So sayeth John Derbyshire in his latest NRO column. Here is the most relevant point to me:

Write a paper arguing that words have no meaning, or that Cleopatra's mother tongue was Yoruba, and you'll get a Ph.D., lifetime tenure at the university of your choice, and a talk show on some obscure cable channel. Wonder aloud why the Ainu of Japan look like Scottish highlanders, and you will be cast out into the place of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Is it me, or is there something weirdly wrong here?

Before I was very familiar with genetics, I did read Coon et al. and concluded it were interesting, but not very scientific (insofar as he had collected many facts, and interesting ones at that, but I really wasn't convinced of his system, especially his idea that the five primary races descended from divergent hominid lineages, an erzatz multiregionalism) [1]. But Derbyshire is right, compared to what passes as "scholarship" in the modern academy, Coon has a leg up because at least he used hard data. [1] By the way, does anyone wonder if brown people are especially interested in h-b-d or what? Seems like a lot of our readers, and many of Steve Sailer's correspondents are brown*.... * I think South Asians should retake the word brown as ours. I know some Latinos are using the term "brown power," I think we need to get our asses in gear, or they'll steal brown from us like the native tribes of the New World stole "Indian" from us while people from the Carribean are "West Indian," as if they even count! I mean, South Asian sounds too clinical. Brown is so much more colorful.