Note I didn't ask, "is intelligence heritable". Because I already know that it's heritable. The only question is to what degree.

Personally I believe that intelligence has an overwhelming biological basis. In other words, how smart you are is largely determined by your genes. Your parents could try to enrich your environment as you grew up, but it won't make you smarter. It will only make you more knowledgeable, or more worldly, or better at taking tests. However your actual intelligence won't become higher to any noticeable degree.

What follows from this is that there are some people who are naturally stupid. And it's because their genes bestow lower than average level of intelligence on them. And if these people somehow manage to procreate and pass on their genes despite their stupidity, then you will have kids who are stupid too. And when you do this for enough generations, and I mean many, many, many generations, then you will wind up with a stupid human population group.

And races are population groups. So, what does this tell us?

This post was edited by JessiWan on Feb 28 2023 07:55pm

Tells us you are clueless.

Wanna guess which population group your people fall into?

I don't know the science behind this but to clarify intelligence is an ability to acquire and process information and then apply it.
There are different types of intelligence that cannot be comparable such as how one is good at crunching numbers and solving analytical puzzles compare to someone who can read a room, make sound business decisions or public speaking. One could be a savant in one area while complete awkward and incapable in the other. These are skills and muscles that are exercised and can be developed to a high degree but some people will not do well in one or two areas but be incredibly proficienct in another.
Then there are average Joes who are not particularly good at anything just average. Then there are actual brain definitions or deformities which don't allow people to learn as well. Then there are people who are slow to pick up knowledge and may appear stupid to you and I but they could be uninterested in knowledge or have a particular learning style that if applied could be considered geniuses.

There are plenty of people who were deemed to being stupid and they would not amount to anything but because the motivation was higher they overcame their disadvantages to become much smarter and more successful than their peers.

You could have a potential of being smarter than Einstein and genes of a world class "insert profession" but without internal drive, goals your intelligence could be considered a locked up Ferrari who never leaves the garage.

It's pretty heritable sadly for your future kids. Before you spin it to a race thing, the GWAS's that found genetic associations to intelligence didn't find differences in races.

You are right; however those things can also have a biological basis.

Maybe the method they used was faulty?

Anyway, it doesn't matter what the authorities say. Authorities can be biased, or wrong. The important thing is that when we look at the world, the overwhelming majority of black countries are shitholes. Whereas most white countries are reasonably hospitable. This doesn't prove that one race is superior to another; however it does suggest it. You are just too close-minded to consider this possibility.

I mean, a gwas is literally unbiased.

Last I checked the best available estimates of genetic variance to phenotypic variance was somewhere in the 0.4-0.8 range, significantly more than environmental factors.
In other words, nature has a bigger role than nurture, but both have roles and the exact degree of either is quite hard to measure with any precision, though there are very clearly established trends like you ain't getting any brighter after childhood

The heritability estimates for IQ are pretty bad last I checked. If your references are from before ~2015 you can more or less throw them out. After that I'm not sure, but before 2015 when I did my lasts deep dive they were basically garbage.