[davidmathers]

Cosma Shalizi will handle this one for me: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html

Let me sum up.

4. Now that people are finally beginning to model gene-environment interactions, even in very crude ways, they find it matters a lot. Recall that Turkheimer et al. found a heritability which rose monotonically with socioeconomic status, starting around zero at low status and going up to around 0.8 at high status. Even this is probably an over-estimate, since it neglected maternal effects and other shared non-familial environment, correlations between variance components, etc.

7. Randomized experiments, natural experiments and the Flynn Effect all show what competent regressions also suggest, namely that IQ is, indeed, responsive to purely environmental interventions.

...

I suspect this answer will still not satisfy some people, who really want to know about differences between people who do not have significant developmental disorders. Here, my honest answer would be that I presently have no evidence one way or the other. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to guess, and I couldn't tell what answer you wanted to hear, I'd say that my suspicion is that there are, mostly on the strength of analogy to other areas of biology where we know much more. I would then — cautiously, because you have a gun to my head — suggest that you read, say, Dobzhansky on the distinction between "human equality" and "genetic identity", and ask why it is so important to you that IQ be heritable and unchangeable.

[thras]

Oh, god, not Shalizi. Back when I was a younger fellow, still willing to devote long chunks of my time in pointless internet debates, I thought of writing up a long critique of Shalizi. He's wrong, and purposefully so. He invokes straw man arguments. He cherry picks whatever evidence he needs to in order to make his points. The fact that he believes something is wonderful evidence that it's probably not true.

A friend of mine once told me that Shalizi's world view was explained by a certain instructor he had as a graduate student, and most of his argument is derived from there, but the name escapes me right now.

Regardless. I happen to believe in evolution. Shalizi believes in a magical equality fairy. One look at an SNP map proves him wrong.

Edit: I just realized that you were trying to follow my suggestion to look into "the literature" and mistook Shalizi's blog entries for actual journal articles. He never published them anywhere as far as I know. Nor could he.