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Just a thought, re:Your conversation with Velveteen ambush below.
When you talk about cultures you are both focused on the prominent products of that culture. The flowers of a culture, not its stems. It was a common metaphor that the knights of a country were the "Flower of France's Chivalry." That's what you're pointing to in your examples. But for every Viking warrior there were a dozen of thralls or karls who stayed home to mind the farm. For every Aztec blood-priest, there were a dozen ordinary Aztec dudes who just drank maize beer and nodded along at the ceremony (and the Aztecs and Vikings were themselves ethnic minorities within their own territories!). Samurai in Feudal Japan constituted about 5% of the population, Seven Samurai for the whole village pretty much gets the percentage right.
And when you talk about your modern examples, you picked representative examples of things you associate with those cultures. Leaving aside the joke stereotypes, manufacturing is 20% of Japan's GDP. The vast majority of Japanese aren't any more involved in manufacturing than that Mexican gardener, and there's little reason to think they're all that much better suited to it than he is. Which is what I'm thinking.
So let's assume that people's personal genetic proclivities determine how they'll express themselves culturally. Cultural change you're seeing doesn't require a change in genetics, merely a change in which genetic groups within a country constitute the flower of the culture. It's not that the Japanese have changed, it's that which Japanese become prominent has changed. In feudal Japan, the flower of the culture, the flower of its chivalry, was a charging army of Samurai; today the flower of Japan's culture is a container ship filled with Toyota Land Cruisers and high tech electronics, or a streaming service of the latest anime. If you held Japan's genetic mix exactly constant, the dorks who design the shocks on Land Cruisers probably aren't the best sword fighters, and the animators probably weren't great archers; they were probably invisible farmers or merchants, with skills that the world simply didn't value at the time. Meanwhile, a talented fighter, filled with piss and vinegar and aggression, who wants to test himself in combat with other men, makes a great samurai. Today, if he's one of the best 100 or so in the country he might make it as a professional athlete, if not he's some anonymous nobody, a cop or a criminal. He has no impact on your impression of Japanese culture, where once he did.
Elon Musk, had he been born a thousand years earlier in Holland, probably dies with his name written only in the baptismal registry of the local church. Temujin, born today, probably runs a street gang somewhere. In medieval times, Ashkenazi Jews were not very prominent examples of European culture, producing few great knights or lords; in the industrial world that valued and rewarded IQ, they gave Europe the Rothschilds and Einstein and Freud. The vast majority of people who don't have the genetic profile that the culture selects for, they get forced into a mold they don't fit and they never amount to anything; the handful that stand out are those that happen to have what society selects for. Change what society selects for, and you get a different "race" because the iceberg flips and the 10% you used to ignore is the only 10% you see anymore.
Idk, just a thought. I'm not sure I buy into genetic determinism that heavily, just pointing to an alternate mechanism.
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