Genetic Link?

Apparently, a team of scientists have published a paper proposing that a group of genetic diseases common in Jews of Ashkenazic origin can be linked to a higher intellectual ability in the same population.

In describing what they see as the result of the Ashkenazic mutations, the researchers cite the fact that Ashkenazi Jews make up 3 percent of the American population but won 27 percent of its Nobel prizes, and account for more than half of world chess champions...The researchers have identified two reasonably well accepted issues, the puzzling pattern of diseases inherited by the Ashkenazi population and the population's general intellectual achievement.

Interesting. But as Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard states in the article:

It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is.