Will Herberg wrote about the Protestantization of other religious traditions in America in his seminal Protestant-Catholic-Jew in the 1950s. 
 
Apparently today one could call that Protestant-Catholic-Jew-Hindu-Buddhist. But crucial to the question of what the 21st century will ultimately look like is whether one can add "Muslim" to the end of that list, or if that is the one that proves unassimilable.

Someone suggest blonds are "syndromal"? What about Tiny Tim? Didn't he have some kind of brunette syndrome?  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skU-jBFzXl0 
 
I often see people here and there, totally unrelated, who share a certain "look". I see people who sort of look like me, and find they think sort of think like me too. 
It would be fascinating to trace one of these "looks" back to their owners' early genetic pool. They might be examples of extended families within the "extended family" that is race/ethnicity. 
Despite a bit of bias towards the mediteranean type, I have to admit my niece and nephew are blond and looked like the proverbial angels when they were little. 
Nothing "syndromal" about their looks, but then again, maybe there is. The rare "sunny blonds with natural peachy tans, full lips, etched eyebrows and dusky lashes syndrome." I think that's the one Hollywood had in mind. 
 
Nevertheless, my niece disliked her blond hair and threatened to dye it red or black, but piercing her finely etched eyebrows with metal rings distracted her from that ambition.  
Around 14 the once chubby tow head startled everyone by becoming a Boticelli beauty resembling the girl who disappeared forever in Picnic at Hanging Rock. Yet still she doesn't think she's pretty.  
I blame the 1965 Immigration Act. Just kidding. 
 
I'm sort of a blond convert though. Blonds are not intrinsically more beautiful than brunettesand arguing is pretty pointless. This debate goes back centuries, but somehow those blond wigs won't go away.

. The sad thing is, I didn't even really mention IQ or intelligence, just that different groups of people have different average means in certain areas, which makes them more able as a group to do some things,: 
 
good grief, these people sound like Manchurian candidates. Usually associating various types of physical prowess and recreational proclivities is not that controversial because form follows function. Nobody thinks of Asians as having many 6'5" and that sort of loose-limbed way. They just don't. 
It has even been brazenly acknowledged that the Chinese have a penchant for ping-pong and that at least one group which shall remain nameless, has natural rhythm, and that they pride themselves on this. 
I have heard respectable people describe certain population groups as really "smart." Nobody gets apoplectic over it as long as that group is designated by some other term than color. 
I don't know where you are Gomez, but check for pods.

"Super-smart women are half-men (tall & legs-shaving). L. Cosmides is the exception." 
 
No, they just seem that way compared to super-smart men.  
 
Anyway, Hedy Lamarr and several of my former classmates would be highly insulted at your silly ass sto-type.

"Like all whites, we're not supposed to dwell on our ethnic identity."  
 
hey--It's ok if you call it by a nationality or linguistic group. You can get around it that way. For instance, you can say Henry Ford was really something because he was of Irish descent, or American, but definitely not because he was white or European. Or a man.  
A co-worker's day care center, quite the multi-cult, makes a curious deal out of St. Patrick's day. Kids in my nun-run school never did, just a little green hair dye and the odd shamrock plastered to the blackboard. Now it seems schools are getting the message that if some kids' ancestral particulars matter enough to be expressed in construction paper, then so should everyone's. 
No idea about why the name Smith is going the way of the dodo bird, but there's at least 10 other names i wish it would take with it.

"So maybe the problem (if problem there be) isn't religion, it's fanaticism?" 
 
yes, that is true imho.

"Or is it that people who think in a religious context are more likely to be aware of the world outside of their selves, and so think in a way where short-chain self-referentialism is not encouraged? Makes it harder to get with mental dysfunction, at least." 
 
well my favorite religion-founder always said, "There is no prison but the prison of self". I think even atheists would do well to keep that in mind, in their scientific efforts. Any strong belief has the power to play tricks with the mind in a trompe d'oiel.  
 
Religious fanatics are very self orientated--they may blow themSELVES up physically or metaphorically in the service of what they think is "religion", in the quest of glory for themSELVES even though the official teachings of that same religion would condemn them to further torment for that action. Not that that matters to their victims. With more normal people though, a focus on what is outside of oneself usually leads to a healthier mentality as long as it doesn't go to an extreme.

"I study economics and I can assure you that everything will be alright. You can support liberalism without fear of being mugged" 
 
yes Pekka, but you live in Finland right?  
Here, liberals of conviction have been known to throw themelves on the funeral pyres of convicted killers. Liberals like us are conflicted.

"Following American stereotypes, we're rednecks. The nerds are just a PR face." 
 
but...your English is so good...and I'm sure you speak well too.

well, it's happened here. Put Dr. or dr in front of a handle and you can expect something...well, interesting. 
What makes you think that people who put babies up for adoption make a point of living on crack, pepsi and big macs? That's actually the diet of a great many more people who keep their offspring. 
There have been countless famines and deprivations throughout the world--China and Korea to name two examples, but the effect has not been to give the victims' descendents low IQs that imbed in the genes and last for generations.  
Those getting upset about the probability of stereotypes have a point. I have my own stereotypes to worry about so I know how that can be; but I'd rather that be the case than get blamed for some stranger's failures. I got problems of my own.  
People who are scared by the truth are like little kids covering their eyes and thinking nobody sees 'em.

Faith and begorra. how things have changed.  
 
Regarding the Hungarians; I once read an review of a book on cursing and learned that Hungarians are the most cursing people, often using religious imagery. It is, after all, the home of the vampire queen elisabeth. I think it had to do with Hungary being a central Euro country, crisscrossed and crosscrissed. People tend to be attached to a religion if they had to fight to keep it. If the religion was forced on them, they are less attached, more hostile. Most Hugarians were kept Catholic forcibly, or so I read.

The famous Victorian era porn writer, Frank Harris, enjoyed success everywhere getting what he wanted, save among one group of females--the Irish. Irish girls were impervious to his charms and cajoling. This didn't include prostitutes of which Dublin had many, information enshrined for posterity by James Joyce. However, among civilian females, Irish women gave him the cold shoulder. He attributed this to the Confessional.

"Most of my Mom's family, as I am, as also lactose intolerant too." 
 
Would that have anything to do with them being B? According to the "eat for your blood type theory" type B arose 40,000 years ago, give or take a millenium, among pastoralists and are the premier lactose people, able to handle jugs of cream and hard cheese. However, these theories are laughed at by doctors, who as we know from history, are always right.

I am ab-negative. so rare i don't exist. 
I once read that ab blood type was only 1000 yrs old, but how can this be? Certainly As & Bs have been conmingling for longer than that.

btw, there is a lot more at stake regarding Watson's comments, than just hurt feelings and moral indignation. If it is not accepted that some people in certain very large extended families are just not as mentally high-functioning as other very large extended families, then...now where am I ... oh yeah .... 
it means that the lower functioning members of very large extended families will always be blaming the more successful members of very large extended families and claiming they were screwed in some way. didn't have enough caviar growing up or something. 
 
That's the problem. the blame game.

"sure they are. but one life is an unrepresentative anecdote. the ppl who frequent this site probably have unrepresentative anecdotes just as watson might."  
true, I like to think mine are special too. 
but if they are, they would be represented at the far ends of the bell curve.  
Some poor young person gets blown up in a humvee in Iraq. Would have been safer in a tank. This is his story, this is a stat. 
 
"All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut."  
go girl. 
The spector of disappointment has shadowed me so persistently, I tossed my nut-cracker long ago. 
Nobody could express discouragement better than the Brontes. Anne was a bit self-referential here, self-effacing as she was. Yet an enormous number of trees have been sacrificed in tribute for recording anecdotes of her and her family--they really make a good read after all.  
They were also statistics: early death, late or no marriage, early sibling mortality, galluping consumption, 1 in a 100,000 fame and success above the hoard of "female scribblers." S

Benn's declaration of love for several billion members of the far eastern sino-races is a little idealistic--not that there's anything wrong with that. Many people these days would attribute such love to reincarnation; but here at gnxp, it's because the Asians are 1/3 of a standard deviation above the norm. 
In my humble opinion, though, Benn is right that humility is the sugar that could have made Watson's pill go down. That, along with the Copernicus method, the impersonal, passive-voice declaration: "it is said that the earth goes around the sun....but we faithful know better, etc.etc."  
 
As for anecdotes, what is life but one long anecdote. Aren't stats made of anecodotes and vice versa. Stats are just a compressed format for displaying anecdotes.

"Bug agnostic, if we empower women and have more women in computing and engineering and science, there will be more interoperability, less evil, and the world will be a better place. That seems to be what Tim Berners-Lee believes." 
 
Sarcasm will get you nowhere, sir. Academics are in a field which is, at its very core, inegalitarian and dependent on inborn brains, and yet they have to pretend that any human-dropping scraped off the street ought to be better employed winning a Nobel Prize. Naturally these academics have become insane. 
 
However, if one persists in declaring that humans have an "evolutionarily" different approach to life according to gender, then it follows that said gender will bring that evolutionary difference to whatever field of endeavor it inhabits in any significant percentage. Understandable resentment occurs when someone affirms that those differences are automatically "better." Moms don't like to be told that some Dads might be better child-raisers, no matter how much greater dad-participation they say they want. Nobody likes to be told they should be supplanted by their betters, whether the supplanters are really better or not. 
Not to worry--evidentally Utopia will not occur due to female entry into science. At least not in the near future. Almost 50% of the medical doctors are female, and while I appreciate that, we don't have Utopia. OTOH, medical science is in a less lofty and authoritarian position than it occupied 50 years ago. Good development, IMHO. Makes room for alternative approaches. 
A woman who attended med school in the 1930s, related a cafeteria tale of some jocular male colleagues who put a cadaver penis in the her hotdog roll. She didn't say how far the joke went, and nobody wanted to ask. Long time ago, but you get the idea, that the lady fielded a lot of missiles in her non-traditional life-choice trajectory. 
Her son observed, "and women nowadays think they have it hard." 
 
They should not jiggle the SATs to make certain groups look better. As I said, academics are already insane, and they may soon have to be committed. Women were entering computer science more before they started to try and drum them in. The percentages have actually declined. 
Ultimately the proof is in the pudding. Or the hot dog roll.

"how many blond Afghans do you meet?"  
I don't know if I've ever actually met one, but I did see one once. A child perhaps four, in the documentary about a beauty shop in Afghanistan (the child had not dyed her hair, btw). She looked something like the little blond Berber. Her parents were both dark haired and were Afghans of no mentioned admixture. 
This film was made too long ago for the little blond Afghan to be the missing McCann child (no joke intended.)

Quotas? Why? We're all equal, right?  
 
I propose a lottery. Let everyone, regardless of race, gender, creed, politics, ecological beliefs, etc., with the requisite SATs and all-other-things-being-equal credentials, throw their names into a spinning keg and then the university president can hire some random somebodies to draw the lucky winners. That function alone should add a few jobs to the economy.  
It's the only fair way.