Inductivist

Carl Zimmer and Razib Khan have made a big deal on Twitter about the inaccuracy of the claim that Elizabeth Warren is no more Indian than the average White American. Razib, a geneticist, says that when the data are interpreted accurately, Warren would probably have 10 times the Indian ancestry of the average White American.

Truth is, 10 times the tiniest fraction is still tiny. Zimmer said the vast majority of white Americans have ZERO Indian ancestry. So you can have a absolutely trivial amount of indigenous blood and still have much more than most of us.

Assuming the Stanford geneticist is correct, Warren had an Indian ancestor 6 to 10 generations back. My parents have carefully documented our ancestry going back many generations. Most of my ancestors are English with a little Welsh, Irish, Scottish, and Danish mixed in.

But I do have one grandmother exactly six generations back who was born in Germany but ended up in Pennsylvania in the 19th century. Have any of my relatives ever dreamed they were German, or even part German? A huge tree of ancestors, and one damn German? It's absurd. I would be a liar if I told people I was German. My boss is 100% German, but you don't see me kissing up by telling stories about my German grandmother.

UPDATE: Hmmm. I wonder if it would work...

It's been a few years since I looked at verbal IQ data listed by ethnicity. It's important to look at recent data since so many immigrant groups have such small samples sizes, estimates are not very reliable. Using GSS data, here is the ranking of scores to a 10-point vocabulary quiz--a quick measure of verbal IQ. I omitted people not born in the US since the quiz is biased against non-native speakers:

Vocabulary Ranking by Ancestry

Austria   7.27
Russia    7.12 
Lithuania   7.08
Romania   6.95
Denmark   6.85 
England/Wales   6.84
Hungary    6.78
Scotland   6.75
Yugoslavia   6.73
Sweden   6.71
China   6.70
Norway   6.68 
Switzerland   6.65
Arab   6.61
Finland   6.58 
Greece   6.53
Czech   6.56
Ireland   6.46 
Poland   6.46
Japan   6.47
Italy   6.42
France   6.34
French Canadian   6.30
Germany   6.29
Belgium   6.28
West Indies   6.19
Portugal   6.18
Netherlands   5.99
Philippines   5.84
Spain   5.83
India   5.53
American Indian   5.31
Africa   5.16
Mexico   5.00
Puerto Rico 4.99

The pattern hasn't changed much since the last time I looked. What jumps out at me: 1) Mex-Ams and Puerto Ricans are still at the bottom, even lowers than blacks; 2) recent data indicates that American Muslims might assimilate better than European Muslims--the data here indicates that US Arabs are pretty smart; 3) Asian Indians (n = 40) still have a low average despite their reputation for intelligence; 4) it looks like southern Europeans don't do as well as northern Europeans (but Romania and Yugoslavia are high); and 5) central and Eastern Europeans might get a boost toward the top of the list by the large numbers of Jews (with a mean of 7.56) among their ranks.

And if you're thinking, this is just all environment, you're wrong: According to this meta-analysis, vocabulary is 62% genetic among children, and it is certainly higher than that among adults.

Oh, and if you think the differences are no biggy, again you're wrong: The gap between the top and the bottom is huge: well over 1 standard deviation.