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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3431 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 25, 2023

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To what extent is the Arab world's relatively low average IQ due to cousin marriage? After all, we know cousin marriage lowers IQ, and Islam is strongly associated with cousin marriage.

Moreover, the Islamic golden age is associated with lots of intellectual accomplishments, which would be odd coming from a civilization with an average IQ of 80, and many of the constituent peoples that later became Arabs have histories of 3,000+ years before Islam in which they seem to have made notable intellectual contributions, something which is not true of, say, sub Saharan Africa. Finally it seems like middle eastern Christians generally have a higher average IQ than Muslims?

The alternative hypothesis of importing massive numbers of sub Saharan African slaves lowering the average HBD of the majority population also explains that pattern, but most Arabs don't look black, so I'm skeptical of the amount of actual admixture.

I think many Arabs look like they have African admixture, and indeed the evidence says they do:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707606302

We have analyzed and compared mitochondrial DNA variation of populations from the Near East and Africa and found a very high frequency of African lineages present in the Yemen Hadramawt: more than a third were of clear sub-Saharan origin. Other Arab populations carried ∼10% lineages of sub-Saharan origin, whereas non-Arab Near Eastern populations, by contrast, carried few or no such lineages, suggesting that gene flow has been preferentially into Arab populations. Several lines of evidence suggest that most of this gene flow probably occurred within the past ∼2,500 years. In contrast, there is little evidence for male-mediated gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa in Y-chromosome haplotypes in Arab populations, including the Hadramawt. Taken together, these results are consistent with substantial migration from eastern Africa into Arabia, at least in part as a result of the Arab slave trade, and mainly female assimilation into the Arabian population as a result of miscegenation and manumission.

not much. elites in Europe and even US interbred for much of the 19th century and didn't seem to hurt them much in later generations

2-3 generations of cousin marriage is different from 1000 years of it(and even then, I’m given to understand that European elite cousin marriage was more distant than the trend among Islamic peoples).

The Islamic Golden Age was really more of a Persian Golden Age than anything else given the backgrounds of most of its eminent figures, and even today Iran is no slouch when it comes to intellectual achievement, producing multiple Fields medalists, and sending many brilliant science and engineering students to study abroad (in the course of interacting with international students in graduate school, Iran was the country I came away with the greatest increase in respect for).

I think the clearest test of the cousin marriage IQ reduction hypothesis would be in South Asia, where we can directly compare Muslims who have practiced cousin marriage for several centuries now with their non-Muslim neighbors who should be otherwise genetically identical (controlling for caste origin and language group), but I don't know if anyone has done that particular experiment. Just looking at how dysfunctional Pakistan is I assume it must be bad for them somehow.

As for Arab Christians being smarter, that's the result of the least successful and poorest among them leaving the community each generation by converting to Islam in order to avoid paying the jizya tax. I think the amount of black admixture in Arab Muslims is 5% or less, similar to your average Mexican or Afrikaner, so not enough to affect appearance or much else.

The “Islamic Golden Age” seems quite overrated to me. A lot of it was just preserving the intellectual achievments of older civilizations. Pretty minimal achievments in math or engineering. Maybe some sketchy medical techniques were developed.

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