MICHAEL BARONE: How genetic science is undercutting the case for racial quotas.

Reich obviously wishes to avoid the demonization endured by Murray, who was attacked by a mob at Middlebury College just last year. He is careful indeed to make clear that his findings should not be used to justify racist practices like the slave trade, the eugenics movement, and the Holocaust.

Reich also makes a point that is obvious to the ordinary person but which he — along with some of his critics who wrote to the Times — thinks needs reiteration. Which is, as one puts it, “differences in individuals vary far more widely than in populations.” When we are comparing traits of people with different genetic ancestry, we are looking at averages, like the differences between American whites’ and Asians’ IQ scores (Asians’ on average are higher). But within the white and Asian populations there is wide variety — which can be represented as an actual bell curve.

The assumption of “well-meaning people” is that ordinary Americans aren’t capable of grasping this. My view is that they understand it very well. They have learned, from school, from work, from everyday life, from public events, that there is a wider variation within each measured group than between measured groups.

Read the whole thing.