There are too many variables for the data in graph to show any worth while. I think the the graph would look completely different if you were to only considered students in each college who had roughly the same SAT score. Is the salary of a college graduate dependent on the intelligence and motivation of the individual or heavy impacted by which college they attended?

LOVE this post. more, please!

another fantastic piece, Kevin. Please keep 'em coming!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100805172951.htm this is somewhat relevant and it came out today. CNVs making up the missing heritability, etc. one deletion gave a 17x increase for schizo.

this was a fantastic post. thanks so much for writing this!

Why does Behe think his arguments are not being refuted over and over?  
 
Maybe they haven't been refuted. I certainly haven't been impressed by his critics. The best ones "refute" i.d. only by postulating a mechanism that can theoretically create irreducibly complex cellular structures. And the worst ones ridicule him for being a creationist, which he isn't.  
 
variants of the God-of-the-Gaps argument 
 
True, but it's an important gap: than Darwinism can't explain most life on Earth. Maybe someday scientists will be able to explain how e.g. flagellum evolved, but they can't now. Maybe that's why so many get ticked off at Behe, for airing their dirty laundry.

Great stuff trajan23, thanks

One aspect of modern civilization, is the aspect of hygiene. The microbes you speak of would have to cause 'asymptomatic' (i.e. no explosive diarrhea) behavioral changes, and have to be extremely resistant to many of the antibacterials commonly used in our society. As a biochemist I can vouch for the danger super-bugs, and for the complexity of immunology...  
 
I can say it's unlikely, but I'd definitely be intrigued by this new facet of microorganism... You're proposing a sort gene outside the organism, which frankly I just find... cool.

Wait a sec... what if you were asked to decide solely on temperature which states suffer from the heat IQ deficiency.  
 
Make 3 groups, one hot dumb group, one medium not-so-dumb-group, and one cold smart group or however you want to split it. 
 
If you did a one way ANOVA on the IQ scores of the three groups, would the P-value be significant? Because then you're using your model to make predictions... maybe even you could try your hand at other climatically similar countries.  
 
Given the traveling patterns of individuals, and the lack of screening for unknown microbes, would you expect 'unknown microbes' to proliferate in other climates similar to the US? 
 
And how do these predictions hold up for Canada? Do people in Yellowknife have higher IQ's than people in Toronto or Vancouver? Very interesting post which raises a lot more questions than answers. 
 
However I do take issue with one thing you said agnostic. Your data does not make anything irrefutable, you are only presenting data which suggests a lack of support for a null hypothesis. Significance is not 'proof'.

My bad didn't read your latest post agnostic... so basically your hypothesis is irrefutable, because it could be anything. Well that's no fun.

Fair enough razib and agnostic. You make good counter-arguments, and I'm no social-scientist or statistician. But I still say there's not that much to discuss until we add in a more direct link to support the 'pathogen' hypothesis. I must admit, I have no interest in doing the analysis myself, but does the CDC keep any useful records regarding west nile, malaria, etc...? Or are we talking just a general 'blah' feeling about being humid? I'm Brazilian, and I have to tell you, I love heat and humidity.

I think it's an interesting finding. However, some criticisms: 
 
Intuitively, one would reason that heat and weather become less of an issue given that people spend less and less time outdoors (i.e. people are air conditioned for the majority of the day). 
 
The types of intelligence required to thrive in a rural and urban setting are vastly different, and the ability to quantify those differences has escaped psychologists for decades. The 'put a yuppie on a tractor' bit. This could potentially weaken the IQ findings. 
 
Degrees earned by whites also poses a problem. It would be interesting to see how this correlation looks if results are normalized for the # of prestigious universities in each state (measured by some kind of impact factor?).  
 
The white crime rate would also be interesting to compare to state unemployment rates. Given that employment rates would probably be higher in colder, more urban centres (assuming of course that employment is a function of economy, and not temperature), it only makes sense that a higher proportion of people commit crimes in hotter states with lower employment rates. 
 
I get the whole 'tropical disease' point of view. It's interesting, but there are so many angles here. And with the advent of Google, one can find a correlation in just about anything: 
 
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/07/petabyte_scale_dataanalysis_an.php

different parts of the mind can "believe" in different things. 
 
Point taken. 
 
remember, the model i'm alluding to posits that most of the variables which result in the distribution of the phenotype are fixed by other selective and functional drives. 
 
You say "distribution of the phenotype," I say "spectrum of variation." Tomaytoes, Tomahtoes.

I simply believe that many of the psychological characteristics which prime one for finding god plausible are present in those who consciously assert that they donÂ’t believe in gods. For example many atheists may feel unnerved in cemeteries despite a materialist world-view; the psychological response may be a result of social conditioning, but it is also possibly a cognitive reflex at an intersection of environmental inputs (think snake aversion as something similar). 
While I agree that that is the case and it's fascinating, the opposite is true also of many people who do outwardly assert that they believe in gods. That is, many believers have confirmed that they have their crises of faith, or find it difficult to belief in the power of prayer, miracles, etc., although they admit so reluctantly.  
 
That just points to a spectrum of variation within humans with respect to religiosity, indicative of stabilizing selection... *cue functionalism and group selection parts*...

Razib wrote "Indo-European languages are just too similar" 
 
This is a debated point among linguists. Linguistic glottochronology has fallen out of favor, so at present the primary arguments for the mounted pastoral nomad hypothesis rest on linguistic paleontology not lexicostatistics or glottochronology. What is needed is objective criteria for debating language separation which for the present is wanting. This is a fundamental problem for much of historical linguistics. Historical linguistics can however tell us much about the material culture, beliefs etc. of the early IE speakers.

I was a center/forward in high school but stopped growing at 6-3. If I'd grown to 6-7, I'd have gone to college on a scholarship, but at 6-3 I was just one of the many, and no amount of effort on my part would have made up for my basic lack of height and speed. So it's safe to say that there are basic predictors of success that we cannot affect by will or training.  
 
But take it up another level of competition and you see that dynamic change. If everyone has met those basic qualifications, then subtle differences become profoundly important. And when you move from individual measurables into a team endeavor, then intangible factors become even more significant.  
 
So the issue here is not whether or not Google should hire liberal arts graduates with so-so grades, but whether it finds the right mix of brilliant, trained and creative engineers and mathematicians. Since these traits can be hard to spot in an interview or a resume, using an algorithm is an interesting solution. One-size-fits-all solutions simply produce poor fits, and neither GPA nor mysterious personality testing is enough in and of themselves.

I wonder if anyone here has read "The God Theory" by Bernard Haisch. It is written by a scientist with impressive credentials who believes that religion and science can coexist, and that it is even rational to believe in a God. Although his main arugments are that the laws of Physics are "just right" for life to even exist, his other arguments are still convincing.

Sure, if they convince the higher IQ blacks to make more babies and the lower IQ blacks to make none.

I thought Nisbett said Asian-Americans are in between Westerners and Asians in terms of personality. Anywho, I wonder if more individualistic, less conformist Asians are more likely to migrate long distances (America, Hong Kong) away from the mainland, whose personality is then passed to their children. (sort of like the migration theory for IQ, smarter people are more likely to migrate long distances) I am suggesting that there may have been personality differences between Hong Kongers and Chinese mainlanders before the British arrived. Being half-Asian myself, I do notice that even Asian-Americans (even the ones born here)and Westerners noticably think and reason differentely, though not as extreme as Nisbetts East-West comparison. (not that any one way is superior to the other)

For information on difference between the Castes:

http://batzerlab.lsu.edu/Publications/Bamshad%20et%20al.%202001%20Genome%20Research.pdf

Both mtDNA but particuarly Y-chromosonal genetic analysis shows the Upper Castes closer to the European Gene pool, and particuarly Eastern Europeans. Autosomal biallelic polymorphisms results place the Upper Castes as less than half the genetic distance from Europeans as lower Castes.