Congrats, Razib!

Adam Corolla used to play a game on the radio show "Love Line" where bizarre news stories involving sexual perversion were read. An example would be a factory employee who got a large washer caught around his penis. He would then make the host, Drew Pinsky, guess if the story originated in Germany or in Florida. (The previous story originated in Germany, of course.)

My handedness is similarly strange. I'm ambidextrous when writing (but a little faster with my right hand), right-handed when I eat with a fork or spoon, right-handed with a pistol, and left-handed when it comes to most other activities involving projection: throwing a basketball, tossing a baseball, firing a rifle, etc.

I couldn't help but note that today New England isn't included in the "Real America." 
 
What role might heavy non-British immigration have played in hardening that attitude toward New England proper and the upper Atlantic region generally?

What is left after you factor out IQ? I don't know, but I suspect that if natural resource abundance were taken into account, then there would be even less to attribute to culture. For example, a few oil-rich states and small island nations preferred by tourists probably skew Lynn and Vanhanen's numbers a little.

also, this focus on the european-non-european difference seems a little weird. in 900 most greek speakers probably were resident outside of europe, in anatolia. just because there's a line on the map doesn't mean that genetic variation is going to track that well. in the 1920s there are a mass transfer of anatolian "greeks" (some of whom spoke turkish but were orthodox christians) to greece itself. 
 
Are you aware of any studies on genetic differences between Greek mainlanders and descendants of Anatolian Greeks?

also, do note that illiteracy doesn't predict islamic fundamenalism within a society. look at at indonesia. the trends are pretty complicated and nested within each other. 
 
Yes, I wonder if the very opposite may not be true: increasing literacy as a driver of Islamic fundamentalism. 
 
I would guess that the sort of syncretic interpretations of Islam common in places like Indonesia cannot easily stand in a society where each believer is capable of interpreting the Qur'an for themselves and where such interpretations are divorced from local political structures. Additionally, those structures are probably being made increasingly irrelevant with the advance of globalism.

When it comes to the less intelligent people of the world: 
 
If they don't each much, then blame it on malnutrition. 
 
If they eat too much, then blame it on obesity and poor dietary habits. 
 
If their country is poor, then blame it on the fact that they must exert themselves at mundane tasks and don't get enough serious intellectual stimulation. 
 
If their country is rich, then blame it on the fact that they don't have to struggle enough and thus don't exert themselves intellectually. 
 
If they are dark skinned, then blame it on the fact their skin is too dark to absorb enough vitamin D. 
 
If they are light skinned, then blame it on the fact they live in a cold climate and don't get enough vitamin D. 
 
Such, my friends, is the many headed hydra of race and IQ denialism.

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.

Tommy, the average Saudi is as poor as the average Chinese person. Don't let the royals you see on TV fool you. 
 
Do you have evidence to back that up? There may be huge wealth disparities in Saudi Arabia but the GDP is fully six times higher than in China and it isn't as if there aren't any disparities in wealth in China. But if you don't want to rely on Saudi Arabia, you can always look next door at Kuwait. Citizens of that country have the same low IQs you find everywhere else in the Middle East but enjoy an extensive welfare state.

I guess the scientific paper I read about the fact that those with darker skin make less vitamin D and it is well established that vitamin D affects development, which could affect IQ isn't a legitimate source. **sigh** You cannot seriously be claiming that Asians from south China are anywhere near as dark as Africans. 
 
Maybe not, but I would certainly claim that Saudis are typically darker than your average Chinese person - and better nourished to boot.

And because this comment page may get more lay traffic than usual, I'll add, with an almost-straight face, "So height has nothing to with basketball proficiency." Finally, I'll ask what the point of the Saudi observation was. 
 
The point is that the average Saudi is almost certainly less deficient in Vitamin D and other nutrients than the average Chinese person and yet the Chinese are still smarter.

Saudi Arabia has a higher GDP than China and almost certainly a lot more sunlight. The average Saudi also has a far lower IQ than the average Chinese person.

No. We know from adoption studies (which control for genes) that parents do not have an influence on scholastic performance. As my Watson post indicated, ethnicity is the single biggest predictor of school performance. And this is apparently if the children are transracially adopted or not. 
 
I think Caledonian is just amazed that anyone who holds a 100% environmental view of intelligence would resort to labeling claims of parental influence on academic achievement as "racist." I have to agree that is pretty nutty.

Steve Sailer provides an excellent example of why we must start honestly discussing this issue: 
 
Every time state schools chief Jack O'Connell thought he was doing something to close the achievement gap, a new round of test scores showed that black and Latino students had gained no ground on their white and Asian American peers. 
 
Like many educators, O'Connell assumed the culprit was poverty. Then he noticed an even wider ethnic disparity among students who were not poor. 
 
The realization was a jolt: Being black or Latino - not poor - was what the low-scorers had in common. And it changed everything. 
 
O'Connell now believes that widespread cultural ignorance within the California school system is responsible for the poor academic performance of many black and Latino students in school. 
 
He offered the example of black children who learn at church that it's good to clap, speak loudly and be a bit raucous. But doing the same thing at school, where 72 percent of teachers are white and may be unfamiliar with such customs, will get them in trouble, he said. 
 
The achievement gap is "absolutely, positively not genetic," O'Connell said. "All kids can learn. I'm saying it's racial." 
 
Even though I'm an atheist, I'm tempted to exclaim "God help us!"

Actually, we cannot know if there is any racial element until we have eliminated several factors. 
 
And that is what a number of studies (such as studies on twins reared apart) have attempted to do. 
 
We know that prenatal and infant nutrition affects IQ. Africans and African-Americans tend to have poor nutrition, particularly during these crucial time periods. This is due to severe poverty in the first instance and culture in the second instance. The second element is psychosocial complexity, which relates, again, to culture. If we have a group that, or historical or cultural reasons have less psychosocial complexity, we would expect that group to have lower IQ tests as adults, insofar as IQ tests the ability to recognize complex patterns. This is why IQ disparities arise over time, as people get older.  
 
Here you have one point; namely, we should be encouraging black women to breastfeed their children. This might have some positive impact on black IQ scores. Barring this, it might be in the interest of society to invest in the development of an infant formula more similar to breast milk in composition. 
 
Thomas Sowell pointed out that African American culture developed out of Scotch-Irish culture, and that is where a lot of African-American attitudes come from.  
 
Thomas Sowell is a man I greatly admire, but he is wrong on this point. The Scots-Irish populations in the South were the group of Southern whites having the least contact with blacks. The Scots-Irish tend to comprise the bulk of those farmers who were too poor to own slaves. A good example of a heavily Scots-Irish region is West Virginia which has only a very small black population. 
 
If you were to compare rural Southern whites' IQs with whites from the North, you would likely find an IQ disparity there too for the reasons of nutrition and psychosocial complexity. You cannot feed your babies soda pop and expect good results. 
 
We may find a disparity, but that would not necessarily be the result of environment and, to the extent that it may be environmental, it may not be relevant to blacks. For example, I recall some studies suggesting that living in a rural environment may depress IQ. That would not explain the black-white IQ gap since blacks are, on average, a rather urban population. 
 
My wife is Mexican-American, and when we were dating, she was concerned about my meeting her family, who all lived in the Rio Grande Valley. I told her that I was from rural Kentucky, and that there was no way they were going to be more shocking to me than my family was going to be to her. When I went down and met her family, I wasn't shocked at all. Her extrended family all acted just like my extended family. When she asked me what I thought, I told her, "You know what the difference is between a Mexican and a Hillbilly? Cuisine." When I brought he
More....

What's a good domain name? iq.org is taken. 
 
gfactor.org?

Given the repetitive questions and claims we hear from IQ and race denialists, knowledgeable people like Malloy, Razib, Half Sigma, Sailer, Guhname, Chris Brand and others might want to consider putting together an ongoing "Race and IQ" FAQ that newbies to the debate can be easily referred to. Right now, there really is no single comprehensive online resource for such information. Malloy's recent post on the Watson controversy is a step in that direction and Half Sigma addressed a few of the more common fallacies he has been hearing from NYT readers in a post today. Such a resource might, if nothing else, improve the quality of the debate online.

The NYT had an article recently about the 50,000 Mandean Gnostics who live in the swamps of southern Iraq, but are not being persecuted by Muslims. 
 
Gnostics? 
 
Perhaps, though some theorize the Mandaeans - who also go by the name Nasoreans (Nazarenes) - might actually be the descendants of the Essenes or the Qumran community (or both if the hypothesis that the two are one and the same are correct) who fled ancient Judea for southern Iraq. They are rather secretive but are said to consider St. John the Baptist the founder of their sect and describe Jesus as a former leader who betrayed their cause.

How about the Shabaks? Do you know anything about them?