>>It is, incidentally, surprising to me that so many commentators
>>should find it disturbing that IQ might be heritable, perhaps
>>largely so. Would it also be disturbing to discover that
>>relative height, or musical talent, or rank in running the
>>100 yard dash is in part genetically determined?
>
> i think you may be missing the point: height is well-defined, at least
> in some sense. gould's and others' criticism is that the notion of IQ is
> conceptually not well-defined. if its nothing but how one performs on
> particular tests, surely the onus is on the other camp to prove that
> such things are indeed hereditary? gould and the related camp could be
> wrong about their belief. but you may be constructing a strawman above.
Well, if I am missing the point, and constructing a straw man, then so is that respected icon of the progressive intellectual left, Noam Chomsky, since the words you quote me as saying above were also said by him, word for word, in his 1972 article on Richard Herrnstein's famous Atlantic Monthly article.
(This is the same article, incidentally, that those level-headed gentlemen of PLP quoted by Michael Pugliese characterize as "racist propaganda". Chomsky, for his part, says "Herrnstein has been widely denounced as a racist for [the argument of the article], a conclusion that seems to me unwarranted").
Now, if you really want answers to some of your questions above, I could go on at some length trying to provide them. But given the rabidly irrational and vitriolic reactions we have seen expressed here by the local "disturbed commentators", it seems pretty clear that would be pointless and pretty unpleasant. One of the disturbed has even suggested that I be kicked out because I have polluted him, which of course makes me even less motivated.
But if you are really interested, you can find these issues addressed in the academic literature. It's pretty complex stuff, though, and of course it is not cut and dried either. The truth, unlike simple and comforting ideology, is often like that, unfortunately.