What does the map purport to show? Is it a probability distribution for the single origin point of lactose tolerance, or is it a distribution map for frequency of lactose tolerance at some date thereafter? Either way, the remarkably smooth nature of the eliptical geometric shape projected onto the map of Europe seems a little odd. What am I missing?

A very large proportion of the genes in the human genome are implicated in the workings of the brain. It is seventy thousand years or more since various human populations started evolving away from each other under wildly different environmental pressures. Surely the onus should not be on those who acknowledge human biodiversity in mental processes to make their case, but on Liberal idealists to justify theirs. Tyler Cowen: can you offer any scientific evidence that all human races are blessed with the same mean and standard deviation for IQ?

There has been an enormous quantity of erroneous and harmful stuff pumped out in the name of "race" -- in science, in folk wisdom, and at the intersection of the two. So a lot of human biologists avoid the term. 
 
This is not a good enough reason to avoid a term if it otherwise serves some useful function.  
 
Over the centuries countless numbers people have suffered or been killed in the name of this or that religious denomination. This is not used to justify avoidance of the terms 'religion' or 'denomination' by theologists. 
 
More pertinent perhaps, during the course of the twentieth century some tens of millions were killed worldwide in the name of social class based politics. The argument was that the proletariat were the class which would inherit society, and all other classes were to some extent inferior to them: enemies of the people to be liquidated. 
 
Do we now find it being argued that because of this, social scientists should stop using the term 'class'? No of course not. 'Class' is a useful term to employ in many different contexts so we go on using it. This despite difficulties over identifying the specific characteristics of particular classes, despite the lack of any 'pure' social classes, despite the clinal nature of class intersections and so on. 
 
If either scientists or laymen find that words such as 'race' or 'class' or 'denomination' serve some useful function, they should not be intimidated into abandoning them.

There was a paper in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology in 2007 entitled 'The geographic distribution of the big five personality traits' (issue 38, 173-212) by D P Schmitt and others. This paper has North East Asians scoring markedly lower than Europeans on the openness to experience trait.

Razib said: 
 
the more intelligence and status are decoupled in a society, the greater the likelihood of revolution. 
 
The Bolshevik revolution is probably a good example of this in that many of its leading lights were bright. However, Russia would probably have been much better off without it. High intelligence might be a good thing a lot of the time but it does sometimes have the unfortunate effect of causing its bearers to imagine impossible utopias.

Acceptance of delayed gratification may have been necessary for the switch from hunter-gathering to farming. This would reinforce the idea that the introduction of farming selected for intelligence.

The latest study, recently published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, shows that golden/red English cocker spaniels exhibit the most dominant and aggressive behaviour. 
 
Black dogs in this breed are the second most aggressive, while particolour (white with patches of colour) are more mild-mannered. 
 
One could be tempted to suggest it's not really that golden/red cocker spaniels are more aggressive, it's just that black and particolour ones are prejudiced against the colour of the golden/red's fur. 
 
Levity aside, Matt Ridley in his book 'Genome' makes reference to similar findings for different colours of foxes and rats. More significantly he then goes on to refer to the 1980s work of Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan on links between colour and behavioural traits in humans.

Dawkins was being interviewed about his new book a couple of days ago here on British television. He made his arguments clearly and persuasively, and I for one have no argument with his arguments. Just one snag: his last answer included the phrase "We were not put on this earth to ....."

Even if paternal grandparents could in some way be 'biologically certain' that the grandchild was the product of their son, it would still be likely that the maternal grandparents would be more caring. This is because maternal grandparents 'see' their genetic heritage being realised only through limited mother-child routes, whereas paternal grandparents still 'see' the prospect of their son spreading his seed more widely.