I'm more directly disturbed by the bias present in your exposition: "perfectly reasonable", "merely expresses agnosticism", "well documented", "harsh and inaccurate".

Starting off a discussion with assorted applause lights and boo lights strikes me as unlikely to lead to much insight.

What would be likely to lead to useful insight? Making use of the tools LessWrong's mission is to introduce us to, such as the applications of Bayesian reasoning.

"Intelligence has a genetic component" strikes me as a causal statement. If it is, we ought to be able to represent it formally as such, tabooing the terms that give rise to cognitive muddles, until we can tell precisely what kind of data would advance our knowledge on that topic.

I've only just cracked open Pearl's Causality, and started playing with the math, so am still very much an apprentice at such things. (I have my own reasons to be fooling with that math, which are not related to the race-IQ discussion.) But it has already convinced me that probability and causality are deep topics which it's very easy to draw mistaken conclusions about if you rely solely on a layman's intuition.

For instance, "the well documented IQ differences between groups" are purely probabilistic data, which tell us very little about causal pathways generating the data, until and unless we have either controlled experiments, or further data sets which do discriminate between the competing causal models (only very grossly distinguished into "nature" and "nurture").

I don't know if the email you quoted (thanks for that, BTW, it's a treat to have access to a primary source without needing to chase it down) is racist, but it does sound very ignorant to me. It makes unwarranted inferential leaps, e.g. from "skin and hair color are definitely genetic" to "some part of intelligence is genetic", omitting the very different length of developmental chains leading from genes to pigmentation on the one hand, and intelligence on the other. It comes across as arrogant and elitist as well as ignorant when saying "I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria".

It is not bad science to be on the lookout specifically for data that claims to be "scientific proof" of some old and demonstrably harmful prejudices, and to hold such claims to a higher standard. Just as we do hold claims of "scientific proof of ESP" to a higher standard - at least of scrutiny and replicability - than, say, claims of a correlation between apparel color and competitive performance. We have more reason to suspect ulterior motives in the former case than in the latter.