If there existed a book written by someone as smart and knowledgeable as Shalizi that would present a systematic, thorough, and unbiased analysis of this whole mess, I would gladly pay $1,000 for it.
There is no such book (yet), but there are two books that cover the most controversial part of the mess that I'd recommend: Race Differences in Intelligence (1975) and Race, IQ and Jensen (1980). They are both systematic, thorough, and about as unbiased as one can reasonably expect on the subject of race & IQ. On the down side, they don't really cover other aspects of the IQ controversies, and they're three decades out of date. (That said, I personally think that few studies published since 1980 bear strongly on the race & IQ issue, so the books' age doesn't matter that much.)
Yes, among the books on the race-IQ controversy that I've seen, I agree that these are the closest thing to an unbiased source. However, I disagree that nothing very significant has happened in the field since their publication -- although unfortunately, taken together, these new developments have led to an even greater overall confusion. I have in mind particularly the discovery of the Flynn effect and the Minnesota adoption study, which have made it even more difficult to argue coherently either for a hereditarian or an environmentalist theory the way it...
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Part 2