More intelligent people more likely to survive hard circumstances, aren't they? Maybe it depends which circumstances. But my thought is that a population of people that's been surviving something really, really hard might end up having it's genes influenced by natural selection, so that there are way more bright people.
Why would you think this? Intelligence is metabolically expensive, and pays off only in the long run (consider how much of a life you can 'waste' getting an education). Putting people into a resource-pressured poor quality environment would seem to select for more immediately useful traits like aggression or growing up very quickly (and hence, investing in poorer quality body parts or less of them, like being shorter).
If there were a lot of resources on average but the environment fluctuated a lot, then there might be evolutionary pressure for intelligence: but this does not describe Africa too well and better describes very northern countries like Scandinavia where you can freeze to death but agriculture or fishing etc still yield lots of food. The book does discuss this theory and run some regressions in its favor. (I've always been a little dubious: it seems to me that it largely depends on European countries for most of its value...)
a population of people that's been surviving something really, really hard might end up having it's genes influenced by natural selection
Why would you think this?
One example: the population is Ashkenazi jews, and the environment is the racist world we live in. It's not clear how much is cultural and how much is genetic, though.
Idang Alibi of Abuja, Nigeria writes on the James Watson affair:
An intriguing opening. Is Idang Alibi about to take a position on the real heart of the uproar?
Darn, it's just a lecture on personal and national responsibility. Of course, for African nationals, taking responsibility for their country's problems is the most productive attitude regardless. But it doesn't engage with the controversies that got Watson fired.
Later in the article came this:
This intrigued me for two reasons: First, I'm always on the lookout for yet another case of theology making a falsifiable experimental prediction. And second, the prediction follows obviously if God is just, but what does skin colour have to do with it at all?
A great deal has already been said about the Watson affair, and I suspect that in most respects I have little to contribute that has not been said before.
But why is it that the rest of the world seems to think that individual genetic differences are okay, whereas racial genetic differences in intelligence are not? Am I the only one who's every bit as horrified by the proposition that there's any way whatsoever to be screwed before you even start, whether it's genes or lead-based paint or Down's Syndrome? What difference does skin colour make? At all?
This is only half a rhetorical question. Race adds extra controversy to anything; in that sense, it's obvious what difference skin colour makes politically. However, just because this attitude is common, should not cause us to overlook its insanity. Some kind of different psychological processing is taking place around individually-unfair intelligence distributions, and group-unfair intelligence distributions.
So, in defiance of this psychological difference, and in defiance of politics, let me point out that a group injustice has no existence apart from injustice to individuals. It's individuals who have brains to experience suffering. It's individuals who deserve, and often don't get, a fair chance at life. If God has not given intelligence in equal measure to all his children, God stands convicted of a crime against humanity, period. Skin colour has nothing to do with it, nothing at all.
And I don't think there's any serious scholar of intelligence who disputes that God has been definitively shown to be most terribly unfair. Never mind the airtight case that intelligence has a hereditary genetic component among individuals; if you think that being born with Down's Syndrome doesn't impact life outcomes, then you are on crack. What about lead-based paint? Does it not count, because parents theoretically could have prevented it but didn't? In the beginning no one knew that it was damaging. How is it just for such a tiny mistake to have such huge, irrevocable consequences? And regardless, would not a just God damn us for only our own choices? Kids don't choose to live in apartments with lead-based paint.
So much for God being "just", unless you count the people whom God has just screwed over. Maybe that's part of the fuel in the burning controversy - that people do realize, on some level, the implications for religion. They can rationalize away the implications of a child born with no legs, but not a child born with no possibility of ever understanding calculus. But then this doesn't help explain the original observation, which is that people, for some odd reason, think that adding race makes it worse somehow.
And why is my own perspective, apparently, unusual? Perhaps because I also think that intelligence deficits will be fixable given sufficiently advanced technology, biotech or nanotech. When truly huge horrors are believed unfixable, the mind's eye tends to just skip over the hideous unfairness - for much the same reason you don't deliberately rest your hand on a hot stoveburner; it hurts.