[CobaltBlue]

I'm not in the field so don't know how hard it is to study this stuff, but from the outside it seems like the study of genetics is really taking off, including the interaction of genetics and behaviour.

NYTimes just carried a very in depth article on that topic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/health/15gene.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

IQ is tricky, though. It's impossible to test the IQ of our ancestors, and not easy to test the IQ of very different cultures. You've been on Free Republic long enough to know that most of the people who are going to seize on the findings of this study are not going to be people with very high IQs themselves, they are just looking for justification for their prejudices.

[VadeRetro]

IQ isn't all that useful. What I see is the problem is the way in which you can't study racial differences at all. There's an intriguing anomaly in sports right now. Practically all the good distance runners of about the last 15 years are from a tiny area in East Africa not much bigger than a couple of medium-large US counties. It lies across Kenya and some of Tanzania, IIRC. Only the tiniest handful of writers have dared mention it. People from this region obviously could have dominated earlier except it was such a backwater that few people from there were making it into international competition.

If you write about this kind of thing, you're branded a racist. You're just not supposed to notice.