Cochran-Harpending article #1 most emailed on NYT:

1.	Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes

Over at GNXP, Cochran and Harpending are explaining their theory in more depth in the Comments section of this post.

Henry Harpending comments:

"[As for] the implications of our model for eugenics, yes, big time, eugenics is IMHO a route to disaster. Well understood engineered gene introductions could be fine but eugenics would be almost certain to bring all kinds of nightmares."

He's referring to the tendency seen among domesticated animals for breeding for any particular positive trait to accidentally introduce negative traits as well. Temple Grandin's recent book lists lots of problems that have crept in by too much artificial selection for single traits. For instance, recent efforts to make chickens more meaty turned a fraction of roosters into sex murderers. Some of the roosters forgot how to do the little dance that gets hens into the mood, so they just use force and end up killing hens a noticeable fraction of the time. The distorted genes for that spread slowly enough that farmers seldom noticed that anything was going wrong. By the time Grandin (whose specialties are cows and pigs) heard about it, farmers would say, "Oh, it's just natural for roosters to kill hens. All just part of Nature's rich tapestry." Of course, it's not. Natural selection would have gotten rid of genes for that a long time ago. It's artificial selection that allows disastrous genes to survive.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer