physics, 26% in physiology or medicine, and 40% in economics.

The raw disparity is astonishing. A population representing about one person in 500 has produced something approaching one Nobel laureate in five.

So does this demonstrate that Jews are unusually intelligent?

Here again, the answer is: it demonstrates something very interesting, but it does not by itself demonstrate a genetic difference in intelligence.

Nobel Prizes are not IQ tests

The first qualification is obvious but often neglected. Nobel Prizes are not awarded randomly to the world's population.

A Nobel laureate is the endpoint of an extraordinarily selective process. The relevant population is not the 8.2 billion inhabitants of Earth, but people who have access to advanced education, research institutions, scientific careers and the social networks through which major discoveries become possible.

That makes the appropriate comparison much more complicated.

A Jewish child growing up in New York, London, Paris or Berlin belongs to a very different statistical population from a child growing up in rural sub-Saharan Africa. The former is much more likely to encounter universities, laboratories, scientific mentors, books, high educational expectations and professional networks.

This is why the denominator matters.

The striking Nobel statistic is real. But “22% of Nobel laureates versus 0.2% of the world's population” is not by itself a controlled experiment demonstrating biological superiority.

Nevertheless, the magnitude demands an explanation

The environmental explanation should not become an escape hatch.

Jewish overrepresentation in intellectual elites is not confined to the Nobel Prize. Historical studies have documented extraordinary Jewish representation in universities and professions in parts of Europe and North America. A review of proposed explanations notes, for example, substantial Jewish overrepresentation among university professors, doctors and lawyers in several European countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

And the pattern extends beyond the Nobel Prize. Jews have been disproportionately represented among recipients of prestigious scientific awards such as the Turing Award and Wolf Prize.

So we are not dealing with one peculiar statistical artifact produced by the Nobel Foundation.

There really is a historical phenomenon of extraordinary Jewish achievement in intellectual, scientific, academic and professional domains.

The question is why.

The cultural explanation is unusually strong

One important clue lies in Jewish history itself.

Jewish communities developed an unusually strong cultural emphasis on literacy and textual learning. The traditional Jewish educational system placed enormous value on reading, interpretation, argument and the transmission of knowledge.

This is not merely a modern stereotype. Historical scholarship has identified the development of Jewish literacy and education as a potentially important factor in the community's later economic and intellectual success. A Jewish People Policy Institute report, for example, points to the historical requirement for Jewish boys to acquire literacy for religious study as one possible source of a long-term educational advantage.

The intellectual style associated with Talmudic study is also relevant—not because studying the Talmud magically increases IQ, but because generations of cultural selection can cultivate habits such as close textual analysis, argumentation, memorization, questioning assumptions and defending propositions.

And these habits are remarkably compatible with modern academic life.

A culture that places extraordinary value on education can generate extraordinary educational outcomes without requiring a genetically exceptional population.

But genes cannot simply be dismissed

This is where the Jewish case becomes genuinely interesting.

Some researchers have proposed that genetic selection may have contributed to unusually high cognitive performance among certain Jewish populations. The hypothesis is most commonly discussed in relation to Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestors experienced particular demographic and occupational circumstances in medieval and early-modern Europe.

The proposed mechanism is not simply “Jews are smarter.” The argument is more specific: strong historical selection for particular occupations, combined with unusual demographic history and genetic isolation, might have increased the frequency of variants affecting cognitive ability.

Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending famously proposed such a hypothesis in 2006. Other researchers have subsequently discussed and criticized it.

The hypothesis is scientifically interesting.

But it remains a hypothesis, not an established explanation of Jewish intellectual achievement.

Indeed, one reason for caution is that the genetic architecture of intelligence is extraordinarily complex. Cognitive ability involves very large numbers of genetic variants, each generally contributing a tiny effect, and the effects of genetic variants can depend upon developmental and environmental context.

There is therefore a huge difference between saying “genetic selection is a possible contributor” and saying “Jewish intellectual achievement has been genetically explained.”

The latter is nowhere near established.

The Ashkenazi question

The distinction between Jews in general and Ashkenazi Jews is particularly important.

The Jewish population is genetically and culturally heterogeneous. Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardi Jews, Mizrahi Jews and other Jewish populations have different histories.

Some of the most dramatic claims about Jewish intelligence concern Ashkenazi Jews specifically.

That makes the Nobel statistic an imperfect piece of evidence. Nobel laureates come from many different Jewish backgrounds, and Jewish identity itself can mean religion, ancestry, ethnicity, culture or some combination of these.

Moreover, many famous Jewish intellectuals were secular or only loosely religious.

The fact that someone is classified as Jewish tells us little about which aspect of Jewish history, culture or ancestry might supposedly be responsible for his or her achievement.

Selection effects may be enormous

There is another factor that deserves more attention: migration.

A disproportionate number of highly educated and ambitious Jews migrated to countries with exceptionally productive intellectual institutions, especially the United States.

The twentieth century's catastrophe intensified this process. Nazi persecution expelled, killed or displaced enormous numbers of Jewish intellectuals from Central Europe. Einstein, for example, fled Germany. So did many other scientists who subsequently became important figures in American science.

The resulting Jewish contribution to American intellectual life was therefore not simply the product of conditions in one population. It was partly the result of a remarkable concentration of highly educated migrants in a country that was itself becoming the world's leading scientific power.

This creates a feedback loop.

A culture values education → educational attainment rises → talented individuals enter elite institutions → those institutions reward intellectual achievement → successful individuals become role models → the culture's emphasis on education is reinforced.

Such a system can produce very large effects over generations without requiring a large genetic difference.

The Nobel Prize also contains a historical bias

There is a further complication that applies to all Nobel statistics.

The Nobel Prize is a product of modern Western science.

Its history is concentrated heavily in Europe and North America. During much of the twentieth century, Jews were disproportionately integrated into precisely those intellectual environments.

That matters because the question is not simply:

“Which population produces the most intelligent people?”

It is:

“Which population produces the most people who become internationally recognized scientists, economists, writers and public intellectuals within the institutional structure of twentieth-century Western civilization?”

Those are not the same question.

A population could have very high average cognitive ability while producing relatively few Nobel laureates if it lacked universities, laboratories, political stability, economic resources or international scientific networks.

Conversely, a population with exceptional access to elite institutions could generate disproportionate numbers of Nobel laureates without having an exceptionally high average IQ.

Yet something remains unexplained

After all these qualifications, we should not make the opposite mistake and pretend that the mystery has disappeared.

It has not.

The combination of Jewish educational traditions, historical selection, occupational specialization, migration, urbanization, socioeconomic status and access to elite institutions explains part of the phenomenon. But whether these factors explain all of it remains an empirical question.

This is precisely where the race-and-intelligence debate becomes intellectually interesting.

There are at least three possible explanations:

First, predominantly environmental and cultural explanations: Jewish achievement results from education, literacy, family structure, occupational history, social networks, migration and cultural values.

Second, a gene-culture interaction: cultural practices created environments in which certain cognitive traits were particularly advantageous, and genetic selection may have subsequently reinforced those traits.

Third, some combination of both, with genetic differences contributing modestly to population differences while culture and institutions amplify those differences enormously.

The third possibility cannot simply be ruled out because it is politically uncomfortable.

But neither can it be asserted because it fits an attractive evolutionary story.

Jews provide a warning against simplistic racial thinking

There is an irony here.

If someone argues that East Asian students outperform Western students because of genetic differences, the Jewish case is sometimes presented as a supporting example: “Look at the Jews. They are a tiny population with enormous intellectual achievement.”

But the Jewish case actually makes the argument more complicated.

Jews have lived under radically different social conditions at different historical periods. Their achievements have changed with education, migration, persecution, emancipation, economic opportunity and institutional access.

And Jewish populations have produced enormous intellectual achievement despite centuries of persecution and exclusion.

That is exactly what we would expect if culture, selection and environment matter profoundly.

The Nobel statistics therefore tell us something indisputable: Jewish intellectual achievement is dramatically disproportionate to population size.

They do not tell us what proportion of that achievement is genetic.

A useful comparison

The Jewish and East Asian cases are therefore revealing when placed side by side.

East Asian societies demonstrate how rapidly educational performance can be transformed by cultural and institutional conditions.

Jewish populations demonstrate how a very small population can become extraordinarily prominent in intellectual and scientific elites.

Neither phenomenon requires the assumption of racial hierarchy.

But neither phenomenon warrants the opposite dogma that biology can never contribute to population differences.

The scientifically defensible position is more modest: human populations have different histories, and those histories can generate complex interactions between genes, culture, institutions and selection. We should investigate those interactions rather than beginning with the conclusion that either genes or culture must explain everything.

And there is one final irony.

If Jewish Nobel achievement really were substantially genetic, that would not make Jews a “superior race.” It would merely mean that particular historical circumstances had favored particular cognitive characteristics in a particular population.

Evolution does not produce superior human beings in the abstract. It produces adaptations to particular circumstances.

The more interesting question is therefore not whether Jews are “smarter” than everyone else.

It is how a tiny population, subjected to extraordinary historical pressures, developed a cultural and institutional tradition capable of producing such an extraordinary concentration of intellectual achievement.

That question is fascinating whether the final answer turns out to be cultural, genetic, or—as is most likely—some complicated interaction between the two.

And unlike the crude question “Which race is smartest?”, it is a question science can actually investigate.