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Notes -
"No Free Lunch" is cope outside of the context of a competitive environment of evolutionary adaptation. This isn't D&D character creation, you don't have a set number of points to spread around. Some people are just strictly better, and others are just strictly worse. While at some point optimizing for one thing might preclude other things, we're a long way from that frontier. The Marathon was contested for a considerable period of time before runners routinely broke the mark that the best Ironman triathletes have set today.
There's no free lunch in genetics in the sense that if there were something that was simply better for the organism in terms of survival and reproductive success, over enough iterations it would have happened already. But, in our case, we aren't really dealing with a competitive evolutionary environment, and a lot of what would have been evolutionary tradeoffs that would have made an adaptation a dead-end until the last hundred years are now trivially unimportant. Tradeoffs like 'burns 2x calories' or 'takes an extra year to mature' might be fatal in the Great Rift Valley and literally meaningless in Berkley.
That said, I share your concern that IQ might be an imperfect measurement. One of the things that frustrates me about IQ debates is that we're rarely limited to talking about actual IQ scores from an actual IQ test, instead dealing with layers of people using proxies like profession or "sounding like" a high IQ person, then correlating that back to IQ, then correlating IQ to that indicator. It's a weird kind of autocorrelation: we know Einstein must have had a massive IQ because he did a bunch of things that indicate intelligence, and because Einstein had a massive iQ we know you need a massive IQ to do things that indicate intelligence.
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