Race?

Jim Watson is a very distinguished scientist. He has recently created a storm of controversy by stating that "Africans are less intelligent than Westerners." Whether he is right about this issue, that different racial groups have different levels of intelligence, is difficult to say (see for example the report in "the Independent":
http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3067222.ece)
Consider the following, all top ten fastest runners in the world are black - no whites! You notice this at the top international level, all the runners from different countries are black. This is far beyond statistics (there are more white people in the world than black), so there must be a rational explanation for it! John Entine wrote a book called "Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It" in which he analyzed this situation. The topic was so controversial that he was at first unable to find a publisher for his book. He found that blacks who originate from west Africa have two advantages over others, first their leg musculature is more developed for running, and second they contain more mitochondria in their muscle cells than whites. This is also true among S. American Indians (who are not known for running) but this is because they live at high altitude with less oxygen. So the higher proportion of mitochondria allow the muscles of black w Africans to work more efficiently.
Similarly with the question of intelligence. This is clearly a multi-gene complex characteristic (phenotype). We might pose the question, since there are observable differences between races, such as skin color, hair type, eye formation (Asians have an extra skin fold on the eye, the epicanthic fold), there might equally well be non-observable differences in other inherited characteristics, there may be "linked" genes. There is no a priori reason why all races should have the same identical "average" intelligence .
A well-known Black comedian in the US, Bill Cosby, who also has a PhD in education, often points our that "Asian get A's and Blacks get B's." This is a known fact, that in US schools, Jews and Asians excel and Blacks are usually at the bottom. However, there might be an environmental explanation for this rather than a genetic one, namely that Blacks were slaves and were not allowed to be educated. Their family life was also destroyed by slavery and they may not yet have recovered from it. However, in general, the more we learn about humans the more we find that genetics is the basis of behavior and phenotype and environment is less so. When I was at the NIH I looked for Black students, but none applied, even though during the 1960s-80s they were given preferential treatment! It has been said that there are more Black men in jail than in university! I cannot vouch for these statistics.
Consider the case of the Soviet attempt to engineer a "Soviet man" by indoctrination. But it has been found that in the "nature vs. nurture" debate, nature is more important, or in other words Vavilov wins over Lysenko! Nikolai Vavilov was a pioneer of plant genetics in the Soviet Union in the 1920s-30s, but was arrested and imprisoned by Stalin under the influence of Lysenko, who opposed genetics. Vavilov died in prison in 1943, but today the Plant Genetics Inst. in St. Petersburg is named after him..