I don’t know much about it, but I will take a stab. A person who is a statistical outlier in some particular (heritable) trait (or collection of traits) is an anomaly – a genetic accident, basically – so even though his own children are apt to be above average in terms of that trait, they are not apt to be as distant an outlier. Also, his children have to have one other person’s genes of course, and that person is not likely to carry the same extreme genotype. (I think both are significant. A person with an IQ of 170 will likely mate with someone with a lower IQ and have children with lower IQs – but even if two 170 IQ people mate, I think there children are quite unlikely to have 170 IQs because it is such an extreme abnormality – though I could be wrong about that, and I invite someone who knows genetics to comment.)

Patrick Ewing’s parents were surely tall, but at 7’0″ he was surely considerably taller. And his own children would be likely to be very tall, but unlikely to be as extremely tall. Patrick Ewing Jr., as predicted by this notion, has regressed slightly to the mean, at 6’8″.

However, toward what mean is Patrick Jr regressing? Human males? Black males? Ewing males? I would say they regress to the mean of the population that makes up any potential addition to the family’s gene pool. Ewings will probably continue to regress toward average height, but not quickly since tall people tend to mate with other tall people – though that tendency is not that strong.

Stronger, it seems, is the tendency for high IQ people to mate with other high IQ people. To me, there’s no reason to think that the IQs of the descendants of the African or Indian intellectual elite who come to the US will regress to the average Gambian or Bengali peasant, as the mean toward which they regress is determined by the pool of potential future mates/additions to the gene pool. And high IQ people tend to mate with high IQ people. A genius’ IQ will regress among his descendents, but not every family’s IQ is fated to fall back to the human average – or their race’s average. It’s a little more likely that short people will continue to enter the Ewing gene pool and reduce the average Ewing height.

The mean is not necessarily the racial mean, as a previous commenter said, because high IQ members of a race and lower-IQ members of the same race are not necessarily mixing so much, and less now than ever.

That sounds believable to me. I haven’t been to San Juan. What percentage of Santo Domingo is black? In any case, as I said, I was just writing from my own experience. I don’t typically meet Puerto Ricans whom you might describe as “black” from their appearance, while I very often encounter Dominicans like that. (But I also encounter “white” Dominicans more commonly than “white” Puerto Ricans.)

Anyway, those kids in the video are surely Dominican.

Happy 4th.

These children are mostly Dominican, not Puerto Rican. Any school in the Bronx is likely to be largely Dominican.

In my experience, the comparison between Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in the US is roughly analagous to your comparison of the Uruguayan and Argentinian soccer teams. I have met white-looking Puerto Ricans, but I’ve met more white-looking Dominicans. But I’ve also met many black Dominicans, while Puerto Ricans are rarely completely black-looking. Both groups most often display a mulatto phenotype, but the Puerto Ricans tend to be lighter.