The American Anthropological Association has a good presentation that demonstrates that fact.
http://www.understandingrace.org/humvar/race_humvar.html

I will reiterate my point that I seriously doubt any race is more or less able to be educated, have brilliant thinkers, or such. The only intellectual advantage the Western European world has had the last five hundred years is a culture that mercilessly exploited others, valued innovation, formally educated more of its people over a longer time than any group in history, and had excess money to spend on risk-taking ventures. Our “superiority”, if we wish to call it that, comes from our culture and not from our genes. Most of us are descendents of fishermen, farmers, pigherders, and slaves of some degree or another. We just don’t want to admit it. Given the opportunity, all other cultural groups can be just as superior.

I wonder, also, if Saletan, Sullivan et al have ever heard of this artist, who made a career out of condemning nice white English people doing really nasty, not to mention stupid things like substance abuse, child neglect, cruelty to animals and all-round criminality, that the descendants of those nice white English people like to accuse other, darker-skinned people of indulging in.

But you can go out and look at the kids playing together on any playground (at recess, that increasingly rare period in American schools) and see exactly how it works at a very early age – and how it changes. There are many forms of intelligence that only emerge collectively, and an individuating test is precisely the wrong way to see them.

But they are by no means impossible to see. Nor is it impossible to envision that other dimensions of intelligence could be a function of collectives – that one’s verbal skills, for instance, could rise in a collective with which one is familiar, and fall in a collective where one is relatively a stranger. Or even vice versa. What is odd about the Saletans and Sullivans of the world is that they are aware that neurology is now not a missing link, and that we know enough to fill in a lot about what impacts the environment has. Yet they persist in using data that often stems from, say, the 1930s or the 1960s, when of course we didn’t have the neurological knowledge we have now.

Either you want to test intelligence as a human trait and link it to genes, in which case you have to come up with a universally human test, or you want to test intelligence as a subset of human traits having to do with certain social wholes, in which case you give up the argument from genetics and make arguments from social conditions. And that argument would be much more friendly to apartheid – it would go, if we have better environments for black students, they could catch up with white students and undo the benefits accrued to white males from 200 years of apartheid in the U.S. And we can’t have that.

***
People need to be brought up to date about population genetics. As I understand it, scientists today do not speak of “race” but of genetic variation and lineage groups. People in Northern Europe (say) probably look alike or have muscular legs (or whatever) because they are rather closely related (7th cousins or the like) ie. they are genetically similar due to isolation and inbreeding.

Europe was colonized in fairly recent times and shares the same relatively few ancestors.

The most genetically diverse continent is Africa, which has the oldest continuous population. New Guinea also has a very old and genetically (and linguistically) diverse population. Some of whom had no contact with the outside world or each other for thousands of years.

By the way, I once read that some of the fishermen of New Guinea could to a Rubik’s cube puzzle in seconds, which took Harvard students days to figure out. These people have a very superior spacial knowledge because they have specialized fishing techniques for spearing myriad species of fish, which they have to keep track of. They also keep in their heads enormously elaborate geneologies, due to their elaborate marriage taboo system of cross-cousin marriage.

Races don’t have leg lengths or musculatures. Individuals do.

The type of reasoning in which you are engaging, along with a great many others who draw simplistic conclusion from crude geographic & “group” (really popultion category) associations, is known in epidemiological study design as the ecological fallacy. Probably in social sciences too.

Several of the phenomena you define as “genetic” are non-genetically biological and environmental. Biology can’t be reduced to genetics, nor genetic manifestations understood apart from enviroments that shape gene expression—same gene acts different ways under different conditions.

See comment 31 above by roger more particularly on brains & neural systems. A recently discovered example of the plasticity he describes is the protective effect of folic acid against neural tube defect, a variety of fetal developmental disorder that leads to many spontaneous abortions as well as to a number of illnesses or structural bad health conditions after birth including spina bifida.

An interesting expression of biological environmental human plasticity that also says something about racial generalizations and their formation can be found in Lord Lugard’s influential 1922 book on what we might call reformed imperialism, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. In it, Lugard comments on what he calls the emergence of a “new race” of Africans—which is being produced by the forces of urbanism and conditions of urban life. He means it in an explicitly biologistic sense.

The relative frequency of great height among some East African pastoral peoples (southern Sudanese peoples like the one from which Manut Bol came, Tutsi, Maasai) is strongly influenced by diets heavily composed of milk and cattle blood dishes. Average height of Japanese immigrants’ children in the U.S. in the later 20th century was considerably greater than parental generation for similar milk & meat-related dietary reasons. Over a longer period of history improved diet has increased the average height of Europeans and Euro-diaspora North Americans.

Kenyan (not an ethnic or racial term btw) lung capacity is definitely created by high altitudes. Kenyans who live in coastal regions or cities are not known as long-distance runners. Those who gain extra capacity at high altitudes retain it at low altitudes for the same reason that a committed runner has a lower pulse rate than she or he would if they stopped running, or than I do, and for the same reason that my pulse rate today is much higher than it was 20 years ago.

World class athletes are really bad examples of anything to do with typifying groups they belong to because by definition they are exceptional. Mark Spitz’ knee-hyperflex that gave him extra propulsion as a swimmer says exactly nothing about the general character of knees in the ethnic group(s?) from which his ancestors came, even if such hyperflex were found more frequently among them than other ethnic groups. It’s just rare. Most Kenyans, even from the highlands, are not world class marathon runners.

Then, consider what your arguments say about “race” in the U.S. Per the Rushtonian schema underpinning Saletan’s idiocy, the Maasai, Tutsi, Nuer & Dinka (“tall” on average) are Negroid. But so are the Hutu, the Sotho in southern Africa (per 19th c. stereotyped comparisons with Zulu stereotypes), the forest-peoples-formerly-known-as-pygmies, and I suppose even the Khoekhoe & San peoples of southern Africa who some earlier race typologists wanted to treat as a separate non-Negroid race (“short” on average).

In other words, the ethnic generalizations on which you rely actually serve as counter-arguments to any racial generalizations.

And this doesn’t even get into things like the historical permeability of the Hutu-Tutsi social distinction in central Africa prior to colonialism, with Hutu becoming Tutsi and vice versa as fortunes changed. These are social groups, not genetic ones, and not even distinct populations.

A final comment on one of Saletan’s many idiotic points. He argues that the hierarchy of average test scores among South African race categories, with whites highest, Coloureds in the middle, and Africans lowest shows genetic effects, because Coloureds are “mixed race.” Actually it correlates better with educational spending, which in apartheid times had Coloureds getting funded at about 1/3 the rate per capita per year of whites, and Africans at 1/10 the rate, distributions which may have closed somewhat but remain strongly stratified.

OTOH, let one of those fat loud hairy feminist white women take up with a non-white guy and watch the RWG’s let fly with racist stereotypes (as well as slut-shaming of the white women).

Of course Derbyshire seems to have a taste for VERY young women. Ew ew ew, I can barely type his name without wanting to take a shower.

sg & kid bitzer: Yeah, Derb has definitely got Bwana/Pukka-Sahib Syndrome. For a “small-government conservative”, he sure does seem to miss the days of Empire.

“To be crude about it, why the HELL should this surprise you?”

brett’s right. nothing surprising about it.

most white racists (at least the male ones) have had fetish-based attractions to women of the very races they claim to be superior to. southern whites had a whole pornography of their attraction to black women.

in the case of white male attraction to oriental women, there’s even a slang for it, ‘yellow fever’.

it goes with ‘orientalism’, the fetishizing of the exotic and alien. which the racist must dominate, subdue, explore, exploit, etc. etc. it’s an old story. massa can’t get him enough brown sugar.

having this pathological variety of attraction to women of a different color is not a surprising anomaly in a racist’s mind, it’s just part and parcel of the racism. it’s just another aspect of seeing the skin instead of the person.

so brett’s right; there’s nothing at all surprising about a racist like the derb having a kink like this.

(and to be clear: i’m not saying that every attraction to people of a different color is pathological, or kinky. far from it. in lots of cases it’s just two people seeing each other as people. but when one of the people has a well-documented history of racism, as the derb does, then that’s an option we can rule out.)

To be crude about it, why the HELL should this surprise you? Even accepting your pejorative description of a guy who happens to be married to an asian woman?

Ok, so you’ve decided, for better or worse, that you’re going to label anybody who believes that the ‘races’ might have slightly different mean endowments a “racist”.

Well, the map is not the place, the label is not the thing. “Racist” is a complex concept, with a whole host of elements which are not logically entailed by the belief that prompted you to apply the label.

So it should not surprise you in the least that, having chosen to label us on the basis of one characteristic of “racist”, we fail to conform to the other characteristics. We’re human beings, not labels.

A reasonable person might respond to this conflict by reassessing whether the label fits. I expect you to just conclude that we’re really good at hiding our conformance to the rest of the stereotype you’re applying to us. The truth is, after all, not as comfortable.

But brains are a completely different matter. We are barely in to the beginnings of measuring the brain’s usage, capability, and function. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that different races developed different portions of the brain. But I would be surprised if any group of humans were not capable of higher thought. And there’s no way in hell I’m taking anything as simple as an IQ test and applying it to anything other than two individuals (and even then I wouldn’t want to rely on that alone.) Measuring brains is only a few generations (if that) away from the science of looking at bumps on the skull, fiddling with well-worn calipers until the right measurements to prove British superiority are discovered, or filling various skulls up with beans to determine racial superiority. IQ tests measure too little to encompass so much. To make social policies based on IQ just isn’t something allegedly-smart people should do.