"Not exactly..."

Depending on the amount of gene expression you actually need, you might get an absolutely higher percentage of females at the highest level of ability, or vice versa. It is model dependent. That was my point.

"...Indian chess players"

The population size doesn't matter nearly so much. What might matter is the population size of interested players. The point is that this is highly culture specific. On TopCoder, per capita, Norway, Croatia, Slovakia, and Poland seem to lead the way in terms of top competitors, and, as we know, tragically, the Jewish population there had been reduced to near non-existence. I don't know why programming competitions are a big deal there, but they are.

In most of the united states, African Americans perform worse than average in most tests of academic achievement. Yet, in New Jersey, Joyce Kilmer middle school in Trenton, has continually fielded one of the top teams. I saw them when they won in 2006, and they were incredible. Say what you want about sample size, but what I've taken from this is that with a good teacher, and inspiration, a team can rise to the occasion and even beat the kids of Princeton professors, despite otherwise being handed a second class public education.

"...oral history."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_King_Gesar

That's pretty darned incredible, to me.

"...it's known..."

Are average? Huh? What a crazy pronouncement. It's not 'known' that astronomy requires any kind of extreme visual ability -- for most of it's history it's involved more bookkeeping than looking at pretty pictures. I don't know what the historical precident was to make Mayans and Babylonians look up in the sky, and eventually develop mathematics to predict solar phenomena, but they did. I think it's a heck of a lot more random than you seem to be implying.

If you were born 300 years ago would you still be a hacker?

"...I wish..."

I wish there was less wasted effort going into measuring something we don't understand, and more energy put into an actual understanding of intelligence. We are further back here than we are in AI. We don't merely have a theory that's incorrect. We don't even have a theory. We're stuck in the local maximum, and I really don't think there's any way to move forward if people keep approaching it in the same way, over and over.

People make these unqualified, absurd statements and they really have no idea what kind of damage they do. I've been studying these things for years, and so I'm in a much stronger place than most. But I know for a fact that if I was told that I couldn't do something because of my genetic makeup, it would have taken a lot of work to get over that. You know what the worst thing is? Most of, if not all of it, is complete baloney.

People see to think that as long as they can measure something in the social sciences, they can publish it, and draw conclusions. Well, the bar is way, way higher in physics, and as far as we're aware, particles don't base life decisions on whether or not our model represents them as different from what they are. Scientists should, and do, take extreme caution when they start to say anything about race, and the few that do not should be called out on it.

(That said, having actually read them, I'd be totally okay with Lawrence Summer's comments were he not the president of Harvard. He should have known people would blow things out of proportion. But "The Bell Curve" is totally fraudulent).