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You’ve mentioned this a few times, including the bit about HBD likely explaining the different outcomes between Arab Christians and Muslims. Do you have any idea how that could have come about historically? My possibly incorrect understanding is that Jews and Christians were ineligible for public service and positions of authority under the Ottomans and various previous Islamic states. They could remove this handicap, and many did, by converting to Islam; they’d also avoid additional taxes that way. Under those conditions, I would have expected the most ambitious (and therefore possibly more intelligent? I’m not sure how well correlated those two traits are) to have converted to Islam over the centuries, leading to a slightly dumber Christian population. Do you know of anything I’m missing?
Christians in the Middle East are a well-educated, relatively wealthy minority everywhere, and when there’s separate IQ data it’s higher. This despite often fairly severe discrimination.
Exactly how this came about is the sort of thing that has lots of different explanations. I personally think Islamic law is dysgenic, but you’ll also notice that 1) the groups are not ‘different religion, same ethnicity’ like northern Irish Protestants and Catholics- there’s over a thousand years of divergence and 2) it’s been hypothesized that the dumbest Christians were unable to afford the jizya and were enslaved, melding into the general Arab Muslim gene pool.
The other elephant in the living room is consanguinity- Arab Muslims have close to triple rate of cousin marriage that their Christian neighbors have- but I don’t think that explains the magnitude of IQ gap(in Israel, the lowest to highest performing groups on college entrance exams, which are probably pretty close to an IQ proxy).
The cousin marriage thing completely slipped my mind. I think you’re probably right that that plays a role, perhaps even a major one.
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