Metcalfe's article is very good so far as it goes, but unfortunately it doesn't go far enough. The key point is that 'race', in the sense used by Saletan, is nonsense.

The genetics and history are fairly simple. Black and white Americans are the product of several hundred years of population mixing. The way it goes is that some of the genetic coding for 'blackness' is recessive (like that for blue eyes), so it gradually diminishes in a mixing population. That fact has combined with two American cultural factors. The first being that evil legal invention, the 'one drop of blood' doctrine, under which a person with any African ancestors, however far back, was legaly defined as 'black', whatever they actually looked like. And the second is the countervailing tendency for people to lie about their ancestry - in other words to 'pass for white'. The result is that many of the physical characteristics of white Americans are derived from black ancestors (particularly in redneck southern communities - just look at photos of Elvis Presley). That is also true vice versa, because a lot of 'black' people have slave owner ancestors, and the result is that 'black' Americans have, on average, paler skins and a higher incidence of red hair, freckles and the like than any (sub-Sahel) African populations.

The result is that there can be no tests which classify intelligence by race - there ain't no such thing occuring in America, and you can't test something which doesn't exist.

All that makes the tone of the posts here quite surprising, and quite distressing. It seems as if the idea of 'race' is so deeply embedded in American conciousness that even the most liberal amongst you really, somehow, believes it exists. I could go on and show, quite simply, how racist ideas are just as stupid applied to the rest of the world, and how single measure IQ results (the famous 'g') are cretinously awful statistics, but I won't bother. Instead I will just remind you of Martin Luther King's wish that, "the color of a man's skin matter no more than the color of his eyes', though I'd say MLK didn't get that quite right - the color of a man or woman's skin doesn't, in fact, matter any more than the color of their eyes; what does matter is that there are an awful lot of idiots who think it does.