Thanks for the info and the reference to Murrey's book.

Whatever it is that IQ tests measure we know that it predicts life outcomes and is the driving force of racial inequality.

There are many sources on the approaches to IQ tests, but none that I know go the extra step and claim that a higher IQ is always a prediction of life outcomes, even if those with a higher IQ can make quicker decisions on some analytical matters. The latter is not absolutely necessary in many cases. And IQ test scores are not traditionally the "driving force in racial inequality." Saidit and only a few other places are the only online locations of discussions about IQ and racial inequality. The vast majority of people aren't having that discussion, nor do they care.

Cavalli-Sforza and others found that human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race

This is of course their claim, and it's a a 19th century imperial Eugenics concept, but both approaches to assumptions about significant bioloigical differences in ethnicities are debunked in many scientific and social research projects. The answer is rather simple: there are too many ethnicities to group into specific biological groups. Racism has been and will be remain a social construct, not founded in biological evidence. Regarding Murray's book, read this and other helpful reviews at Amazon:

Michael Jackson - 2.0 out of 5 stars A hereditarian edifice built on a foundation of sand - Reviewed in the United States on 1 March 2020 - Verified Purchase:

https://www.amazon.com/Human-Diversity-Biology-Gender-Class/product-reviews/1538744015/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewpnt_rgt?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews&filterByStar=critical&pageNumber=1

Social constructionism holds that race and gender are shaped more by social forces and less by biological facts than people commonly realize. Charles Murray believes that this view has become an unscientific “orthodoxy,” and he offers a biological perspective that he believes can dispel much of this fuzzy thinking. It turns out that Murray’s biological perspective also rests on a great deal of fuzziness, though frequently concealed. In fairness to Murray, the genomic and psychometric research he surveys is difficult and technical. Murray recognizes this and provides several lengthy sections explaining this research clearly so that non-specialists can understand it. His success in doing so is probably the strongest feature of this book. The rest of the book, however, is more problematic. The issues are complex, and Murray does not always present the whole picture. Many readers will assume that Murray’s representations are accurate. Few will directly access the sources he cites, and fewer still will know how to evaluate the methods and findings of these sources, or the conclusions that Murray draws from them. In what follows, therefore, I will detail some significant problems with Murray’s account. NOTE: Some of the following citations refer to sources cited by Murray (indicated with an asterisk); others refer to scientific sources that will not be found in Murray’s book. Full reference information for all these sources can be found on the “References” page of my website, which can be accessed from my Amazon reviewer’s page.

To begin with, Murray consistently overstates the evidence for genetic influence and understates the evidence for environmental influence on human diversity. He devotes large sections of the book to the former, often mentioning the latter only in passing, or in endnotes, or not at all. For example, Murray makes no mention of the Flynn Effect, one of the clearest indications of environmental influence on cognition (Mackintosh, 2011); he cites several sources on the validity of twin studies (pp. 215-217) but ignores Joseph’s (2015) extensive critique of that literature; he stresses the limits of early childhood interventions but says little about the social forces that undermine them (Protzko, 2015); and in discussing stereotype threat he emphasizes publication bias, yet says nothing about such bias in the publication of brain imaging studies, where it appears to be rampant (see Jennings & Van Horn, 2012). Along similar lines, the genetic methods and technologies that Murray admires often have serious reliability issues (for example, see de Gruijter et al., 2011 and Szpak et al., 2019), yet little or no attention is given to rigorous research designs finding environmental effects (e.g., Koch, D’Mello & Sackett, 2015). These examples are not exhaustive and several more will be given below. But Murray’s general stance is worth noting here—as is the fact that he frequently tags biological and genetic studies with adjectives like “seminal,” and “highly regarded” (pp. 102, 438), while ignoring or dismissing research widely recognized as supporting social construction (e.g., *Lewontin, 1972).

It should be kept in mind that nearly all the evidence that Murray cites to argue for genetic determination is correlational. Even the brain imaging studies he reviews typically show neural correlates whose causal relationships to developmental and environmental influences are complex, multi-directional, interactive, and largely unknown. Most college students understand that correlation does not prove causation; but they rarely grasp just how ubiquitous and persistent correlation/causation fallacies actually are. Even professional researchers commit these fallacies when they survey vast fields of interrelated variables and make conscious or unconscious assumptions about causation which they then import into interpretations of the data based on circular reasoning. Hereditarians like Murray are notorious for falling into these traps—and some, like Arthur Jensen, for diving into them. Such fallacies are particularly misleading when used to portray group differences as genetic, not only because they frequently scapegoat ethnic minorities and confuse the public, but also because they concern processes of such complexity (like the neural interactions described above) that inferences about genetic causation are essentially unfalsifiable—i.e., nothing can be decisively proven or disproven, so anything goes. [...]

[...] Murray now hopes to redefine membership in those same groups, not by phenotypic but by genotypic markers—whereupon psychological measurements, bogusly interpreted as genetic (see below), will establish the same old circular justification. Meet the new conflation; same as the old one.

This conflation becomes more clear as Murray explains how his ancestral population clusters were discovered. Researchers led by Noah Rosenberg (*Rosenberg, Pritchard, & Weber, 2002) using a computer program called Structure found that the genomes of people whose ancestors came from each geographical continent are slightly more similar to each other than they are to those whose ancestors came from different continents. This is not surprising since genetic variants (alleles) change frequencies over time as populations disperse through migration, and these populations can therefore be expected to show greater similarity to neighboring populations and less similarity to more distant ones. But to Murray and others looking for a scientific basis for race, these clusters of genetic similarity hold great significance since they roughly align with the five major geographical continents (Africa, Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania) and the racial associations of these continents for most Americans.

But there are problems with this interpretation. First, the Structure program presupposes that the data will form clusters and that the number of such clusters will be whatever the researcher tells it to find. There are different techniques for deciding if a particular input number identifies objectively real clusters—but these techniques are complex, often vary with sampling, and do not always agree with each other. [...] Overall, therefore, the human ancestral structure appears to be much more complex and multi-leveled than Murray portrays it, and not particularly supportive of the continental race theory.

Another problem for Murray is that race categories only weakly differentiate people genetically. This was first discovered by *Lewontin (1972), who found that only about 6% of genetic variance in humans is associated with traditionally defined racial categories (Murray’s wording on p. 130 misleadingly implies that the number was close to 15%). [...]

Murray knows this, and he has already, in effect, preemptively admitted it at the beginning of his “race” section—where he acknowledges that cluster differences are “minor,” and even adds that there are “many ways in which race is a social construct” (p. 157). But Murray is determined to keep this construct alive, and to do so he must show that race is intrinsically biological. [...]

[... review continues... - read at Amazon.com]

Overall, then, Murray’s argument, both in this section and throughout the book, can be described as a hereditarian polemic. It rests on skewed data, over-interpretations of favored sources, under-interpretations of critical ones, and subtle (or not-so-subtle) misrepresentations of research findings. The result is an impressive edifice of hereditarian ideology built on a conceptual foundation of sand.