Racial differences...

[Reenk Roink]

Of course cognitive abilities differ between populations.

Well duh, but is there any kind of statistically significant difference between various ethnicities that is not then explained away by environment at the expense of race my Asian-American example. Forget the more problematic notions of race which would be even harder to prove. No good evidence I've seen.

If a trait is heriditable, and it is different between individuals, then it is subject to evolutionary pressure. So all we need is to show that cognitive abilities differ between individual people, and that there are heriditable aspects. I would show, but neither of these two is in much dispute.

What kind of deduction is this (formalize please)? You are going from individuals and then to...?

If you are just attempting to state the obvious fact that there is variation in the human population when it comes to cognitive ability and that this may be partly due to genetics (which I don't think anyone questions), then OK.

However, I don't see how this at all lends any credence to any kind of statistically significant cognitive differences between different ethnicities/races that can is primarily explained by biological/genetic factors, which is my interest in the thread.

It's all you need. Everything else is creationist obfuscation: the idea that evolution somehow stops at the human brain, which is the realm of the soul.

First, believing that evolution stops at the level of the brain is not necessary for the dualist position (which is what I think you're getting at with the soul comment - forgive me if I'm wrong). Thank god there is still much implicit dualism in neuroscience in their unwillingness to study or speak about any kind of neural mechanism of consciousness ('covert dualism' as called by Arshavsky in his polemical ‘‘Scientific roots’’ of dualism in neuroscience because many scientists generally will not want to explicitly endorse such "pernicious" metaphysical ideas like mind-body dualism which are anathema to their naive worldview guided by the intellectually poor doctrine of falsifiability, damn you Popper!).