The Genetics of Intelligence

Amanda Marcotte graces us with this post on the racial basis of IQ nonsense most recently resurrected by William Saletan (who, it seems, is the best example contra his own arguments). And Atrios has this to say about it:

I suppose this round is over, but let me just finish it off with a hearty simelsesque "blow me" to all the people who excuse Saletan's racism by pretending it's merely knee-jerk contrarianism. If you make the claim that black people are stupid, assert that anyone who denies this is equivalent to a creationist, rely on the junk science of explicit racists to make your claims, and manage to studiously avoid the vast numbers of very smart people who have repeatedly pointed out that this stuff is bunk, then the conclusion is unavoidable. Will Saletan may be a perfectly lovely person who has lots of black friends, but his only "contrarianism" here was his eagerness to embrace junk theories of racial superiority. While issues of race and racism manifest themselves in complex ways in our society, the belief in the innate inferiority of one culturally defined racial subgroup relative to another pretty much is the root definition of racist thinking.