Dear Aham,

You remark that "The truth is that there are differences between people, and turning a blind eye won't make them go away." This is, indeed, one of Dr. Sternberg's central points- though not, I think, in the way you intend it. Part of his research examines how people may express the same skill through different means. Take your point about abstraction as a fundamental logical faculty: (one of) the issue(s) is not whether certain groups, ie people in industrialized and post-industrial nations are smarter than other groups, ie people from non-industrialized nations. This is the conclusion one would reach just by examinging standardized IQ test scores as they are currently administered. This, in turn, has led to all sorts of arguments with racial and racist underpinnings (see "The Bell Curve" for a prime example). The point is that this type of testing purports to test IQ across cultures, when in fact it is culturally biased. In other words, people may have those abstraction skills but be unable to express them in a standardized test format because they learned to express them in different ways. That was the focus of the Brazilian street children study Dr. Sternberg mentioned.