"What have economists contributed outside economics?" 
 
I agree that historically eugenists have made larger contributions to statistics, but for the record Harold Hotelling, one of the pioneers of Principle Components Analysis, was an economist. And some economists have been major contributors to mathematical game theory. Though it could be said that Hotelling (and some others) were primarily mathematicians who happened to work in economics as well. 
 
Incidentally, some economists have also been eugenists: Keynes and James Meade come to mind.

"What occurs to me is how much causcasian ancestry the father in this case may have. If one of his parents is causasian and the other African, perhaps the African parent is himself mixed race, some small x%." 
 
The father is half-Barbadian. Most 'black' people from Barbados would have some European ancestry but not (I think) more than the average African-American, i.e. about 20%.

Good pic here of Thandie Newton (half-African) with her beautiful children (quarter-African). 
 
As Razib points out, the curliness of the hair is a rather persistent character.

Living in London, I see a lot of mixed-race adults and children. Skin colour is not the only issue. A child who is slightly less than 1/4 black, as in this case (since the mother is white and the father half-white plus probably a bit of white on the Barbados side as well) would often be within the usual range of 'white' skin colour. But, in my opinion, it would be unusual for there to be no sign of black ancestry in hair, eyes, and facial features either. With only 1/8 mixture this would be much more plausible, though the child would probably still look more 'Mediterranean' than the average Brit.

Yes, there are some Imogen goodies on YouTube, including the beautiful Speeding Cars 
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3R0RHNHaU4 
 
which oddly is currently not available on CD.

Yes, Hamilton was always open to wild ideas. Pity one of them killed him. 
 
One of the problems with this subject is that mainstream biologists don't often want to get involved with it. People don't want to waste their time, resources and reputation on fields of research that they don't think will produce positive results. So claims of 'Lamarckian' inheritance are not always tested as strictly as they should be.

Sandgroper: Thanks. Nice to know someone reads these things. 
 
Ben: I don't understand. 
 
Mark: I know a little bit about these things, but I'm not sure if they count as IAC in the literal sense. That would require feedback from some environmental influence back into the germ line. I read a book by Eva Jablonka some years ago (not the more recent '4 dimensions' one), but it seemed like a ragbag of unconnected things to me. You always have to watch for the bait-and-switch tactic: someone finds evidence for something that isn't 100% conventional genetics, and before you know it they are saying 'Back to Lamarck'!

See Daniel Kevles, 'In the Name of Eugenics'. Kevles says 'After the Second World War, 'eugenics' became a word to be hedged with caveats in Britain and virtually a dirty word in the United States, where it had long been identified with racism' (p.251 in the Penguin edition).  
 
But I don't think there was an overnight change. Eugenics was already declining in reputability before the War. See for example the way that J. B. S. Haldane got more and more anti-eugenic in the 1930s. Then the post-War revelations about the Nazis made things even worse. But it probably didn't reach its nadir until the 1970s, when 'blank slatism' was in the ascendant and Marxists dominated much of the academic world.

I took a (slightly) closer look at the paper. The exclusion of 'problem' studies is one factor in the differences between Wicherts and L & V, but probably not the main one. If you exclude the studies in L & V that fail this criterion, the mean IQ goes up by about 5 points, which is significant but not enough to close the gap.

I have now seen the full study, but not 'studied' it in depth myself (and probably won't, as my interest in the subject is limited).  
 
I think that the exclusion of data where there were 'reported problems during testing' could be important. It is common for IQ testers to find that uneducated rural populations (anywhere in the world) have difficulty in understanding test instructions, and indeed the very idea of the tests - see for example P. E. Vernon's various writings. So 'reported problems during testing' could exclude most African rural populations. 
 
Whether or not such exclusions are legitimate is problematic. Excluding the bulk of the population you are trying to sample is not on the face of it desirable. If the aim is to measure the average cognitive abilities of the total population, you need to find some test that is generally applicable, and if you can't, the only legitimate conclusion is that the average abilities are unknown. 
 
If on the other hand the aim is to estimate the potential IQ of Africans given reasonable levels of nutrition, education, etc, then excluding uneducated rural populations is fair enough. 
 
Indidentally, Wicherts et al deal with the question of the correlation between national IQ and educational performance (TIMMS, etc) and argue that a regression of IQ on educational performance predicts an African mean IQ consistent with their own figures, and not with L & V's.

No doubt this is clear in the full study, which I cannot access at present, but what are the 'five inclusion criteria'? These seem to reduce the number of 'acceptable' studies, and to increase mean IQ, quite dramatically. The authors seem in fact to be as selective in one direction as L & V are in the other. This may of course all be quite legitimate, but one would need to watch out for criteria that, intentionally or not, restrict the nature of the sampled populations, e.g. to children who have undergone a specified amount of modern education.

Thanks. I suppose it is something to be sure that echinoderms and vertebrates are both Deuterostomes! Maybe I am greedy, but what I would really like is to understand what the ancestral deuterostome was like, and what sequence of genetic and developmental changes led to the different body types (Bauplans) of vertebrates, tunicates , hemichordates, echinoderms, graptolites (?), conodonts (?), and any others. I don't think we have that understanding yet. It is the kind of thing that 'Evo-Devo' promises, but it hasn't yet delivered.

I doubt that this was intentional suicide. Another obvious possibility comes to mind.

While this is a bit of a digression from the subject of abortion, I believe traditional Catholic theology was also a bit wobbly on infanticide in cases where the birth was grossly abnormal. If what comes out of the womb doesn't look human, does it have a soul? Should it be baptised? Should you try to keep it alive? Of course, with gross abnormalities this would usually be an academic question, as the 'baby' would not survive anyway.

Does anyone literally believe that abortion is always unjustifiable? Not sure where the Catholic church stands on this, but presumably only a religious loony would think abortion was unjustifiable if continuing the pregnancy would kill both mother and baby. I wonder if the high 'yes' percentages for some countries reflect the low IQ and/or education of the population, leading to inability to understand the question?

I had a look at Fisher's paper, but it is too advanced for me. There is no reference to mating, so I think it applies to either sexual or asexual populations, provided there is some 'diffusion' of offspring away from their parents. 
 
I also looked at the abstract of Barton's paper. He seems to be dealing with cases where populations meet and hybrids between them have a selective disadvantage. In this case a gene that might be advantageous in both populations may be stopped from spreading if the hybrid disadvantage is great enough.

I haven't studied Fisher's paper, but I assume he distinguishes between a local population which is assumed to be panmictic, i.e. breeding randomly throughout the locality, and a larger population in which the probability of interbreeding between two individuals is some function of distance. Obviously in the panmictic case the only factor influencing the rate of increase of an advantageous gene is its selective advantage, because that is built into the assumptions, whereas in the larger population we also have to allow for rates of interbreeding and migration. I can't see any particular relevance to the theory of punctuated equilibrium in all this. I think the punk-eek theorists generally assume that punctuation occurs in a geographically isolated population, and forms a new species (reproductively isolated) before spreading out. This is not Fisher's model, which assumes a continuous population without barriers.

Negative results should be published somewhere, however briefly. Otherwise, some idiot will do a 'meta-analysis' of published results, and find - lo! - there is a positive effect. Maybe there should be a special 'Journal of Negative Results'?

Anyone whose life is changed over one study is an idiot. 
 
Depends on the study, surely? E.g. Francis Galton reading Darwin's Origin.

"in the case where the female provides most of the resources and does the choosing, I think it's a mistake to assume that the only contribution of the male is his sperm. Instead, the male also spends a lot of resources getting chosen as a mate by the female."  
 
Sure, the male expends a lot of effort, but this is not a contribution to the offspring. It does not enable more offspring to be produced. 
 
"Hermaphrodites are vulnerable to certain kinds of destructive competition if it's (as it usually is) a greater cost to lay eggs / bear children than to fertilize / father them."  
 
I don't understand this comment. Males do not devote less 'expenditure' to reproduction than females, they just do it in different ways. If anything, males are more vulnerable to 'competition' than females, because often they are fighting each other. The comment seems to assume that the evolutionary choice is between being a hermaphrodite and being male, but it is not: it is between hermaphroditism and separate sexes. 
 
There is a large literature on when it is advantageous to be a hermaphrodite. There is no single answer, but obviously specialisation in one sex or the other is often more efficient. Hermaphroditism seems to be found mainly among organisms that are either fixed (plants and many sessile invertebrates) or relatively sluggish, such as worms and (literally) slugs. Fixed or sluggish creatures may not have many local conspecifics to mate with, so they don't want to find they are both male or both female.

In my post I didn't discuss the various common 'solutions' to the problem in detail, because that wasn't the purpose of the post. But commenters might find it useful, before making their own suggestions, to look at a survey such as this 
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_sex 
 
which is quite good, though I think it is too harsh on Kondrashov's theory. 
 
'the fact that some plants reproduce both ways' doesn't prove that there is no group selection benefit, but it does suggest that there must also be a strong individual benefit, since otherwise the sexual option would soon disappear. And if there is a strong individual benefit, the case for a large group selection effect is weakened, since the main reason for appealing to group selection in the first place is that people couldn't think of an indidivual explanation!