Yeah, to see him up on stage ranting about open source and scratching his genitals at the same time is wondrous. NOT!

The subspecies thing is another misdirection, and often explicitly or implicitly paired with the same conclusion: differences in socially valued traits cannot plausibly exist unless humankind can be partitioned neatly into a mythical conception of 'subspecies'.  
 
Because, after all, it's not as if there is no variance in IQ among caucasians, is there? 
 
"Them there 'tards must be a different subspecies!"

But the Swedes were pretty warlike as late as the 17th century, when under Gustavus Adolphus they invaded most of Germany and the Baltic states, so any genetic change must be very recent! 
 
At the risk of piling on, I present some more pertinent examples: 
 
But the French were pretty warlike as late as the 19th century, and look at them now, a bunch of wusses. 
 
But the Germans were pretty warlike as late as the 20th century, and ... 
 
But the Japanese were pretty warlike as late as the 20th century, and ...

xxxx

In short, Shang Yang extols the virtues of the Malthusian Trap in perpetuating a stable & well ordered state! 
 
However, it could also be that by entrapping the majority in the joys of Malthus he was reducing the competition his own descendants would face for access to resources ... and making for a more stable, predictable future in which they could operate.  
 
It would seem that emperor 高祖 arose from the peasant class. Very unsporting of him. Upset quite a few apple carts I imagine.

 
The Swedish-speakers are, by far, the most pampered and the most over-privileged minority in the First World and their sense of entitlement makes French-speaking minorities seem perfectly reasonable in comparison.  
 
 
You are wrong. We have the most pampered minority here in the US.

Help me out here: 
 
But it is not a test of reading comprehension but a test off perceiving the "logic" of social arrangements - for example, why streets are numbered in order. 
 
In what way is having streets numbered in order a social arrangement? 
 
My first understanding of that sentence related to street numbers, ie, houses on a street, however, being familiar with streets in San Francisco it is possible that he is referring to First street, second street, third street and so forth. 
 
So, I am at a loss to understand what he means. There is no other logical way to number streets, although the practice in the West of the US (or is it only the Bay Area?) of leaving large gaps between numbers is semi-logical. However, the number nightmare that is El Camino Real is unwarranted.

Saul says: 
 
1. Many of the very highest ranking nations on that list: Canada, New Zealand, Netherlands also happen to have the highest proportion of non-whites (25%, 22% and 17% respectively). While overwhelmingly white nations like Lithuania, Latvia, Croatia, Bulgaria are found in the bottom half. 
 
However, a quick check with NZ Gov't data, which it sure looks like Saul used shows that someone does not understand that Asians are not white. 
 
There are indeed, according to the 2001 data 22% Maoris and Pacific Islanders in NZ, but there are also 7% Asians. 
 
Secondly, those 7% Asians are predominantly from HK (personal knowledge). 
 
Secondly, it is interesting that Saul omitted countries like Australia and counted the large number of mixed people in Canada as non-white. How convenient (this site shows those with mixed ethnic backgrounds making up 26% of the population but shows us no break down for that group; however, I think we are entitled to regard it as mostly a mixture British, French and other European.

My dear man, A'levels are not taken at age 16.  
 
Who said they were. They would be taken at the same age as the HSC in Australia or the the Senior Highschool year in the US. Ages can vary for those. In the US AP exams can be taken pretty much for any of the four years of high school and the SATs or ACTs are usually taken in the first half of the senior year but can be taken in the junior year to get them out of the way. 
 
My daughters were 16 or earlier when they took their SATs (or equivalent) and had a great many AP classes (with 4s and 5s to their credit) and started college when they were 17. 
 
I am beginning to see who has limited knowledge and experience. 
 
By the way, you still haven't provided evidence for those 8 A's (A-levels that is, were they taken when only P/PO/F were given?).

According to Wikipedia:  
 
Research from Durham University found A-levels were graded "more severely" in mathematics, sciences and modern languages than in humanities and arts. 
 
It also goes on to imply that only in places like Singapore do they study 12 A levels. 
 
Perhaps you could indulge me and provide some evidence that you got 8 A's and let us know what subjects ... evidence beats all arguments. 
 
Being a PhD student is does not really mean that much. I tend to be more interested in things like papers. 
 
As to substructure, it could be cognitive ability substructure which we are not yet able to discern on DNA tests. Hopefully, in a few years we will.

dataset says: 
 
Are people here aware that Indians far outperform Pakistanis in every facet of life in the UK? Once upon a time Pakistan and India were joined...so obviously genes/race do NOT come into play with academic achievement in the UK at least. Pakistanis are very low in SES/Education attainment/Public perception, yet Indians outperform whites. LOL, for anyone to think genes are primarily involved is quite funny. 
 
Clearly, sitting there in your armchair, you are unable to understand that Indians and Pakistanis might have separated along the boundaries of the substructure that already existed in pre-partition India.

'Easier tests' might explain some of the changes, but as I made clear (I hoped) in my brief post, it can hardly explain one group (Black Africans) overtaking another (Pakistanis). 
 
Are all the tests public examination type tests, or is there a subjective grading component in any of them?

Willy wonka says: 
 
I and others who feel as I do are not the ones making a case. We are not presenting any theory or any form of hypothesis. We do not claim to have any answers. We didn't get given huge grants to conduct research. And as such, we only have to show that the case being made is inconclusive. 
 
Oh but you do claim to have answers and make claims. Your claims are above: Race does not exist and is a social construct as any biologist will tell us. You said that yourself.  
 
You also claim that there are no differences, otherwise you wouldn't be here arguing ...

I think willy wonka gives the game away when he says: 
 
If we do ever find a genetic source which is causative for intelligence, is it conceivable that the alleles won't be spread across the artificial designations of race? How would that even be possible? (Emphasis added.) 
 
Clearly, he, or she, has not been keeping up with the literature.

Over at Matthew Yglesias' blog posting about the Baruku and intelligence improvements once they get to the greatest Western Country proving that all claims of an association between IQ and achievement are conservative racist justifications for white males being on top we see a comment that: 
 
Also, as Ezra Klein has noted, when IQ tests are translated into ebonics (which some linguistics, such as McWhorter, point as has all the grammatical and syntax structures of an actual language) without changing the question and answers, the black-white gap disappears. 
 
An interesting claim. I wonder if there is any data to back it up?

We can expect humans, or indeed any animal for that matter, to have developed an approximate, good-enough, reality-detection engine. 
 
The expense of developing a perfect reality-engine is usually not worth the trouble.

 
How do you figure that Some Random Weirdo? That sentiment, obviously heart felt, is prima facae evidence for son preference. 
It's something a PC artist editor would most certainly frame in neon-lights. 
 
 
Someone with more experience of the world would realize that mothers often love their sons more while fathers often love their daughters more. 
 
It is prima facae evidence that that mother loved her son, but it does not fit the narrative that males oppress females to the extent of preferring male children over female children. In this case it was a female expressing that view.

In that report the grieving mother says: 
 
"That was the only boy child I had," said Mavundu. "I loved him very much." 
 
I am surprised that the PC editors let that quote through.

 
Why is it that if the kid is bright, blame the Chinese, if its dumb, blame the brown one. It seems that stereotyping is controlled by the those who love to talk. 
 
 
In my experience with both Filipinos and Chinese (from the South of China) their skin colors are indistinguishable. They are both brown.

Anna says: 
 
If you want to retain any credibility you are going to have to distinguish between a landing party and permanent settlement or immigration. 
 
Newly arrived Britons or Germans or Swedes will always be considered "American". 
 
No. You claimed, based most likely on a Wikipedia article, that "The Filipinos have been here since 1587 earlier than most white immigrants ..." 
 
This is simply not true, and the claim is based on a landing party on a Spanish vessel who were Filipino. 
 
Using the same method it could be claimed that the Chinese have been in Australia since the 1500s or in Kenya since 1433 (as that was the date of the last Zheng He voyage). 
 
By practice, Chinese females seldom marry non-Chinese ... 
 
That is not my experience, since I know many Chinese females who married non-Chinese. Indeed, I am married to one. The key, in my opinion, is that Chinese females have an in-built high-IQ detection system.

Anna says: 
 
The Filipinos have been here since 1587 earlier than most white immigrants yet they are still discriminated as "foreigners" Makes you wonder how bad the racism is in the US. 
 
If you want to retain any credibility you are going to have to distinguish between a landing party and permanent settlement or immigration.

Blacks have higher downward mobility than whites 
 
Regression to the mean cited.

Some have argued that so-called "Sub-Saharan Africa" never produced "technical civilizations". Wrong! The location of Kush is in the sub-Saharan area of the Sudan. There there was writing, cities, etc. B 
 
Please compare it with China. Which one has mantained a continuous history, and is a people that still exists today.

No. Read Razib' link above, where a (ex?) GNXP poster shows how, in a world with IQ testing, companies would need to practice 'reverse affirmitive action' (what a euphemism!). 
 
The problem with Razib's link is that while the conclusion is essentially correct, the numbers are wrong. 
 
So, read the comments, which introduce their own incorrect claims that twins reared apart show lower IQ correlations than siblings reared together.  
 
Sigh. The blogosphere is full of shit.

Tommy says: 
 
 
An extensive welfare state is no argument. There is a positive correlation between those on welfare and low IQ. If you don't have to fend for yourself, how smart do you have to become? 
 
 
Pointing to an extensive welfare state in the desert whose citizens have low IQs is a perfectly good argument when it comes to rebutting claims that undernourishment or vitamin D deficiency might be the cause of race differences in IQ. Kuwaitis aren't starving. You are shifting the argument: instead of arguing poverty is to blame, in the case of the Kuwaitis you want to claim they're not poor enough. 
 
Moreover, he's prepared to accept use it or lose it in the current generation, but unprepared to accept that this happens genetically over long periods as well (in both directions).

*sigh* are you saying that there aren't other sorts of nutrient deficiencies in africa? even richard lynn assumes there are problems with micronutrients. strawmen abound on all sides it seems. 
 
Moreover, dark-skinned southern Chinese (广州）have skin colors indistinguishable from Indonesians and Malays and live in the same areas (in Malaysia and Indonesia), yet there are clear differences in IQ.

 
*sigh* are you saying that there aren't other sorts of nutrient deficiencies in africa? even richard lynn assumes there are problems with micronutrients. 
 
 
If course there are other nutrient deficiencies that are possible in Africa, just are there are in other places. 
 
However, to latch onto nutrient deficiencies as the panacea seems like grasping at straws.  
 
Moreover, the US has done lots to try eliminate nutrient deficiencies, but there is still good evidence that high SES blacks still get lower test scores that poor whites in some cases.

Now, to return to environmental factors, is it possible that vitamin D deficiency could explain IQ differences? I think the suggested experiment with biracial children would be a good way of testing for this. 
 
Sigh. People insist on only looking at the picture in the US. 
 
In the parts of Africa inhabited by blacks, vitamin D deficiency is not an issue, nor is it in the northern parts of Australia or places like Indonesia.

 
So my guess is that we won't, in the end, find any racial differences in IQ -- but we will find that certain social conditions result in cultures that affect IQ positively or negatively... 
 
 
No, no. You have that all wrong. 
 
Certain IQ ranges result in certain social conditions, and IQ is highly heritable. The arrow of causality is from IQ to culture, and we can see it in pretty much most societies, since they contain roughly three broad sub-cultures.

[cut the sarcasm]

christopher asks: 
 
1. So those studies that show that merely exposing children of one race or another to discriminatory statements can negatively or positively affect their performance on a test are irrelevant? 
 
Can you link to the studies that have shown this effect? 
 
Can you tell us how discriminatory statements against East Asians have had the effect of improving their performance on tests?

the dichotomy is totally dominant in the elite discourse now. the only difference is that it is attributed to one parameter only. and that attribution has public policy consequences. it was/is a high risk strategy, with the joint plank of premising moral arguments upon a naturalistic consensus. the objection of over-simplification would carry more weight if it was consistently applied in the public discussion. 
 
You cannot fool me young man. It's turtles all the way down! 
 
It is most likely that a large majority of people cannot understand the realities of group difference. Hell, if they can't understand negative numbers they are not going to be able to understand differing distributions and the realities of the statistics behind group differences, let alone understand what selection has done to different populations. 
 
Such fertile ground for the demagogues to manipulate.

The Average Punter Cannot Understand Negative Numbers 
 
Is there any better demonstration that we are not all equal when it comes to IQ? 
 
Were it as clear to the great majority of managers as it is to Math teachers in US high schools that a great many people, perhaps the majority, cannot understand negative numbers, we would probably not be having this discussion.

Razib says: 
 
the case in malaysia is one where the authorities (dr. mahathir mohommed) used the argument of innate inequality (because of different initial ecological and density conditions) to argue for differential treatment of the majority and minority. this is a classic case which falsifies the idea that a particular naturalistic assumption result in invariant policy responses. 
 
Mahathir's argument is more sophisticated than we usually hear, and in any event, I was not referring to that. I was referring to the usual anti-Chinese demagoguery that we hear from the non-Chinese political classes in those countries. 
 
It is notable, also, that at least one leader from a country colonized by whites referred to Mahathir as recalcitrant, an adjective that Mahathir was bound to be able to understand. 
 
It is also notable that on average, Chinese students from both Indonesia and Malaysia do better than Malays and Indonesians.

Widespread knowledge of h-bd invalidates the discrimination assumption. That is the assumption that the plight of group X is due to racist action by group Y. (Changes added.)  
 
This is a very important notion, and can be extended to the actions of certain majorities, eg, Malays and Indonesians who were the majorities, against Chinese who were the highly achieving minorities in those countries, or, even the Jews, that high-achieving but minority group in Europe and other places. 
 
The reality is that it is usually the elites in any group scapegoating some other group so that they can continue to reap benefit from their positions and avoid scrutiny. Exploitation central.

What is so weird about all this is that the focus is on racial differences, but differences in IQ exist within each racial group. 
 
There are white people I went to high school with years ago who cannot do what I can do and who I would not employ for any position. 
 
Equally, of course, I cannot pound rocks all day or do road work all day, but then, those jobs do not pay big bucks and will not help me put my children through expensive colleges.

Credell Phillips asks: 
 
Would it not be better that people of African descent and Asia descent make up their IQ test and let you take? 
 
Well, you know, the funny thing is that East Asians do better, on average, on this test that white Europeans invented, so why should they bother to invent their own?