[CitizenUSA]

I get your point but what would one do with that knowledge? Just because a given ethnicity is generally more intelligent than another, doesn’t mean that individual members of that group aren’t also very intelligent. Get rid of quotas and extra efforts to recruit people into areas that they aren’t necessarily interested or talented in, and individuals will go as far as their own skills take them. But you don’t need to know general traits of a given group to make those changes. Not saying we shouldn’t test for those things, but the information shouldn’t change how we treat individuals.

[Tax-chick]

Get rid of quotas and extra efforts to recruit people into areas that they aren’t necessarily interested or talented in, and individuals will go as far as their own skills take them.

I agree. However, it would be interesting, just for its own sake, to know whether achievement in spelling bees reflects an aptitude for, say, visual recognition, or whether it's strictly effort, driven by family pressure to achieve in this particular way.

When I was a spelling bee competitor (early 1980s) the winners tended to be Korean, which leads me to believe that effort is it, rather than genetics at the ethnic-group level. Individuals, on the other hand ... comparing Indian spelling-bee winners with Indian robotics-competition winners could be interesting.

[Cronos]

Hmmm... good point, CitizenUSA -- take the above groups I mentioned. There are Americans of sub-Saharan African ex-slave ancestry who are still as brilliant such as Sir William Arthur Lewis who won the Nobel for economics or Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court.

Also, Indians and Chinese seem reasonably good (not spectacular) at some sports

What good would it do? Hmmm... I can't think of any good.