The Martian Gene
a research proposal
"The Martians" (Hungarian: "A marslakók") were a group of prominent scientists (mostly, but not exclusively, physicists and mathematicians) of Hungarian Jewish descent who emigrated from Europe to the United States in the early half of the 20th century (Wikipedia)
The label originated as a proposed solution to the Fermi paradox, the puzzle of why no alien race more advanced than humans had yet showed up. The Hungarian immigrants, inhumanly brilliant, speaking an exotic language and with strong accents, were obviously Martians, perhaps the children of Martian scouts who hung around Budapest for a few decades having children by human mothers and then left.
When the question was put to Edward Teller – who was particularly proud of his monogram, E.T. (abbreviation of extraterrestrial) – he looked worried, and said: "Von Kármán must have been talking."
Which Hungarian immigrant scientists are counted among the Martians depends on who is counting them. Istvan Hargittai, in Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century, includes only five, four of whom worked on the Manhattan project. Wikipedia list nineteen.1 All were from Budapest, all of Jewish descent, all brilliant, mostly in math or science, all immigrants to the US. I would add four more, two immigrants to Britain2 and two who remained in Hungary,3 for a total of twenty-three.
They are an impressive group. Among them they won eight Nobel prizes — two in physics, three in chemistry, one each in medicine, economics and literature, and one Abel prize, widely viewed as the equivalent for mathematics. Members of the group were largely responsible for the creation or discovery of the nuclear chain reaction, the hydrogen bomb, the idea of decision behind the veil of ignorance,4 the stored-program electronic computer, holography, game theory, Hicks/Kaldor efficiency, the computer language BASIC and Vitamin C.
Scott Alexander, in The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project, explores a variety of explanations, including education:
On the other hand, we have a Hungarian academy producing like half the brainpower behind 20th century physics, and Nobel laureates who literally keep a picture of their high school math teacher on the wall of their office to inspire them. Perhaps even if teachers don’t explain much of the existing variability, there are heights of teacherdom so rare that they don’t show up in the statistics, but still exist to be aspired to?
But finds it an inadequate explanation:
During this era, formal education in Hungary began at age 10. By age ten, John von Neumann, greatest of the Hungarian supergeniuses, already spoke English, French, German, Italian, and Ancient Greek, knew integral and differential calculus, and could multiply and divide 8-digit numbers in his head.
Likewise, consider Paul Erdos, a brilliant mathematician born in Budapest around this time. As per his Wikipedia page, “Left to his own devices, he taught himself to read through mathematics texts that his parents left around their home. By the age of four, given a person’s age, he could calculate, in his head, how many seconds they had lived.”
His final conclusion:
All of this suggests a pretty reasonable explanation of the Martian phenomenon. For the reasons suggested by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending, Ashkenazi Jews had the potential for very high intelligence. They were mostly too poor and discriminated against to take advantage of it. Around 1880, this changed in a few advanced Central European economies like Germany, Austria, and Hungary. Austria didn’t have many Jews. Germany had a lot of Jews, but it was a big country, so nobody really noticed. Hungary had a lot of Jews, all concentrated in Budapest, and so it was really surprising when all of a sudden everyone from Budapest started winning Nobel Prizes around the same time.
Thomas Snodgrass, in “The Martians and Their Schooling,” cites Scott Alexander but suggests that environmental influences, high schools much better than anything that exists in America today plus one-on-one tutoring by intellectually able tutors, reinforced by a heavy cultural emphasis on scholarship:
“On Saturday afternoons,” wrote Wigner, the gymnasium teachers “often met at a coffeehouse to discuss their work with university colleagues.” Students were sometimes invited along to participate. Can you imagine that level of intellectual exchange today?
may explain more than Scott allows for.
I do not know what the right explanation is but I have a proposal for finding out: genetic testing. The Martians had at least sixteen children, most of whom are probably alive, as are two of the Martians.5 Get permission for genetic testing from as many as possible and look for patterns.
Doing that will also test my favorite explanation of the Martians: A supergenius Casanova wandering around Budapest with, like Richard Feynman half a century later, a hobby of seducing other men’s wives. All the Martians were born over a forty-eight year period, from 1881 to 1929, so for a vigorous man who started early it would not be impossible; perhaps the later ones were his grandsons.
If I am right, most of the Martians will turn out to have been half brothers, perhaps a few of the later ones half nephews or cousins. It is, I admit, not likely, but it makes a great story and would be much easier to identify from the genetics than a more subtle relationship.
My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else
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Dennis Gabor and Nicholas Kaldor.
Albert Szent-Györgyi and Imre Kertész.
Usually credited to Rawls but proposed almost twenty years earlier by Harsanyi — who, unlike Rawls (see Contra Rawls in this post), was willing to follow the argument to its logical conclusion.
Peter Lax and John Polanyi.
Hungarian Jew from Budapest here, though not a very smart one. I think that Scott Alexander did a fair treatment of the problem, but there is some important context that he missed. Here is some of it:
Why is Budapest special:
Budapest and the rest of Hungary are culturally two very different societies that diverged in 1686 in an event that is taught as "the liberation of Pest and Buda from Ottoman yoke". The united armed forces of the ̶W̶a̶r̶s̶a̶w̶ ̶P̶a̶c̶t̶ Holy League defeated the Ottoman forces in Buda and Pest and subsequently murdered and expelled the entire ethnic Hungarian (and other) population of the (then) two cities, replacing them with German settlers. The reason for this was counter-reformation: the Ottoman empire was (for financial reasons dictated by their interpretation of Islam) the most religiously tolerant state in XVIIth century Europe, offering refuge to non-Catholic Christians and Jews from persecution by Catholics. The Holy League was a Catholic-Orthodox alliance formally against Ottomans (Muslims), but in practice also against Calvinist Protestants and Jews. Hungarians at that time were mostly Calvinists (still about a third of them are). From 1686 till about 1820, Buda (called Ofen) and Pest were entirely German-speaking cities, with the last German-speaking neighborhoods disappearing only in 1945, in a similarly ugly expulsion of Germans shortly after WW2. Even today, Hungarian as spoken in Budapest differs from the literary standard in several German-influenced ways and Budapest slang is full of German expressions. Ethnic Hungarians and Jews moved to Budapest in increasing numbers during the urbanization and industrialization in the XIXth century. While Hungarian-speakers eventually became a majority (around the 1860's), the German language retained its prominent role until WW2. My grandmother was fluent in German and her reason for not passing it on was the Holocaust. After the 1867 Compromise resulting in the Habsburg empire becoming Austria-Hungary, Budapest Jews became increasingly bilingual, but stopped using German entirely only after WW2. Today, Budapest is home to about one fifth of Hungary's population, producing half of its GDP.
Secondary education in Hungary:
Secondary education in Hungary (between ages of 14 and 18) was and still is world-class (though deteriorating), unlike primary and post-secondary education, which have never been particularly good and now are really bad. The key to this is the high degree of freedom of high schools to choose their students and teachers, resulting in a handful of elite high schools for which both the best students and the best teachers compete. It is highly prestigious to teach there as well as to learn. This was very much the case in the first half of the 20th century as well. Regular competitions in academic disciplines are also a very important ingredient. Interestingly, the Tiger Mothers of the Chinese and Vietnamese communities that experienced explosive growth recently due to favorable immigration policies are also pushing their children into these high schools. I disagree with Scott Alexander that they failed to work their magic on gentiles. It is just that normal distributions have this very counter-intuitive property of tiny differences in means and standard deviations result in huge differences in frequency at the extremes.
In agreement with Scott Alexander, I also think it is multiple factors, both genetic and social/environmental coming together in a particularly lucky way. I would bet serious money against "the Martians" being particularly closely related genetically to each other.
A modest proposal: let's just clone Von Neumann and let 2.0 figure it out. We know where he's buried and ofc he'd consent.