Go to the web sites of venture capital, private equity or hedge funds, or of Goldman Sachs, and you'll find that HYPS alums, plus a few Ivies, plus MIT and Caltech, are grossly overrepresented. (Equivalently, look at the founding teams of most startups.) Most top firms only recruit at a few schools. A kid from a non-elite UG school has very little chance of finding a job at one of these places unless they first go to grad school at (e.g.,) HBS, HLS, or get a PhD from a top place. (By top place I don't mean "gee US News says Ohio State's Aero E program is top 5!" -- I mean a math PhD from Berkeley or a PhD in computer science from MIT -- the traditional top dogs in academia.) This is just how the world works. I won't go into detail, but it's actual somewhat rational for elite firms to operate this way -- a Harvard guy knows how the filtering works at his alma mater and at similar places so he trusts it. Plus, at the far tail of ability I would guess the top 10-20 UG schools grab almost 50 percent of the pool. I teach at U Oregon and out of curiosity I once surveyed the students at our Honors College, which has SAT-HSGPA characteristics similar to Cornell or Berkeley. Very few of the kids knew what a venture capitalist or derivatives trader was. Very few had the kinds of life and career aspirations that are *typical* of HYPS or techer kids. At the time I took the survey almost 50 percent of the graduating class at Harvard was heading into finance. You can bet that the average senior at Harvard knows what Goldman Sachs is (and even what it means to make partner there), that Mckinsey is so over (relative to careers in finance), what the difference is between a Rhodes, Marshall and Churchill scholarship, etc. etc. Very few state school kids do ... Last year a physics student at Oregon won a Marshall to go to Cambridge. The administrators were happy about the PR. I had a conversation with a vice-provost about how to ensure a steady pipeline of such candidates -- but there are not the resources, institutional understanding of the process, etc. (let alone pool of able kids) to turn UO into a Rhodes/Marshall/... machine like Harvard. Now tell me that peer or network effects don't matter. Controlling for SAT may account for much of the variance in well-established careers like medicine or even law, but for the very top jobs (which count disproportionately toward income inequality), kids at elite schools have huge advantages. Guess where I will send my kids (assuming they can get in)?

To see the elite / non-elite divide most starkly, look at the probability of (earned) net worth, say, $5-10M by age 40. This cuts out almost all doctors and lawyers and leaves finance, startups and entertainment (i.e., movies or television; let's ignore sports). Even after controlling for SAT, I would guess elite grads are 3 or maybe even 10 times more likely to achieve this milestone. Obviously this kind of assertion is difficult to back up with hard data or academic studies. In fact, most academics don't know all that much about how the real world works. David Kane, one of the contributors to this blog, is an exception, and I would like to hear what his take is on all this. I bet he agrees with me as long as I add Williams College to the list of elites: HYPS ---> HYPSW :-) My bona fides (why I think I know something about this topic): BS Caltech, PhD Berkeley, research fellow at Harvard (lived among undergrads and tutors in Dunster House), Prof. at Yale, Prof. at U Oregon, Silicon Valley startup founder, consultant to VC funds, recruited more than once by Wall St. firms (derivatives and prop. trading).

OK, I don't think we disagree. The Haworth paper (see link below for non-gated version) does suggest a non-zero shared environment effect for MZ twins as late as young adulthood. Note the shared E is a bit smaller than the non-shared E, and both are much smaller than the genetic component of variance. (Figure 1) 
 
http://www.tweelingenregister.org/nederlands/verslaggeving/NTR-publicaties_2009/Haworth_MP_2009epub.pdf 
 
For ordinary sibs I would guess the non-shared E is much larger than the shared E, which has interesting implications for parents.

Ben, 
 
As I pointed out to you on the thread below, many researchers argue that MZ twin results *overstate* shared environment relative to what non-identical siblings in the same family would experience. 
 
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/11/mystery-of-nonshared-environment.html 
 
You need to carefully define what you mean by "shared environment" (SE) -- does this mean the common environmental effect on identical twins, born at the same time and who look and act alike, and are consequently treated similarly? Or are you trying to estimate the common environmental effect on, say, two siblings born a few years apart with dissimilar appearance and personalities? These two situations are very different: one might expect the MZA and MZT data to give a much larger SE estimate than is relevant for ordinary sibs. 
 
I suspect that when researchers state that SE is nearly zero by adulthood, they are talking about ordinary sibs -- two ordinary sibs raised together are no more alike than two random people, once the genetic effect is accounted for. Equivalently, as your adoption graph shows, adult IQ shows zero correlation between adopted and biological children raised in the same home. I don't think it's fair to use the MZ data against the adoption results: you are comparing apples to oranges. I expect the MZ value of SE is an upper bound on the SE for ordinary sibs, not a straightforward estimate.

Razib, 
 
Thanks for the compliment. The compression post was mainly for non-experts, but seems to have attracted comments from people who know a lot about psychometrics. The wealth post was kind of meant as a joke, but not entirely.

"I don't know a single HBD-blogger who would disagree with this obvious truism." 
 
I was mainly referring to commenters, but probably it occasionally applies to bloggers. 
 
Just because they wouldn't disagree with the explicit statement doesn't mean they don't occasionally make a slip in logic.

As with all complex human activities there are multiple factors affecting the outcome. It's amazing how often people in the HBD-sphere forget this. 
 
Football, like all sports, requires skill development. 
 
States vary a lot in the level of football skill development. In some states 8 year old kids are already playing in helmet and pads, whereas in other states this doesn't happen until junior high. This makes a big difference later on. The intensity of HS football in Texas (see FNL) is way beyond what you'll find in most other states. I doubt NYC has good youth leagues for football, but Ohio and Pennsylvania do. 
 
One of the least skill-intensive events is the 100m dash -- yes, technique is still important, but less so than in soccer, football, basketball, etc. If you want a good measure of the genetic football potential on a state by state basis, look at the list of fastest 100m times by state (easy to find online). I think you'll find most SEC states eclipse the times put up in places like Iowa or Oregon. Around here, you can probably win the state title with a 10.8 or so. Down there, it might take a 10.2 or 10.4 (that's a huge difference). 
 
You can easily get to a few-factor model for football prospect output by state -- genetic (100m times), skill development (penetration of pop warner leagues, budgets of HS programs), and overall state population.

But if we had to be *really* (exponentially) lucky, then it would look a lot like ID or intervention to someone who didn't think in terms of 10^100 Earth-like planets + anthropism. Those improbable steps that the evil IDers (and Godel) talk about might really be there.

HDL: My argument is not specific to humans. You can replace humans with any kind of intelligent (or even sufficiently complex) life.  
 
The point (which I think you appreciate) is that Godel could be right *and* life evolved on Earth in 5 Gyr. It just means that the overwhelming majority of Earth-like planets will not have evolved life and we were lucky. The outcome of 5 Gyr of evolution on a typical Earth-like planet might be some crappy simple organisms stuck at some local fitness maxima, or perhaps only a soup of molecules without even basic "replicator" capability. 
 
But I don't think this point is well understood by most biologists. 
 
For more, see  
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/10/evolution-design-and-fermi-paradox.html

We know from fossils that multicellular organisms can change very radically over X years, and can show that it has happened dozens of times. So I don't think there's that much hand-waving there. 
 
Uh, how do you know? That's assuming there was no "help". 
 
IF there was help along the way, you don't know anything -- you've got exactly one record of a history of assisted evolution. What does that tell you about how evolution would work (e.g., rate of progress) in the absence of help? 
 
Let's try it this way: suppose we live in a multiverse, and suppose that only in 10^{- googleplex} of those universes could humans manage to evolve in 5 Gy. In all the other universes organisms get trapped at certain local maxima, at certain bottlenecks. We, of course, happen to live in one of the lucky universes. But perhaps our evolutionary history is so improbable that it hides the reality that such traps exist: i.e., the *typical* time required to evolve humans is 10^{+ googleplex} years, or something like that.  
 
If such traps exist, then people like Godel (and, gulp, Behe) are, in a sense, right. Can you prove he is wrong? Or is it an act of faith on your part? How do you know that our evolutionary history is *typical* in the multiverse? 
 
Godel and Co. (I am avoiding the mention of Behe) would like to make some general theoretical analysis of evolution using physical laws like ours. At the moment this is beyond anyone's powers. You say you have a specific history that renders their arguments incorrect. How can you be sure? Maybe we are lucky (anthropic principle), or maybe we had help! :-)

I realize this is off-topic from what Razib wants, but I don't think we should completely dismiss what George / Godel are saying on this issue -- there is a lot of hand-waving in the claim that evolution produced everything around us (with no divine nudging, perhaps at the molecular level) in 5 billion years.  
 
No one can give any kind of quantitative estimate of how long it should have taken given the known laws of physics. 
 
We have evidence that evolution (or something like it) occurred, but the only argument against intervention is really Occam's razor, and this depends on some crucial priors. 
 
Personally I believe in evolution (at reasonably high confidence), but I think there are a lot of biologists out there who don't realize how much of their case depends on priors (no deceptive activist God, etc.). 
 
My confidence in the accuracy of Newtonian mechanics or classical electromagnetism or special relativity or QED is much higher than my confidence that evolution produced us. 
 
While no one is going to prove the theorem Godel proposed any time soon, also no one is going to prove that known physical processes have a reasonably high probability of producing humans in 5 billion years.  
 
Godel: "... a mathematical theorem to the effect that the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of physics (or any other law of a similar nature) starting from a random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is about as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components'."

J MCT: 
 
I think you're really describing the non-science areas of academia. In science, it isn't enough to be smart -- one has to produce new results (prove theorems, develop new techniques, more accurate measurements, models that are later confirmed). There isn't that much disagreement (at the highest levels) about who has made important contributions and who hasn't.

There might be an order of magnitude (i.e., 17,000 vs 1700 in the NFL) more people of the right age who could have played in the NFL but who aren't. No more than that as the system is pretty efficient (combines, scouting, lots of college teams with scholarships). See the case of Brock Lesnar (NCAA wrestling champ, UFC champ, played high school football and almost made the Vikings as a walk on) for a case of very rare (1 in 10^{5-6}) raw talent that still didn't make the cut, mainly due to lack of skills (not ability). (The question is a bit ill-defined as NFL success requires both ability and skill development that takes years of practice, although the skill component in some positions is dominated by natural ability.) 
 
Re: Putnam, no single test is a perfect predictor of performance in a more complex activity (see http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2006/03/success-vs-ability.html ). I've worked with Putnam and Olympiad winners and though anyone who does well on those exams is very smart, they are not necessarily the best researchers. (However, in analogy with the original post, that *population* -- like the group of kids of pro athletes -- would be a good place to look for superstars.) 
 
I do believe that, above a certain cutoff, academic science is the single largest accumulator of top-ability brains. I can debate that with anyone who wants to claim otherwise (perhaps citing hedge funds, silicon valley, defense industry, etc.). 
 
This whole discussion boils down to a signal and correlation question, as Razib pointed out.

1. The parental midpoint is likely much lower than the father's level (the wife was probably not as athletically gifted as the father). 
 
2. Regression to the mean implies that the kids will *on average* not be as exceptional as the parental midpoint, but since the midpoint is still superior the 2nd generation population (kids of superstars) is still a good place to look for future athletes. 
 
3. Regression to the mean depends on the assumption of a random environmental factor. Instead, in the case of athletics, a superstar parent might be able to provide all kinds of environmental advantages: coaching, skill development, insider understanding of how recruiting and college/pro sports works, etc. 
 
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/10/regression-to-mean.html

Vanya wrote: "... Hitler's basic plan was very simple - empty out Central and Eastern Europe of its Slavic and Jewish population and refill it with Germans. Is that really so different from the intent of what the US did to the Indians? Supposedly that's where Hitler got the idea in the first place - reading those old Karl May novels. When the Belgians do it in the Congo or the Brazilians do it in the Amazon rain forest, we call it evil but summarily forget about it - when Hitler does the same thing to white people it becomes "implausibly evil" and discussed incessantly for the next 100 years. There's a sense in which Hitler was really the last gasp of 19th century imperialism." 
 
I agree completely.  
 
If you read Mein Kampf it's amazing how obvious the parallels are between Germans "settling" the east and what happened in the Americas. What makes it "singular evil" is that he wants to do it to other Europeans. Since he didn't succeed (although central Europe is now mostly free of Jews), the victims' narrative is accessible to subsequent generations. 
 
To quote the War Nerd:  
 
"I don't live this double life, benefiting from the fact that my house is built on some other tribe's land and then pretending to regret that. I'll always remember having to study Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and everyone sobbing for the poor Indians, but nobody's gonna give them the land back. I mean, one way or the f*#king other: either you give them the land back, or you admit you're a predator and you eat meat." 
 
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/war-nerd-interview.html 
 
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/05/conquest-david-day.html

Moldbug, 
 
Thanks for the Freda Utley reference. I was just looking at her stuff and it is fascinating. 
 
http://www.fredautley.com/ 
 
See link below for more recommendations, including the war diary A Woman in Berlin: 
 
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/12/defeat-is-bitter.html

There is a huge gap in life expectancy between group 1 (Asians) and group 3 (most affluent white subgroup, "middle America"). See figures 1 and 3 in the paper. This despite the fact that per capita income is *lower* in the group 1 than in group 3. 
 
There is some related discussion here: 
 
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/04/us-human-development-indices.html 
 
The Asian-White gap in human development index is about the same as the White-Black/Hispanic gap!

At this stage of its economic development cycle, I personally think that China could benefit from at least a pinch of "Socialism." 
 
This is being fought over at the highest policy levels. 
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4686&page=0 
 
"The rise of the team of rivals arrangement may result in fewer policies aimed at maximizing GDP growth rates at all costs. Instead, it might give way to policies that provide due consideration to both economic efficiency and social justice. Already, the ongoing global financial crisis has driven the leadership to change its emphasis from export-led growth to encouraging domestic demand, which means addressing rural needs. An ambitious land reform plan, which was adopted in the fall of 2008, promises to give farmers more rights and market incentives to encourage them to subcontract and transfer land. This strategy aims to increase the income of farmers, reduce economic disparity, promote sustainable urbanization, and ultimately end the century-long segregation between rural and urban China. Some analysts think that this land reform, along with a nearly $600 billion stimulus plan announced in November that favors railroad construction and rural infrastructure development, will greatly boost the country?s domestic economy and hopefully propel China through the current economic crisis."

Maciano: "the US ... feels genuine shame for some historic mistakes." 
 
Ha ha -- yeah, you, me and Howard Zinn feel some shame. Most everyone else, not so much. 
 
In 100 years some affluent Chinese intellectuals will write some books about what a shame it is what happened in Tibet/Xinjiang in the 20th and early 21st centuries. Everyone else will wonder what they are talking about. 
 
War Nerd: "I don't live this double life, benefiting from the fact that my house is built on some other tribe's land and then pretending to regret that. I'll always remember having to study Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and everyone sobbing for the poor Indians, but nobody's gonna give them the land back. I mean, one way or the f*#king other: either you give them the land back, or you admit you're a predator and you eat meat." 
 
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/05/conquest-david-day.html

i'm not saying that a state *needs* justification 
 
Razib: I know you're not, but that seems to be the motivation of others who comment on this issue.

Uhh, what's the historical justification for the current US government and its control of this continent? Nothing other than military conquest followed by displacement / marginalization of the previous inhabitants. How is this any different than what is going on in Tibet / Xinjiang? (Other than what was done in America was 100x more brutal.) 
 
We have our own historical propaganda just as the current Chinese government does. See Howard Zinn, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, and all that.