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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Nepal, Guatemala, and Nicaragua are the three non-black countries in the bottom ten in the world by IQ score. All three are desperately poor, badly run countries that plausibly have environmental factors causing loss of IQ points in kids that grow up there. And really 7/10 countries being African sounds not too far off from a sample of 3rd world countries.

The main thrust of my argument is that since non-black is not a monogenetic group, and black isn't either, the pattern of every non-black group outperforming every black group demands an explanation. I'm aware of the cold winter hypothesis, and that's why I included southeast asia- why does the dumbest country in SE Asia(Indonesia) have an average IQ roughly on par with the smartest country in subsaharan Africa(Sudan)? Since we know that childhood malnutrition and parasite burden and all sorts of other things black countries usually do badly on lower IQ, it accords with available evidence to suggest that the average IQ of blacks would be in the eighties if they lived in countries that were as nice as Thailand or the Philippines. To my knowledge, it doesn't require a cold winter to reach either of these countries from Africa, and neither of them has undergone some kind of selection effect for high IQ, and if anything biased sampling probably makes Africa look relatively better than more urbanized SE Asian populations rather than explaining the gap.

To my knowledge, it doesn't require a cold winter to reach either of these countries from Africa

All of these countries had quite dark-skinned populations several thousand of years ago. Then, populations originating from territory of modern China came and largely displaced them, sometimes without a trace of preceeding population. A large fraction of area of modern China was permafrost or under glaciers at some point.

Why do you think Indonesians literally living at equator have such light skin?

A diet based almost entirely on rice would tend to lighten the skin over generations, but the Chinese replacement also makes sense.

In general, it almost never occurs that some recent non-African population had its ancestors follow shortest path from Africa.