I could see how using SAT scores from one group of ordinary public HS students and comparing them to the SAT scores of their own parents, or even their own ethnic group if coherent enough could yield something interesting, if not conclusive, about inheritance.

But are there enough “ordinary”, not to say rough, public high schools in America where the student body over generations reflects enough parents and children or even the same ethnic mixes, to do that on this scale?

I mean, he didn’t just take samples of SATs from Chester A Arthur High of Brooklyn in 1950 and then the same school in 2000 and draw conclusions about heredity? There might not be any heredity.

“Heritability can also vary over populations, or over the same population over time, for an important reason that is too seldom recognized: As society does a better job of enabling all of its citizens to realize their talents, the heritability of those talents will rise.”

coupled with the passage about Norway sound like an argument for the traditional meritocratic scouring of the lower orders for talent, marrying them into the elite, and maintaining an otherwise broadly assortative mating pattern among the same.

Actually, so does the Stuyvesant section.

Eeeh. I believe there’s a little sophistry here because after all if you are deciding how tall Joe should be and he IS a part of a gene pool that is tall then he’s likely to be tall because he’s in the tall gene pool. He doesn’t stand alone. He’s part of the tall gene pool no matter if you “magically” separate him or not.

I see this as a trick used to pretend that there are NOT traits in different gene pools. They use this sort of magic mathematical foolishness to pretend that, things are not, what they are. That it’s dishonest I’ve proven by simply noting that you can’t remove that which is then declare it not a part of the set it is in in the first place honestly.