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You complain about "poor human capital" and "dysgenics" seemingly ignorant of the fact that if you're right, hinduism-- specifically, any proscriptions regarding caste separation-- must be the direct cause. The very existence of an "upper caste" requires the existence of a lower caste. And once you've created one, you can't turn around and complain that that caste then turns around and wants to become the "upper" caste themselves.
It's incredibly unlikely that the effect of government policy post-independence has had more of an effect on local genomes than the effect of literally thousands of years of caste-based rule. If you have less smart people now, it's because of the castes. And in any case, while I'm inclined to doubt IQ research in general, even if I were to accept it, IQ looks like it's basically just correlated with cold weather, and high-iq countries almost invariably lack castes. Actually, if I was going to bet on anything increasing IQs, it would be the existence of longstanding meritocratic civil-service exams tied to a powerful, well-renumerated bureaucratic class. Tying wealth and therefore reproductive fitness directly to a measure of analytical fitness seems like it would apply the most powerful selection over the broadest possible pool of candidate genes.
Also, England didn't replace their underclass. It did literally the exact opposite-- replacing celtic with roman with germanic with norman nobility. The underclass sticks around and interbreeds with the newcomers every time, both accepting "fallen nobility" but also producing its own occasional homo novus granted land and titles. Honestly, if you want a genetically elite upper class that's just objectively the sane way to do it-- instead of assuming prima facie that your ancestors 3,000 years ago had the very best genes and you're going to preserve them forever, just continuously skin the cream off the top while siphoning the congealed milk off the bottom.
Replying here to both your comments.
This is a big claim when from my perspective the historical performance of pakistan and india have been pretty similar in terms of GDP per capita. The main reversal has come only recently, which seems like it would directly counter your complaints about indian society becoming more dysgenic. And saying that there's not a lot of differences between those countries-- and that those differences are shared with countries that perform both better and worse than india on an IQ and economic basis-- indicates that those differences are not decisive in increasing indian IQ.
Elites are smarter than their underclass everywhere. You don't need castes to do it. Rather, the evidence is that creating caste-based elites makes your nation underperform relative to other nations with similar capacity for elite formation. Consider Mexico, which got mogged by brazil and the US in the 20th century at least in part due to political instability caused by the remanants of its caste system. Consider how recent european history is basically just relatively meritocratic states stunting on relatively aristocratic states. Picking smart people to form your elite just works better in every way that picking an elite and trying to make them smart.
source? And what does that have to do with my argument about selecting for IQ? Even if you're right, it seems to fit pretty smoothly into my model of, "create intermarrying genetic castes -> castes put on bottom have a rational reason to revolt".
And this counters my argument how?
Um, yes? From here:
Also relevant,
It's not an exact match, but considering that rome then proceeded to collapse and never re-unite while china had long stretches of stability, it's fair to say that European and Chinese civilization were probably fairly comparable at various points in history.
You foundational assumption-- that castes increase the total amount of very-smart people-- is wrong. India has the same normal distribution of IQs as everyone else. If you were right, India would have a right-skewed distribution. The caste system may or may not provide IQ benefits to the elite castes (I'd guess "not" looking at how the Indian elite underperform relative to the european and chinese elite), but it definitely fails to provide that benefit to society at large. At best, castes don't do anything except split India into a variety of fueding interest groups. At worst, they reduce global selection pressures for IQ without actually doing much to improve outcomes locally.
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