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Why would that be suspicious at all? g is not an unalloyed good, and there's a reason that evolution hasn't turbocharged it beyond what we have now. Even in modern societies the effect of IQ on reproductive success is complicated, to say the least.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797612473119
Higher IQ people are more sensitive to the environment while growing up, and that "extended sensitive period" actually represents a serious trade-off in some places. If you're growing up in subsaharan Africa, the combination of a longer development period, larger cranium (cranium size is weakly correlated with IQ) causing potential issues during childbirth, social issues that emerge from difficulties relating to people several SDs away from you in IQ and the (potential, haven't found a good study yet but seems plausible) higher nutrition requirements of higher IQ brains means that a lot of mutations which would lead to an increase in g actually decrease reproductive fitness in many contexts, especially ones where physical violence is a daily reality. Modern societies where you can live in an extended adolescent period until your 20s and then transform a high IQ into vast amounts of financial resources/reproductive success are incredibly new, evolutionarily speaking, and it takes at least two generations for changes in selective pressure like that to start being noticeable.
Lots of good stuff here to think about. Among different isolated niches one can imagine different things playing off and there are always trade-off relationships.
There's plenty to check out, re nutrition requirements but I suppose not having the research base some of it feels a bit 'just so' to me, not to say that it's definitively wrong.
Some of the things you point out re brains and the hip, brain-size, plasticity trade-off could be argued either way. These are the key evolutionary advantages of humans in the first place. This is what allowed cognition, communication, cooperation and group cognition/culture. My understanding of lineage arguments is that advantages in group cooperation were key in strategic specialisation that were advantage in circumstances of resource competition and violence/warfare. The group/culture interacts then with evolutionary adaptation so that specialisation and cognitive, group niches could develop, presumably with systems of caring for young, which it should be noted for humans are universally vulnerable irrespective of intelligence.
G is a measure of cognition and at first blush should confer strategic advantages even in times of violence.
If you can find someone willing to back a study on this topic I'd be more than happy to quit my day-job and put on a lab-coat, but in the modern west I'd probably have more luck funding a study on the unconventional feminism of Adolf Hitler than one which could be uncharitably described as explaining the precise mechanisms behind African stupidity and violence (that's not how I view it but it is absolutely how an academic review board would).
You're right here when you view g in a vacuum. But what happens when that higher g means that you're developmentally behind all of your peers when it comes to physical instrumentality during extremely important stages of your life and development? Sure you might be a much better leader for the tribe in the long run, but good luck convincing the chief that he should abdicate to this weird nerd who isn't even that great at stealing cattle from the neighbouring tribes. That's the point of bringing up those trade-offs - while there are definitely environments and culture that select for higher g, there are also environments and cultures that select against the trade-offs required for that higher g. It is my contention that some of the same mutations and alleles which lead towards higher g impose handicaps during development which impose significant penalties on reproductive success in the kind of brutal Hobbesian environments that you find in a lot of prehistory, and hence evolution will not simply turbocharge g at the cost of everything else.
Of course in the long run optimising for g wins out and societies which select for it eventually acquire overwhelming asymmetrical advantages over those that prioritise nothing but personal, physical violence and charisma, but the nature of the problem means that low g human societies aren't really going to select for g until the environment forces them to. It isn't like our modern society is immune to these pressures either - go look up the data on the correlation between IQ and the number of children/sexual partners one has in the modern day.
That is what parents are for any child and the way they do this is through strategic alliance with the tribe, co-operate to achieve strategic advantages over other tribes, and have a system of child development, underneath culture. Probably an oversimplification but this is actually how cognition evolved, and in all these behaviours I would find G useful.
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