If I told you people with phone number that end in an odd number have higher IQs than people with even phone numbers, you would ask me how that could possibily be. There is no connection between phone number and genetics.

There is also no connection between the few external features we associate with race-- skin color, eye shape, nose shape, hair texture-- and membership in a gene pool or a population. The genetic diversity of sub-sahara Africa is the same as the genetic diversity of the rest of the world combined.

In other words, the people living in an isolated village in Ghana and the people living in an isolated village in Malawi have no more connection to one another (based on analysis of their mitocondrial DNA) than a group of people in Finland and either African group.

If human history and culture had divided people up in categories based on other external features, as it has in the past, then the catagories would be different.

Black Africa is not a genetic population. Black Africa cannot have a lower IQ as a group because it is not a group. It just cannot be. There is no objective way to measure IQ between groups that differ in terms of diet and culture and education and environment.

You have no way to get at intelligence. You have tens of thousands of genetic populations, not 3 or 4. You really should not go around saying something as idiotic as black people have lower IQs. You have a lower IQ if you can't see that.

Geneticists I have heard interviewed in Canada (particularly after the Philippe Rushton controversy blew up here), make this point. Making the valid point that genetic variation is large in Africa is not the same thing as saying that there are are no genetic variations implicated in levels of intelligence across populations, however. It does highlight the importance of understanding complexity and nuance in a subject before writing about it, though.

If that is true, then why are certain genetic diseases prevalent among certain races? Why are asians more likely to be lactose intollerant? Why are blacks more likely to get sickle cell anemia? Why are whites more likely to have pale skin? I know that race isn't as simple as some would believe, that there isn't overlap, etc. But to throw the concept of race out entirely because there is genetic deviation within groups is dishonest.

The lactose intolerance situation is not entirely straightforward. There is a difference between rates of lactose intolerance between northern and southern Europeans. Lactose intolerance is not high amongst some Asians (e.g., people from Mongolia).

And if a disease is a signifier of race, then certain groups of Jews that are prone to Tay-Sachs disease constitute a race.

And, if it hasn't been mentioned already, if sub-Saharan Africans had average IQs of 70, most the of continent would be classified as slightly (if not more than slightly) retarded...

But I guess the point remains that there are certain genetic traits that people of a geographical region or ethnic group share. I'm not saying that census categories are terribly meaningful, just trying to point out that genetics aren't so convoluted as to be totally meaningless.

The history of IQ testing is interesting and I don't know how to take historical data. I'm not saying it's measured acurately because I really have no clue.

I guess we wouldn't be parsing the meaning of race so much if this was a New England Journal of Medicine article about the correlation of African American men and higher rates of heart disease. That is what the spirit of this article is about. People are willing to tear genetics apart when it used to reach a conclusion they don't like, whereas they accept factoring in race when it comes to screening for diseases.

The methodology is probably wrong, average IQs of 70 just don't "feel" right, and the catagories are probably too broad and arbitrary to be meaningful. But to say that ethnicity is entirely a social construct and that genetic drift is racist simply isn't true.

But sub-Saharan blacks don't belong to one group. Of all places in the world, this is where the highest genetic diversity is. Genetically speaking, s-S blacks constitute perhaps 95% of genetic possibilities. It makes no sense to me that 'by accident' these 95% all score lower on IQ tests than the meager 5% that are whites, East Asians and the rest. It seems to me the biological basis of this reasoning is flawed.