Am I the only person that thinks this topic was revived to get more people to read Saletan?

If I had to guess, I'd say that the race and IQ topic probably has provided Saletan with more views or clicks than any other topic he has written on. I can also imagine a significant drop in readership after that issue died down.

Could this be an attempt to stir the pot and get more people to read his column?

<rolls eyes> No, I really believe that Saletan has been undergoing pangs of angst, and honestly rethinking his position on this matter these many months. And so he feels compelled to share it with us - AGAIN.</rolls eyes>

Besided he hasn't been read because I don't think he has been especially present. Maybe he has been roiling in self-doubt and unable to produce like he used to.... hmmm.

It certainly occurs to one. But I think we should give the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately one is then left with either naivete or arrogance. I still find it hard to believe that Mr. Saletan could fail to detect - as most people who have made an even cursory examination of this topic have - the following fairly uncontroversial points:

1. There is not a scientific consensus on the definition of intelligence, let alone a way to measure it.

2. What people normally call "race" doesn't map well to any modern scientific construction.

3. Many - perhaps most - people react emotionally, not rationally, when one tries to link brain power and skin color.

Nonetheless, Saletan seemed to think he was going to come down from the mountaintop and, by quoting a few studies and dropping rhetorical clusterbombs all about, lead us all out of our self-imposed darkness. I am reminded of Lin Yutang's remark, from another context: the contradiction of common sense does not necessarily imply a scientific mind. I humbly suggest we all simply move on...

another fairly uncontroversial point:

4. A great deal of the "science" supporting the race realists' position has been conducted by or financially supported by those who believe in the inherent inferiority of certain races (e.g. racists).

Standing alone, I don't think this point should matter in a scientific inquiry. However, combined with a number of errors in these studies that tend to push the results of the studies in the direction that race realists hope for, the entire enterprise becomes suspect.

those are all obvious points that anyone who was striving to make an unbiased report would note. and it's amazing how many people want to justify their personal prejudices with science.

what are the chances that people will just "move on", though...

Agree with tubbs. I'm at the bottom kind of suspicious about people who devote their entire careers to the study of race differences, especially black-white differences. I wonder what motivates them. I do take their data with a grain of salt because it would be prejudicial on my part not to.

Second the motion. Why does anyone talk about "races", which as I heard about it in Biology, has no scientific meaning at all, except as the Human Race? We should just drop the term totally, as we have with "witches". That does not at all mean that we can't talk about "cultures" or "ethno-nationalism", which are very powerful, even if kind of flaky. "Free Will" at work. disigny

we dont need a modern construct to know a nigger when we see one

Is that what you tell yourself when you look in the mirror each morning kraker?

"1. There is not a scientific consensus on the definition of intelligence, let alone a way to measure it."

Irrelevant. Whether you want to play semantic games and claim that the general factor is not "intelligence" simply doesn't matter. The point is that is is a real construct and has a real impact on a wide array of life outcomes. Since we're talking about group differences in the area of these very same outcomes, g must be dealt with.

"2. What people normally call "race" doesn't map well to any modern scientific construction."

Oh yes it does:

We have analyzed genetic data for 326 microsatellite markers that were typed uniformly in a large multiethnic population-based sample of individuals as part of a study of the genetics of hypertension (Family Blood Pressure
Program). Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African
American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States
and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed
near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity. On the other hand, we detected only modest genetic differentiation between different current geographic locales within each race/ethnicity group. Thus, ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ethnicity—as opposed to current residence—is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population.

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Without knowing the self-reported race of the subjects, the research found that they formed four major genetic clusters and assigned individuals to the correct cluster with over 99% accuracy.

"3. Many - perhaps most - people react emotionally, not rationally, when one tries to link brain power and skin color."

Sad, isn't it?

"Second the motion. Why does anyone talk about "races", which as I heard about it in Biology, has no scientific meaning at all, except as the Human Race?"

Because it does have scientific meaning. You were simply too ignorant to recognize the political influences of academia. Race is subspecies. It's no less valid than saying that the Bengal and Siberian tiger are valid subspecies classifications. Incidentally, tigers have smaller autosomal FST (a measure of within population variance as compared to total variance) than do humans if one considers six major racial groups.

Really you are a simple jackass. IQ studies often quoted try to assert that blacks in Africa are 1 or 2 standard deviations of IQ lower than whites.

You're the ignoramous who falls for that shit. You're a clown. You and Saletan join in mutual mastubatory stupidity for propping up pseudo-science to make you look bigger than the real mental midgets you are.

Did I say it? Let me emphasize it again. You're a clown.

Really you are a simple jackass. IQ studies often quoted try to assert that blacks in Africa are 1 or 2 standard deviations of IQ lower than whites.

You're the ignoramous who falls for that shit. You're a clown. You and Saletan join in mutual mastubatory stupidity for propping up pseudo-science to make you look bigger than the real mental midgets you are.

Did I say it? Let me emphasize it again. You're a clown.

This isn't a very trenchant response. The 1 to 2 standard deviation difference has been confirmed many times over in almost every sub-Saharan nation. You should also familiarize yourself with the recently published data by Heiner Rindermann. He took international scores from the PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS and compared them to the IQ data compiled by Lynn and Vanhanen. n his paper, Heiner Rindermann takes this sort of analysis to the next level by collecting data from all 20 total international student assessment tests encompassing some 78 countries and comparing them with measured IQ data from 128 countries. Rindermann finds, first of all that the combined national student results correlate perfectly with the combined national IQ data (.98), demonstrating the assessment scores and the IQ scores are the same measured construct. With all these diverse kinds of tests for each nation, Rindermann examines the data together through factor analysis and finds that the g factor of intelligence explains some 95% of the variance in the test results: "Thus, cognitive ability differences across nations are by and large unidimensional". (p 681) Here's an excerpt from the European Journal of Personality:

I do not believe that the [sub-Saharan testing] scores at the general level are largely incorrect: The low values correspond to too many other variables and aspects standing for low cognitive abilities like results of student assessment and Piaget studies (e.g. Botswana in IEA-Reading 14 year-old pupils 1991 330, as IQ 75; South-Africa in TIMSS 8th graders 1999 259, as IQ 64; Ghana in TIMSS 8th graders 2003 266, as IQ 65; South-Africa in TIMSS 8th graders 2003 254, as IQ 63; plausibility considerations lead to lower results for the youth of Africa because of low school attendance rates and unrepresentative participation of countries), poor quality school systems, high skipping rates, low rates of high school degrees, low patent application rates, no famous universities, and many reports of everyday behaviour from officials, traders, journalists, ethnologists and other scientists in 19th century to this day... (p 770)

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Perspective Nature Genetics 36, S17 - S20 (2004)
Published online: ; | doi:10.1038/ng1455 Conceptualizing human variationS O Y Keita1, 2, R A Kittles1, 3, C D M Royal1, G E Bonney1, P Furbert-Harris1, G M Dunston1 & C N Rotimi1

"'Race' and research
Modern human genetic variation does not structure into phylogenetic subspecies (geographical 'races'), nor do the taxa from the most common racial classifications of classical anthropology qualify as 'races' (Box 1). The social or ethnoancestral groups of the US and Latin America are not 'races', and it has not been demonstrated that any human breeding population is sufficiently divergent to be taxonomically recognized by the standards of modern molecular systematics. These observations are not to be taken as statements against doing research on demographic groups or populations. They only support a brief for linguistic precision and careful descriptions of groups under study. Terms and labels have qualitative implications."

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And ditto to spiker. BJ, you're a clown.