IME most people only think individual IQ differences are ok because they believe other qualities compensate the difference. If they say that some person has a higher IQ, they usually (at least implicitly) question their social skills, financial success, physical prowess, etc.. Also they always talk about much smarter people, not about the 50% under the average, conveying the idea that difference is due to the genius' unusually high IQ not because most people are stupid in comparison. OTOH group comparisons usually imply that one group is smarter and the other is dumber, by comparing the average values for each group. While race is a sensitive issue, if we exchange race by gender, economical status, birthplace, weight, etc., the controversy is pretty much equivalent.
About the IQ vs. GDP "controversy" both Lynn and Vanhanen should be ashamed. They're not even decent scientists, their methodology is flawed and they manipulated the data to fit their results! You can't say "I don't have the real data so I'll just put a number here and argue that it's true because I say so." and expect it to be taken at face value. It's not an experiment if it isn't reproducible (which rules out almost everything except biology, physics and chemistry ;) and you can't reproduce it if you force the data to fit your pattern.
Now, speaking about IQ itself, does make sense talking about it? Is there (at least) a significant correlation between IQ and any useful metric? Can we say that IQ improves our utility, for example? Are we (as a scientific community) sure that IQ measurement isn't just self fulfilling (i.e. it measures what high IQ people have, but not much more)? I know of the (methodologically valid) studies that show people with higher IQ earning more but those studies don't show if these cases are a direct result of IQ (i.e. they're more effective) or a indirect result due to employers favoring people with high IQs (or SATs). Also other (methodologically valid) studies show that IQ doesn't correlate to financial growth (i.e. becoming richer) because people's investment and saving habits don't correlate with IQ.
IMO IQ is a poor metric, it can't give reliable predictions about things that really matter (e.g. GDP, personal finance, scientific achievements, etc.). I fail to see how it's better than trying to measure how fast can people divide long numbers, surely it may be impressive and have a couple of use cases, but mostly it doesn't matter. IMNSHO it's telling that those people trying to correlate IQ with other values always use bad methodology and end up trying to convince the reader that correlation (i.e. their results) equals causation (i.e. their hypothesis).
Idang Alibi of Abuja, Nigeria writes on the James Watson affair:
An intriguing opening. Is Idang Alibi about to take a position on the real heart of the uproar?
Darn, it's just a lecture on personal and national responsibility. Of course, for African nationals, taking responsibility for their country's problems is the most productive attitude regardless. But it doesn't engage with the controversies that got Watson fired.
Later in the article came this:
This intrigued me for two reasons: First, I'm always on the lookout for yet another case of theology making a falsifiable experimental prediction. And second, the prediction follows obviously if God is just, but what does skin colour have to do with it at all?
A great deal has already been said about the Watson affair, and I suspect that in most respects I have little to contribute that has not been said before.
But why is it that the rest of the world seems to think that individual genetic differences are okay, whereas racial genetic differences in intelligence are not? Am I the only one who's every bit as horrified by the proposition that there's any way whatsoever to be screwed before you even start, whether it's genes or lead-based paint or Down's Syndrome? What difference does skin colour make? At all?
This is only half a rhetorical question. Race adds extra controversy to anything; in that sense, it's obvious what difference skin colour makes politically. However, just because this attitude is common, should not cause us to overlook its insanity. Some kind of different psychological processing is taking place around individually-unfair intelligence distributions, and group-unfair intelligence distributions.
So, in defiance of this psychological difference, and in defiance of politics, let me point out that a group injustice has no existence apart from injustice to individuals. It's individuals who have brains to experience suffering. It's individuals who deserve, and often don't get, a fair chance at life. If God has not given intelligence in equal measure to all his children, God stands convicted of a crime against humanity, period. Skin colour has nothing to do with it, nothing at all.
And I don't think there's any serious scholar of intelligence who disputes that God has been definitively shown to be most terribly unfair. Never mind the airtight case that intelligence has a hereditary genetic component among individuals; if you think that being born with Down's Syndrome doesn't impact life outcomes, then you are on crack. What about lead-based paint? Does it not count, because parents theoretically could have prevented it but didn't? In the beginning no one knew that it was damaging. How is it just for such a tiny mistake to have such huge, irrevocable consequences? And regardless, would not a just God damn us for only our own choices? Kids don't choose to live in apartments with lead-based paint.
So much for God being "just", unless you count the people whom God has just screwed over. Maybe that's part of the fuel in the burning controversy - that people do realize, on some level, the implications for religion. They can rationalize away the implications of a child born with no legs, but not a child born with no possibility of ever understanding calculus. But then this doesn't help explain the original observation, which is that people, for some odd reason, think that adding race makes it worse somehow.
And why is my own perspective, apparently, unusual? Perhaps because I also think that intelligence deficits will be fixable given sufficiently advanced technology, biotech or nanotech. When truly huge horrors are believed unfixable, the mind's eye tends to just skip over the hideous unfairness - for much the same reason you don't deliberately rest your hand on a hot stoveburner; it hurts.