::::: I am not an academic, but I've read some of the research by James Thompson along with people like Heiner Rindermann and found it riddled with motivated reasoning. These people look for data that will reinforce their prejudices while ignoring whatever doesn't. Then they present the data in a dishonest manner, sundered from all context and nuance, in an attempt to overwhelm their readers with spurious correlations.  

 I'll give one specific example, lest you think I'm trying to dismiss them unfairly, from Thompson, Rinderman, et al. 

 http://www.iratde.org/issues/1-2009/tde_issue_1-2009_03_rindermann_et_al.pdf 
 
 On the surface, this looks like a dispassionate scientific study. But read it carefully and you’ll find statements like this: 
 
 “Different from the SAS, Scandinavia reaches in the cognitive elite not such a good rank (11. Finland IQ 121, 12. Estonia IQ 121 [the Baltics are added here], 16. Sweden IQ 120, 25. Denmark IQ 118, 34. Latvia IQ 117, 38. Lithuania IQ 116, 39. Iceland IQ 116, 41. Norway IQ 116). Maybe a homogenizing educational policy furthering weaker but disadvantaging high ability pupils leads to a smaller standard deviation and lower values for a gifted subgroup. Better are the traditional Commonwealth countries” 
 
 In other words, Scandinavia performed worse than what their prejudices felt they should, so they invented an ad hoc environmental explanation for this (“homogenizing educational policy”). Weird how they don’t give other countries the benefit of the doubt. 

 And this: 
 
 “Kazakhstan seems to be too good in cognitive competence levels.” 
 
 In other words, the data do not confirm their prejudices. 
 
 And this: 
 
 “There are some anomalies in data like decreasing rates of patents in UK and Switzerland or years without patents in Norway (changed into missing values). Nobel Prizes also seem to be given with political considerations, e.g. there is a serious decline of Nobel Prizes for Germany starting with 1933 (Nobel Prizes are given for life’s work achievement and not for one single achievement in a current year); related to the population size persons from Sweden seem to receive a Nobel Prize more easily, US-Americans less easily” 

 What’s not an anomaly is the fact that these people obviously made up their minds beforehand and simply looked for data to give their prejudices the veneer of scientific objectivity, so they could strengthen their lame appeals to prejudice and parsimony. As I said, lots of this hereditarian research is loaded with motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. Once you look at ALL of the data impartially, not just the cherry-picked data from the hereditarians, you notice that the picture is far more complex than they paint it.