And since I don't trust myself to be restrained in my own words this is from the NYT review Andrew Sullivan linked to above:
"Although hereditarianism has been widely denounced as racism wrapped in pseudoscience, these books drew on a large body of research and were carefully reasoned...its real value lies in Nisbett�s forceful marshaling of the evidence, much of it recent, favoring what he calls �the new environmentalism,� which stresses the importance of nonhereditary factors in determining I.Q. ... evidence � drawn from neuroscience and genetics, as well as from studies of educational interventions and parenting styles."
