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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3429 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 25, 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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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.

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