Check my Blog on IQ and Environment:
http://iqandenvironment.blogspot.com/

Ive also got a section on Zambia, Qatar and Nepal all having exactly the same IQ scores and comparing theyre human development index too.

I was just gearing up to respond to the post, and you did a much better job than I could have. I would only point out that the article referred to in original comment is most probably:
Eric Jorgenson, Hua Tang, Maya Gadde, Mike Province, Mark Leppert, Sharon Kardia, Nicholas Schork, Richard Cooper, D. C. Rao, Eric Boerwinkle, and Neil Risch.
2005. Ethnicity and Human Genetic Linkage Maps. American Journal of Human Genetics 76(2):276-290.
This piece by Jorgenson and colleagues (including Neil Risch) is a fascinating exploration of the techniques (and pitfalls) of using human gene markers to group data by geographic point of origin. In particular, they point to the large number of ‘null’ readings on alleles in African and Asian donors as there is not adequate data to match alleles from these groups. The researchers suggest that anamolies on chromosomes 8 and 12, with inversions showing up on white and (oddly, in my reading) Japanese populations (the stand-in for ‘Asian, which begs its own discussion; of course, so would using a US white population as ‘white,’ but that’s a different discussion).

Of course, the Jorgenson article says exactly nothing about ‘race’ and intelligence, lactose tolerance, or sickle-cell anemia, all of which are FREQUENT topics of discussion — in the critical sense — in most responsible anthropological discussions of human variation. Agustín’s suggestions about other readings are great. And the AAA website also has great stuff on sports, which is a personal favorite for me.

Agustín’s comments are far more measured and substantial than mine likely would have been. I recently did some investigating of the ‘science of race’ because of comments made here in Australia by Prof. Andrew Fraser, a now-retired law professor at my home institution, Macquarie University. He was calling for a return to ‘whites only’ immigration policies on the basis of ‘evidence’ of ‘genetic’ inferiorities of African populations. His numbers were so odd that I went looking for the source, realizing that the claim that sub-Saharan African populations had average IQs in the 70s (and Khoisan allegedly in the 60s) that he had to be quoting some source verbatim. The claim that a whole population was, on average, ‘mentally retarded’ was so ludicrous and illogical that, from years of spotting plagiarized information in student papers, I realized Dr. Fraser had to be swallowing someone’s information without even thinking it through (e.g., could a population with a mean intelligence in the ‘mentally retarded’ zone survive for many generations in a dessert on their wits and oral knowledge of hundreds of food sources?).

What I stumbled upon was one of the great failings of Wikipedia: the entry for ‘Race and Intelligence.’ Unfortunately, excluding crackpots and persistent, obdurate racists is not something that a collective effort like Wikipedia does very well…

Discovering shared frequencies of alleles in regional and meta-populations is expected via standard models of gene flow. However, globally humans break the standard models of gene flow by their very low inter-population variation relative to species wide variation (not to discount the reality of a lot of variation across the geographical distribution of our species and huge inter-individual variation)…Doublehelix uses the Risch and other articles to refute this, but ignores all of the work by many, many others (see below for a sample) that discuss and explain why one might see clustering of some allelic variation as associated with geography, and what that might or might not mean in an evolutionary sense. We are well beyond Lewontin 1972… Allele frequency clusters are not races or even biological units…the association of function with specific distributions of frequency patterns of various alleles can and should be done, but has to be done with extreme care and we must play by the biological rule book. If you are comparing biological units they must be biologically, not socially, defined.

The statement “As for the notion that race is not supported by biology, I ask: Why do races differ so profoundly in so many different characteristics, such as IQ, lactose tolerance, the resistance to malaria, skin and hair color, the effectiveness of certain drugs?” is rooted in a severe simplification…for example, lactase production is widespread across 100s of human populations with peaks in Northern European, east African and even middle eastern populations…so what does it say about race? Malaria resistance via one of the 5 sickle cell mutations occurs with high frequencies in West Africa, but also South West Asia and the Middle East? What race is that? Hair color ands type are widely distributed…but not markers of unity…for example if having tight curly black hair unified groups then populations in Papua New Guinea and Nigeria would be linked…they are not. As for drug differences, this is a very important and complex area of investigation where we actually see some amazing integration of social, physiological and contextual patterns (see recent BiDil research) but not clear patterning of socially defined races as showing any specific identifiable bio-based markers.

So for neuroanthropology—we are always going to be tied to a historical context of trying to demonstrate differences between social races, but the terrific opportunity here (thanks to Greg and Daniel) is to break out of a dichotomy of nature/nurture and think out loud about the real processes and patterns extant in humans (individuals, groups, societies, etc…). Once we leave behind the notion of either “biology” or “society/culture” having more or less agency and try to look at integrative systems of development, actuation, emergent properties and how things might actually function (at physiological, behavioral, and genomic levels) then we can attempt to link these facets across levels and contexts in an evolutionary sense. This is very complicated and difficult but we are at a place in time and accumulated scientific knowledge where we can at least try. However, we must leave some of our historical roots to do so. I urge readers here to go to the AAA race site for current understandings and issues in the science and anthropology of race (http://www.understandingrace.org/home.html)

Kittles, R. A., and Weiss, K. M. (2003). Race, genes and ancestry: Implications for defining disease risk. Annual Reviews in Humans Genetics 4:33-67.
Peregrine, P. N., Ember, C. R., and Ember, M. (2003). Cross-cultural evaluation of predicted associations between race and behavior. Evolution and Human Behavior 24:357-364.
Relethford, J. H. (2002). Apportionment of global human genetic diversity based on craniometrics and skin color. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 118:393-398.
Templeton, A. (1999). Human races: A genetic and evolutionary perspective. American Anthropologist 100:632-650.
Templeton, A. R. (2005) Haplotype trees and modern human origins. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 48:33-59.
Weiss, K. M. (1998). Coming to terms with human variation. Annual Reviews in Anthropology 27:273-300.

The nature/nurture debate is indeed tedious, but you seem to be suggesting that the environment, which impacts development so powerfully, is wholly independent of the individuals living within it. That one could pluck an infant from one environment and raise him or her in a different one, and that individual would be much more like her adopted parents than her biological ones. That is simply not the case, as anyone who has adopted children would tell you.

As for the notion that race is not supported by biology, I ask: Why do races differ so profoundly in so many different characteristics, such as IQ, lactose tolerance, the resistance to malaria, skin and hair color, the effectiveness of certain drugs? The old notion that within group variability is greater than between, as argued by Lewontin, is true for one gene. If one looks at a great many more markers simultaneously, the opposite conclusion is reached: This is from a recent paper in the American Journal of Human Genetics 6:268–275, 2005, by Risch et al:

Attention has recently focused on genetic structure in the human population. Some have argued that the amount of genetic variation within populations dwarfs the variation between populations, suggesting that discrete genetic categories are not useful (Lewontin 1972; Cooper et al. 2003; Haga and Venter 2003). On the other hand, several studies have shown that individuals tend to cluster genetically with others of the same ancestral geographic origins (Mountain and Cavalli-Sforza 1997; Stephens et al. 2001; Bamshad et al. 2003). Prior studies have generally been performed on a relatively small number of individuals and/or markers. A recent study (Rosenberg et al. 2002) examined 377 autosomal micro-satellite markers in 1,056 individuals from a global sample of 52 populations and found significant evidence of genetic clustering, largely along geographic (continental) lines. Consistent with prior studies, the major genetic clusters consisted of Europeans/West Asians (whites), sub-Saharan Africans, East Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans. ethnic groups living in the United States, with a discrepancy rate of only 0.14%.