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Another HBD question(the motte's favorite topic). What is the reason for higher north-east Asian IQ? Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews and Brahmins all have plausible enough explanations, but my understanding is that the hajnal line doesn't cover east Asia and that most inhabitants there were rice farmers for thousands upon thousands of years, not scholars.
I tend to believe it's nowhere near as false as blank-slaters would like, and not as true as HBDers would like.
I think my own take is a little different--HBDers are correct on the facts, but then seem to conclude that genetic factors are immune to policy, which I do not believe. Is intelligence determined by some combination of genes and environment/nature and nurture/etc.? Yes, certainly. However, I don't think you can split the influences into "X% this, Y% that," because the factors are not distinct--they heavily influence each other over time, to the point that they cannot be disentangled.
Tracing out one example--the impact of culture. Culture is obviously not itself genetic, though it is inherited. At a minimum, a culture contains some priority scale of values, and grants status to those who better exemplify the values emphasized. Higher cultural status is very directly linked to success in procreation, which means that later generations will be more populated by those who achieve more cultural success in earlier generations.
If you have a culture that highly values communicative creativity, then you'll get more competitive wit, wordplay, and language skills that tolerate more complexity in exchange for finer-grained precision in description. Those who perform well generate more of the next generation, which will have more skill at symbol-manipulation on average than previous. If this emphasis persists, the culture will itself evolve to handle an increased number of poets...and lawyers. The impact cycles back and forth between cultural success generating genetic success, which influences cultural evolution that modifies the definition of cultural success, and so on.
There are also multiple success and failure modes for a given population, as well. A culture that presents multiple high-priority values that exist in some natural tension with each other may find itself less subject to culturally-influenced genetic drift, and therefore more stable over time. Whether this is a success or failure mode depends on the surrounding circumstances--is there a need for more rapid adaptation? A population may find itself in a sociological niche that favors specialization, and can become distinct from nearby genetically separate populations remarkably rapidly. (If a clan is told, "you guys are all blacksmiths now, and we're paying a lot for the best swords," I'm going to expect the great-great-grandkids to have unusually developed upper-body musculature, and probably pretty decent heat-tolerance.) Or a culture may decide to pick super-hardmode, and deprioritize procreation as a value. The hedonic draw of sex isn't enough to guarantee replacement-rate fertility; cultural support is necessary.
Tl;dr: 'natural' selection is culturally mediated.
I take it one step further and claim this holds across populations, too.
Sure, very likely. The point I was trying to set up with my toy blacksmith example was not just a population group being shoved into a niche ("you're all blacksmiths now") but also that the group had a motivation to lean into the niche ("paying a lot for the best swords"). If a group highly values excellence in a particular area, then individual excellence in that area should be a correspondingly strong status boost.
In your phrasing, crushing status plausibly should lead to lower average performance, but you'd still likely see internal measures of status within the group, emigrants that seek status elsewhere, or other reactions.
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