And I think that's the case.  I think the problem here is the use of two very vaguely defined and hard to measure concepts, race and intelligence.

I think (could be wrong) that scientists are happy to discuss what different genes and their variations do, and what happens in inheritance patterns or to groups that seem to share certain genes.

But do clusters of genes make up races?  Probably not.  If anything it seems that clusters of shared genes make small related groups of somewhat isolated populations where isolated may be due to geography or religious practices.  In a sense it seems clear to me that there is no African race, but I would think it makes sense to discuss various genetically related population groups that come from Africa.  Or Europe, or Asia, or South America.  And more sense still to talk about people that have gene X or some particular group of genes.

And then there is the question of intelligence which usually does seem to be measured more relative to cultural issues than to some sort of inherent intelligence.

My problem though is that we do claim to be able to measure the intelligence of various animals, and so I suspect that in the long run, we will have various markers that seem to correlate to some inherent intelligence.

I don't think it's true that intelligence is not measurable, though I tend to agree that it's most likely that our current IQ tests are very culturally related.

And when the concepts of race is tossed out, but the concepts of groups of people that share certain gene patterns is included, I think it will be clear that on average some groups that share certain genes are more intelligent than other groups that share certain genes.  Perhaps they have more effective myelin coating their neurons.  Perhaps nerve cells cluster and self arrange a little better.  Perhaps nerve cells fire a little faster.

I don't think differences in some group average should be considered a big deal -- it tells you nothing about an individual.

I also think that whether it is genes coding for intelligence or genes coding for a disease or any other gene, we need strong privacy laws to make sure that information is not used against individuals by insurance companies or employers or schools or anyone.

There is also a battle that can be seen at various liberal blogs this week to make sure this topic cannot be discussed at all, without calling people racists.  I think that's a pretty dumb, unscientific, illiberal approach.

Perhaps, just as the stem cell opponents don't want to put taxpayer money into stem cell research, people that feel there can be no discussion of any sort of how intelligence is inherited, created, developed, encouraged, or just differently distributed would be happy if no taxpayer money goes into such research.  I'm not sure what impact that might have on Alzheimer's research though.