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Hard to say, but my personal suspicion is that culture and tradition matter a whole lot more than most rationalists would like to acknowledge.
Like Admiral Cuningham said when asked by Parlament why he was risking his ships to support what was ultimately a doomed last stand. "It takes three years to build a ship, it takes three centuries to build a tradition.”
What I often see overlooked in these arguments is that culture and biology reinforce each other in feedback loops. Africans don't have high IQ's because having a higher IQ is not incentivized in their society; being smarter and inventive beyond the bare minimum to survive will simply result in a larger number of friends and relatives mooching off your success while you are left with the same amount. Are East Asians better at taking standardized tests on average because it is a skill that has been traditionally valued in their culture or because they have inherited traits that make them good at it? Both.
This still leaves the question of which to target if one's goal is to create a better society (of course some might argue that having this goal is precisely the problem). The historical record shows us many examples of improving culture leading to what we now consider desirable outcomes, while the track record of changing biology so far is a list of genocides and atrocities. Whether that will change with new medical technologies that enable parents to create designer babies we can't say for sure, but I certainly wouldn't fault people for being suspicious.
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