Race and IQ

A useful nuance in the debate:

Geneticists have come up with the concept of a reaction norm to describe the range of environments in which a genetic trait might develop. Under this view, characteristics of organisms are not either innate or learned: they vary in the width of the reaction norm describing the kind of environmental inputs they require. Under this view, the race and IQ question comes down to the question of whether African IQ deficits are like dark African skin, so pervasive across all imaginable environments that calling them innate is perfectly reasonable as a first approximation, or more like African-American success in popular music, for which we require no scientific evidence to attribute to the particular combination of history, culture and sociology of the present time. We are justifiably offended by a hypotheses involving, say, an innate gift of rhythm.

What we're discussing is a function of both genetics and environment and their interaction. I don't think those pointing out resilient racial differences in IQ are positing anything as crude as "innate."