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Notes -
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.
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).
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