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NancyLebovitz comments on Suppose HBD is True - Less Wrong
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Not quite. You are thinking of breeding people to develop a trait (in this case, intelligence) and are correct that you want diversity in your breeding stock. However what that diversity gets you is not just top-end results. It gets you variance -- basically, you'll get a few geniuses and a lot of idiots.
In animal breeding that's not a issue -- you kill off (or prevent from breeding) all the failures and just keep the very few top results. For humans that would be... problematic.
So if you encourage greater variance in outcomes and you keep all of them, the question becomes who breeds faster: idiots or geniuses. Let me point out that I'm not optimistic about that question.
By the way, empirically people with both black and white ancestry have average IQs between the pure blacks and the pure whites. This seems to indicate that you don't get much by cross-breeding.
My impression is that breeding from diverse backgrounds gets you hardiness-- mutts are less likely to have the specific genetic ailments you get from purebreds. On the other hand, you're less likely to get extraordinary development of particular traits.
On what is possibly the gripping hand, that's dogs who've been selectively bred, which is not the same as people roughly adapted to different environments.
Yes, but I think this works on a different scale. Purebred domestic animals are usually heavily inbred, precisely to push a particular trait to new heights. In the standard textbook manner this makes the chances of the animal getting multiple copies of some recessive gene skyrocket, thus the fragility.
The human equivalent is marrying your cousins (inbred human populations exist, they usually don't look too good) which is different (scale) than marrying someone from a large enough gene pool (e.g. like all Europeans).