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Due to the Ashkenazi "superiority" in terms of IQ when compared to gentile whites, white supremacists would not have struck me too as an obvious first guess.
This was a survey of ancestry/genetic structure. Not trait values. Here is the post, just page down to the image and you can see why they were interested:
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/01/how_ashkenazi_jewish_are_you.php
In response to
BHTV: Eliezer Yudkowsky & Razib Khan
Down syndrome is not really "on the smallest chromosome". It results from an extra copy of chromosome 21. (22:48).
Right. I'm gonna have to find a balance between using bio-words and stuff I translate into normal speak on-the-fly. My first thought was to blurt out trisomy 21, and then I would have had to use the word non-disjunction. So I simply noted it was a problem with chrom 21 , and that is the smallest chrom so as to minimize dosage dependent effects.
It really isn't hard to find genes for intelligence - assuming that you mean the conventional thing by "a gene for x":
"Maynard Smith reached for a hypothetical example and came up with a 'gene for skill in tying shoelaces'. Pandemonium broke loose at this rampant genetic determinism! The air was thick with the unmistakable sound of worst suspicions being gleefully confirmed. Delightfully sceptical cries drowned the quiet and patient explanation of just what a modest claim is being made whenever one postulates a gene for, say, skill in tying shoelaces.'"
One example:
"Gene found for mental retardation"
Yes, it is very hard. I know, because I know people attempting to find those genes. They report that it's very hard. I specifically said normal variation in IQ to make it clear that I'm not talking about mutations and variants which cause retardation. Those QTLs of large effect are easy to find, but they aren't implicated in normal human variation. How do we know this? Because they don't show up in linkage or association studies consistently.
I didn't say it's impossible. There were many things impossible 10 years ago that are possible now. But I didn't make that assertion in ignorance.
In response to
BHTV: Eliezer Yudkowsky & Razib Khan
Not finding genes for IQ? What about DTNBP1, CHRM2, ASPM, NR2B, HAR1, PYDN?
"What about DTNBP1, CHRM2, ASPM, NR2B, HAR1, PYDN?"
Not replicated, or nothing found. ASPM for example isn't associated with normal variation in IQ (or the effect size too small to detect, they've looked). Please see my coblogger "ben g"'s post on the topic:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2010/02/half-sigmas-flawed-post-on-dtnbp1.php
(and no, I'm not one of the people who is excited that we haven't been able find these genes yet)
In response to
With whom shall I diavlog?
someone theist. ramesh ponnuru. andrew bacevich. jim pinkerton.
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Got it. Makes more sense with the data. I guess in the flow of conversation, we do tend to miss a couple of things :)
This was the most difficult diavlog of the seven I've done so far. 60 minutes just wasn't enough for this conversation and I had to do a lot of on-the-fly judgment of what I should elaborate on, and what I should simplify or elide for the sake of concision. The others were more "interview" formats where there was a more formal structure, as opposed to riffs. Also, Eliezer and a subset of the audience knows a fair amount of biology, but the majority of the audience did not, so I kept having to navigate between these two tensions.
I assume Eliezer had similar issues when we got the section where Kahneman & Tversky's ouvre were implicit background assumptions, but we'd burned through 2/3 of the time by then so the choice on whether to elucidate or not was made for him :-)