Suppose, for the purposes of argument, HBD (Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations (I will be avoiding using the word "race" here insomuch as possible) of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some difference in average intelligence from population to population) is true, and that all its proponents are correct in accusing the politicization of science for burying this information.

I seek to ask the more interesting question: Would it matter?

1. Societal Ramifications of HBD: Eugenics

So, we now have some kind of nice, tidy explanation for different characters among different groups of people. Okay. We have a theory. It has explanatory power. What can we do with it?

Unless you're willing to commit to eugenics of some kind (be it restricting reproduction or genetic alteration), not much of anything. And even given you're willing to commit to eugenics, HBD doesn't add anything HBD doesn't actually change any of the arguments for eugenics - below-average people exist in every population group, and insofar as we regard below-average people a problem, the genetic population they happen to belong to doesn't matter. If the point is to raise the average, the population group doesn't matter. If the point is to reduce the number of socially dependent individuals, the population group doesn't matter.

Worse, insofar as we use HBD as a determinant in eugenics, our eugenics are less effective. HBD says your population group has a relationship with intelligence; but if we're interested in intelligence, we have no reason to look at your population group, because we can measure intelligence more directly. There's no reason to use the proxy of population group if we're interested in intelligence, and indeed, every reason not to; it's significantly less accurate and politically and historically problematic.

Yet still worse for our eugenics advocate, insomuch as population groups do have significant genetic diversity, using population groups instead of direct measurements of intelligence is far more likely to cause disease transmission risks. (Genetic diversity is very important for population-level disease resistance. Just look at bananas.)

2. Social Ramifications of HBD: Social Assistance

Let's suppose we're not interested in eugenics. Let's suppose we...

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