ABSTRACT
The noted mathematician Norbert Wiener, writing his autobiography, meditated upon the significance of the Jewish family for the Jewish contribution to scholarship and science. He set down briefly the sociobiological theory of the Jewish intellectual endowment. The Wiener-Haldane hypothesis is certainly consistent with mathematical genetics. Haldane was not only a most distinguished mathematical geneticist but he was also the leading English Marxist scientist. The modified sociobiological theory, on the other hand, is neither racial nor environmental. No hypothesis is proposed that the Jews as a race ab initio were endowed with a genetic basis for intelligence superior to that of other races. The modified sociobiological theory rather affirms: whatever the primordial genetic endowments of races, certain values and practices in sexual relations will maintain the constancy of that endowment, whereas other practices, especially a differential adherence of the intellectual class to celibacy and homosexuality will tend to diminish that endowment.
