Women are better at verbal ability and social cognition, whereas men are better at visuospatial skills. The sexes achieve similar levels of overall performance via somewhat different mental "toolkits." Murray devotes a section to a 2007 result of Johnson and Bouchard, who report that ["_g_ masks the dimensions on which [sex differences in mental abilities] lie"](/papers/johnson-bouchard-sex_differences_in_mental_abilities_g_masks_the_dimensions.pdf): overall levels of mental well-functioning lead to underestimates of the effect sizes of specific mental abilities, which you want to statistically correct for. This result in particular is _super gratifying_ to me personally, because [I independently had a similar idea](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/)—it's _super validating_ as an amateur to find that the pros have been thinking along the same track!
The second part of the book is about some ways in which people with different ancestries are different from each other! Obviously, there are no "distinct" "races" (that would be dumb), but it turns out (as found by endeavors such as [Li _et al._ 2008](/papers/li_et_al-worldwide_human_relationships_inferred.pdf)) that when you throw clustering and [dimensionality-reduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionality_reduction) algorithms at SNP data (<em>s</em>ingle <em>n</em>ucleotide <em>p</em>olymorphisms, places in the genome where more than one allele has non-negligible frequency), you get groupings that are a pretty good match to classical or self-identified "races".
Women are better at verbal ability and social cognition, whereas men are better at visuospatial skills. The sexes achieve similar levels of overall performance via somewhat different mental "toolkits." Murray devotes a section to a 2007 result of Johnson and Bouchard, who report that ["_g_ masks the dimensions on which [sex differences in mental abilities] lie"](/papers/johnson-bouchard-sex_differences_in_mental_abilities_g_masks_the_dimensions.pdf): overall levels of mental well-functioning lead to underestimates of the effect sizes of specific mental abilities, which you want to statistically correct for. This result in particular is _super gratifying_ to me personally, because [I independently had a similar idea](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/)—it's _super validating_ as an amateur to find that the pros have been thinking along the same track!
The second part of the book is about some ways in which people with different ancestries are different from each other! Obviously, there are no "distinct" "races" (that would be dumb), but it turns out (as found by endeavors such as [Li _et al._ 2008](/papers/li_et_al-worldwide_human_relationships_inferred.pdf)) that when you throw clustering and [dimensionality-reduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionality_reduction) algorithms at SNP data (<em>s</em>ingle <em>n</em>ucleotide <em>p</em>olymorphisms, places in the genome where more than one allele has non-negligible frequency), you get groupings that are a pretty good match to classical or self-identified "races".