nature, nuture

Read the Globe and Mail this morning at breakfast, the big teaser on the front page was RACE. The ensuing article was interesting. Here's a couple of salient paragraphs:

Why ... have Jews of European descent won 27 per cent of the Nobel Prizes given to Americans in the past century, while making up only 3 per cent of the population? Why do they produce more than half the world's chess champions? And why do they have an average IQ higher than any other ethnic group for which there's reliable data, and nearly six times as many people scoring above 140 compared with Europeans?
...
[The] theory is that during 1,000 years of persecution, social isolation and employment restrictions in Europe that kept Ashkenazi Jews from farming, they were forced into (then disreputable) jobs such as trade and finance, which demanded mental agility. Success in these fields could lead to food, shelter and family. Under such pressures, the paper suggests, genetic traits related to intelligence became more prevalent among central and northern European Jews.
Two U.S. journals refused the paper, an unusual experience for this widely published scholar. “We finally had to send the paper to England, where they're not so obsessed with political correctness,” Prof. Harpending [University of Utah] said.
...
In Canada, researchers from McMaster and McGill Universities are breaking down heart disease by nationality to understand the interplay of genes and environment. The answers may explain why South Asians suffer high rates of high blood pressure, why heart attacks hit Middle Eastern men 10 years earlier than Europeans, or why the Chinese seem to boast the trimmest waistlines in the world.
The genes discussed in Dr. Harpending's team's paper, meanwhile, are known to be the ones that account for the high Ashkenazi rates of breast cancer, the neurological disorder Tay-Sachs and other conditions. The mystery is why these traits have persisted at high rates over generations. The Utah group's conclusion (to be published in the Cambridge University Press Journal of Biosocial Science) is that the diseases are a tragic side effect of genes selected for their role in boosting brain function.
Given the explosion of research in race and genetics, Francis Collins, a former leader of the Human Genome Project, had to admit in the journal Nature Genetics last fall that “well-intentioned statements” about the biological insignificance of race may have left the wrong impression: “It is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection. It must be emphasized, however, that the connection is generally quite blurry.”

Here is the link to the Haplotype Project, a (so far) four-year project to catalogue and compare the genetics of people with African, Asian and European ancestry.

As a scientist, it all of course makes perfect sense from a completely objective standpoint. As for short-range, short-term changes to something relatively unquantifiable and qualitative as intelligence, I wonder how much of that is nature vs. nurture. As somebody interested in philosophy and the ethics of science, I can see massive challenges, benefits, and drawbacks ahead. As me, I don't think that my fellow man is ready for this kind of information.