I thought Stephen Jay Gould did a good job of discrediting the IQ and intelligence ranking obsession of some researchers in his book 'The Mismeasure of Man'.

IQ is just a test score and intelligence is just an abstraction.

Shouldn't the research focus more on the physical basis for 'natural talents' in some individuals and the lack of it in others?

There does appear to be some physical basis for differences between those with particularly high IQ's at least:

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"The brains of highly intelligent children develop in a different pattern from those with more average abilities, researchers have found after analyzing a series of imaging scans collected over 17 years....

The analysis was started to check out a finding by Dr. Thompson: that parts of the frontal lobe of the cortex are larger in people with high I.Q.'s. Looking at highly intelligent 7-year-olds, the researchers said they were surprised to find that the cortex was thinner than in a comparison group of children of average intelligence.

It was only in following the scans as the children grew older that the dynamism of the developing brain became evident. The researchers found that average children (I.Q. scores 83 to 108) reached a peak of cortical thickness at age 7 or 8. Highly intelligent children (121 to 149 in I.Q.) reached a peak thickness much later, at 13, followed by a more dynamic pruning process."

Thanks for the link. This kind of research raises a few questions- if we know the natural processes which make kids smart and if we can replicate them in less-smart kids, should we? Is it ethical/ desirable to make everybody have the same kind of intelligence, the same perspective? Isnt it better to have a population with a diverse outlook about the world, even if some of it does not meet 'our' standards?

I know its a long excursus from the racial profiling at stake here, but isnt race really the most obvious reflection of a diverse human experience? (quite literally if you believe the evolutionist)

Gould's book was popular with reporters and those ignorant of the basic research. It tended to dominate the popular press, because it played to what they wanted to believe. In the scientific world it sank without a trace.

That's because it was a social science tract interrogating the basis for that science. Like everything else, science has a sociopolitical basis, and however many scientists may have believed that Gould was wrong in the details the reason why he continues to be referenced is because he's right to question the overall process by which we come to such "facts".

A "social science trace interrogating the basis for that science" isn't of much worth if it fails to explain the data that the science it's interrogating does.

That's only if you prize one set of observations over another. In this case, Gould was observing inconsistencies in practice and using the basic scientific practices of today to interrogate the ways in which another era's less technologically-advanced scientists used social bias in order to fill the gaps and make big leaps towards questionable conclusions.

The evolution of the method of measuring intelligence was itself the subject, not whether the data could be confirmed in the end. Disagree all you like about Gould's possible misunderstandings of older science data. He was after methodological inconsistency as a window into the social construct that supported those methods. Those observations held up well because, for the most part, the traces of bias and race in their conclusions are made clear by the fact that much of the hard data with which these scientists were working were warped by the way they handled their cadavers, their specious reasoning regarding the correlation between mental health and physical markers, because they could not actually sample blood and decode DNA and take into account social conditions that may have affected their specimens.