Sunday, December 09, 2007  "All Brains Are the Same Color"
University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett has an
excellent piece on IQ and race.  Sidebar: The article mentions a
recent series of articles (in Slate) by William Saletan. Cosma
Shalizi has a series of posts on them, and as usual, they are
all a must read.  Slate's very own critic-at-large Stephen
Metcalf castigates William Saletan for basing his article
largely on racist junk peddled by a couple of hereditarian
fundamentalists .  * * *  Nearly all the evidence suggesting a
genetic basis for the I.Q. differential is indirect. There is,
for example, the evidence that brain size is correlated with
intelligence, and that blacks have smaller brains than whites.
But the brain size difference between men and women is
substantially greater than that between blacks and whites, yet
men and women score the same, on average, on I.Q. tests.
Likewise, a group of people in a community in Ecuador have a
genetic anomaly that produces extremely small head si