MICHAEL BARONE WENT THERE.

In a recent column, he noted the common origins of several of the Manhattan Project's scientists.

Today's human resources department professionals would be triggered if they looked at the list of physicists hired to produce what President Franklin Roosevelt was told could be a uranium-based bomb "with a destructiveness vastly greater than anything now known." They would be astounded that the president, in his haste to develop such a weapon, as he put it, "before Hitler got it," authorized the hiring of scientists without any attempt to match the diversity of the American population.

They would have noted that Leo Szilard, who drafted the letter signed by Albert Einstein that alerted Roosevelt to uranium's potential, was born a Hungarian Jew and was educated in the Realiskola, one of Budapest's elite high schools. And that among the lead physicists at the Manhattan Project were three other Hungarian Jews from Budapest educated at a single school, the Fasori Evangelikus Gimnazium, in the years during and just after World War I -- Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller.

Szilard even had the nerve to joke about their common origin. When asked why there was no evidence of intelligent extraterrestrials, he said, "They are already here among us -- they just call themselves Hungarians." These men were obviously a product of both nature and nurture, of hereditary mental capacity and a brilliantly stimulating education. Von Neumann, for example, could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head by age 6, while his parents had him tutored in French, English, German and Italian.

That's reasonably standard stuff, noodle around in political economy or applied mathematics or philosophy or even theology and you'll turn up a few Mitteleuropaische Jews.  There's a fairly anodyne explanation economic historians use, in that people who are forbidden to own land might become proficient at developing human capital that is portable.  Note, though, the turn Mr Barone takes.

The Manhattan Project's success owed much to Roosevelt's uncanny knack at choosing the right person for the jobs he considered important and to the clear need to hire the very best physicists available. And the prominence of the Martians, who grew within a few kilometers of each other, is one example of how the very best talent is unevenly distributed among humankind.

You can see something like that if you've been watching the Olympics over the years. As the writer Steve Sailer noted, runners of West African descent have dominated Olympic sprint events for years (a Chinese runner was the first sprinter with no such ancestry to qualify as a finalist since 1980) and runners of East African descent have dominated long-distance races for years as well. Something in the environment in which their ancestors evolved, plus rigorous training and personal discipline, accounts for their excellence.

That's also unsurprising, although his citation of Mr Sailer is. Ordinarily establishmentarian writers don't go there, as there are alt-right and pickup artist types who make blunter use of Mr Sailer's platforms including VDare and Unz Review.

Mr Barone doesn't stop there, either.

Nor is it likely that American Blacks will soon be represented proportionately to population in the right-hand tail of the IQ bell curve, given the gap between Black and non-Black people's IQ scores that has persisted despite half a century of attempts at remediation, as documented in Charles Murray's recent book, "Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America."

As Murray argued, the correct response is to judge people as individuals, not members of a race or other collective. And to appreciate that every group of people in the right-hand tail of any bell curve looks like part of America. Just like the Hungarian-born "Martians" in the Manhattan Project.

That's another reference that might set Establishment Opinion off.  Two deeper questions suggest themselves, though.  First, if some areas of intellectual or semi-intellectual inquiry are Off Limits, is that attitude likely to drive more people to world-views that they might not otherwise hold?  Second, what is the most effective way for a community dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal to encourage the emergence of applied mathematicians or philosophers of West African descent or of sprinters or distance runners of Hungarian extraction, that is where kids take an interest in those things?