AT Race Realism

Arbitrary Constructions
Black People Vary A Ton
Many black populations in Africa share more gene variants with other continental populations
because there is more variation in African than anywhere else
http://www.mixedracestudies.org/?p=25802
Clines Are Better
Global human genetic variation is better depicted by clines rather than races, and that continents
are not more solid barriers of gene flow than many other barriers that people do not infer as a race
divider.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15342553
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-14679657
https://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v92/n4/full/6800418a.html
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-67-2-130.pdf
A crucial point here is that things like heritability of IQ has to do with what proportion of variation
in IQ can be attributed to genetic variation. It isn't about the causes of between-group differences.
http://psych.colorado.edu/~carey/pdffiles/heritability_vissher.pdf
There is a lot of material about environmental interventions on IQ in this paper:
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-67-2-130.pdf
Differences Too Small
Population genetics models show neutral trait differentiation following the patterns of population
differentiation of single loci (Think Lewontin's Fst or AMOVA type analysis) rather than the
pattern of multi-locus analysis like STRUCTURE or PCA.
Basically this means that without evidence of selection (or perhaps other evolutionary forces) the
phenotypic differentiation between populations will be very small (e.g. ~10% of variation in traits
is found between populations) and the majority of traits will not be informative about race. This
makes it reasonable to have the null hypothesis for any between group analysis to be that the causes
are non-genetic in nature until there's evidence for evolutionary action on the trait/gene.
Mere Correlation
The genes responsible for racial phenotypes (largely skin color and bome structure) are not directly
tied to any kind of mental properties. Thus, any correlation between the possession of particular
racial phenotypes and intelligence are not the result of underlying realities, just the byproducts of
environment over long time periods. These correlations can be decoupled leaving the apparant
phenotypes in place.
Probably the best resource for the skin color quote which explains broadly the function of melanins
but also touches on a specific type of melanins called neuromelanin which is a [neuroprotective
agent](In that way, neuromelanin is as a double-edged sword and currently is an issue of active
research.) At present, it appears that only significant dysfunction, not natural variations, account
for neurological issues. For example, OCA2 plays a primary role in pigmentation. Notably,
conditions associated with non-normal OCA2 gene "does not cause the characteristic neurologic
features" associated with those conditions like Angelman's and Prader-Willi syndromes. While
OCA2 may be of primary importance, there are a total of "378 genetic loci involved in determining
skin color in human and mice", so we can't rule out with certainty that there is no relationship
between skin color and neurological function, but at present there is no evidence of such.