The best recent work on this subject is the 2006 book "IQ & Global Inequality" by Lynn/Vanhanen. Posters should not get their shorts in a bundle until they learn the science. All races have the full range of IQs, but the distribution of more blacks is in fact at a lower part of the spectrum. This has no moral significance--all people are worthy of respect--but it clearly has social, economic, and political consequences. I suspect most posters want to be emotional about this and shout about "racism," but facts aren't racist.

I've not read IQ & Global Inequality, but I'd be more than a little suspicious of it. Follow the links to its funding source (Pioneer Foundation) and Publishing Board (Occidental Quarterly) in the Wikipedia article:

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Both with racist ties and histories. Calling this work "science" would seem kind of iffy, at best.

An excellent treatment of race and IQ (some of it focusing on The Bell Curve -- another Pioneer Fund project) is Stephen Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (2nd Edition). He's got a very good section just on the origin of IQ testing, its various inherent biases, how the results have been interpreted and applied over the years, and then the problems of genetics.

Another good book would be Cavalli-Sforza's various books on human population genetics, which also bring into question any claims based on "race" -- the genetics of any human population are just too mixed to draw any such conclusions.

Not sure how you can be suspicious of a book you haven't read. And I thought everyone knew wikipedia is fraud that has no academic--that is, peer-reviewed-- validity. Why not spring for the Lynn/Vanhaven paperback--I bet it's less than $20--and then have a real discussion. (The late Prof Gould & Prof Pinker are honorable scholars--Pinker's latest is favorably reviewed in the Oct 8 American Conservative Magazine--but both were/are afraid of the 3rd rail of racial differences.) Don't be afraid, gdurkee. You're clearly a smart guy, but the reality of racial differences is there for those who have the honesty to see it.

Gdurkee: Have you ever read Mismeasure of Man? I have. All the book really says is

A: The people who researched intelligence with respect to race in the distant past were bigots.

This is true, of course. On the other hand, virtually everyone on earth at the time was a bigot by modern standards, and such claims of bigotry reflect not a whit on modern research.

B: Intelligence is too vague to make claims about, or there is no such thing as general intelligence.

Here I disagree with him here in every way. The statement "I am smarter than my brother" is as true as the statement "My brother is taller than me". There is an amazingly strong correlation between completely different tests of intelligence. They are measuring something.

I think that it is sad that we cannot intelligently discuss anything that has to do with group differences. Charles Murray's work in the Bell Curve might have had some methodological problems, but nothing deserving the vilification he received.

He has more recently written a nice piece arguing against the taboo against scholarship of this sort (link). Here is a short excerpt from it:

1. The differences I discuss involve means and distributions. In all cases, the variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups. On psychological and cognitive dimensions, some members of both sexes and all races fall everywhere along the range. One implication of this is that genius does not come in one color or sex, and neither does any other human ability. Another is that a few minutes of conversation with individuals you meet will tell you much more about them than their group membership does. <SNIP>
   
2. The concepts of "inferiority" and "superiority" are inappropriate to group comparisons. On most specific human attributes, it is possible to specify a continuum running from "low" to "high," but the results cannot be combined into a score running from "bad" to "good." What is the best score on a continuum measuring aggressiveness? What is the relative importance of verbal skills versus, say, compassion? Of spatial skills versus industriousness? The aggregate excellences and shortcomings of human groups do not lend themselves to simple comparisons. That is why the members of just about every group can so easily conclude that they are God's chosen people. All of us use the weighting system that favors our group's strengths.

It seems that much criticism of Murray's work, as well as that of others who bring up group differences, is based not on so much on the idea that it's untrue as on the idea that it's "wrong" to mention such matters. We value free expression and inquiry enough, however, that the critics don't feel free to say that openly, and thus make their attacks much more loaded and personal than the statements they are attacking would warrant.

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here's the link I failed to include in the last post