It's clear that the Founding Fathers were mostly men of remarkable talent... 
 
They were also a self-selected elite, not a random demographic sample. 
 
Yes, that's certainly true, but consider just how small the total population of their society was at that point. The total number of the Founders and their educational/social peers really wasn't a totally negligible fraction of American society. Yet today, I'd suspect you'd never find that level of ability in a similar relative fraction of Old Stock Americans. 
 
It's a little like Classical Athens. I don't doubt that America's brightest are today much, much brighter and more creative than Pericles and Socrates, but our population base is also 1000x larger...

The natural growth rate of the American population from the early colonial period until the Civil War was probably the highest rate of sustained population growth in the history of the world.  
 
I've always suspected that the differential birthrates during this period of exponential growth is a major factor behind a decline of Old Stock mental ability. It's clear that the Founding Fathers were mostly men of remarkable talent, but that seems considerably less true for their typical co-ethnic descendants. 
 
My impression is that if you look at e.g. the men behind the Declaration and the Constitution, you'll find far smaller families than contemporaneous backwoodsmen out West who had 10 or 15 children. A few generations of this pattern can make a huge difference, even before the era of modern birth control.

Jing: 
 
Yes, that's a very interesting analysis. 
 
I've frequently heard it argued that China's current lack of any reasonable "social safety net" (universal pensions+medical care) produces significant problems because it forces people into over-saving and under-consuming. Isn't the government talking about adding a basic medical-care system for exactly this reason, thereby allowing more of China's future economic growth to be self-generated by consumption? Given the astronomical inefficiency and corruption of America's health care system, I'd think that China could provide a pretty reasonable state-run one for basic needs at a minuscule fraction of the cost. 
 
At this stage of its economic development cycle, I personally think that China could benefit from at least a pinch of "Socialism." Obviously nothing like America's terribly debilitating hyper-Socialism, but a pinch nonetheless.

Yeah, Steve Hsu nailed it---I'd been planning to make exactly the same sort of point. 
 
Remember, a couple of hundred years of political control is really a pretty long time in the scheme of things. Maybe someone should couple match those maps showing the historic expansion of "China" with maps showing the geographical extent of "America" during those same two centuries years. 
 
Even leaving aside all those "uncivilized" indian tribes, what about giving California, Texas, and a bunch of other big American states back to Mexico? America grabbed them much, much more recently than China grabbed those various outlying provinces.  
 
Wonder how American politicians would react to Chinese leaders, intellectuals, and journalists all starting to demand that that America disgorge all its occupied Mexican holdings, and passing around maps showing the "correct" legal borders of America...

Actually, it is a little interesting that Northern Han are generally more loyalty/discipline/organization oriented, while Southern Han are more business (and perhaps "wheeler-dealer" oriented). 
 
This is loosely the same pattern in Europe between the Northern Europeans and the Southern Mediterraneans such as Italians, Greeks, etc. 
 
I wonder if this correspondence is entirely coincidental...

A very useful and interesting thread... 
 
I've always considered myself to have a "pretty good" knowledge of China, so I found the claims of the long WSJ piece to be *extremely* peculiar. But then, just like Razib, I wondered whether the author's China knowledge was simply of far greater depth than my own. Based on the thread comments---Nope! 
 
I think the best clue is that the piece appeared in a heavily neoconized portion of the Journal, although not on the notorious op-ed page itself. I've never heard of the author's particular thinktank, but I can easily guess his ideological influences. 
 
The fundamental neocon agenda is to disrupt, degrade, and ultimately dismember all major countries not dominated or directly controlled by neocons or their close allies. China is obviously the largest and most powerful of these, hence a central target of this sort of totally dishonest psy-ops warfare. The pattern is an extremely familiar one.

...Actually, let me clarify my American analogy a bit... 
 
To the extent that white Americans constituted distinct ethnicities, these tended to be much more along regional/cultural lines than based on appearance or genes. For example, white Southerners might regard themselves as distinct, but that wouldn't be much based on whether they were fair- or dark-haired, or the shape of their head.

Actually, I'd argue that "ethnicity" is far more of a cultural/linguistic subjective trait than something objectively based on appearance (i.e. genotype). If the various Han Chinese sub-groups regard themselves as a single Han ethnic group---which I think they do---then they're probably correct, almost by definition. 
 
Similarly, among white European Americans there's obviously a great deal of regional and cultural variation, and there was even more in the past, but they generally all considered themselves "white Americans", so they were. Same for most of the allegedly homogeneous European nations. 
 
Meanwhile, from what I've read, Serbs and Croats (or Greeks and Turks) are virtually indistinguishable genetically, but they are *not* the same ethnicity...

Well, for whatever it's worth, I'd have to go with the skeptics in this particular case. The total combination of skin color, hair, and features seems pretty implausible, though certainly not impossible. (However, a much larger photo would certainly help in the features category.)

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if Linux actually runs on more CPU cores than Windows (given the vast number of servers, and their higher-core structure). 
 
Also, since an increasing fraction of all software activity is via the Web/Server model rather than locally on the PC, I'd bet that Linux totally dominates the active-CPU-clock-cycle measure of computer activity. 
 
And given how dreadfully bad the new Windows Vista version seems, and the rise of netbooks, I think the local platform may be heading in the same direction. 
 
And don't forget the other incredibly successful software components of the Free/Open Source movement, such as Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc., most of which have pretty much wiped out their non-free competitors. 
 
I really, really would avoid making "Anti-Free" arguments when you're talking about software (for which the cost of production and distribution is zero!)

For a long time I've thought that three of the biggest genetically-isolating factors for most of history would be geography, religion, and language. Basically, people tend to marry and have children with others who match on two or three of those factors. 
 
For example, a little while back Razib nailed that puzzle about why Greeks are genetically close to Near Easterners. For a thousand-odd years, the Greek/Byzantine Empire had its population center-of-gravity in the Near East, resulting in heavy gene flow. And the Greeks there also tended to intermarry with the Greeks in Greece, or actually went there after the Greek/Turkish expulsions.

Well, I'd vaguely heard about that "White Stuff" website here and there, but never visited it. 
 
Now that I have, it seems absolutely deadly dull to me, without more than the faintest trace of wittiness, humor, or insight. 
 
Maybe the problem is that only White People like the "Stuff White People Like" website, and I'm not a "White People"...

Yes, my analysis of the issue is extremely close to that of Razib's, with the Carlos Menem analogy being pretty determinative in my own mind. 
 
It's pretty funny to me that both American political camps seem remarkably ignorant and dishonest in their wild claims and counter-claims in this matter. 
 
And I'd guess that the marginal increase in the likelihood of Obama being assassinated by some Muslim fanatic on these grounds is pretty negligible, especially when compared with the pretty sizable likelihood of domestic assassination attempts from various rightwing fanatics.

Luis: 
 
A lot of Smiths change their names. I used to be a Smith. Seemed like no name at all. 
 
That's a very logical explanation and the only reasonable one so far. 
 
C'mon---30% of ALL the Smiths in America changed their last names during a single six year period???!!! 
 
I think my own Martian anthropologist suggestion is a little more plausible...

I'll admit that I find Razib's initial posting as totally mysterious as he did, and none of the explanations suggestioned seem very plausible. 
 
Basically, the number of "Smiths" in America dropped by almost 30% in the six years from 1984-1990. Offhand, this seems as totally astonishing as if a couple of our biggest states disappeared during that period. 
 
Maybe we'd had a gigantic number of Martian anthropology students doing field work here under the most innocuous assumed name, and they all finished their studies and went home again. 
 
Actually wasn't "Smith" the name used by all the aliens in that Buckaroo Banzai movie, which came out right around 1984---so maybe the Martians got scared their cover had been blown!

"spiritual wives" collect welfare for their children..if you weren't aware then you don't know much  
 
Interesting. I *didn't* know that which proves that I *didn't* know much about Mormonism... 
 
...But then, I never thought I did...

During the height of the recent Romney campaign, I happened to come across a paper on the web claiming that Mormon population growth had been exponential for about the last 100 years, and had actually accelerated in the last few decades. Don't have a clue whether this is correct or just pseudo-academic propaganda, but perhaps you do. 
 
If so (and even including a substantial drop-out factor), it does explain why Mormons seem to be so much more numerous and visible today than even just a couple of decades ago, and why social "friction" with Mormons seems to have shifted from Utah into Nevada, Arizona, and Texas. As a tiny data-point, Romney himself seemed to have an extremely large family for someone of his socio-economic status. 
 
Perhaps the correct political question to ask is not the year in which America will elect its first Mormon President but instead the year in which America will elect its last non-Mormon President...

BTW, I just wanted to clarify that I was also a bit puzzled by the seeming conflicts between the various genetic estimates in the different studies. Presumably, as more individuals, more markers, and more populations are added, this will gradually be resolved. 
 
But I was just saying that those new 3-D/3-PC display graphs are really nice, and much easier to decipher than the previous ones I'd seen. Sometimes software leads science rather than the other way round.

These triple-eigenvector 3-D graphs are enormously easier for me to read than the one that Steve Sailer posted earlier on his blogsite.  
 
Graphical display technology leaps forward!

Someone, by which I mean Razib, should write something about Cavalli-Sforza's principla constituents. The different P-C's are relics of different migrations / diffusions, so that two peoples might be similiar on one and diametrically opposed on another.  
 
Very interesting---is this really correct? I'd been vaguely assuming that the different PC's were simply synthetic and probably artificial, corresponding merely to the largest eigenvectors. Is it generally believed instead that they usually represent something "intuitive", like a particular ancestry-group?

Razib's point about the majority of "Greeks" having lived in Anatolia for maybe a thousand years prior to the 1920s seems a very good one.  
 
That might certainly allowed a great deal of intermarriage/genetic transfer over the centuries between the Anatolian Greeks and the Greece Greeks, even before the eventual population transfers after WWI.

I'm not too surprised the the Ashk Jews cluster pretty closely with the Armenians, for exactly the reasons cited.  
 
But what *does* surprise me is that both these groups cluster so closely with the Greeks, whose historical connection is pretty tenuous. After all the ancient Greeks were supposedly Indo-Europeans from the North, not Semites, and I'd always half-suspected that modern Greeks might be mostly "Hellenized" Slavs or whatever---maybe Bulgarians or something. Either way, you'd expect the Greeks to be much, much closer to the other Europeans than to Armenians or Jews. 
 
It would also be very interesting if our techniques become precise enough to extract Carthaginian DNA, and determine whether the Mid-Eastern ancestry of Ashk Jews is actually mostly Carthaginian rather than Judean, as I've often suspected.