"We classical liberals aren't Nazis, but we do love our Nazi sources!"

I disagree here because it entails a silent acceptance of the premise of "what if IQ differences are determined by genetic race?" which there really isn't any solid evidence for in the first place.

The unlikely premise is that any differences between lineages in any complex characteristic does not have both environmental and genetic components. Part nature, part nurture. Practically everything works like that.

Except there's nothing to indicate that it's overwhelmingly likely that genes explain the IQ-gap between racial categories.

We don't know which specific genes determine intelligence, but for any attribute as complex as intelligence it's likely that a large number of both genetic and environmental factors are interacting to produce the final result. The answer to the "nature vs nurture" debate is almost always "some of both" -- why would this specific attribute be any different? The default position should be that it's not, unless somebody proves otherwise. Furthermore, we certainly know there's a strong genetic component to intelligence just looking at the correlation between parents and their children; if you extrapolate this down to their childrens' children and beyond, you end up with differences among lineages unless the entire human population is extremely well-mixed (which we know historically was not the case; for example, Swedes weren't mating with indigenous Australians on a regular basis a thousand years ago).

However, it's still stupid to judge any individual human, for better or worse, by the intelligence of their parents, and it gets even dumber as you branch out to more extended family and the ultra-extended family one might colloquially call a race. Even dumber yet is for people to be proud of the average intellect of their distant relatives, even when their own is not so hot; this is basically what's happening on the alt-right.

Of course, individual differences exist but what if there is a biological ceiling for the intellectual capabilities of certain "races"?

There is no hard ceiling on the capacity of any lineage, which is part of why it doesn't make sense to use lineages to judge individuals. The smartest person in the world could come from a lineage with a low mean IQ; they would just be more of an outlier if they did, so it's less likely. However, any lineage large enough to be colloquially called a "race" is likely to include many extremely smart people, regardless of the group mean. Any member of that lineage that you encounter could always be one of their smartest, or one of their dumbest, or anywhere in between, which is why the only sensible way to judge them is as individuals.

Again going into problematic territory: "Ok, so black people might be less intelligent on average but we should only care about individuals!" -- people are likely to strongly disagree there.

Agreed, that's why I won't touch the topic non-anonymously and I wish Sam had stayed out of it. It's very hard to agree with the first half of that sentence but convince people that you sincerely believe in the second half; the left thinks the first half makes you racist and the second half is an insincere cover story, while the right thinks the first half actually justifies racism and the second half is just political correctness. There's no way to win except to never even touch the topic with a ten-foot pole.

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