This bothered me more than the autopraise. He (and, if he is to be believed, China) are proceeding from the assumption that IQ can be reduced to a set of switches in the genome.
What if there are alleles that select for intelligence--but also select for a mixture of cancer, OCD, suicidal depression, and plain batshit crazy?
1.3 billion bald, cat cradling, evil geniuses, all saying "mbwah, ha ha" in eerie synchronicity?
I'm not saying it captures every element of our experience, but surely we can point to it and say it represents some subset of our understanding of the idea we point at when we say the word "intelligence". It really isn't competing with anything that's remotely as useful. IQ, although it has faults, seems to be a relatively cheap, standard, well understood metric, that also explains quite a few other phenomenon. If you give me two regression analyses, one of them using IQ and one not, I cannot imagine what understanding you would gain by refusing to acknowledge the former -- and that mistake seems like precisely the type of "foolish over assessment of our current collective understanding" that you deride.
I score very highly on IQ tests, but I've worked with a great many people who I would guess do not score more than slightly above average but nevertheless bring a lot to the table that I cannot.
I guess my point is that using IQ as an authoritative measure of "intelligence" is missing the forest for the trees (well I suppose to best fit the metaphor it would be 'tree').