What I don’t get, I guess, is the defensiveness. Are the knee-jerk universalists worried that, if we concede that there might be fundamental variation in humans, we inevitably move toward racism? If so, we’re in trouble. Do they think that the existence of human genes means that we must necessarily be a species of genetic clones?

I totally agree that we’re not a clonal species, but I still think that it’s more parsimonious not to assume that non-universals are rooted in genetic determination. Speaking of “universals” and lack thereof, culture probably is the most/only constant universal, and also the key factor for everything that is not.

Whenever genetic determinism/strong enough influence seems to really be the case, the odds just happen to be that it wouldn’t so much of a racial thing, as most of human genetic variation is shared by all races. It could still be the case that sometimes there would be non-universals that are considerably genetically based and such genes are found in significantly differing frequencies along the races, though. But I think that the odds would be that it’s quite rare, possibly something that “does not even occur”, or that is dwarfed by the role of shared genes that are more evenly distributed, and sheer non-genetic determination.

I have this suspicion/gut feeling that perhaps the most significant form of “genetic determinism” in racial/group differences would be something like the cultural adoption of “behaviors” that are genetically influenced in some individuals, who happened to be more “culturally influential” for whatever reason. Not necessarily at an “individual” level anyway, they don’t need to be “celebrities” of any kind, nor the first ones who copy their behavior. It is not rigidly dependent of the allelic frequencies. It could happen that the cultural influence outlives the meaningful frequencies of the influential alleles. Or even that the cultural influence grows throughout the population regardless of the negligible frequency of the influential genetic variation, that may be rare from the start.

It is also bizarre to try to argue that we should consider westerners as being more normal simply because they are more wealthy. What sort of logic is that? How arbitrary.
There is nothing defeatist in noting that among human beings as a whole, westerners comprise a minority and at times display atypical behavior. It is not a value judgment.